Jodi Schorb

Hard-Hearted Women: Sentiment and the ScaffoldAuthor(s): Jodi Schorb Source: Legacy, Vol. 28, No. 2, Women and Early America (2011), pp. 290-311 Published by: University of Nebraska Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5250/legacy.28.2.0290 . Accessed: 24/03/2015 16:31 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp . JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. . University of Nebraska Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Legacy. http://www.jstor.org This content downloaded from 134.84.192.102 on Tue, 24 Mar 2015 16:31:11 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions Hard-Hearted Women: Sentiment and the Scaffold jodi schorb University of Florida T o dramatize his argument about the disappearance of torture as public spectacle, Michel Foucault juxtaposes the graphic drawing and quartering of Damiens the regicide in 1757 with a regimented schedule for penitentiary inmates published eighty years later. Flesh torn, wounds doused with molten liquid, Damiens’s tortured body horrified onlookers into submission. In this way, public execution served as a “moment of truth,” a scene of public expiation that solidified state power by publishing the prisoner’s “crime and the justice meted out to him by bearing [the truth of what he had been charged with] physically on his body” (43). A century later, Foucault argues, the object of punitive discipline had shifted from the body to “the modern soul,” the product of a new economy of punishment (23). Subsequent histories of American punishment have followed Foucault’s model, tracing the historical shift from a colonial-era display of the body to a nineteenth-century discipline of the soul.1 This contrast usefully distinguishes colonial-era punishment from the modern penitentiary’s technologies of power, architecture, space, and disciplinary regimes. But Foucault’s theory of public punishment does not adequately explain the tenor and purpose of colonial American execution accounts, which sought to produce “a moment of truth” not by torture, nor through the mere spectacular display of the body, but by promising access to the soul of the condemned. The condemned galvanized spectators because she or he stood seemingly on the precipice of eternal salvation or damnation. Ministers overseeing a public execution strove desperately to (re)produce this feeling of immediacy both in the condemned and in the 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 the condemned themselves expressed deep interest in the persuasive and affectlegacy, vol. 28, no. 2, 2011. pp. 290–311. copyright © 2011 the university of nebraska press This content downloaded from 134.84.192.102 on Tue, 24 Mar 2015 16:31:11 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions ing qualities of execution sermons and confessions. It was not enough to have the condemned confess guilt or recite the familiar narrative of sin’s slippery slope from disobeying one’s parents or failing to observe the Sabbath to committing murder. Instead, the narratives sought to assess and convey the sincerity and felt urgency of the condemned’s spiritual readiness for death.2 This meant a complex rendering of the body on the scaffold, one with both a surface (capable of expressing gesture, posture, and other semiotics of penitence) and an interior, defined most crucially by the heart—the seat of both emotion and spirituality and, hence, an invaluable space for representing the process of religious conversion. As a result, the execution rituals that developed in colonial New England were variations on early modern anatomy theaters, laying bare the interior—the heart—of the condemned in order to move spectators to self-examination and spiritual knowledge.3 While any prisoner on the scaffold served as a potential vehicle of affect, women were more frequently used to dramatize both the hard-heartedness of sin and the heart-melting processes of religious conversion and confession. This is especially evident through the 1740s, the period when Protestant spiritual practice heavily shaped the form and function of published execution accounts prior to the 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 the condemned and in those watching her or his execution. Replacing the body of Damiens with the bodies of Sarah Threeneedles, Esther Rodgers, and Margaret Gaulacher allows us to see the 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 the body. By asking scholars of punishment to think more rigorously about what it means when the body of a woman becomes a figure not merely of public shame but also of communal identification, embodying the wider social body’s possibilities of reform and redemption, this essay complicates modern theories of punishment that are shaped by the assumption that the ritual of the scaffold can produce a kind of truth. Literary scholars and historians have productively analyzed the cultural work of eighteenth-century execution narratives and the complex drama of New England public execution rituals, clarifying the important roles of the criminals, ministers, audiences, and print marketplace.4 Nevertheless, they have not considered the particular and durable representative power of the female body on the scaffold. To understand the importance of condemned women’s bodies we must recognize how the meaning of the body changed during the early eighteenth century, as scientific understanding shifted from a one- Jodi Schorb This content downloaded from 134.84.192.102 on Tue, 24 Mar 2015 16:31:11 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 291 sex model, which envisioned the body as having one sex and a variety of gendered forms, to a two-sex model, which posited “two stable, incommensurable, opposite sexes” (Laqueur 6). Between 1690 and 1780, the same period when the criminal confession genre expanded and adapted to the eighteenth-century print marketplace, the long-standing belief that women were more prone to influence and temptation vied with emergent rhetoric that women, by their biological nature, were more naturally passive, were better able to withstand temptation, and possessed a “greater capacity for moral resilience” (Godbeer 266). Elizabeth Maddock Dillon observes that “the historical shift from the one-sex model of bodily identity to the two-sex model corresponds roughly to the period of Puritan cultural dominance and decline in New England” (134).5 Women’s execution accounts foreground this shift in miniature, for they illustrate the heart’s multivalent representative power through the 1740s and then suggest the heart’s more rigidly gendered embodiment by century’s end. Integrating new discourses of sentiment and science, early American execution rituals continued to make the woman’s body a mechanism of truth, even as the nature of this truth changed. The jeremiad sermons of Puritan ministers and the often-formulaic confessions of prisoners seem to be unlikely antecedents to the development of an American culture of sentiment. Reading New England execution narratives alongside eighteenth-century evangelical and early modern medical discourses of the body illuminates how an early language of the heart circulated in a genre so infrequently associated with affect and interiority. By directing attention to a largely male-authored ritual that evolved in the mid-seventeenth century, this essay follows Dana D. Nelson’s call to theorize sentiment apart from nineteenth-century middle-class women’s