Queer enthusiasms: cross-gender awakening and the affective remnants of religious feeling

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Content QUEER ENTHUSIASMS: CROSS-‐GENDER AWAKENING AND THE AFFECTIVE REMNANTS OF RELIGIOUS FEELING by Gino Conti A Dissertation Presented to the FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY (ENGLISH) August 2015 2 TABLE OF CONTENTS INTRODUCTION: REALNESS, REVEALS, AND THE RELIGIOUS GESTURE 4-‐30 Queering the Non-‐Secular 14-‐18 Early Enthusiasms 18-‐21 Methodology 21-‐28 Chapter Descriptions 28-‐30 CHAPTER 1: RELIGIOUS MELANCHOLY, METHODIST 30-‐70 ENTHUSIASM, AND GENDER-‐CROSSING IN HENRY FIELDING’S THE FEMALE HUSBAND Enthusiasm Delineated 36-‐44 Melancholy Methodists 44-‐48 “Enthusiasm Delineated (c. 1761),” William Hogarth 48-‐53 “Credulity, Superstition, and Fanaticism (1762) 53-‐54 The Female Husband 54-‐70 CHAPTER 2: “OH, I FEEL, I FEEL, I FEEL!”: MORAVIANS, 70-‐105 FREE GRACE, AND THE AFTERLIVES OF ENTHUSIASM John Wesley’s Moravian Awakening 76-‐83 Awakening and Conversion 84-‐87 Sidehole Time and the Labor of Grace 87-‐105 CHAPTER 3: MELANCHOLIA IN DRAG: RELIGIOUS 105-‐162 ENTHUSIASM AND INVERSION IN THE WELL OF LONELINESS Melancholia in Drag 109-‐114 Case 166: Psychopathia Sexualis: Count Sandor/Countess Sarolta Vay 115-‐125 Dragging The Well 125-‐129 “A moral poison that kills the soul” 130-‐136 Encounters with the Wound 136-‐140 Encounters with Holy Books 140-‐145 Animal Encounters 145-‐152 Awakening in Drag 152-‐161 3 CHAPTER 4: “[A] REMEDY, BY WHICH ONE NATION 161-‐218 SHALL BE THE WOMAN”: LENAPE AND MORAVIAN SPIRITUAL GENDER CROSSINGS IN H.D.’S THE GIFT “Home to Bethlehem”: Queer Nationalism in The Gift 168-‐174 Gender Homes and Middle Grounds 174-‐181 The Walking Purchase 181-‐188 Missionary Histories 188-‐192 Delaware as “Women” 192-‐198 Eighteenth-‐Century Moravian Gender and Practice 198-‐209 Dream and Vision in The Gift 209-‐218 CODA: DOES IT GET BETTER? TRANS SUICIDE 219-‐234 AND THE ENTHUSIASTIC GESTURE BIBLIOGRAPHY 234-‐254 ENDNOTES 254-‐271 Introduction 254-‐256 Chapter 1 256-‐260 Chapter 2 260-‐261 Chapter 3 262-‐264 Chapter 4 264-‐270 Coda 270-‐271 4 INTRODUCTION REALNESS, REVEALS, AND THE RELIGIOUS GESTURE Despite the high-‐glam, haute couture that is a must for any drag queen competing on Logo television’s RuPaul’s Drag Race, the most shocking reveals on this long-‐running reality show about female impersonators who compete in weekly eliminations to become “America’s Next Drag Superstar” are psychological rather than sartorial. In a dramatic high point of the show’s first season, for example, the boyish and bald petite queen Ongina broke down on stage in front of a panel of judges that included the show’s creator and namesake, RuPaul Charles, to reveal what “I’ve been wanting to say and I’ve been always so afraid to say it, that I’ve been living with HIV for the last two years of my life” (“S1, E4” RPDR). Several queens in later seasons followed emotional suit. In a fourth-‐season, after-‐show episode of Drag Race called Untucked, in which queens sip mixed drinks and throw shade in the aptly named “Interior Illusions Lounge” while waiting for the judges to deliberate about who that week will “sashay away,” plus-‐sized queen Jiggly Caliente tearfully confessed to her drag sisters that her brother took beatings for her when they were children, telling bullies, “ [Jiggly’s] not wrong, he’s just different” (“S4, E3” Untucked). Two seasons later, a watery-‐eyed Monica Beverly Hillz revealed her secret to Drag Race judges on the main stage: “I’m not just a drag queen. I’m a transgendered woman” (“S5, E2” RPDR). And in a confessional moment that seemed to genuinely move the judges to tears, one of the season’s top remaining queens, Roxxxy Andrews, burst into sobs after recounting the way her mother abandoned her at a 5 bus stop when she was only three. This last reveal shook even RuPaul’s usually steady exterior. “We love you. You are so welcome here,” she assured Roxxy. Then, with an audible tremble in which the queen’s pain registered with— perhaps even as—her own, Ru gave the queens and television audience an extempore mini-‐ sermon: “You know, we as gay people, we get to choose our family. We are a family here” (“RuPaul’s Drag Race/8 Most Emotional Moments”). Trauma—an HIV-‐positive status, past prison time or drug abuse, alcoholism or a secret trans identity, childhood bullying, a teenage suicide attempt, or estrangement and abuse from fathers who aren’t down with their drag or their gayness—renders these Drag Race queens sisters and creates an opening for the formation of chosen kin. “Realness,” in this commodified cross-‐dressing competition, is just as often judged by a drag queen contestant’s willingness to testify to brokenness as it is by her ability to convincingly pass as a fashion-‐forward woman. Along with the struggle of competing in fashion and acting challenges, walking the runway, facing the judges’ critique, and, if they are in the bottom two performers for the week, lip synching “for— their— lives!” in a high-‐stakes, drag performance-‐elimination challenge, these queens must demonstrate not only that they have suffered real emotional struggles, but importantly, that they trust the other girls and judges enough to reveal their inner despair to a newfound drag family. Such emotional conversions, not unlike the despair and salvation of earlier Protestant autobiographical traditions this project will examine, operate according to Drag Race theology: in exchange for a heartfelt reveal of their past or current suffering, Ru’s “girls” receive the promise that they will overcome their personal 6 struggles “through the power of drag.” Yet until these television queens do confess their trauma, drama, and other moral failings, they face the relentless critique of a panel of judges—especially RuPaul’s Jersey Girl-‐esque sidekick Michelle Visage, whose repeated refrain to those queens who don’t open up, break down, or otherwise demonstrate what passes for emotional authenticity is, “We don’t really know who you are.” Fans, of course, doubt many of these emotional reveals, and yet we can’t help but be moved by at least some of the show’s moments—like when Drag Race All Stars queens Raven and JuJubee—besties since the second season and paired as team “RuJubee” for the all star show—broke down after a losing lip synch; or the time the talented, but financially destitute Yara Sofia literally fell apart in a similar lip synch-‐for-‐your-‐life battle against a best friend on Season Two, strewing her fabulous, feathered, self-‐designed costume across the stage until, shirtless and sobbing, she knelt and collapsed backward into the wreckage (“RuPaul’s Drag Race”/8 Most Emotional Moments”). Ultimately, it is a convincing performance of vulnerability and despair that renders these queens worthy of inclusion in the season’s top finishers—a public reveal of emotional struggle, of secret shame and pain overcome, that purges and bonds Drag Race queens as that old gay euphemism “family,” repurposed from subcultural code to pop cultural utterance. In this way, Drag Race’s self-‐reveals do function as Protestant conversion narratives—public spiritual autobiographies of suffering and salvation that are more akin to testifying before an affirming congregation than to solitary Catholic confessionals, the religio-‐ discursive model upon which Michel Foucault’s foundational account of modern Western sexuality is constructed. As this project will demonstrate, these Christian 7 models of religious self-‐accounting are not so different in their disciplinary outcomes: both Protestant and Catholic spiritual reveals depend upon suffering as the means to salvation, yet the Protestant means to grace this project examines, as well the enthusiastic believers cross-‐gendered by these forms of Protestantism in the eighteenth-‐century and the narrative and gender afterlives of those beliefs in the twentieth-‐century, trouble that emotional pattern, just as they also depend upon the recognition, kinship, and discipline of religious communities not so unlike the drag world. In fact, Drag Race takes conscious steps to equate drag practice with not only Protestant Christian forms of self-‐revelation, but more so, with specifically black church formations, albeit of a generic and self-‐helpy variety. Season five Drag Race queen Latrice Royale, for example, became known on the show for her churchy refrains and songs; she used one of the audience’s favorites to comfort a tearful Jiggly in the Untucked episode mentioned above, exhorting, “Sop it up! Cause Jesus is a biscuit!” (“S4, E3” RPDR). RuPaul herself ends every Drag Race episode with the same call-‐and-‐response questions to his queens and his viewers: “If you can’t love yourself, how in the hell you gonna love somebody else? Can I get an amen up in here?” To which the stage-‐full of queens and the panel of judges—hands raised in ritual church gestures of affirmation, recognition, and celebration that are sometimes so awkward they register as part hallelujah, part high-‐five—erupt in a chorused, “A-‐men!” Ru and the Season Five queens have even recorded a song of the same name and refrain, “Can I get an Amen?”, that positions drag performance as the antidote to down-‐and-‐outness (“S5, E6” RPDR). In this ironic twist on the “it gets 8 better” of mainstream GLBT narratives that promise struggling youth a future filled with social acceptance and love so long as they hew to homo-‐norms, “Can I Get an Amen?” vaguely gestures to a better future in the “some day” while focusing on the way many drag queens survive the now: they go to the drag bar, tuck their junk, and walk the runway. Drag queen uplift here means a paid gig, a lace-‐front wig, and a supportive drag community to affirm your experience, as exemplified in the show’s compelling catch-‐phrase. Drag Race’s religious gesture—the framing of cross-‐gender recognition as an emotional pain that needs expression and affirmation in order to authorize a psychological “realness”— has a long history, this project will argue, both in twentieth-‐century gender melancholia, and prior to that, in the religious underpinnings of cross-‐gender narrative that have historically depended upon figurations of melancholia, even martyrdom, to mark the gender-‐crosser as moral and godly. 1 Preexisting, too, I also argue, are historical and theological refigurations of this gender trauma—the taking in, and taking on, of the wound, and of woundedness, as a means of embracing an unorthodox gender and faith that this project locates in transatlantic Protestant religious enthusiasms of the First Great Awakening. 2 Queer Enthusiasms: Cross-‐Gender Awakening and the Affective Remnants of Religious Feeling examines the overlap between the non-‐secular and the non-‐ gender normative through attention to the gesture of religious enthusiasm in three historical moments—the mid-‐eighteenth-‐century; the early twentieth century; and briefly in the coda, the contemporary. This temporal triptych reveals those enthusiastic religious structures of feeling and historiography that cross-‐gendered 9 believers in the eighteenth century; marked inversion and androgyny in the twentieth; and continue to trigger trans discourse in the twenty-‐first. Ultimately, this project concludes that the affective remnants of enthusiasm continue influence GLBT cultural narratives—especially trans calls for mainstream rights and recognition. Both contemporary trans activism, I contend, along with some of queer studies’ backward historical turns and structures of feeling, are repeating a series of affective, temporal, and narrative gestures whose histories can be located in eighteenth-‐century enthusiasms that center around Lutheran-‐Pauline understandings of faith and grace as they are taken up by both British and German Pietism. We might be tempted to view such moves as radical, as some recent philosophical returns to Saint Paul I discuss in Chapter 2 suggest. However the history of enthusiasm embedded in these trans and queer backward gestures, as well as the types of embodied “awakenings” and suffering feelings they engender and privilege—white, middle class, western—also urge caution. One caution is the connection this project will make between modern and contemporary cross-‐gender narrative and the already well-‐recognized influences of Enlightenment epistemologies of science and self on enthusiastic religious feelings and narratives. 3 Another link comes through the literary: via a Protestant spiritual autobiography that itself has been recognized as influential to the developing British and American novels. 4 A final connection I make is to discussions in American and Indigenous studies about affective belonging to the nation in literary texts that draw on structures of feeling, and historical and personal narrative, which overlap with what I am calling “enthusiastic” feelings and narrative gestures. For example, those 10 modernist queer re-‐genderings my project examines— cross-‐gendered turns to enthusiastic Christianities by white privileged female writers such as Radclyffe Hall and H.D.—depend upon an enthusiastic discourse that itself relied on the racialization of Native Americans and African Americans. 