Hard-Hearted Women: Sentiment and the Scaffold

Abstract

To dramatize his argument about disappearance of torture as public spectacle, Michel Foucault juxtaposes graphic drawing and quartering of Damiens regicide in 1757 with regimented schedule for penitentiary inmates published eighty years later. Flesh torn, wounds doused with molten liquid, Damiens's tortured horrified onlookers into submission. In this way, public execution served as of truth, scene of public expiation that solidified state power by publishing prisoner's crime and justice meted out to him by bearing [the of what he had been charged with I physically on his body (43). A century later, Foucault argues, object of punitive discipline had shifted from to the modern soul, product of new economy of punishment (23). Subsequent histories of American punishment have followed Foucault's model, tracing historical shift from colonial-era display of to nineteenth-century discipline of soul. (1) This contrast usefully distinguishes colonial-era punishment from modern penitentiary's technologies of power, architecture, space, and disciplinary regimes. But Foucault's theory of public punishment does not adequately explain tenor and purpose of colonial American execution accounts, which sought to produce a moment of truth not by torture, nor through mere spectacular display of body, but by promising access to soul of condemned. The condemned galvanized spectators because she or he stood seemingly on precipice of eternal salvation or damnation. Ministers overseeing public execution strove desperately to (re)produce this feeling of immediacy both in condemned and in spectators, which meant making both parties open and receptive to God's saving grace. While modern readers tend to find these ritual performances rote and formulaic, ministers, spectators, and often condemned themselves expressed deep interest in persuasive and affecting qualities of execution sermons and confessions. It was not enough to have condemned confess guilt or recite familiar narrative of sin's slippery slope from disobeying one's parents or failing to observe Sabbath to committing murder. Instead, narratives sought to assess and convey sincerity and felt urgency of condemned's spiritual readiness for death. (2) This meant complex rendering of on scaffold, one with both surface (capable of expressing gesture, posture, and other semiotics of penitence) and an interior, defined most crucially by heart--the seat of both emotion and spirituality and, hence, an invaluable space for representing process of religious conversion. As result, execution rituals that developed in colonial New England were variations on early modern anatomy theaters, laying bare interior--the heart--of condemned in order to move spectators to self-examination and spiritual knowledge. (3) While any prisoner on scaffold served as potential vehicle of affect, women were more frequently used to dramatize both hard-heartedness of sin and heart-melting processes of religious conversion and confession. This is especially evident through 1740s, period when Protestant spiritual practice heavily shaped form and function of published execution accounts prior to genre's gradual secularization. Thus, modifying Foucault, I argue that execution's gendered power effects shape its power affects, its ability to produce an affective response in condemned and in those watching her or his execution. Replacing of Damiens with bodies of Sarah Threeneedles, Esther Rodgers, and Margaret Gaulacher allows us to see lesser-understood mechanisms of affective exchange at work in early American execution rituals, transactions grounded not only in Protestant spiritual practice but also in shifting scientific and medical understandings of body. By asking scholars of punishment to think more rigorously about what it means when of woman becomes figure not merely of public shame but also of communal identification, embodying wider social body's possibilities of reform and redemption, this essay complicates modern theories of punishment that are shaped by assumption that ritual of scaffold can produce kind of truth. …