culture (“‘No Cold or Empty Heart’” 32).6 In doing so, it encourages scholars of nineteenth-century literary sentimentalism to attend to a range of representations of the eighteenth-century affective body.7 The stories of hard-hearted women on the scaffold are valuable to the study of sentiment not merely because they serve as cautionary tales of bad behavior but because they also reveal an early articulation of the cultural need to “feel right” by participating in scenes of female suffering (Stowe 385). DISMAL SPECTACLES Though our brother is upon the rack, as long as we are at our ease, our senses will never inform us of what he suffers. . . . By the imagination we place ourselves in his situation, we conceive ourselves enduring all the same torments, we enter as it were into his body, and become in some measure him, and thence form some idea of his sensations. . . . His agonies, when they are thus brought home to ourselves, when we have thus 292 legacy: volume 28 no. 2 2011 This content downloaded from 134.84.192.102 on Tue, 24 Mar 2015 16:31:11 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions adopted and made them our own, begin at last to affect us, and we then tremble and shudder at the thought of what he feels. Adam Smith, Theory of Moral Sentiments You have before your Eyes, a Couple of Malefactors, whose Murderous Uncleanness . . . brought upon them, a most miserable Death. May your Hearts now give a profitable Attention unto the Use that should be made of such a dismal Spectacle. Cotton Mather, Warnings from the Dead While Adam Smith’s Enlightenment meditation on sympathy appears to be intellectually distant from Puritan rhetoric, his meditations on public torture share attributes with Mather’s invocation to spectators. Smith launched his treatise on the origins of sympathy by pondering a scene of public punishment, one of several episodes of public death invoked throughout Theory of Moral Sentiments to define the origins and effective use of sympathy. Smith sought to articulate the moral basis of fellow feeling and distinguish the social passions, which formed the basis of a moral and benevolent society, from the selfish passions, which he believed undermined the social good. By contrast, Mather directed his audience toward the proper response to an execution, outlining an affective transaction that merged the spectators’ eyes and heart to produce fear and self-scrutiny upon beholding the “dismal Spectacle” on the scaffold. For Mather, a properly felt response, which mobilized the heart to identify with the condemned, forced spectators to reexamine their own sinful behavior. While the treatise and sermon emerged from distinct traditions, both appealed to the imaginative reconstruction of another’s experience and the emotional reaction to another’s suffering for their effects. Both articulated a form of sympathetic identification as a way to promote social order. As Mather demonstrates, Puritan execution sermons were crafted to reanimate spiritual zeal by cultivating in audiences a felt response to another’s proximity to death and suffering. Emerging out of a late Puritan anxiety over so-called cold hearts and communal backsliding, the sermons and narratives were first popularized by ministers eager to “revitalize” their congregations by linking individual sin with collective transgression (Williams, “‘Behold a Tragic Scene’” 830). While the first published accounts were jeremiads, lambasting unregenerates and spectators as sinners on the precipice of doom, their emphasis became more evangelical in tone and purpose over time. Near 1700, Daniel E. Williams argues, “the criminal narrative genre became less concerned with the excitement of terror and more concerned with the process of conversion. Narrative emphasis shifted from the criminal’s pitiful rebellion Jodi Schorb This content downloaded from 134.84.192.102 on Tue, 24 Mar 2015 16:31:11 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 293 against God to his or her struggle to achieve redemption” (“‘Behold a Tragic Scene’” 831). The sermons called for introspection, urgency, and emotional identification with and response to the condemned. While criminals potently symbolized the costs and consequences of disobedience, execution literature worked to make the condemned legible “as models for more ordinary sinners to empathize with and emulate”; the printed sermons, confessions, personal narratives, last words, and dying warnings produced on the occasion of an execution encouraged audiences to identify with the “moral condition” of the condemned as well as to imitate the “spiritual progress” a prisoner made as execution day approached (Halttunen 8). The confessions were read aloud on execution day and later published as “roadmap[s] to paradise,” establishing patterns and behaviors of suffering, regret, and subsequent redemption for readers (Williams, “‘Behold a Tragic Scene’” 831, 836–37). To work fully as a truth-producing ritual, the execution needed to move audiences both to identify with the sinner on the scaffold and to accept the inherent justice of the sentence. The biggest threat to the ritual’s power affects was the uncooperative prisoner, the prisoner who refused to accept the justice of the sentence or to follow the expected path of heartfelt contrition and persuasive performance. Cotton Mather was particularly prone to documenting such encounters, whether with rebellious pirates or stubborn servants like Sarah Smith, who slept through her own execution sermon. While such figures could usefully dramatize the consequences of disobedience, they were not well suited for the public ritual or for publication, because the perceived insensibility of such condemned persons to their crimes and ensuing deaths affected the ability of spectators—and print audiences—to feel on their behalf and to embrace the prisoners’ imminent dramas as their own. Recalcitrant prisoners interrupted the necessary emotional transaction between spectator and spectacle. The sermons written on the execution of Sarah Threeneedles reveal the challenges that fearful hardness of heart posed for the New England execution ritual and usefully illustrate the heart’s role in producing the ritual’s semiotics of truth. Threeneedles, a young, white Bostonian, bore two illegitimate children in succession, murdering the second. Observing her 1698 trial, Samuel Sewall noted in his diary that Threeneedles accused shopkeeper Thomas Savage, Jr., of abandonment, claiming that “he had ruin’d her; if he would have promis’d her any thing [i.e., marriage], it had not come to this” (399). Savage denied the accusations, and Threeneedles was sentenced to death. Her execution generated at least five sermons by three different ministers.8 Unlike many other execution narratives that contain some degree of first-person testimony, the sermons did not include her version of the events. 