5 In the same way, calls to recognize the gender and citizenship rights of GLBT people, as well as academic and activist gestures to claim the queer status of the queerly gendered or desiring subject, continue to draw on tropes of exceptionalism, martyrdom, suffering, and suffering’s contestation that themselves depend upon whiteness and are entangled with settlement, as critics such as Jasbir K. Puar, Scott Lauria Morgensen, and Mark Rifkin have argued. 6 While the relationship between enthusiasm and woundedness has had different iterations in different historical moments and locations, it is still the case that contemporary theorizations of gender melancholia—whether to pinpoint heterosexuality and not homosexuality as melancholic (Judith Butler’s argument in The Psychic Life of Power) or to embrace and recognize those bad, shameful, and “backward” structures of feelings and anachronistic turns back or away from progress as queer (Heather Love’s argument in Feeling Backward)— pivot around a wound my project will recognize as a religious wound. My coda makes similar claims about contemporary uptakes of the recent suicide of Ohio trans teenager Leelah Alcorn that has been framed as an anti-‐religious gesture. Specifically, I examine the hashtag response to Alcorn’s suicide, #LeelahAlcorn, as well as the racial implications of these religious gestures. Both strategies of looking back to painful pasts and looking ahead to pain-‐free futures draw our attention to, and their energies from, the gender wound, even when they purport to overcome it, 11 or even to draw pleasure from it. Rather than favoring one approach, the goal of this project is to recognize the non-‐secular, enthusiastic remnants—earlier Protestant religious affects and narrative gestures—in modern and contemporary cross-‐gender narrative. Queer Enthusiasms situates its history of gender wounds in two eighteenth-‐ century transatlantic Protestant groups, the Methodists and the Moravians, and their influence on modern understandings of gender alterity. These intersections, which I argue result from a belief in a Lutheran understanding of grace as freely available through faith rather than earned through work, troubled Methodist and Moravian relationships to labor and the feeling body, marking their religiosities as queer. Such “queer enthusiasms,” as I am calling them, were thus available for resurrection in the twentieth century by social scientists and novelists who converted these and other religious enthusiasts into inverts, perverts and queer saviors. 7 Bringing into conjunction early twentieth-‐ and mid-‐eighteenth-‐century moments, Queer Enthusiasms critically mimics the enthusiastic move made by twentieth-‐century white female writers Radclyffe Hall and H.D., whose cross-‐gender narratives I examine in this dissertation and which rely on an embrace of enthusiastic spirituality as it is represented both in psychosexual science (sexology and psychoanalysis, for example) and figured through what are rendered as more “primitive” religiosities and peoples (Catholicism, Moravianism, Irish, and Native Americans, for example). As part of a call for recognition of their own gender and sexual alterity, these white modernist writers skipped over the nineteenth-‐century to recognize a kinship and kindred wound in a racialized religious otherness 12 marked by gender-‐crossing. In fact, the desire to return to an earlier time and “primitive” people—whether one that is pure and apostolic or one that is tainted and heretical—was also the temporal modus operandi of eighteenth-‐century enthusiast and anti-‐enthusiast alike (Taves 17; Rosenberg 6-‐9). First Great Awakening groups deemed enthusiasts, such as Moravians and Methodists, sought a return to a primitive form of apostolic Christianity (Fogelman 4-‐7; Rack 90), while anti-‐enthusiasm polemic, such as George Lavington’s “The Enthusiasm of Methodists and Papists Compared,” attempted to put enthusiasm into a heretical line, represented as manifestations of cyclical recurrence, from Gnosticism to Dissent. Therefore, enthusiastic analogies between present and past are more than simple gestures back to an earlier time, people and circumstance; they also temporal narratives of cyclical return. In Critical Enthusiasm: Capital Accumulation and the Transformation of Religious Passion, Jordana Rosenberg claims a connection between enthusiasm and modern historicism that contends “enthusiastic discourse became a significant rubric for thinking historically, particularly in thinking through economic transformations of early modernity” (6). This challenges “canonical accounts of the coeval rise of historicist consciousness and secular rationality” (6), Rosenberg notes, contending “that what has appeared to be enthusiasm’s tempestuous, achronological relation to historical time became, in the period in question, a discursive logic that expressed not only critical aspects of this period’s history, but a theory of history itself” (6). Rosenberg’s account suggests the importance of enthusiasm’s temporal gestures to contemporary understandings of history and secularism in the context of capitalism. 13 My project examines eighteenth-‐ and twentieth-‐century backward turns and gestures through a return of its own from the present gender epoch, specifically to make visible pre-‐modern connections between enthusiasm, labor, and whiteness in twenty-‐ and twenty-‐first-‐century transgender and queer narrative—connections that, this project argues following from Molly McGarry, have been occluded by the largely secular frame of not only mainstream GLBT politics, but also much of queer cultural studies until the recent non-‐secular turn. 8 This project seeks to contribute to a growing body of work on the queer non-‐secular to demonstrate how affective and epistemological traces of religious enthusiasm persist in twentieth-‐ and twenty-‐ first-‐century cross-‐gender literary and cultural narratives. Rather than a departure from Foucault’s History of Sexuality, however, I situate enthusiasm and its varieties of the non-‐secular as one trajectory in the “alternative history of nonsecular sexualities… that restores a connection to histories of religion,” which Molly McGarry calls for, and understands Foucault’s genealogy as opening up (157). McGarry recognizes the History of Sexuality as a secularization narrative. Just as the sexual and the secular emerge concurrently in Foucault’s telling, McGarry notes—the birth of sexuality also the transubstantiation of the confessional into medical, scientific, and legal terms—so too does the unraveling of the secularization thesis by accounts such as Charles Taylor’s suggest a post-‐ Enlightenment productivity of non-‐secular self-‐knowings that have transubstantiated themselves into forms we can recognize as sexual. This has been the project of McGarry and other queer critics who are thinking the non-‐secular into largely nineteenth-‐century and later American spheres and faiths. 9 Along similar 14 lines, eighteenth-‐century scholars are also thinking sexuality into religious structures of experience. 10 More broadly, queer turns to the ghostly and the spectral also inform my interventions throughout this project. 11 While McGarry’s Ghost of Futures Past focuses on American Spiritualist specters and her call for “alternative histories of non-‐secular sexualities” focuses on the nineteenth-‐century, Foucault also pinpoints Methodism as an earlier Protestant form of religious discipline (History of Sexuality 116, 120). It is Methodism, and Methodism’s inciting enthusiasm, Moravianism, that are therefore this project’s focus. Queering the Non-‐Secular By now, the positioning of Christianity as antithetical to queerness is a familiar narrative. Ann Pelligrini and Janet Jakobsen (Love the Sin) demonstrate that secularized versions of Protestant morality mark American legal and social discourse, while Jordana Rosenberg (Critical Enthusiasms) and Molly McGarry (Ghosts of Futures Past) reveal the way that the birth of both modern historicism and modern sexuality depend upon secularization narratives (though both of these works trouble the secularization thesis). McGarry’s monograph recognizes that one of Western queer theory’s foundational narratives, Michel Foucault’s The History of Sexuality, Vol. One, doubles as a history of secularization, arguing that “histories of secularism structurally underwrite histories of sexuality and function to elucidate some forms of sexual subjectivity while occluding others” (155). Thus her work suggests that the foundational nineteenth-‐century turn on which the History of Sexuality pivots also marks a concurrency with a queer secular modernity whose 15 own recognition would seemingly depend upon the medical discourses that supplant religious imaginings of self (155-‐56). McGarry, Taves, and Jakobsen and Pelligrini’s work, and more broadly the writing of Charles Taylor, Michael Warner and, as Warner notes, many others thinking outside a Western frame, have troubled the clean transition from the religious to the rational that the “secularization thesis” would have us believe. 12 Foucault’s genealogy of sexuality and homosexuality, as McGarry’s work elucidates, recognizes religious discipline and self-‐imagining as the root of the modern medico-‐ juridical self. This includes contemporary sexual and gender identity narratives that contain the affective and structural remnants of religious narratives, emotions, and practices that have themselves influenced a purportedly secular queer theory and those structures through which not only the “homosexual,” but also the transsexual, narrates him/herself. 13 While McGarry notes that Foucault’s is a particularly French Catholic historiography (sexuality’s birth arises from Catholic confessions of self), Foucault also acknowledges a British Protestant equivalent of self-‐accounting in Methodism (itself influenced by German Lutheran Moravianism), which was to be the subject of a never-‐materialized manuscript, Confessions of the Flesh (Carette 3; 39). As the eighteenth-‐century anti-‐enthusiasm literature cited in this project will make clear, there is a conflation of groups like the Methodists with Catholicism in anti-‐enthusiasm literature. 14 In that sense, then, Foucault’s Catholic genealogy of self and self-‐discipline—the one that he claims underwrites current Western medical and cultural forms of narrating the sexual self, and which Western queer theory still 16 largely privileges as the authority on both sexuality and operations of power— overlaps with an enthusiastic one. My project extends the previously-‐referenced body of work on conjunctions between the sexual and the spiritual, yet it privileges not sexuality, but instead gender. I aim to put gender into a Foucauldian history of sexuality that is already concerned with bodily—we might even say pietistic— discipline. 15 I do this through a return to eighteenth-‐century religious enthusiasm and an analysis of queer returns to enthusiasm in the twentieth-‐century and contemporary moment. My project recognizes repetitions of what I am calling the “enthusiastic gesture”—a way of feeling history and knowing the self that authorizes the feeling body, particularly feelings of cross-‐gender embodiment I link to eighteenth-‐century Lutheran understandings of grace and concomitant queer religious categories, antinomianism and melancholy. Such a move puts contemporary trans discourse into a religious genealogy that is also Foucauldian. That is, it resists a wholly recuperative analysis that would view queer enthusiasts as those who contest, or appear outside of, religious, secular, medical, and gender/sexual norms. Rather, queer enthusiasts delimit and constitute these norms, and as such, participate in their discipline—but not without taking their own pleasure. In accordance with such pleasures, centering gender in an enthusiastic genealogy of present trans discourse brings attention to the body, and to those parts of the self outside rational knowing that resonate with the non-‐secular—figurations of spirit, soul, heart, and flesh that serve as embodied epistemologies and that constitute crucial aspects of a cross-‐gendered ontology, but that are often obfuscated through a secular history of transsexuality. Making visible 17 these non-‐secular, cross-‐gendered aspects of the self, and moreover recognizing these feelings of knowing as they are still remnant in contemporary trans narrative and politics, aims to also further recognize, as many contemporary queer scholars such as Mark Rifkin and Scott Lauria Morgensen have already have begun to—both queerness and enthusiasm’s enmeshment with whiteness and settlement. The eighteenth-‐century’s obsession with the rational and the temperate rendered enthusiasm’s spiritual awakenings marks of political, economic and bodily disorder. In part because of such imbrications—a feature of enthusiasm’s capacity to encompass multiple and multiply registering differences—those cross-‐gendered white female writers who took up enthusiastic structures of feeling in the twentieth century invoked the feelings of racialized others in order to experience what I am calling their “gender awakenings.” I focus on how white modern forms of what Jack Halberstam has termed “female masculinity,” in his book by the same name, find gender recognition in a religious enthusiasm that itself encompasses an excess of differences beyond gender and sexuality—class, racial, and ethnic difference, for example, and religious, political, and economic queerness are all contained in capacious categories such as enthusiasm and its associated components, melancholy and antinomianism. I read religious melancholy and antinomianism as related, yet differently inflected, devotions to spiritual and bodily wounds. Both of these enthusiastic categories and practices, I argue, were queered through their relationship to grace. In particular, I examine a German Lutheran line of Reformation Protestant theology that influences transatlantic First Great Awakening religions such as 18 Methodism and Moravianism. This version of Lutheranism becomes secular in ways that overlap with, but also contest, the Protestant secular that Janet R. Jakobsen and Ann Pellegrini and Janet Jakobsen, in Love the Sin: Sexual Regulation and the Limits of Religious Tolerance, identify as undergirding contemporary U.S. sexual morality. The spread of Methodism, via Moravianism, through Britain and the British North American colonies suggests a need to reconsider, or at least expand our understandings of, the influence of German Pietist strains of Lutheranism on what is typically understood as the Calvinist Puritan “spirit” of the modern, from capitalism to the novel. 