1795: Martha Laurens Ramsay's "Dark Night of the Soul"

Abstract

HREE days before her death on June io, i81 I, Martha Laurens Ramsay told her husband for the first time about the diary she had kept for fourteen years of their married life. She also told him where to find it-in which drawer it was concealed, along with other private papers, at their home in Charleston. He responded by publishing the diary with some of her letters and meditations, compiled into memoir, less than six weeks after her death.1 David Ramsay's haste was surely spurred by his interpretation of his dear wife's deathbed revelation as an imprimatur. Her actual instructions were that the manuscripts, legacy to her loved ones, be kept as common book of the family. The largest portion of the diary printed in the memoir concerned the year I 7 9 5, when Martha had suffered ma or depression; thus David's editorial impulse preserved remarkably explicit account of the mental illness in eighteenth-century analytic terms, an interior description of psyche disintegrating and then restored.2 Martha wrote of her crisis in the religious rhetoric that furnished the vocabulary of citizenship and marriage, spiritual chronicle and physical trial, for educated eighteenth-century Americans. Among the religious texts that particularly influenced her were Isaac Watts's Divine and Moral Songs for Children, Richard Allestree's The Whole Duty of Man, Jeremy Taylor's Holy Living and Dying, and William Law's Serious Call to Devout and Holy Life. She was high-minded Christian who knew nearly the whole of Young's Night Thoughts from memory. Her diary also reflects imagery from other women's devotional writings and memoirs, including such self-referents as a monument of forbearing mercy or the sin of