294 legacy: volume 28 no. 2 2011 This content downloaded from 134.84.192.102 on Tue, 24 Mar 2015 16:31:11 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions By 1700, premarital pregnancy was on the rise and bastardy had become a serious social problem in New England. Sharon M. Harris observes that during this period “infanticide crimes suddenly took on a highly symbolic and problematic meaning within the social, religious, and legal constructions of the community and the region” (32). As Kathleen M. Brown argues, during the 1690s “[t]he body of the female infanticide thus became an emblem of the colony’s uncleanness and the means by which ministers could attempt to reclaim authority that had become tarnished by their complicity in the Salem proceedings” (79). Beginning in the 1690s, numerous colonies passed variations of a 1642 British law, “An Act to Prevent the Destruction of Bastard Children,” which made concealing the birth of an illegitimate child evidence of intent to murder. The legislation revealed anxieties about premarital sexuality, particularly an unmarried woman’s ability successfully to conceal sexual activity, pregnancy, and even murder. By insisting on eyewitnesses to prove that infants were born dead, the statute attempted to curb mothers from making false claims that their children had been stillborn or had died of natural causes. The statute shifted the balance of power to the courts: They no longer had to prove a murder had occurred; instead, the accused woman had to prove that a murder had not occurred. This legal redefinition, both Harris and Brown argue, attempted to redress lingering discomfort from the witch trials over false accusations and the challenge of determining what constituted evidence and “proof ” of illicit behavior (Harris 64).9 Numerous execution sermons and criminal confessions emerged out of and in response to this evidentiary crisis. By publishing sermons on the execution of Sarah Threeneedles, ministers promoted a ritual that promised to make sin and error legible on the body. Because undetected sexual activity and concealed pregnancy challenged preconceptions over the legibility of sin, such rituals seemed to be particularly necessary. If evidence of illicit sexual activity could not be seen on the body, if pregnancy itself became undetectable, if murders could happen unnoticed, how might a community in crisis assure itself that misdeeds would come to light? Samuel Willard, author of one of Threeneedles’s execution sermons, speaks directly to this crisis, rebuking himself for failing to distinguish sinner from saint: “My Soul was the more deeply affected with her condition, partly, because she belonged to my Flock, and had received the Seal of the Covenant from my hands, and was under my Charge; in which I could not but feel an heart thrilling rebuke in the Holy Providence of God” (n.p.). Threeneedles, a covenanted church member, had embodied so many compelling attributes of the regenerate that her failings had eluded even his detection. Yet his tone shifts from doubt to confidence when he highlights Jodi Schorb This content downloaded from 134.84.192.102 on Tue, 24 Mar 2015 16:31:11 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 295 the justice of her conviction, proclaiming, “[Y]our own sin hath found you out, and God hath made you a Spectacle to the world, of his righteous indignation” (22). Here, and elsewhere, the language of sight and visibility counters the cultural fear of female concealment. As if to mediate his earlier failure, Willard celebrates the power of the community’s vigilance, reminding the prisoner that she was “brought up in a Land of Uprightness, in the Valley of Vision” (23). By bringing sin to light, making justice publicly visible, and dramatizing true repentance, execution rituals promised to make the hidden and unknown both visible and tangible. But Willard’s sermon refuses such closure, and, like other infanticide sermons, lacks a sense of fait accompli. These sermons, ostensibly attempts to control the discourse of sex and sin, are instead dominated by a lingering sense of failure, a ritual performance anxiety prompted by the frustration that the women are still concealing something.10 Repeatedly, the sermons express dissatisfaction with their power of revelation, and this dissatisfaction becomes affixed on the body—particularly the heart—of the condemned woman for not revealing enough. This fear leads to the sermon’s insistent anatomizing of the woman’s heart. Willard vehemently protests Threeneedles’s “fearful hardness of heart” in his direct address to the condemned woman: Be convinced of the amazing danger which you have exposed your self to, by your fearful hardness of heart. . . . Had not your heart been dreadful hardned [sic], would you not have taken warning by the first fall which God left you to, to have avoided evermore exposing of your self to such another[?] . . . Had not your heart been desperately obdurate, would you . . . have run your self over such a precipice as this, to expose your self, by adding of Murder to Whoredoms[?] . . . [W]hereas instead of discovering a broken heart, and a contrite spirit, . . . your whole carriage both before and at your Trial, and at the very pronouncing of a Sentence of Death upon you, hath been . . . so stupendous. (24–25) Threeneedles’s “hardness of heart” had multiple effects—explaining her first sexual fall, her illicit sexual acts, the murder, and, crucially, her poor performance during and after her trial. God’s withdrawn grace did not merely release Threeneedles onto a slippery slope of sin; it hardened her heart so as to make her insensible of her increasingly “stupendous” behavior. Because Threeneedles had already confessed to the murder and numerous other sins, the sermon’s frequent invocations of her “hardness of heart” suggest that the true crisis was not her sexual misbehavior. Rather, Threeneedles catalyzed the cultural fear that someone capable of concealing sin was also capable of counterfeiting real repentance. Indeed, in these narratives, hard-heartedness becomes a more pressing crisis than murder. 296 legacy: volume 28 no. 2 2011 This content downloaded from 134.84.192.102 on Tue, 24 Mar 2015 16:31:11 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions DISSECTING THE HARD HEART: NEW ENGLAND’S ANATOMY THEATER The spiritual definition of hard-heartedness as a problematic cooling or spiritual insensitivity emerged directly from the early modern Galenic conception of the heart as the “body’s furnace” (Laqueur 105), as well as the source of heat, life, and sensation (Erickson 2). Robert A. Erickson’s extensive exploration of the heart in early modern religious and scientific discourse highlights the organ’s multivalent symbolism. According to Erickson, By the early modern period, the word “heart” had come to mean a variety of things: the center of all vital functions, the source of one’s inmost thoughts and secret feelings or one’s inmost being, the seat of courage and the emotions generally, the essential, innermost, or central part of anything, the source of desire, volition, truth, understanding, intellect, ethics, spirit. It was the single most important word for referring both to the body and to the mind. No other word performed what “heart” did, and no other word today quite replaces it. (11) This definition establishes the heart’s association with interiority, its central role as the body’s life-force and soul-force in the early modern period. In early medical thought, the heart circulated the “natural pneuma,” Greek for both “breath” and “spirit” or “soul”; for Aristotle, writing before knowledge of the nerves, the heart not only catalyzed the body’s natural heat but was also responsible for all sensation (Furley and Wilkie 19, 20). Awareness of this Galenic model helps to contextualize the Puritan fear of hard-heartedness: As a religious condition, hard-heartedness was most damaging, indicating a hardening of the soul, shutting off not merely affection but the means of true spiritual understanding. The