16 In embracing a Calvinist or Puritan structure of feeling, these British-‐ American institutions and genres are always already enthusiast, yet I argue there are important influences of German Pietism on English Pietism that distinguish eighteenth-‐century Methodist and Moravian structures of feeling and uptakes of Luther from earlier Puritan Calvinist ones. These are both temporal, and hence, of narrative and historiographic import, and ontological, and thus, spark epistemological concerns, especially as they relate to cross-‐gender narrative. Following Jakobsen and Pelligrini, I argue that afterlives of both types of enthusiasm are remnant not only in liberal arguments for trans rights, but also in queer turns to the temporal, making it crucial to recognize the religious underbelly in such purportedly secular critical moves and movements, as well as the whiteness that tends to adhere to such gestures. Early Enthusiasms A seventeenth-‐ and eighteenth-‐century Protestant category, enthusiasm functioned as a slur against transatlantic Protestant groups such as Puritans in 19 seventeenth century England and America, and Methodists and Moravians in eighteenth-‐century England, America, and Germany. These groups, especially earlier forms of Protestant dissent in England, threatened religious, political, and gender authority: enthusiastic ways of knowing, which often manifested bodily in what Ann Taves has signposted as “fits, trances, and visions”—purported manifestations of a direct, emotional, and bodily encounter with the Holy Spirit connected to physical and emotional disorder (Taves 14-‐19). This was in part because the process and narrative structures leading up to enthusiastic conversions involved, at least in Calvinistic iterations of spiritual autobiography such as Puritan conversion narrative, suffering and anxiety over the state of one’s soul (Hindmarsh 31). As both religious and medical disorder, enthusiasm was believed to generate a set of linked excesses, including not only excessive sexual desire, but also gender inversion, melancholy and mania, and excessive financial and emotional expenditure. While the medical classifications for these religious disorders was melancholy, the perceived theological mistake was antinomianism—the suspension of moral law because of a belief in “faith alone” (following Luther, through Saint Paul). Thus enthusiasm and its related sub-‐categories, melancholy and antinomianism, functioned as an expansive and embodied category of difference, one that did not distinguish the religious from the sensual, emotional, economic, or medical; that also somatized religious difference by linking it to humoral theory and bodily-‐psychic disorder at both the depressive and manic ends of the spectrum; and that racialized and feminized religious difference through enthusiasm literature. 20 Recently queer critics have begun to recognize early American and early modern categories that both exceed sexuality and sex and include it in conjunction with other forms of difference. These include religious categories related to enthusiasm as well as scientific, natural, or legal categories that are similarly capacious. 17 This project seeks to extend these revelations to establish additional non-‐secular eighteenth-‐century categories related to enthusiasm that demonstrate entanglements between religion, science, and gender that continue to matter to trans discourse. As such, I recognize enthusiasm itself and its related terms, melancholy and antinomianism, as similarly capacious categories that encompass not only gender and sexual difference, but also differences of labor and class, race and ethnicity, and place, time, and body. Yet my project privileges the gender differences highlighted in these categories that will allow me to connect enthusiastic forms of feeling and knowing the self and the body to modern and contemporary cross-‐gender narrative. Specifically, I examine gender melancholy and a Lutheran understanding of grace that troubles the gender of believers by exploring how woundedness figures in both eighteenth-‐century religious and twentieth century queer literary narratives of gender-‐otherness. What are the “affective remnants”—those enthusiastic Christian structures of feeling, ways of understanding time, and encounters with, and ways of knowing, the feeling body—that shape modern and contemporary cross-‐gender narrative and its ways of knowing and understanding the self? I argue that the embodied epistemologies of First Great Awakening enthusiasms such as Moravianism and Methodism, themselves influenced by a mystical German Lutheran 21 Pietistic tradition with roots in the seventeenth century and in medieval Catholic mysticism, figured prominently in those modernist cross-‐gender narratives this project examines as well as in the development of the Euro-‐American psychosexual sciences on which these narratives rely and that continue to delimit contemporary trans and queer understandings of gender. Thus, these premodern categories of medical and religious otherness such as melancholy, enthusiasm, and the related slur of enthusiasts, antinomianism, functioned as early forms of queerness more capacious than later categories because they not only incorporated gender and sexual trouble, but also indicated alternative relationships to labor, family, time, place, class, and race that late-‐nineteenth and early-‐twentieth century science would come to sort into separate types of difference. Thus, because of continued influences both medico-‐scientific, racial, and literary, religious enthusiasm as an embodied affect—a way of feeling that is known bodily in parts of the self variously and historically understood as heart, spirit, soul, unconscious, and skin—also figures in contemporary cross-‐gender narrative. Because these largely white “queer enthusiasms,” as my project is calling them, themselves can resurrect these earlier, imbricated categories of religious difference by drawing on religiously racialized others to effect their own gender transformations, recognizing enthusiastic remnants in contemporary trans, queer, and GLBT discourse is crucial to recognizing how even narratives and strategies of resistance to norms—“queer” ones, in other words—may also participate in what Mark Rifkin has recognized as “common sense” forms of settler colonialism. These are areas my last chapter and coda begins to explore; a future project would make such concerns central to a 22 genealogy of contemporary trans studies and politics that posits enthusiasm as these movements’ troubling ancestor as well as their promising legacy. Methodology While the spiritual, medical, and autobiographical precursors to my project take root in the seventeenth century and in Calvinist Puritan conversion narrative, my project concerns itself with two eighteenth-‐century Lutheran-‐influenced groups charged with enthusiasms that depended on a grace freely given: Methodism and Moravianism. In the sects who practice and experience what Methodist leader John Wesley named “free grace” (Wesley “SFG”), the focus shifts from melancholy, despair, and uncertainty about the state of one’s soul and, instead, a belief in “faith alone,” felt bodily in the heart rather than known rationally in the head, which effects a spiritual peace and, at least in German Pietist groups such as the Moravians who influence Wesley and the British Methodists, a refiguration of religious woundedness to communion and even ecstasy. While Wesley came from a tradition of English Pietism, my project suggests that Wesley’s contact with German Pietism through the London-‐ and American-‐based Moravians shifted the affective emphasis from the despair leading to conversion to the moment of embodied knowing at, and after, the moment of conversion. The conversion narrative is a Puritan structure of religious experience in which despair and struggle are preconditions of salvation (Hindmarsh 31). What I am calling queer awakening, as I recognize it in twentieth-‐century narrative, draws on both Puritan and later Methodist and Moravian conversions that emphasize the moment of felt transubstantiation—the awakening— and its effects. Moravian and 23 Methodist awakenings, loosely defined in my first two chapters as overlapping with conversion, center on the touching of the heart and a feeling of bodily knowing. Moravians believed grace did not require suffering; Methodists allowed that grace was available to all through “faith alone,” but that a subsequent process of perfection followed conversion. Both groups, however, were charged with “enthusiasm,” in part because of what was perceived as a temporal queerness of their conversions and a lack of spiritual and economic labor. A present-‐focus, in fact, is the reason that Max Weber excludes the Moravian “spirit” as outside the ethos of the ideal capitalist (Methodists, on the other hand, he groups with Calvinists). These three factors— affect, time, and embodiment—distinguish what I am calling enthusiastic awakenings influenced by Lutheran understandings of grace. The narrative remnants of these awakenings also appear in the affective structures and embodied epistemologies I recognize in twentieth-‐century queer returns to enthusiasm (Stephen Gordon’s invert awakening in The Well of Loneliness, for example), and they form the basis of the connections I will make between enthusiasm and contemporary trans discourse and narrative. Recognizing enthusiastic awakenings in the literary, the medical, and the contemporary cultural and political, will be a central project in each chapter. Similarly, recognizing pre-‐ modern queer categories that are also religious categories will help me to identify non-‐secular epistemologies and ontologies that encompass gender and gender-‐ crossing. A transhistorical and transdenominational return to religious enthusiasm demonstrates the way that Lutheran-‐influenced forms of the non-‐secular continue 24 to indwell understandings of gender in both our theoretical and cultural imaginaries. This importantly allows for a more capacious understanding of difference that can account for historical conjunctions between gender and race that exceed our currently defined identity categories, and that furthermore move beyond simple analogies that would conflate these distinct forms of difference. Likewise, putting these earlier enthusiastic gestures into conversation with contemporary turns back and cross-‐gender “awakenings” elucidates the non-‐secular, and hence the disciplinary, in current trans and queer discourse. Recent scholarship on the intersections between religion and sexuality has begun to recognize the spiritualities of centuries past as forms of queer sexuality and sociality (Abelove, Coviello, Luciano, McGarry, Anderson, and Warner). This work is in keeping with the backward-‐turning gestures of queer historiography (Freeman, Love), as well as with the temporal turn in queer studies broadly. Similarly, religious and literary historians have connected the two eighteenth-‐ century Protestant groups that this project examines, Methodists and Moravians, to differences that encompass both gender and sexuality (Taves, Anderson, Abelove, Peucker, Atwood, and Fogleman). My own project brings together these related conversations, both by drawing out the queerness of Moravians and Methodists suggested by these denominationally specific works and by drawing on the trans-‐ temporal leaps made not only by recent queer historiographies, but also importantly, by the white modernist figures and works that this project considers. Likewise, investigating twentieth-‐century returns to eighteenth-‐century enthusiasm reveals an emphasis on sexuality that has persisted in queer criticism because of its 25 beginnings in psychosexual, and specifically psychoanalytic, narratives. This strain of criticism