"I don't like strangers on the Sabbath": Theology and Subjectivity in the Journal of Esther Edwards Burr

Abstract

From 1754 through 1757, Esther Edwards Burr, daughter of Jonathan Edwards and wife of Aaron Burr, Sr. (and mother of the notorious Aaron Burr), wrote a daily letter-journal to her friend Sarah Prince. Burr's journal stands as an account of current events and of her daily activities and interactions with a wide circle of family, friends, acquaintances, and her husband's students and colleagues. Like a diary, the journal records Burr's spiritual and emotional growth and functions as an example of eighteenth-century American women's lifewriting, in accord with William Spengemann's view of all autobiographical practice as a pattern shaped by changing ideas about the nature of the self, interpreting the self, and reporting those interpretations (xiii). Burr interprets her self through the primary cultural institution in her life, the Puritan evangelical church. Her religion shapes her sense of self; everything she is and does, everything that happens to her, she puts within the context of her faith and her God. As Burr discusses her life in accordance with her Bible and her ministers, however, she theorizes about God and faith in new ways that foreshadow the work of today's feminist theologians. My paper discusses the methods by which Burr claims an empowered subjectivity as she articulates a woman's theology. I argue that as Burr theorizes her religion, this busy, devout, loving, acerbic latter-day Puritan comes to understand her own worth and to privilege what she terms her "heart to reflect and improve" (57). 1