woman on the scaffold was well suited to embody this crisis: She represented the feminized role of the willing convert, while dramatizing the struggle of both body and mind to receive that vital, innermost spiritual spark. Erickson traces the cultural movement from the Galenic model of the heart, which operated through a process of attraction and reception, to a later (but still premodern) “ejaculatory” model of the heart (10). This later model, circulated by William Harvey in his 1653 Concerning the Motion of the Heart and Blood, reconfigured the heart as a strong, pulsing, red-fleshed, muscular organ that pumped vital fluid into the far-reaching areas of the body (nether regions configured in Galenic terms as cooler, feminine areas). On the gendering of this heart, Erickson argues, “Although it would be far too simple to characterize the Galenic heart, in all its rich accumulations of meaning by the early modern period, as a ‘female’ heart, and the newly emerging Harveian heart Jodi Schorb This content downloaded from 134.84.192.102 on Tue, 24 Mar 2015 16:31:11 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 297 as ‘male,’ in terms of classical and biblical notions of gender, the Galenic heart has a strongly receptive or ‘feminine’ function, and the Harveian heart a more ejaculatory and ‘masculine’ function” (10). Erickson’s distinction runs the risk of over-feminizing the Galenic heart, downplaying its simultaneous association with masculine heat as well as feminine receptivity; after all, the same warm and receptive heart attracted blood (from the liver) and moved it through the body of both men and women in a Galenic one-sex system. Yet his comparison usefully suggests two ideas: first, why a woman on the scaffold resonated so strongly among evangelicals influenced by Galenic models, and second, how the Harveian heart anticipated the later emergence of a two-sex model of gender. Because Galenic models remained dominant in colonial New England, the body of a woman was highly suited to symbolize the heart’s multiple functions. The heart served as a wonderfully evocative “symbol of the ambivalence of human existence,” Erickson argues, since it represented, “on the one hand, the fountainhead of all human wickedness, often linked with the ‘imagination’ and duplicity, and on the other hand . . . the source of truth, understanding, and sincerity” (28). The heart was like Eve herself: “Since biblical woman was regarded as the source of evil and the pollution of sin (after Eve), yet at the same time the originator, preserver, and sustainer of life in the family, she exemplified more fully than man the Bible’s representation of the ambivalence of the heart” (Erickson 15). Thus, recasting Foucault for colonial New England, no figure better embodied the ambivalent struggle of the convert than the woman on the scaffold. Further attention to how perceptions of the body were changing during this century helps to clarify the problem of hard-heartedness for New England Puritans and to contextualize the durable power of the female body to adapt to the era’s evolving concerns. In her analysis of Baptist discourse of the eighteenth century, Janet Moore Lindman argues that the early medieval body was more “porous” than the solidly depicted early modern body: The medieval spiritual body was “frequently engulfed by erotic encounters with Christ,” whereas “the early modern body” was becoming “a solid entity that was more impervious to spiritual invasion” (63).11 During the eighteenth century, men debated whether women were the less perfect sex or a different sex altogether (Laqueur 5–6). Accused of hard-heartedness, the female prisoner could potentially illustrate these debates: She exemplified this emergent “impervious” body, she refused to yield to proper influence, and she rejected the call of her (increasingly) gendered body. We see all of these tendencies at play in the various denunciations of Sarah Threeneedles. Cotton Mather admonished her for her “Hard-hearted Wickedness” and called on God to “break that Stony heart . . . Melt this Obstinate Soul, and once at last, mould her Heart into the Form of thy 298 legacy: volume 28 no. 2 2011 This content downloaded from 134.84.192.102 on Tue, 24 Mar 2015 16:31:11 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions Glorious Gospel” (Pillars of Salt 90). In this and other examples, Mather’s desire to “break that Stony heart” was as much a command to women to submit to male authority as a lament that the female body seemed to be impervious to God’s grace. Mather imagines triumphing over the obdurate early modern heart, remolding it into Christ’s more perfect form and feminizing the rebellious woman. More provocative, the problem with the hard heart was less its link to social disobedience than its threat of concealment—its holding out of sight something essential from the viewing audience. The hard heart of the condemned compromised the execution ritual’s ability to generate affective association between the audience and the condemned, thereby disrupting the process of sentimental exchange. Willard laments, “Oh that I might have had the occasion and encouragement to have spoken a consolatory word, to a broken heart, wounded to death under the Arrows of the Almighty, and sensible of her miserable condition, humbly asking after the hopes of her Salvation; the Lord knows how my heart would have rejoyced, might it have been so” (54). Here, Willard imagines his own heart rejoicing at reaching a resistant Threeneedles; he fantasizes (“Oh that I might have had”) and imagines the joy (“the Lord knows how my heart would have rejoyced”) of penetrating her evasive interior, making her sensible, opening her soul to God and to spectators. Both insufficiently feminine (failing to fulfill the receptive function of the Galenic heart) and insufficiently “melted” (lacking the promise of “Salvation”), Threeneedles’s hard heart limits the economy of sentimental exchange promised by the spectacle of her death. Thus, the fear that condemned women were still concealing something drove the obsessive anatomizing of hard-heartedness. In her 1693 confession, for example, Elizabeth Emerson admitted to being a “Miserable Sinner” and to desiring “Humbly to Confess my many sins before God,” begging forgiveness for being “more Hard-hearted than the Sea-Monsters” (C. Mather, Warnings from the Dead 70)—but Cotton Mather remained unimpressed, noting, “Indeed, I Fear, I Fear! This is not All that she should have Acknowledged” (72). Likewise, Sarah Threeneedles volunteered numerous examples of the types of regrettable folly that led her to murder (including a fondness for the expression “I’ll be Hang’d”), yet Mather accused her of having a “Stony heart” and pushed her to confess still more (Pillars of Salt 89, 90). In fact, the vast majority of narratives depict penitent women participating in the ritual and offering the sorts of orthodox confessions that the genre encouraged, yet ministers continued to fret over the women’s insufficient power to generate sympathy and introspection in audiences. Cotton Mather addressed this crisis more fully in A Sorrowful Spectacle, Jodi Schorb This content downloaded from 134.84.192.102 on Tue, 24 Mar 2015 16:31:11 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 299 a sermon that depicts the hard-hearted woman as an emotional thief who robs the execution ritual of affective power. Delivered in 1715 on the death of Margaret