understands religious desire along psychoanalytic lines, as an expression of sexual desire, obscuring somatic aspects of religious alterity that exceed the sexual and which include, but also exceed gender. Calling attention to religious structures of feeling that continue to mark contemporary cross-‐gender narratives and gender categories, my project challenges the largely secular framing of queer cultural studies. Although I use the term “enthusiast” in its historically accurate sense to describe the particular set of religious beliefs, desires, and practices that branded certain religiosities problematic or heterodox within eighteenth-‐century transatlantic Protestantism, I also allow the term to become more capacious, and more speculative, as I employ it in the twentieth century and beyond. This methodology fuses literary historical and cultural studies approaches, particularly recent work in queer theory on temporality and historiography that seeks to circumvent the limits that a strictly linear, historicist approach sets for thinking about embodied forms of alterity in, and through, the past. I contend that reecent work by Heather Love (Feeling Backward) and Elizabeth Freeman (Time Binds), though it may understand itself as secular, relies on non-‐secular and even implicitly Christian, structures of feeling and literary historical practice. This project’s set of trans-‐historical affinities, resonances and leaps make visible untimely connections between eighteenth-‐ and twentieth-‐century gender and sexual alterity, between converts, inverts and perverts. Yet these claims are also historically grounded: they both recognize enthusiasm as a broad category of eighteenth-‐century religious 26 difference and they mark twentieth-‐century queer returns to eighteenth-‐century enthusiasm. This project’s own enthusiastic turn, then, is from present trans narrative and discourse to recognize in its affective structures the spirit of religious awakening. I also follow queer critics who have recognized connections between temporal disruption and both capitalism and racialization, that provide a caution against reading queer enthusiasm as wholly recuperative (Luciano, Ahmed, Rosenberg, Puar, Morgensen). In other words, enthusiasm as a framework of analysis, temporally “queer” as its present-‐focused affect and epistemology may appear, also marks its participation in a spiritual exceptionalism that functions as a strategy of recognition (Puar, Morgensen, Rifkin, Smith). Queer Enthusiasms, then, aims to retain a Foucauldian critique of the queer that demands recognition of the troubling potential of, and the trouble with, enthusiasm. What I am calling the “enthusiastic gesture” is not just a narrative or temporal structure, nor even a solely affective logic. It is all of these, but most importantly, it is an embodied epistemology—a way of knowing and feeling through those parts of the self beyond the rational, an in excess of the Cartesian. Such aspects of the self have been known by often-‐overlapping religious terms such as spirit, soul, heart, vital matter, or unconscious. In a similar way, Jay Prosser links skin to transsexual autobiography, while Mark Rifkin also points out the way that “common sense” logics of settlement extend the settler-‐citizen’s feeling body to encompass an extra-‐ bodily, geographic and material surround such as homes and property. Rifkin’s Settler Common Sense demonstrates how these nineteenth-‐century feelings of belonging to the land, and thus to the nation, depend upon the removal and 27 disappearance of Native claims to land. Relatedly then, labeling something “queer”—whether the definition hews to older understandings of queer as sexual and gender alterity or a broader definition of position outside the norm—does not remove it from the scope of power’s disciplining force. It may, and often is, part of that discipline. For this reason, I will also employ the enthusiastic gesture as a historical methodology—a performative way of doing history that attends to feeling and the materiality of the body and its encounter with other bodies and environment. An enthusiastic history of gender-‐crossing instead gestures to those parts of the self that contain the affective remnants of religious knowing—soul, flesh, spirit, heart, or home—that may yet be occluded by secular ontologies. These enthusiastic gestures to god or a community can also generate feelings of kinship that register in the body. Throughout the project, I return to enthusiastic religious categories that, I argue, queer and cross-‐gender believers through the feeling body. Like enthusiasm itself, these categories—antinomianism, melancholy, grace, faith, and home, for example—bring the enthusiastic historical gesture into focus. My project’s non-‐ secular lens makes visible those connections between enthusiasm’s remnants and historically repeating gestures that reveal the way the extent to which white western cross-‐gender narrative—stories of coming to self-‐recognition and claiming recognition for one’s self as invert, butch lesbian, trans woman, or drag queen— depend on racialization, settlement, and exclusion. I aim throughout my chapters to make connections between “gesture” and drag performance as necessarily repetitive, or ritual, reenactments of an imagined ideal that constitute that ideal. 28 Drag has been foundational to canonical white queer understandings of gender performativity and gender melancholia (Butler, Love). Likewise, recent philosophical returns to Saint Paul have focused on the “call” as constituting the Christian subject (Critchley, Breton); I make a connection these between gender and spiritual hails. By recognizing enthusiasm as a gesture—of narrative, of affect, of ontology, of historiography—I convert a Butlerian practice of gender performativity, in which cultural ideology forms individual subjectivity, into a way of performing history with attention to those enthusiastic logics that recognize cross-‐gendered white bodies through non-‐white ones. Chapter Descriptions Queer Enthusiasms pinpoints four significant examples in which religious enthusiasm, science and gender intersect. The first set of related chapters considers the connections between gender queerness, religious enthusiasm and religious and medical understandings of melancholy and melancholia. Texts include Henry Fielding's quasi-‐journalistic pamphlet about a cross-‐dressing Methodist woman, The Female Husband (1746); Radclyffe Hall's novel of female inversion, The Well of Loneliness (1928); and a case study by German sexologist Richard von Krafft-‐Ebing that influenced The Well of Loneliness, the case of Countess Sarolta/Count Sandor Vay from Psychopathia Sexualis (1886). The project's second set of chapters considers enthusiastic attempts to refigure the wound: for example the way that eighteenth-‐century Moravians refigured religious woundedness through a devotion to the crucifixion wound of Christ they worshipped as the Side Hole, or modernist poet H.D.’s attempt, through a 29 return to the femaleness of early American Moravians, to assert her own spiritual and artistic giftedness by conflating her spiritual line with a Native American one. I argue that the Moravians’ wounds-‐devotion, which stemmed from a Lutheran understanding of grace, was a significant factor in the sect’s cross-‐sexing and cross-‐ gendering, just as a historical fantasy of the Moravian brothers’ cross-‐gendering and their missionary relationship with the Lenni Lenape in the 18 th century allowed H.D. a literary means through which to recognize her own effeminate masculinity. Texts in this section include eighteenth-‐century anti-‐Moravian tracts by Bishop George Lavington, Henry Rimius, and Andrew Frey; Moravian liturgy, sermons, diaries and hymns; twentieth century historical, social scientific, and literary accounts of Moravians by John Jacob Sessler, Oskar Pfister, Max Weber, and the modernist poet H.D., whose memoir The Gift details her early years in the Bethlehem, Pa. Moravian community. A coda explores the place of religious enthusiasm in the online representations of the recent suicide of Ohio transgender teen Leelah Alcorn collected under the hashtag, #LeelahAlcorn. I put #LeelahAlcorn into conversation with religious enthusiasm, defined both as direct encounter with the holy spirit and a return to apostolic Christianity. I characterize as differently enthusiastic not only Alcorn and her parents’ versions of events, but importantly, the exegesis of these narratives by a largely white, liberal gay and trans community whose reframings rely on troubling analogies to race and the reiteration of a secularization narrative that continues to position queerness as antithetical to religious devotion. A close reading of these interrelated narratives reveals an emergent discourse around trans youth that both 30 reinforces the origin of trans suffering in religious misery and rejects that trauma as the means of trans realization: melancholia becomes the affective mark of Alcorn’s call for transgender recognition. CHAPTER 1 RELIGIOUS MELANCHOLY, METHODIST ENTHUSIASM, AND GENDER-‐CROSSING IN HENRY FIELDING’S THE FEMALE HUSBAND In The Female Husband (1746), Henry Fielding’s anonymously published, fictionalized account of a cross-‐dressing woman, Mary (alias George) Hamilton travels the countryside, seducing and marrying a succession of English women—as many as 14 in some versions of the broadsides on which Fielding loosely based his pamphlet (Baker 222). Though Methodism goes unmentioned in newspaper accounts of Hamilton’s legal case, it is central to Fielding’s fictionalized tale (Battestin 366, n. 2; Baker 217). There, he describes a young Wells woman, who— strictly raised, her conscience theretofore untainted by “irregular passion” (Fielding 365)—develops an “Enthusiasm” for the female sex only after being seduced by a Methodist neighbor, Anne Johnson, herself “no novice in impurity, which, as she confess’d, she had learnt and often practiced at Bristol 18 with her methodistical sisters” (366). In Fielding’s version of events, religious enthusiasm, of which Methodism is the exemplar, is narrated as the origin of first, Hamilton’s same-‐sex desire and subsequently, her masquerades. Indeed, it is chiefly because Fielding remakes Mary/George Hamilton into a Methodist that these masquerades exceed gender: after conversion, Hamilton passes not only as a man, but also an effeminate one, and further as an itinerant preacher and “doctor of physic” (374), which is 31 Fielding’s interpretation of news accounts that describe the real Hamilton as a travelling “Quack Doctor” who “has for some Time follow’d the Profession… up and down the country” (22 Sept., No. 27, p. 3, qtd. in Baker 221). Both itinerant preacher and traveling “Quack Doctor” are suspect inhabitations associated with Methodism (Hempton 33; Abelove 15-‐16; Anderson 92-‐95). Fielding also converts Mary Hamilton’s male alias from Charles to George, which, Sheridan Baker observes, was the name of a Jacobite rebel tried around the same time as Mary Hamilton (222, n. 29). 19 Thus Fielding’s transformation of the real Hamilton into a fictional one draws loosely on enthusiastic connotations suggested by Hamilton’s case and its cultural context to render Hamilton a popish pretender whose gender, religious, and medical frauds are all subsumed, this chapter argues, to the overarching imposture of Methodism. In fact, there is no separation between Hamilton’s seduction and conversion: the two happen simultaneously and are constitutive of the same wickedness, the heretical always already imbricated with the antinomian. It is this portrayal of Methodism, indistinguishable from the sexual, that Sheridan Baker, writing one of the first extended considerations of The Female Husband in 1959, characterizes as “a pious hypocrisy leading from emotionalism to perversion” (Baker 217): As Molly Hamilton was extremely warm in her inclinations, and as those inclinations were so violently attached to Mrs. Johnson, it would not have been difficult for a less artful woman, in the most private hours, to turn the ardour of enthusiastic devotion into a different kind of flame. Their conversation, therefore, soon became in the highest manner criminal, and transactions not fit 32 to be mention’d passed between them. (Fielding 366-‐367, qtd. in Baker 217) Terry Castle has made much of the pamphlet’s “matters not fit to be mentioned”—those absences, euphemisms, and double-‐entendres that, she argues in a reading that does not lack its own transmutative qualities, create a campy textual ambivalence that renders Hamilton “phantasmagoric” (“Matters Not Fit” 602), the force of her gender masquerade “magical, numinous” (618). For Castle, lesbianism is the spectral presence of not only this pamphlet, but also those pre-‐ 1900 texts that figure in her subsequent book, The Apparitional Lesbian, which uses the trope of the ghost to make visible literary representations of pre-‐modern female same-‐sex desire, contending that “the literary history of lesbianism is to confront, from the start, something ghostly…” (28). Yet until only very recently, the place of Methodist enthusiasm in effecting Hamilton’s conversion from ingénue to foppish rake was implicitly “not fit to be mention’d,” as evidenced by its lack of any but a cursory mention of Methodism in much of the contemporary literary criticism about The Female Husband. Recent work on the pamphlet has begun to remedy this absence—notably Misty Anderson’s Imagining Methodism in 18 th -‐Century Britain: Enthusiasm, Belief, and the Borders of the Self, which reveals the way eighteenth-‐ century British culture imagined Methodists “as modernity’s homegrown, mystic-‐ evangelical other” (3). Anderson argues that Methodism, as it is employed in The Female Husband, explains “epistemologies of the desiring self in the eighteenth-‐ century that are prior to our own understandings of sexuality and sexual desire” (72). Methodism, in this frame, becomes the historically accurate category for encompassing a queerer sexuality than the use of modern sex/gender terms would 33 allow (73). Eighteenth-‐century representations of Methodist conversion (29) and Methodism, including Fielding’s portrayal of Mary/George Hamilton in The Female Husband, Anderson claims, “in a moment prior to modern conceptions of sex, gender, and sexuality, yet in the midst of their formulation, could function like a sexuality” (99). 