Cast Down: Abjection in America, 1700-1850 by Mark J. Miller

Abstract

Reviewed by: Cast Down: Abjection in America, 1700-1850 by Mark J. Miller Philippa Koch (bio) Cast Down: Abjection in America, 1700–1850 mark j. miller Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016 240 pp. In Cast Down, Mark J. Miller offers a thought-provoking analysis of the role of suffering in the creation of the modern individual subject. His core argument is that "the religious rhetoric of abjection participated in the creation of new and wide-ranging racial norms while also allowing and sometimes even encouraging participants in evangelical discourse to depart from these emerging norms" (5). Religious understandings of abjection, which Miller defines in terms of both performance and identification, contributed to understandings of both race and gender in early America. To suffer and to describe suffering is to organize interior, affective experiences, behaviors, and—perhaps most markedly, Miller argues—ideologies. Miller focuses on two historical eras he views as central to the transformation of abjection and its role in defining "modern notions of interiority [End Page 257] and the liberal humanist subject" (2). He looks first at the transatlantic religious revivals of the 1730s and 1740s—focusing in particular on Puritans and Quakers—and the manner in which they understood suffering and thus transformed public discourse on conversion and the regulation of the self, often vis-à-vis emerging Enlightenment ideas of rationality and sentiment. He then moves, second, to the 1830s and 1840s in a discussion of liberal reformers, whom he views as successors to (or inheritors of) the earlier religious discourse on suffering. By connecting these two eras, Miller makes a significant argument for the role of religion in the formation of the American public in terms of sympathy, race, and gender. He writes that antebellum reformers depended on long-standing religious ideas about suffering and its role in authorizing and licensing speech and evangelism. The authoritative speech and work that developed within this tradition, then, would merge with "rational, empiricist Enlightenment discourse grounded in ascetic self-control." By the 1830s and 1840s, these two forms of discourse together allowed "religious communities [to harness] the power of sentiment to institutionalize white male control" (5-6). It should be noted that Miller does not oversimplify this trajectory; while religious discourse provided a sense of continuity and authority to what were, in fact, new ideas about inherent racial difference, religious communities themselves often resisted new forms of scientific racism through discourse. In making his argument, Miller offers four chapters and an epilogue focused on very different texts, including conversion narratives, martyrologies, religious periodicals, abolitionist newspapers, novels, and plays. He begins with a chapter on the New England Puritan Jonathan Edwards and his Faithful Narrative as well as his personal conversion narrative, which remained unpublished in his lifetime. Miller argues that Edwards, on the one hand, furthered a developing model of conversion that depended on a performance (in body or text) of an interior state of grace. Such conversion accounts relied on the experience, performance, and interpretation of suffering, which were crucial for the development of both "masochism and the liberal subject for whom masochism could be a perversion" (26). While other scholars have highlighted Edwards's personal conversion narrative as a prototype of "feminine masochistic eroticism," however, Miller argues that Edwards in fact works to regulate such desires and reject their perversity. Miller emphasizes Edwards's focus on controlling his voice, acknowledging [End Page 258] the limited authority offered by uncertain grace and, thus, also resisting the "liberal humanist subject." Recognizing Edwards's control is critical not only for understanding Edwards but also his context; with its focus on experience and interiority, the new conversion narrative could authorize marginal colonial voices, but Edwards sought to contain such potential with careful attention to hierarchy. Miller's close reading of Edwards sets up the analysis for the rest of the book. Miller is careful, always, to highlight the expansion of certain genres toward new, modern conceptions of the individual and of suffering—and yet he also clarifies how authors themselves understood, engaged, and resisted these expansions. Cast Down continues with an excellent chapter on the Pequot (and adopted Mashpee) William Apess, who served as a Methodist preacher and whose writings demonstrate...