Gaulacher, an Irish servant sent to America on a convict ship and later convicted of neonatal infanticide, the sermon is structured around the proposition, “[W]hat is an Hard Heart? And what are the Symptoms of it?” (7). Mather systematically defines the hard heart (as dull, inflexible, insensible— much the same as he depicts Gaulacher), then recounts her convictions for theft, her concealed pregnancy, and her refusal to admit her Catholic sentiments. His effortless connection of theft to fornication to spiritual obduracy constructs her hard-heartedness as the culmination of a long series of crimes. To make matters worse, Gaulacher, who could not read, remained tight lipped at her execution. Mather notes, “She said little, but referr’d herself to the Paper which had been read Publickly in the Congregation just before.” Rebuked for her scanty speech, Gaulacher concedes one last line: “Then the Lord be Merciful unto me! and spoke no more” (iii). Much might have accounted for her speechlessness (including the fact that she could not read), but Mather interprets her silence as yet another theft: “Oh! I wish, the Testimonies of a thorough Repentance in her, were more Conspicuous. But I would make the best Use I can, of what Little has been obtained” (83). The sermon suggests that Mather objects to her silence not because he is concerned for her eternal soul but because she is ruining the moment for everyone else: “Behold, Ah! poor Margaret, Behold a mighty Congregation of People, with Hearts Bleeding for thee, and Wishing and Praying and Longing to see the fear of God making some Discoveries in thee. And shall thy Heart still remain unaffected[?] . . . No Tears are enough, Tears of Blood were not enough, to be employ’d on so prodigious a Spectacle! I am sorry, I am sorry, that I find myself obliged so much to speak it” (79). Mather’s prostrate, ejaculatory, and reiterative speech (“I am sorry, I am sorry”) sought to compensate his audience for Gaulacher’s theft of feeling and scant oratory, providing his spectators’ “Hearts Bleeding” with an outlet for sympathetic exchange. Given the skepticism that emerged in the wake of the 1692 witch trials over what constituted proof, one might expect execution sermons to exhibit wariness of the performative aspects of confession, to discourage women from acting sorry, feeling penitent, or imploring for mercy. But the opposite was true. Since concealment signaled insensibility, ministers tried to show persuasively that the condemned had learned the true costs and consequences of hiding sin, encouraging the women to demonstrate this understanding through emotive, affective, and even spontaneous exposition. Nevertheless, this proved difficult. While such women were well suited to illustrate the ambivalent or obdurate soul in need of softening, how to make their bodies signify the transforma- 300 legacy: volume 28 no. 2 2011 This content downloaded from 134.84.192.102 on Tue, 24 Mar 2015 16:31:11 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions tive power of grace became challenging. Their early modern bodies were better equipped to articulate a problem than a solution. THE NAKED TRUTH Truth feareth nothing so much as concealment, and desireth nothing so much as clearly to be laid open to the view of all: when it is most naked, it is most lovely and powerful. Richard Sibbes, The Bruised Reed Truth loves the light, and is most beautiful when most naked. Richard Baxter, The Reformed Pastor12 The close relationship between truth and nakedness as antidotes to concealment, expressed repeatedly by Puritan divines, helps to explain the difficulty of making the infanticidal woman a monument to truth, even as she served as the most useful monument to the spiritual ambivalence of the early modern soul. Although her sin had been found out, her crime had been punished, and her demeanor was often repentant, she remained a challenging and potentially unmoving spectacle, confounding the affective power of the execution ritual. On one hand, the condemned woman had already revealed too much (chiefly through her public “Whoredoms”); on the other hand, she revealed too little (most often through her perceived hard-heartedness). As a monument to truth, she had to repent not only for murder but also for the sexual transgression that preceded it. This stance demanded that she perform newfound chastity and modesty. The best remedy for fear of concealment (per Sibbes) was that she be “naked” and “laid open to the view of all,” a risky gambit for a woman already deemed guilty of sexual misdeeds. Spiritual nakedness was a potent motif that celebrated the stripping away of artifice so central to Puritan ecclesiastical and rhetorical reforms, such as purifying the church and ridding prose of unnecessary ornamentation. Yet, as seen in the above epigraphs, Puritan rhetoric constructed truth as a form of exhibitionism: Truth loves exposure, craves visibility, flaunts its nakedness. Thus, getting the bodies of already sexually transgressive women to yield “naked” truth remained tricky. The narrative effectively had to “la[y] open” the condemned women’s sinfulness without inciting the baser passions of the spectators.13 In response, execution narratives sought to embody the truth of repentance and conversion by invoking a newer model of the heart—a heart grounded in biological difference, a significant departure from the Galenic heart men and Jodi Schorb This content downloaded from 134.84.192.102 on Tue, 24 Mar 2015 16:31:11 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 301 women purportedly shared under the one-sex model. This is evident in later texts such as A Faithful Narrative of Elizabeth Wilson (1786), in which a convicted murderer becomes a sympathetic victim of male cruelty. But the heart’s redefinition begins much earlier, a shift evident in the potent transitional text, Reverend John Rogers’s “The Declaration and Confession of Esther Rodgers” (1701). The Faithful Narrative, influential in the development of the miraculous conversion criminal genre, combined Rodgers’s extended first-person account, dying warning, and final words with extended third-party and eyewitness accounts of her demeanor while in prison and on the scaffold. The “Declaration” bears the imprint of both Galenic and two-sex models as it transforms the sexually transgressive female into an exemplary figure of truth (of God’s power, of the law, and of real conversion). Esther Rodgers, a white indentured servant from Maine, was executed in 1701 for murdering an infant conceived while she was working in a public house. During her trial, she admitted to entertaining companions “in a back part of the house” and becoming pregnant by “the Negro man belonging to that House,” after which she concealed the pregnancy, gave birth in a field, covered the body “with Dirt and Snow, and speedily returned home again” (123– 24, 124, 124). Others at the public house suspected that she had given birth and initiated a search; they soon discovered the site of the hasty burial and confronted Rodgers with the dead body. While such scrutiny seemingly confirmed the community’s successful mechanisms of surveillance, Rodgers’s subsequent confession contained a disconcerting revelation: She admitted to having concealed a pregnancy four years earlier while she had been a servant in a private home. Her reconstruction of this past event highlighted her stealth. She recounted suffocating the first newborn to “prevent coming