20 As Anderson’s readings and scholarship reveal, Methodism’s capacity as category that encompasses, yet exceeds same-‐sex desire to include extra-‐sexual threats such as cross-‐gendering and male effeminacy, fraudulent healing, and itinerancy allow me to similarly mobilize Methodism in The Female Husband, contextualized within broader discourses of enthusiasm, as the category through which to understand Hamilton’s excesses, frauds, and desires. Extending both the work of Castle and Anderson, then, I want to ask: to what extent are Castle’s lesbian ghosts also Holy Ghosts—that is, enthusiastic spirits of a particularly Methodist persuasion that have until only very recently been considered unmentionable in much of the literary criticism of The Female Husband? 21 The Methodist spirits that animate Hamilton, I argue, cannot be disentangled from Castle’s lesbian apparitions without compromising our understanding of contemporary narratives of female masculinity that bear their enthusiastic traces. Yet although Methodism is Hamilton’s first and precipitating enthusiasm, there remains an equally important absence in the discussion of The Female Husband that is central both to Hamilton’s conversion and perversion: her warm temperament. 22 Strictly raised, her conscience never tainted by “irregular passion” prior to her encounter with Methodism (Fielding 365), Hamilton is nevertheless an “easy convert,” Fielding notes, because of a warm-‐heartedness that “rendered her 34 susceptible enough of Enthusiasm” (366). Thus, Hamilton comes into her awakening encounter with the spirit-‐made-‐flesh already in possession of a passionate temperament easily inflamed by the heretical and the immoral. This is a temperamental susceptibility that Castle, in her work on Eighteenth Century measuring instruments, The Female Thermometer, has linked to females and the feminine, such as those feminized male Methodists whose enthusiasms Castle reads as sexual (28-‐35, esp. 31, top). Anderson also links feminine receptivity and enthusiasm to Hamilton’s same-‐sex desire, confounding expected connections between gender and orientation to render Methodist conversion “a queer technology of desire” (72). Several critics, Castle included, do connect medical discourses such as melancholy, hysteria, or temperamental disorder to femininity (Castle, Blackwell, and Friedli), to The Female Husband (Blackwell, Anderson, and Castle), and to Methodism (Anderson, Taves). Lynne Friedli notes the importance of fraud in the spheres of both the medical and religious, which are important underpinnings in The Female Husband that I will draw on in this chapter. Specifically, Friedli notes religious enthusiasm as symptomatic of a “constitutional[] susceptibil[ity] to influence” (237). Bonnie Blackwell discusses Hamilton’s medical deception in The Female Husband as well as the period’s questionable medical treatment of “hysterical diseases” of women, such as greensickness, which is the focus of her article (60). I will be drawing on connections that Blackwell makes between greensickness and medical melancholy, specifically love melancholy (61-‐65), in order to link religious melancholy to Hamilton’s enthusiasm and her doctoring, as 35 well as to establish her quack doctoring as part of her melancholic enthusiasm. What I draw out in this chapter are the connections between the discourses of temperament, enthusiasm, melancholy that, I argue, inform the gender-‐crossing of George/Mary Hamilton. What are the links between gender-‐crossing, enthusiasm, and melancholy that deserve more explicit mention? Methodism was a repeated and recognizable target for Fielding, whose satiric portrayals of Methodists in novels such as Shamela, Joseph Andrews, and Tom Jones, lampoon the sect specifically and enthusiasm broadly, echoing contemporaneous critiques (Baker 217; Battestin 366, n. 2 and 3; Anderson 74). Thus, the trinity of critiques Fielding’s pamphlet raises against Methodism—false and sudden spiritual experience that immoderately inflames the passions and leads to antinomianism; false claims to preaching and healing that threatens established church authority, in no small part because of Methodist itinerancy; and importantly for putting The Female Husband into conversation with modern narratives of female masculinity, false crossings of gender and excessive sexual desire triggered by Methodists’ free and easy encounters with a democratically available grace—reiterate anxieties about enthusiasts generally, and Methodists specifically, that circulated transatlantically during the First Great Awakening. 23 Yet these conflations also function as a religiously heretical etiology that explains, medically, George/Mary Hamilton’s “abominable and unnatural” gender presentation and the sexual, legal and economic frauds she commits (Fielding 365). This chapter demonstrates, then, how Fielding’s pamplet medicalizes enthusiasm by drawing on preexisting understandings of melancholy and its 36 associations with religious enthusiasm that will come to figure importantly in modern psychosexual and literary narratives of female masculinity such as The Well of Loneliness that are conditioned on the gender melancholia of their protagonists. Fielding’s account marks a secularizing shift to the rational, the moderate, and the typological that is occurring in both the religious and secular spheres in the mid-‐ eighteenth century as natural explanations for religious experiences come to replace supernatural causes (Taves 16-‐19). 24 While medical and religious understandings of melancholy have long been entwined, there are also particularly seventeenth and eighteenth-‐century historical associations between the discourses of medical melancholy and those of religious enthusiasm, Protestant conversion narrative, and Methodism (Taves 17; Sim, “Despair, Melancholy and the Novel,” 114-‐141; Jackson 95-‐99; 328-‐341). I draw on these earlier interpretations of the pamphlet and connections scholars have made between Methodism and melancholy to argue that not only is The Female Husband a cautionary tale of religious awakening that threatens rationalism through the specter of a masculine female effeminacy, but that it can also be read as a medical awakening narrative that draws on specific connections between Methodism and bodily disorder, and between religious enthusiasm and melancholy, to make a medico-‐moral case study of George/Molly Hamilton. Contained in The Female Husband is the etiology of an enthusiast. Enthusiasm Delineated Fielding’s spoof reiterates common eighteenth century critiques of Methodists, whose promiscuous commerce with the divine and prodigal proffering of grace were linked to fraud, excess, and disorder. 25 Such critiques were also, importantly, 37 temporal. Because Methodists experienced spiritual awakening instantaneously— an encounter with the spirit felt in the heart, which sometimes led to paroxysms of the body, especially among Methodism’s female followers—their religious experience was considered false, immoderate, and irrational by a culture that championed rationality, form, moderation and decorum (Abelove 64-‐73; Hempton 137-‐140; Anderson 73-‐81). The passionate sermons of Methodist co-‐founders John Wesley and George Whitefield, along with their less-‐educated helpers, who traveled England and America delivering extemporaneous sermons, purportedly incited the passions of especially their female and youngest hearers, triggering such “Excesses and Extravagancies” as shrieking, crying, screaming, roaring and groaning; praying, exhorting, and singing hymns; visions of heavenly transport and conversing with Jesus and angels; convulsive twitching; and the most telling evidence of “the working of Enthusiasm, laughing, loud hearty laughing, was one of the Ways in which our new Converts, almost every where, were wont to join together in expressing their Joy at the Conversion of others” (Chauncey, qtd. in Lovejoy, 73-‐77). This description is taken from a 1742 letter written by Congregationalist minister Charles Chauncey, in which he decries the passionate preaching of Whitefield and his helpers in America. “[W]herever [Whitefield] went he generally moved the Passions, especially of the younger People, and the Females among them; the Effect whereof was, a great Talk about Religion, together with a Disposition to be perpetually hearing Sermons, to neglect all other Business” (Qtd. in Lovejoy 73). Subsequently, less educated ministers were “formed into Mr. Whitefield’s Temper, and began to appear and go about preaching, with a Zeal more flaming, if possible, 38 than his” (74). It wasn’t long before “Mr. Whitefield’s Doctrine of inward Feelings began to discover itself in the Multitudes, whose sensible Perceptions arose to such a Height, as they cried out, fell down, swooned away, and to all Appearance, were like Persons in Fits; and this, when the Preaching (if it may be so called) had in it as little well digested and connected good Sense, as you can well suppose” (75). One of the theological debates about enthusiasm that Chauncey’s letter raises is the distinction between “extraordinary” and “ordinary” gifts of the Holy Spirit (Lee 135; Hempton 35-‐37). Methodists’, Chauncey charges, presume these “Excesses” and “Extravagancies” have supernatural causes, that they are “Arguments of the extraordinary Presence of the Holy Ghost” (76), rather than spiritual gifts available to all believers, or conversely, mental illness stemming from natural causes. The Methodist emphasis on these noisy and bodily expressions of passions as “sure Marks, or, at least sufficient Evidences of a just Conviction of Sin on the one Hand; or, on the other, of that Joy which there is in believing, and so of an Interest in the Favour of God” was therefore “most dangerous” (77) to a rational Protestantism that did not allow for such divine encounters in modern times. 26 While the claim to prophesy had always been a distinguishing feature of enthusiasm 27 , Ann Taves’ work on enthusiasm and Methodism explains a shift from supernatural to natural explanations to explain religious experiences as those Methodist expressions of the spirit that Chauncey’s letter describes. 28 Taves situates Chauncey’s writing on enthusiasm in the context of the Puritan conversion tradition (22-‐23); his descriptions of bodily disorder, “at least nascently psychological” (23), link enthusiasm to melancholy (23). Taves writes, “At one point [Chauncey] claimed 39 that the cause of enthusiasm is ‘bad temperament of the blood and spirits.’ At another point, he averred that it is ‘properly a disease, a sort of madness,’ to which none are more susceptible than ‘those, in whom melancholy is the prevailing ingredient in their constitution’” (23). I want to follow here from the connection Taves draws attention to, in Chauncey’s description of enthusiasts, between enthusiasm and melancholy, which he frames as a type of “constitution”—caused, in the humoral sense, by an “ingredient” in the “blood and spirits”—that rendered the melancholic, Taves notes, “susceptible to delusion” (23). Thus, enthusiasm manifests as “a sort of madness” that stems from a melancholic constitution: physical and psychic manifestations of enthusiasm included trances, convulsions, screaming, visions and trembling (22), yet these stemmed from a susceptible physical constitution, a melancholic one (23). Thus, I read the earlier-‐cited passage of Chauncey through Taves’ interpretation and the connections she makes apparent in Chauncey between enthusiasm and melancholy. Whitefield’s preaching, Chauncey notes, was not “well digested”; it lacked “good Sense,” leading not only fits, swooning, and crying out, but a “neglect of all other Business.” Like digestive upset, mental and emotional derangement and idleness were also linked to melancholy—the former caused by digestive “vapours” believed to overheat the brain, and the latter a cause of melancholy and a lifestyle that could lead to the former symptoms. Idleness that stemmed from a faith-‐based belief system was also a critique of Methodists and other sects deemed enthusiast (Anderson 17-‐22; Hempton 34). Taves observes these connections between Chauncey’s descriptions of enthusiasm elsewhere and the two-‐part Puritan 40 conversion cycle of despair and joy manifest (22). There is a similar movement in the passage I have cited above: Chauncey’s employment of temperament and temperature (“Temper”, “Zeal more flaming,” “sensible Perceptions arose to such a Height”, “well digested”) as well as his conjuring of the dualistic affective structure of the Puritan conversion narrative (Sim 114-‐15; Hunter, The Reluctant Pilgrim 89; Hindmarsh 27-‐31) (“just Conviction of Sin” on the despairing side, and the “Joy” and “Favour of God” on the ecstatic end) overlay his description of Methodism with associations of religious melancholy. Therefore I read Chauncey’s argument is both a theological and a medical one: those shrieks, visions and convulsive fits that Methodists proffer as evidence of divine encounter with the holy spirit could be explained medically and, importantly, are rendered enthusiast ipso facto because neither reasonable Protestant theology, nor medical discourse, allowed for the possibility of religious inspiration in modern times (Lee 58, 72, 135; Hempton 35-‐ 57). Furthermore, following Taves, I argue that Chauncey’s critique nods at overlapping dualities present in the entwined discourses of enthusiasm and melancholy: excess at both extremes—hot and cold, ecstatic and despairing— marked Methodists as both heretical and mentally ill or melancholic. Increasingly, Taves has noted, enthusiasm was coming to be understood as the latter (18-‐19). Charges against the Methodists straddle two related, though seemingly opposite, poles that Catholic historian Bernard Knox recognizes as two facets of enthusiasm discourse cross-‐historically: antinomianism and rigor (2-‐3). 29 Methodists were accused of enthusiasms of both extremes: either they were described as being too disciplined or too out of control in an era that valued the 41 rational and the temperate within religion and without. 30 On the manic side, the emotional and sudden nature of the Methodist conversion, which stemmed from a Lutheran belief in “free grace”—salvation available to all rather than to an elect few; bestowed through “faith alone,” rather than earned through good works (Wesley, SFG)— carried with it the specter of seventeenth century antinomianism and its accompanying political trouble that continued to haunt the eighteenth century (Rack 38). In The Enthusiasm of Methodists and Papists Compared, Bishop George Lavington connects Methodism to Catholicism and to an enthusiasm that, similarly to Charles Chauncey’s thinking earlier, stems from an overheated brain. Lavington contends he isn’t “acccus[ing] the Methodists directly of Popery,” though he admits suspecting some overlap in belief. Instead he sees analogy in the their shared delusions, “designing only to shew how uniformly both act upon the same Plan,… their Heads fill’d with much the same grand Projects, driven on in the same wild Manner; and wearing the same badge of Peculiarities in their Tenets:—not perhaps from compact and design; but a similar Configuration and Texture of Brain, or the fumes of Imagination producing similar Effects” (10). On the despairing or “gloomy” side, Lavington more directly connects Methodism to melancholy, citing Methodist leaders’ John Wesley and George Whitefield’s prohibitions against laughing, expensive clothes and goods, and entertainment as proof not only of a kind of extreme austerity, but also of an irrational and melancholic “Character” (19-‐24). On Wesley’s position against laughing, Lavington concludes, “As laughter is a faculty peculiar to the Human Species, the Resolution of a Religious Melancholist entirely to discard it may be reckon’d a little Essay towards putting away the Properties of a 42 rational Creature” (20). On Whitefield’s zero tolerance policy toward entertainments such as cards, music, and dancing, Lavington calls for moderation. “But Moderation, Reason and Scripture are Things unregarded by Enthusiasts; who must act in Character,” he writes. “[Methodists] cannot, they care not allow any thing that carries the name or face of Recreation and Chearfulness; for fear of dispersing a little of that black bile, that gloomy humour, which is the most essential Ingredient in their Religion” (24). For Lavington, melancholia’s black bile constitutes not only the “Character” of the individual Methodist, but the entire body of Methodism. Edmund Gibson also writes against Methodist manifestations of the former, more heated type in Observations upon the Conduct and Behaviour of a Certain Sect Usually Distinguished by the Name of Methodists (1744), arguing for attention to church law, sacrament and service rather than instantaneous and bodily spiritual encounter: The “regular attendance on the publick offices of religion” were “better evidence of the co-‐operation of the Holy Spirit than those Sudden Agonies, Roarings, and Screamings, Tremblings, Droppings-‐down, Ravings and Madness; into which their Hearers have been cast” (qtd. in Hempton 33). David Hempton calls attention to Gibson’s contention that a “gradual improvement of grace and goodness” through attention to church sacraments, laws, and worship was preferable to the Methodists’ “extremism, antinomianism, and instantaneous conversion” (Hempton 33; see also Abelove 89 on instantaneous conversion)—according to Hempton a lasting view that influenced “two centuries of criticism of Methodist enthusiasm” (33). The immediacy of Wesley’s conversion and, consequently, the fact that it was unearned 43 through steady improvement by established, and Established Church, means deemed Methodist inspiration suspect. Ironically, Wesley himself followed a rigorous spiritual discipline in his Oxford days that was similar to, though perhaps more extreme than, the kind of gradual, steady progress towards grace that both his mother and Gibson advised: Wesley and the select members of the Oxford “Holy Club” followed a strict schedule of prayer, scripture study, fasting, self-‐examination, and good works that earned them the epithet “methodists” because of their mechanical piety (Rack xiv and 84). So ascetic was the discipline of these early Holy Club Methodists that a father of one of the club’s former members blamed his son’s death on the club’s rigorous practices (Knox 431). Although less extreme and with a focus on emotional conversion before sanctification, Methodism as a movement did incorporate a similar spiritual discipline into its practices and organization (432). Thus, Methodism was characterized by enthusiasm at bipolar extremes. The Methodists’ sudden, emotional and bodily conversion; their belief in grace as “free” or democratically available, regardless of election or class position; their perceived sexual excesses among itinerant helpers and leaders; their controversial hymn singing during services—all of these factors were related in anti-‐enthusiasm discourse to a manic or hysterical type of excess. Conversely Methodists’ rigorous discipline and belief in perfectionism, coupled with an organizational structure that encouraged continual examination, and self-‐examination, of members’ conduct and spiritual states, generated claims of an enthusiasm of the more anxious or despairing. Likewise the association that the Methodist doctrine of free grace—a 44 grace that, as Wesley wrote in a sermon of the same name, was “free in all, and free for all” (“SFG,” 3) —threatened political trouble from a developing working class and the mobile preachers who ministered to them (Rack 314-‐22; Hempton 32-‐35), and as such, connected Methodism to seventeenth century Dissenters such as the Puritans (Abelove 86-‐90), whose spiritual narratives vacillated between despair and exultation and, as earlier sources have noted, were linked to melancholy. Melancholy Methodists “There is a Melancholy which accompanies all Enthusiasm,” Anthony, the Third Earl of Shaftesbury, in “A Letter Concerning Enthusiasm” (1708), observes. “Be it Love or Religion (for there are Enthusiasms in both) nothing can put a stop to the growing mischief of either, till the Melancholy be remov’d, and the Mind at liberty to hear what can be said against the Ridiculousness of an Rxtreme in either way” (13). While the religious enthusiasms that influenced Shaftesbury were those of the French Camisards (Rosenberg 41-‐44), his conception of enthusiastic excess as something that affects the mind, as a condition outside the range of the temperate, and as an extreme worthy of ridicule could also apply to mid-‐century perceptions of Methodists. Importantly, the enthusiastic trinity that Shaftesbury identifies here— melancholy, religion and love—relied on an earlier but still influential medical classification of religious melancholy that, I argue following Ann Taves and Stanley Jackson, informs the connections between religious and romantic devotion in Fielding’s The Female Husband: Robert Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621). Both Taves and Jackson trace enthusiasm as it moves from a matter of belief to one of disorder in which melancholy was the cause and enthusiasm the 45 manifestation (Jackson 329; Taves 17-‐18). Burton’s codification of preexisting associations between melancholy and religious delusion— enthusiasm became a type of “religious melancholy in excess” (Jackson 329) and “ ‘Religious Melancholy’” a “ ‘distinct species’ of the more traditional medical malady ‘Love-‐Melancholy’” (Taves 17)—allowed religious polemic to position enthusiasts as melancholic (Jackson 329).Prior to that, there had been a connection between melancholy and sin dating to medieval Christianity (Jackson 326) and between religious enthusiasm and melancholy dating to the sixteenth century (328). Connected in the Middle Ages to sins of sloth (acedia) and spiritual despair (tristia), this version of religious melancholy was suffered largely by solitary monks (66, 69, 328). But the idea of enthusiasm as “‘divine possession’” influenced post-‐Protestant Reformation era enthusiasm discourse (328). Both Taves and Jackson trace enthusiasm as it moves from a matter of belief to one of disorder in which melancholy was the cause and enthusiasm the manifestation (Jackson 329; Taves 17-‐18). Taves frames The Anatomy of Melancholy as a precipitating event that allowed “enthusiasm” to emerge in the 1650s as a general epithet aimed no longer at false doctrine, but rather at false claims to spiritual experience (17). By drawing on The Anatomy of Melancholy, Taves contends, “Enlightened’ Anglican” pamphleteers could mitigate potentially problematic religious and political dissent by rendering it mental derangement: “Recast as delusion or madness, political and religious radicalism was more easily contained” (18). In The Enthusiasm of Methodists and Papists Compar’d (1749), for example, Anglican bishop George Lavington brought together charges of spiritual excess 46 against Methodists with a mental and moral derangement he explained by drawing on medical understandings of melancholy. Two of the Methodists’ offenses in Lavington’s framework, enthusiasm and superstition, have bodily causes that affect the brain, while the other deals with imposture. All three classifications, then, deal with falsity, though only one of these false types is conscious and intentional; the others are attributed to mental illness. "When the blood and spirits run high, inflaming the brain and imagination, it is most properly Enthusiasm; which is religion run mad: —when low and dejected, causing groundless terrors, or the placing of great Duty of Man in little observances, 'tis Superstition; which is religion scared out of its senses:-‐-‐ when any fraudulent dealings are made use of, and any wrong projects carried on, under the mark of piety, ‘tis Imposture, and may be termed Religion turned Hypocrite” (81-‐82). Although Lavington separates the hot or ecstatic type of excess from the low and despairing kind, he describes them both in the framework of mental disorder suffered by a range of religious enthusiasts such as mystics, heretics, believers in superstition, and Catholics, all comparable to Methodists. Even his third category, imposture, which is more criminal than crazy, turns on its “mark of piety”—those manifestations, or symptoms, that signal devotion or inspiration. In this respect, Lavington’s critique exemplifies Taves’ contention that it was the Methodist experiences, rather than their beliefs, were considered false— either purposefully, as in the case of Methodist preachers and followers pretending religious inspiration, or as a result of a disordered mind, via enthusiasm or superstition. The focus is on these embodied manifestations of religion as the mark of a mental illness that encompasses both religious despair and 47 religious rapture. Ann Taves marks Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy as the text that grouped together as “Religious Melancholy” a number of religious others, such as Catholics and Puritans. Here, she follows Michael Heyd. However whereas Heyd claims it is Burton who constitutes these groups as “enthusiasts,” Taves contends the later Anglicans who take up Burton and the category religious melancholy are instead responsible for