to Publick Shame,” hiding the child “in an upper Room, till the Darkness of the Night following, gave advantage for a Private Burial in the Garden,” then adding, “All this was done in Secret, no person living whatsoever, no not so much as the Father of the Child himself was privy to my disposal of it, or knew that I ever had such a Child” (122, 122, 123). She also claimed that her first child was fathered by “a Negro Lad living in the same House” (122), adding another act of miscegenation to her growing list of transgressions.14 Indirectly, she acknowledged the social stigmas that encouraged single servant women to conceal pregnancies while testifying to their ample opportunities for secrecy. The details surrounding Rodgers’s crime and arrest seemed poised to maximize a jeremiad rhetoric that infanticidal women, particularly servants, were prone to lies, disobedience, and concealment. But the “Declaration” did not rest its rhetoric on such common themes. Instead, it focused on “this marvelous Change in this poor Creature” rather than on anxiety over her sinful acts 302 legacy: volume 28 no. 2 2011 This content downloaded from 134.84.192.102 on Tue, 24 Mar 2015 16:31:11 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions and the potential lingering effects of concealment on her multiply transgressive body (n.p.). Reverend John Rogers’s trio of execution sermons reanimated the trope of infanticide as sexual transgression, but Esther Rodgers’s “Declaration,” published along with the sermons, was unconcerned with her ability to hide and conceal, instead remaining focused on what it considered to be her successful conversion. John Rogers’s sermons shift between gendering Esther Rodgers’s crime and reminding audiences that her corruption stemmed from original sin. So the sermons link the notoriously “defiled” servant to “a company of loose and lewd women,” including “Rahab the Harlot” (114, 70). They highlight her “ungodly” act of being “Mother and Murtherer . . . O cruel monster in Nature!” (68, 68–69). However, they step back from this rhetoric to remind audiences, male and female, that they are equally stained by original sin and that “[t]he same Corruption is acting and reigning in the heart of every natural man and woman” (96). Against these sermons, the “Declaration” articulates Rodgers’s transformation and reshapes the murderous woman as naturally suited for the softening powers of grace. Samuel Belcher’s preface, added for publication, prepares readers for the dramatic unveiling of Rodgers’s transformed body: “[B]ehold a Tragick Scene, strangely changed into a Theater of Mercy, a Pillar of Salt Transformed into a Monument of Free Grace; a poor Wretch, entering into Prison a Bloody Malefactor[;] . . . [after] the space of Eight Months she came forth, Sprinkled, Cleansed, Comforted, a Candidate of Heaven.” In Belcher’s potent reversal of infanticide, a bloody, wretched body emerges reborn and purified. Rodgers’s eight-and-a-half-month “Confinement” becomes a metaphor of gestation and rebirth (Rogers 118). In this way, Belcher transforms a “Bloody Malefactor” into a “Candidate” for salvation, a more gender-neutral identity that rescripts Rodgers’s transgressive sexuality. Provocatively, Rodgers’s rebirth was dependent upon her social death. The “Declaration” pronounces her “Dead in Law”: “Here is One in the Congregation at this time, of whom it may be thus spoken, That she is a Dead Woman; not only that she was dead in Trespasses & Sins, but is Dead in Law, and by a Sentence of Condemnation must be put to Death before another Sabbath come about: And yet there is more than a possibility through Grace, that she may Live again” (135). This invocation of Rodgers as “a Dead Woman” is especially resonant. On one hand, it posits the death of her problematic femininity (kill the woman, save the soul). On the other hand, it highlights how her religious conversion transformed her transgressive body into a more acceptable femininity (a “Mother and Murtherer” metamorphosed into a “Woman”). Moreover, in this example she becomes a “Woman” at the moment she is declared “Dead in Law,” an evocative, albeit unintentional, commentary on women’s legal status. Rodgers’s own confession pairs eerily with the declara- Jodi Schorb This content downloaded from 134.84.192.102 on Tue, 24 Mar 2015 16:31:11 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 303 tion that she is “Dead in Law,” for her language is simultaneously self-asserting and self-erasing. Her last lines, punctuated by exclamations and repetitions, both counter and underscore her legal erasure: “O let me beg of you all to hear me! for the Lords Sake Remember me! O let every one Remember me!” (148). Observers applauded Rodgers for her self-possession, her strength of character under duress. Yet her final words, notable for their urgency, highlight that her self-possession was made possible, ironically, by giving up her self. The final portion of the narrative serves as a clarifying example of both the spectacle of the scaffold and the mix of feminine modesty and masculine bravery that transforms Rodgers into an exemplary convert. Esther Rodgers was a model prisoner in part (but only in part) because she cooperated and said the right things. After all, many other narratives had accused women of being hard-hearted despite their penitent stances, confessions, and cooperation. Rodgers’s success stemmed from her powerful ability to convey persuasively the “Saving Change upon her heart” through both speech and exterior display (her gestures and her stance) (139). The result was spectacular, as documented in the anonymous observer’s account of her effect on the thousands who gathered to watch her die: THE manner of her Entertaining DEATH,15 was even astonishing to a Multitude of Spectators, (being as was judged Four or Five Thousand People at least) with that Composure of Spirit, Cheerfulness of Countenance, pleasantness of Speech, and a sort of Complaisantness in Carriage towards the Ministers who were assistant to her . . . that even melted the hearts of all that were within seeing or hearing, into Tears of affection, with greatest wonder and admiration. Her undaunted Courage and unshaken Confidence she modestly enough expressed, yet steadfastly held until the end. (153) Here, the observer seems especially struck by Rodgers’s ability to contain feminine excess, to offer a “mixture of Tears, and a show of moderated sorrow,” images that blend feminine expressiveness and masculine stoicism (147). Belcher’s preface reinforces this idea. He praises Rodgers for demonstrating how “the Weaker Sex” could be “unconcerned with the business of Death, at once out doing all the old Roman Masculine bravery” (119). Transformed from “Bloody Malefactor” to admirable member of “the Weaker Sex,” Rodgers embodied what by century’s end would be the natural and biological marks of womanhood: cheerfulness, pleasantness, penitence, receptivity. These characteristics were markers of feminine difference in an emerging two-sex model, one that would eventually distinguish between female hearts and male hearts. Rodgers’s celebrated capacity to wring tears and melt hearts illustrates how the eighteenth century began to perceive the emotions and the passions dif- 304 legacy: volume 28 no. 2 2011 This content downloaded from 134.84.192.102 on Tue, 24 Mar 2015 16:31:11 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions ferently. New intellectual ideas, imported from moral-sense philosophers and English Latitudinarians, who advocated broader Protestant sympathy over rigid sectarianism, advanced a view that the human mind was a divine creation and that the human faculties were both “necessary and . . . beneficial” (Landsman 68). According to June Howard, the term sentimentality entered common use by the mid-eighteenth century, signaling the “moment when a great deal of attention was being paid to the moral and social function of emotion” (214). The emotions—once dangerous signs of human frailty and original sin, the “body’s furnace” (in Galenic thought)—now appeared to be divinely mandated and essential to human welfare, and the less derogatory term “affections” emerged in religious discourse as a substitute for the more unstable signifier, “passions” (Landsman 68). Howard argues that the era created a new “conceptual system” in which “the process of identification—how an individual puts himself or herself in someone else’s place and claims knowledge of what that other person is thinking and feeling—establishes the grounds for virtuous behavior and a humane social order” (214). These changes merged new theories of the human interior with arguments about how this interior served a larger civic purpose. The civic purpose of sympathetic identification with the condemned became more pronounced in later infanticide narratives, even contributing to the demise of public support for public execution. Whereas the earliest narratives encouraged audiences to feel like the woman on the scaffold—to identify her soul as their own and her imminent death as their own—later narratives constructed the woman as a sentimental object of pity. In 1739, for example, Penelope Kenny and Sarah Simpson were executed for infanticide; Reverend Arthur Browne preached a sermon upon Kenny’s execution, and Reverend William Shurtleff preached upon Kenny and Simpson. Browne directed the audience’s attention “to a miserable poor Creature, . . . reduced to this deplorable Condition, chiefly from a want of those Opportunities of Instruction, you so plentifully enjoy,” rhetorically creating a more privileged audience (a “you”) to put Kenny’s disadvantage into perspective (13). Shurtleff also drew attention to his “tenderest Bowels of Compassion” and directed his audience to offer “your tender Regards to the Person[s] here before you. . . . They are most certainly fit and proper Objects of your Pity” (17, 19). In these later sermons, there are no mentions of the murderers’ hard hearts. Instead, the ministers recount Kenny’s and Simpson’s hardships, ill treatment, negligent parenting, poor educations, poverty, and other social disadvantages.16 The sermons thus became an opportunity to express pity for the condemned, and the ministers modeled and moderated this process. Attending an execution or reading a sermon thus became an opportunity to perform one’s civic duty by expressing a measured display of sympathy. Jodi Schorb This content downloaded from 134.84.192.102 on Tue, 24 Mar 2015 16:31:11 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 305 Meanwhile, according to Harris, jurors, more sensitive to the plight of women who lacked protection and economic support, became less willing to execute women for neonatal infanticide (52). Late-eighteenth-century cultural texts were increasingly prone to depicting women as “unwittingly committing infanticide” rather than being driven by passion or inherent wickedness (62). Sermons continued to grapple with the implications of this shift, advocating pity for the condemned while defending capital punishment as just. In his 1740 sermon, Shurtleff began his address to the “Christian Reader” by reprinting the “Act to prevent the destroying and murdering of Bastard Children” so “that it might be better known in all Families” (i). This move forcefully merged legal and theological discourse but also suggested the limits of both the church and the state, since the public needed to be reminded of the law and that public execution was indeed just. Years later, in 1787, Benjamin Rush would publish his influential argument that public punishment undermined rather than reinforced social order.17 If these pitiable female bodies produced truth, then what this truth signified (sin? poverty? abuse by men?) became less and less clear. In 1786, the same year that Elizabeth Wilson was put to death for murdering her twin infants, “Ezekiel Russell printed an ELEGY&c., a doggerel broadside ballad” that condemned the “Hard-hearted Wretch! a Monster sure”— but the “Hard-hearted Wretch” was not Wilson (Williams, “Source Notes” 279). Instead, it was Joseph Deshong, the lover who had abandoned her (272). Deshong emerged as a real-life Lovelace, Samuel Richardson’s infamous libertine, who proclaimed, “Hard-heartedness, as it is called, is an essential of the libertine’s character” (601; emphases added). By the end of the century, narratives of murderous women had largely embraced the sentimental rhetoric of female weakness and misfortune. The narratives produced in the wake of Wilson’s execution highlighted her plight, her abandonment, and her pitiable state; her pleas of innocence were interpreted as believable rather than as obdurate. Thus, Wilson’s confession offered no slippery slope of crime; her sin began with her seduction, as the narrative used her penitent confession, religious conversion, and deep sense of tragic victimization to “[exonerate] Wilson . . . while indicting her evil lover” (Williams, “Victims of Narrative Seduction” 153). The narrative even inspired a later fictional account, tellingly titled The Victim of Seduction!18 Hard-heartedness, once dramatized by a female body that evoked the universal sinner’s need for the softening power of grace, now became the mark of the male libertine. As “poor Creature[s]” who had fallen victim to the pulsing, throbbing masculine hearts of their seducers, the hard-hearted harlots of criminal confessions had been transformed into sentimental victims of seduction. 306 legacy: volume 28 no. 2 2011 This content downloaded from 134.84.192.102 on Tue, 24 Mar 2015 16:31:11 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions NOTES 1. For example, see Meranze 4–9, 19–54, and 293–328. 2. On the early “important spiritual role” of the American murderer (9), see Halttunen 7–32; on the importance of public confession to conversion rhetoric, see Caldwell 45–80; on the spectacle of public execution, criminal conversion narratives, and emerging evangelicalism between 1700 and 1740, see Williams, “‘Behold a Tragic Scene.’” 3. On the history of Renaissance anatomy theaters and the culture of live dissection, see Sawday 54–84. I use the term anatomy theater metaphorically, to signify a performative ritual based on the literal display and the metaphorical opening of the body for pedagogical purposes. 4. See Williams, “‘Behold a Tragic Scene’” for a concise analysis of the miraculous conversion genre. See also Williams, Introduction; Halttunen 7–32; Cohen 3–38; and Masur 25–49. 