privileging “enthusiasm” as “a catch-‐all term for religious excess” (367, n. 12). Importantly for thinking about religious melancholy as connected to cross-‐gender narrative, Burton’s typology of melancholy classified religious enthusiasm and its excessive devotion as a kind of disordered love, both in degree and in symptom, where the object of desire was God (Taves 17). Such a classificatory schema allows for the reframing of religious enthusiasm as an excessive desire that contains both religious and sexual expression. It thus sheds light on the conjunctions between sexual, emotional and religious excess temperamentalized in Methodists like Mary Hamilton. Melancholia and mania have been linked as early as the first century B.C. (Jackson 250). They were sometimes viewed as related disease and discussed together or proximately in the medical literature; in other cases, they were treated as component parts of the same disorder (249-‐273). For example, Jackson notes that Galen (131-‐201) theorized two types of bile—one, natural black bile, caused melancholy; the other, “burnt” or unnatural yellow bile, caused mania (253). Whereas black bile’s humor was cold and resulted in “pathological dejection,” yellow’s was hot and caused “pathological excitement” (253). By the eighteenth 48 century, mania had come to be included within melancholy as a more advanced or progressed stage of the condition (256-‐58). I want to recognize a similar connection in the way that the mid-‐eighteenth century satirical engravings of William Hogarth draw on the extremes of both melancholic temperament and religious enthusiasm to render Methodists enthusiasts manifesting excessive symptoms of mania. My readings of these prints are influenced by, and extend, a trinity of readings the same images by Terry Castle, Ann Taves, and Misty Anderson. “Enthusiasm Delineated” (c. 1761), William Hogarth <http://www.britishmuseum.org/research/collection_online/collection_object_details. aspx?objectId=1439204&partId=1&people=58368&peoA=58368-‐3-‐18&page=1> In the unpublished print, “Enthusiasm Delineated” (c. 1761; see link to the print above), William Hogarth satirizes the instantaneous, immoderate experience of Methodists in an image that reflects the entwinement of melancholy and religious enthusiasm, and the dualities within both discourses. Hogarth’s engraving depicts a range of enthusiasms that measure on a giant foregrounded thermometer the emotional and bodily state of a congregation during a frenzied Methodist sermon— degrees of enthusiasm that range from “love-‐heat,” “exstasy,” and “revelation” in its upper registers to “sadness,” “despair,” and “prophesy” in its depths. Convulsing women, ecstatic couples, and transubstantiating congregants are all in the throes of a religious transport that throb into the thermometer’s upper ranges, its heat equal parts sexual and spiritual. 31 Just as in Burton’s understanding of “Love Melancholy,” lovesickness and god-‐sickness are indistinguishable on the top register of Hogarth’s Methodist 49 measuring instrument: the congregations temperature spikes past love-‐heat and lust and convulsion fits, threatening to push toward exstasy and revelation. As the congregation’s emotional temperature rises, fueled by intemperate sermon, song, and transubstansive encounters with the spirit, love-‐heat and lust verge into ecstasy; the measuring instrument sits atop a “Methodist brain” (Taves 14: Anderson 153), which Anderson observes “seems to include male and female genitalia” (153). These details satirize Methodist practice, but they also emphasize connections between religious enthusiasm, melancholy, and desire. While the middle register of the thermometer indicates a calm and temperate middle state (“luke-‐warm”), its lower register, which I will examine shortly, leads to despair, agony, and eventually prophesy (or in a published, secular version of the print, suicide 32 ). That the thermometer also has a lower register is equally important for thinking about Methodism in terms of medical understandings of religious melancholy, yet little mentioned in readings of the print, which concentrate on the thermometer’s upper register. Arguably the hot zones are the only registers that apply to the engraving tableaux, as the Methodists have reached the state of boiling blood and spiritual frenzy. Yet considering the thermometer’s entire range effects the possibility of a similar—possibly a previous or subsequent— dip into a colder, gloomier extreme. Just as the thermometer’s mercury currently registers exultation and boiling blood, it could also drop suddenly into a depressive register: plummeting into “Low-‐Spirits” and “Sorrow,” into “Agony,” “Settled Grief,” and finally, to the depths of “Despair.” Common to both the pinnacle and nadir of this emotional-‐meteorological spectrum is divine encounter: 50 revelation at the high end and prophesy at the low. However in order to get to such an embodied religious experience, the emotionally extreme Methodist hearer had to first pass, at both ends, through “Madness.” Thus, melancholy in this temperamental conception includes both those bottom-‐register emotional states, such as despair and sadness, as well as the warmer-‐temperatured states, here depicted as a religious mania indistinguishable from the sexual. Both in its upper and lower registers, this Methodist thermometer uses terms that could measure either religious or romantic devotion. In reading the full spectrum of melancholic temperament and temperature in this print, I want to emphasize both the manic and the despairing through Burton’s category of “Religious Melancholy” as it figures in the context of mid-‐eighteenth century anti-‐ enthusiasm discourse against the Methodists (Taves 17; 367, n. 12). Firstly, these lower-‐register categories are a neglected part of readings of the Hogarth prints and their understandings of Methodist enthusiasm, and yet melancholy is an component of anti-‐enthusiasm discourse important both to enthusiasm’s connection to disorder and to the way that Methodists are feminized through both discourses. In the Hogarth prints, I argue that the thermometers represent the spectrum of melancholic disorder, which ranges from despair to madness, and that the thermometers register the heat of their enthusiastic delusions. However it is not only the thermometers that suggest melancholic enthusiasm; many of prints details reference Methodist excess and melancholic symptom. Anderson reads repeated references to excrement, flatulence and wind into this and other Hogarth prints— for example, in Enthusiasm Delineated, Anderson reads 51 Hogarth’s depiction of another small Jesus, who gathers a congregant’s tears while farting, as “a satire on the notion of the Holy Spirit as a heavenly wind that was fairly common in Methodist sermons” (167). Such windy spirits also recall melancholic digestive disturbance whose resulting vapors rose and affected the brain (Jackson 275). Because of its association with hypochondria, melancholy or melancholic conditions were referred to as “’windy’ ” and “ ‘flatulent’ ” (Lawlor 27-‐28). Likewise, Hogarth’s situating of a thermometer, one that measures the mental state of the congregation during a preacher’s “windy” sermon (Anderson 153-‐54), atop a Methodist brain conflates a bodily disorder, melancholic vapors, with enthusiasm’s overheated emotional states. Such a portraiture reinforced the ridiculousness and disorder of a divinely inspire enthusiasm in part through medical theories of religious melancholy. The overly emotional sermon of the preacher and the bodily responses of his congregants remind of critiques against Methodist preachers for rousing crowds, as well as for the irrational and immoderate states that their sermons often produced among hearers and skepticism about their instantaneous conversions. The preacher’s garb, Anderson notes, connects Methodism to Catholicism (152). At the tip-‐top of the drawing, Whitefield dangles puppets over the congregation, resulting in a wig reveal that exposes the papist underneath the Methodist: sporting a monk’s tonsure, he exhorts his congregants towards “extasy” (152-‐3). George Chauncey’s charge that women were among those groups most susceptible to this type of passionate assay likewise figures in Hogarth’s mise en scene; it a woman who has fainted in the foreground of the engraving as the upper ranges of the 52 thermometer (Anderson 150). Likewise, the “blood blood blood” boiling on a second instrument represents a sexual-‐religious-‐medical trinity. Anderson links it to a Methodist focus on the blood and body of Christ and, along with other details such as the congregation’s literal ingestion of miniature Christ figurines, demonstrative of Hogarth’s critique of what he regarded as a Catholic-‐like belief in transubstantiation or consubstantiation (153-‐4, 163). Thirdly, blood is a yet another of humoral theory’s bodily fluids that, when bile was not removed from it, resulted in melancholic madness (Lawlor 28). All of these factors—the religious, the passionate/sexual, and the manic—overlap with the “warm temperament” of Mary Hamilton, one that Fielding contends makes her susceptible to Methodist conversion, and to the sexual impropriety that follows but is indistinguishable from that conversion in both the pamphlet and in Hogarth’s print. Turning to the Hogarth print once again before returning to The Female Husband, I want to linger over some of its details. A woman in the foreground of the scene of worship has fainted or fallen into convulsive fits in response to Whitefield’s passionate sermon. Anderson reveals that she is meant to represent a Methodist character from playwright Samuel Foote’s Methodist spoof, The Minor (150). In a subsequent engraving published the following year, “Credulity, Superstition and Fanaticism” (1762), Hogarth transforms Lucy into Mary Tofr (Anderson 150), conflating the “new birth” of Methodist conversion into the scientific “miracle” of a woman birthing rabbits. Tofr’s 1726 case was one of the many scientific, literary and medical hoaxes, frauds and forgeries that proliferated in the mid-‐eighteenth 53 century through the Romantic period. 33 Another that Anderson observes in the print is the Cock Lane ghost, which involved a Methodist preacher who conducted séances to communicate with the ghost of a murdered woman who rapped on his daughter’s bedroom walls (158-‐59). These eighteenth century proliferations and fascinations with imposture (Russett 4-‐5), which are also represented in Fielding’s The Female Husband’s tale of an innocent young woman disordered and transformed by Methodism into a fraudulent seducer, husband and doctor, manifest broader social concerns about personhood that coalesced around the changing areas of gender relations, religious belief, and sexuality (Anderson 71-‐72; Wahrman 3-‐44). “Credulity, Superstition and Fanaticism,” William Hogarth (1762) <https://web.duke.edu/secmod/pfau/hogarth1.html> Misty Anderson explains that Methodist epistemology was influenced by John Locke’s conception of the conscious self, one developed over time and through experience (Anderson 5, 71) that also incorporated mysticism and that was feminine in orientation (72). Although Methodism and empiricism overlapped, its belief and practice of instantaneous conversion through a grace that they felt bodily triggered such anxieties, Anderson observes (4). “Such a self has given way to enthusiasm or ‘revelation’ by the definitions Locke established, a ‘failure’ that both Fielding and [anti-‐Methodist pamphleteer and Bishop of Exeter George] Lavington represented as feminizing” (7). Thus, Fielding’s George/Mary Hamilton passes as a Methodist preacher because she reads as a feminine man. Anderson also connects Whitefield to Fielding’s Hamilton through their shared “combination of the masculine and feminine” (84). Terry Castle also connects Hogarth’s thermometers 54 in these prints to the “sexual weatherglass,” a type of thermometer that measured fluctuations in specifically female desire. By using the sexual weatherglass in these prints, Hogarth feminizes male Methodists (Castle 30-‐31). Anderson also discusses connections between the Methodist self and femininity (72), and Methodism and women (77-‐80) and women. Relatedly, in the next chapter I will discuss how the Methodist theology of grace also genders enthusiasm feminine. At the start of this chapter, I linked Fielding’s discussion of Molly/George Hamilton’s warm temperament to the feminine and to the enthusiastic. In this chapter’s final section, I return to The Female Husband to explore how Methodism’s connections to the medical and the mobile allow Hamilton to convincingly perform an effeminate masculinity. The Female Husband In the preface to The Female Husband, Fielding attempts to negotiate an ambivalence between what he understands as a natural, species-‐perpetuating propensity for opposite-‐sex desire with a propensity for the sin of enthusiasm: a predisposition of the necessary “carnal appetites” toward “excess and disorder,” even excesses of the “monstruous and unnatural” variety, such as Hamilton’s uncontainable same-‐sex desire and cross-‐sexing: That propense inclination which is for very wise purposes implanted in the one sex for the other, is