5. Laqueur places the shift “[s]ometime in the eighteenth century,” clarifying that it “did not happen all at once, nor did it happen everywhere at the same time, nor was it a permanent shift” (149, 150). Dillon observes that this shift parallels “the move from a monarchical and hierarchical political order to a modern politics of natural rights, equality, and social contract in the Anglo-American world.” This emerging discourse of natural rights authorized itself, she argues, by “articulating and justifying power differentials among individuals. Differences in authority that were once sustained by divinely ordained hierarchy now begin to be sustained by biological difference” (135). Even as she highlights the ways two-sex models were used to limit women’s rights, Dillon cautions that “one-sex” imagery in Puritan culture did not mean a corresponding social freedom for women or a freedom from gender norms (139). 6. Recent work on sentimental masculinities has productively widened the scope of American sentiment beyond nineteenth-century middle-class women’s culture, particularly through an examination of the literature of the “man of feeling” and the literature of the early Republic (Chapman and Hendler, Introduction 3). See, for example, Barnes; Burgett; Chapman and Hendler, Sentimental Men; Ellison; Nelson, National Manhood; Schweitzer; and Stern. 7. Important works linking eighteenth-century evangelicalism to nineteenth-century sentimental cultures include Gustafson and Reynolds. See also Boudreau, who notes that “the language of sympathy appeared long before the popular form of the sentimental novel” (Sympathy in American Literature 4). 8. Sermons on Threeneedles include two by Samuel Willard, assembled under the title Impenitent Sinners Warned of Their Misery; two by Increase Mather, assembled under the title The Folly of Sinning; and one by Cotton Mather included in his compilation Pillars of Salt. 9. Increase Mather’s Cases of Conscience Concerning Evil Spirits Personating Men doc- Jodi Schorb This content downloaded from 134.84.192.102 on Tue, 24 Mar 2015 16:31:11 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 307 uments the shifting attitude toward evidentiary standards of guilt and innocence in the wake of the witch trials, as Mather grappled with the problem of unreliable evidence. This renewed interest in evidence and proof continued during the Great Awakening of the 1730s, with a revived fascination in the observation of the smallest and most minute aspects of a would-be convert’s behavior, scrutinizing bodies for signs of sin or signs of grace. Thus, examinations of suspected witches for devil’s marks or witches’ teats and Jonathan Edwards’s “Apostrophe to Sarah Pierpont” were two distinct but interrelated cultural moments when the female body—understood as intensely receptive to influence (whether Satanic or Divine)—was read for legible signs of sin and salvation. 10. Harris, on the other hand, emphasizes the powers of “cultural hegemony” at play in infanticide cases and in the law’s power to define the strict parameters of acceptable female behavior, arguing that “the pulpit, the courtroom, and the press” controlled not only the body of the woman on the scaffold but also the discourse surrounding her crime (26, 27). Whereas Harris highlights the pulpit’s power, I emphasize its limits. 11. Citing Susan Juster’s argument that “the body remained the primary means of spiritual access in the eighteenth century,” Lindman highlights how the spiritual body was in the process of becoming increasingly solid in religious discourse as the eighteenth century progressed, which necessitated more forceful metaphors of spiritual penetration (qtd. in Lindman 63). For example, she cites emergent images of electricity, lightning, temperature, and fire to describe the Baptist conversion process (63). 12. These epigraphs exemplify the Puritan “plain style of preaching” (Ryken 104). They are quoted in Ryken 17. 13. A related challenge occurred in seventeenth-century England as authorities regarded the detailed medical illustrations of the female reproductive body in texts like Helkiah Crooke’s Microcosmographia with increasing scrutiny; see Sawday 224–26. 14. In 1705, just a few years after Rodgers’s case, Massachusetts passed the “Act for the Better Preventing of a Spurious and Mixt Issue,” which prohibited sexual intercourse between blacks and whites. Samuel Sewall worried that the law would “promote Murders and other Abominations” by encouraging women to abort or kill their mulatto offspring to avoid prosecution (Diary 532). 15. “Entertaining” could be read as an adjective or a verb—the former implying the audience’s sensational thrill of watching Rodgers die, and the latter, a more persuasive reading, expressing admiration for the stance with which she faced her end. 16. For more on how social experience impacted convictions and textual representations, see Cohen 89–99 and Harris 51–55. 17. On dangerous and disruptive public sympathy for the condemned, see Rush 141– 43. On how public sympathy led to arguments against capital punishment, see Meranze 87–127 and Boudreau, The Spectacle of Death 19–35. 18. For a detailed reading of the fascinating publication history resulting from Wilson’s execution and her narrative’s elaborate sensational rhetoric, see Williams, “Victims of Narrative Seduction.” 308 legacy: volume 28 no. 2 2011 This content downloaded from 134.84.192.102 on Tue, 24 Mar 2015 16:31:11 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions WORKS CITED In the sources listed below, EAI indicates those contained online in Readex’s Early American Imprints, Series I: Evans. Barnes, Elizabeth. States of Sympathy: Seduction and Democracy in the American Novel. New York: Columbia UP, 1997. Boudreau, Kristin. The Spectacle of Death: Populist Literary Responses to American Capital Cases. Amherst: Prometheus, 2006. ———. Sympathy in American Literature: American Sentiments from Jefferson to the Jameses. Gainesville: UP of Florida, 2002. Brown, Kathleen M. “Murderous Uncleanness: The Body of the Female Infanticide in Puritan New England.” Lindman and Tarter 77–94. Browne, Arthur. 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Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1981. Richardson, Samuel. Clarissa; or, The History of a Young Lady. 1747. Ed. Angus Ross. London: Penguin, 2004. Rogers, John. Death The Certain Wages of Sin to the Impenitent; Life The sure Reward of Grace to the Penitent. Boston: B. Green and J. Allen, 1701. EAI. Rush, Benjamin. Essays, Literary, Moral and Philosophical. Philadelphia: Thomas and William Bradford, 1798. 310 legacy: volume 28 no. 2 2011 This content downloaded from 134.84.192.102 on Tue, 24 Mar 2015 16:31:11 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions Ryken, Leland. Worldly Saints: The Puritans as They Really Were. Grand Rapids: Academie, 1986. Sawday, Jonathan. The Body Emblazoned: Dissection and the Human Body in Renaissance Culture. New York: Routledge, 1995. Schweitzer, Ivy. Perfecting Friendship: Politics and Affiliation in Early American Literature. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 2006. Sewall, Samuel. The Diary of Samuel Sewall, 1674–1729. Ed. M. Halsey Thomas. Vol. 1. 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Pillars of Salt: An Anthology of Early American Criminal Narratives. Madison: Madison House, 1993. ———. “Source Notes to A Faithful Narrative of Elizabeth Wilson.” Williams, Pillars of Salt 279–81. ———. “Victims of Narrative Seduction: The Literary Translations of Elizabeth (and ‘Miss Harriot’) Wilson.” Early American Literature 28 (1993): 147–70. Wilson, Elizabeth. A Faithful Narrative of Elizabeth Wilson. Philadelphia, 1786. EAI. Rpt. in Williams, Pillars of Salt 270–78.  Jodi Schorb This content downloaded from 134.84.192.102 on Tue, 24 Mar 2015 16:31:11 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 311