not only necessary for the continuance of the human species; but is, at the same time, when govern'd and directed by virtue and religion, productive not only of corporeal delight, but of the most rational felicity. But if once our carnal appetites are let loose, without those prudent 55 and secure guides, there is no excess and disorder which they are not liable to commit, even while they pursue their natural satisfaction; and, which may seem still more strange, there is nothing monstrous and unnatural, which they are not capable of inventing, nothing so brutal and shocking which they have not actually committed. (1) Fielding’s disclaimer both holds up heterosexuality and opposite sex attraction as rational, necessary for reproduction, and “implanted in one sex for the other.” At the same time, however, he also suggests an irrational drive just as natural: those “carnal appetites” that tend toward “monstrous and unnatural” “excess and disorder” and that must therefore be kept in check through religion and virtue. Specifically, Fielding is arguing calling for the check of a rational religion that is the antithesis of forms of Protestant evangelism and Great Awakening religious experience deemed enthusiast, which operated through irrational leadings of the spirit felt in the heart, a passion felt bodily. He is also, here, naturalizing original sin—rooting it in a biological determinism that, without a disciplined faith, becomes “unnatural.” Later in the text, Fielding will deem Hamilton’s desires (and here we can understand these desires both religiously and sexually) as “unnatural.” Thus the enmeshment between science, religion and gender is evident, as is the transition to a “rational” and willful religion that functions to keep bodily desires on track—away from excesses and disorders that are also, curiously, constructed here as natural to these desires. This foreshadows nineteenth and twentieth century psychosexual narratives of gender and sexuality that would naturalize pathological desires and embodiments in ways that also reinforced the limits of the natural. 34 56 If we think of The Female Husband’s morality as constitutively interlaced with the medical, then we can recognize that such a narrative structure—as much case study as cautionary example of enthusiasm’s potential to unleash an uncontainable same-‐sex desire that will lead to “monstrous and unnatural” cross-‐sexing — constructs the enthusiast as a category or identity occupied by a certain “warm” or passionate type. This was a type—working class, often female—who Fielding presents as vulnerable to what was anxiously rhetoricized in the eighteenth century as the spread of a spiritual phenomenon that mobilized an already mobile and increasing plebian, industrialized class whose enthusiasms triggered fears of political unrest (Anderson 18; Rack 273-‐281; Hempton 202-‐209). In constructing Hamilton’s medical and moral history as one of innocence tempted and tainted by Methodism, yet equally open to that tainting by a flawed feminine temperament that draws on understandings of melancholy as its evidence, Fielding in effect medicalizes an already gendered moral concept, original sin. As historian Henry Abelove has observed, Methodism troubled traditional family structures, mobilizing women to leave their homes for their religious societies, or to forgo marriage or family responsibilities—including, possibly, sex with their husbands— for the sake of their faith (Abelove 64-‐65; 70-‐72). Furthermore, enthusiastic experience triggered anxieties about embodiment—that is, about a kind of embodied religious experience and belief, a touching of the heart by a holy spirit through which believers claimed knowledges beyond the rational, and hence, that marked that knowledge as religiously and sexually suspect, in part through its association with the feminine (Taves 28-‐30; Abelove 66-‐70; 73, n. 74; 57 66-‐70; 89). All of these anxieties are recognizable in the way that Fielding creates a spiritual etiology for Hamilton’s gender and sexual imposture conditioned both by a flawed temperament and contact with another Methodist woman. Subsequently Hamilton’s enthusiasm manifests, symptomatically, in an itinerancy linked with Methodist enthusiasm. Sarah Nicolazzo reads the charges against Hamilton, under the Vagrancy Act of 1744, as connected to economic fraud: Hamilton’s marriage to the widow Rushford and attempts to consummate that marriage with a repeatedly discovered dildo— “an instrument of financial fraud” in Nicolazzo’s rendering (339)— are an attempt at inheritance. Nicolazzo reads The Female Husband in the context of eighteenth-‐ century vagrancy laws to understand vagrancy as a “queer category” in which labor, gender, and sexuality are imbricated (335). Much of this reading overlaps with my own—particularly the connections that Nicolazzo makes between vagrancy and idleness, which overlap with Methodism (Misty Anderson has also made such connections). However, I will use itinerancy in this chapter, rather than vagrancy, to discuss Hamilton’s wandering because this term is more closely aligned with enthusiastic, and especially in this text, with Methodist, preaching. Following Anderson, I consider enthusiasm (or more specifically, a religious melancholy associated with enthusiasm) as the “queer category” that, as Nicolazzo points out, involves the overlap of other markers of difference such as class, gender, sexual, and religious, difference. 35 The imbrication of Hamilton’s itinerancy with Methodism, I argue, complicates her fraud to something beyond sexual, gender, and marital passing, even as these 58 categories already overlap with economics and class. In fact, a succession of passings occur in this text: at the same time Hamilton passes as a man, she also passes as a Methodist preacher, then as a doctor, described in legal records as a traveling “Quack doctor” (Battestin, “Supplement” 382). Not only must Hamilton pass as a man to be read as both preacher and doctor, but both of these occupational passings are also themselves suspect and inseparable: the itinerant quack who peddles home remedies and promises miracle cures “up and down the Country” is the medical equivalent of the enthusiastic Methodist convulsed with the Holy Spirit. Thus what Fielding presents as a switch from one form fakery to another—from itinerant enthusiast preacher to itinerant quack doctor—is actually not a switch at all, but rather a condition of the overlapping categories of preaching and healing that constituted eighteenth century Methodist practice (Abelove 8-‐9; 16; 27-‐30), and that subsequently become embroiled in Hamilton’s itinerant seductions. All are suspect masquerades, frauds related to the suspicion of enthusiasm. In The Female Husband, Fielding attributes not only Hamilton’s gender fraud, but also her medical quackery, to Methodist enthusiasm. However the legal case that triggered the pamphlet mentions only Hamilton’s cross-‐dressing, marrying women, and suspect doctoring. 36 It is quite possible that Methodism may have been signaled, or at least suggested as a possibility, by the newspaper account’s use of the term “quack” because there was a cultural association between Methodist preachers and fraudulent healing (Abelove 16; Knox 425). Regardless, it seems the case in Fielding’s account that all of Hamilton’s passings—of gender, marriage, sex, medicine, and faith—at least evoke Methodism, itself characterized (following 59 Taves) as a false form of religious doctrine experience: in other words, as enthusiasm (Taves 16-‐19). Yet Fielding’s connection of Hamilton’s gender and sexual perversions to a false practice of religion that is inseparable from her suspect medical practice further underscores how those bodily causal features of Hamilton’s enthusiasm— a “warm” temperament that evokes medical notions of bodily humors, but that also resonates with Castle’s description of the “female thermometer” and its susceptibility to an overheating of the passions (Taves 23; Castle, Female Thermometer 21-‐43). Not only is Hamilton portrayed as a false man, deceiving her wives through the use of “false and deceitful practices” (Fielding 380) certain vile and deceitful Practices, not fit to be mention’d,” but she is also a quack doctor, wandering the country to spread her “infallible nostrums.” Presumably this “infallible nostrum” refers to the dildo that Hamilton uses to treat her brides for what Bonnie Blackwell has identified as an eighteenth century illness called “greensickness,” a type of anemia or hysteria believed to be suffered by virginal young women, and believed curable by married sex. Blackwell connects greensickness to female melancholy and hysteria through Robert Burton’s connection, in The Anatomy of Melancholy (62). While Blackwell does not focus on Hamilton’s Methodism, her analysis of greensickness and Hamilton’s doctoring in The Female Husband support the connects this chapter makes between cross-‐ gendering, enthusiasm and melancholy. Yet just as “nostrum” suggests the medical, “infallible” evokes notions of religious enthusiasm that Bishop George Lavington will connect to the Methodist practice of gaining spiritual knowledge through “inward feelings” of “the workings 60 of god” “impressed upon their hearts” rather than through scripture (“Methodists and Papists Compared” 246). Lavington’s three-‐part pamphlet connects Methodism to Catholicism, also associated with a doctrine of infallibility. 37 Lavington wonders “with what pertinacious Confidence are Impulses, Impressions, Feelings, Transports of Sensible Joy, &c. been advance into Divine Calls, Commissions, Directions, and certain Rules of conduct; Proofs of Sins forgiven, Justification and Salvation ensured? How have they been convinced by inward feeling, the most infallible of all Proofs?” (246). He connects this conviction of “infallibility” to a false pride. Elsewhere Methodist John Wesley is connected to Moravian Count Nicholas Ludwig von Zinzendorf, who Lavington calls “the Moravian’s Infallible Bishop” (149). Furthermore, the woman who converts Hamilton to Methodism, Anne Johnson, is described as a novitiate from a Bristol convent, where, with her “methodistical sisters” [emphasis mine], she “confessed,” “impurity” was “practiced” as a spiritual discipline. This is just one of several connections that The Female Husband makes between Methodism and Catholicism. These connections, along with Fielding’s use of the phrase “infallible nostrums,” brings together three common charges against Methodists that allow us to read Molly/George Hamilton as an enthusiast: fraudulent healing, sexual excess, and similarities in doctrine and practice that rendered her akin to an effeminate papist. These overlappings between enthusiast and Catholic, connoted by Fielding’s use of “infallible,” but more overtly stated by Lavington’s direct analogy between Methodism and Catholicism, draw attention to the skepticism with which Anglicans held both Catholic trust in Church authority and Methodist trust in “inward feeling,” “heart,” and sensory experience. 61 Connections between Methodism and medicine began with the denomination’s charismatic leader John Wesley, who in the tradition of English gentlemen, doctored to his flock (Abelove 8-‐9). Along with the offering of free grace, Wesley offered the common folk he ministered to free medical advice and treatment for both physical and emotional ailments (Abelove 27). “ ‘I prepare and give them physic myself, having for six or seven and twenty years made physic the diversion of my leisure hours’; nor did his enemies fail to accuse him of dosing his converts with halicacabon and other drugs to produce hysterical symptoms” (Knox 425). At a time when a professional class of physicians and medical literature was developing, Wesley wrote medical guidebooks in plain language that were designed to provide common people with folk remedies (Anderson 92-‐93). Wesley’s less knowledgeable helpers, largely from the artisan classes, “copied him in their own way, as they could. Instead of trying to play doctor, and failing, they made cure-‐all medicines. They compounded a pill or brewed a ‘balsam,’ which they peddled as they traveled, in the intervals between preaching” (Abelove 16). Thus, both Wesley and his helpers appeared suspect—Wesley in terms of the liberality with which he dispensed medical and emotional care, advice, and financial assistance to classes not his own, in subversion of established codes of class and the distribution of wealth, in his promise of salvation for all, and in his itinerant preaching (Abelove 7-‐23; 27-‐33); and Wesley’s helpers because they were not aristocrats nor ordained ministers as they concocted and peddled remedies in an attempt to “copy [Wesley] in their own way” (16). 62 If we read “Quack doctor” (“Supplement” 382) and “doctor of physic” (Fielding 374) as interchangeable with Methodist preacher, then we see that there is really no switch from religious to medical masquerade in The Female Husband. Further, Wesley’s offering of a free grace available to all “troubled his fellow clergymen of the Church of England”(Abelove 32). In other words, that Wesley’s assurance of salvation was freely given and received independent of class status— not conditioned on good works nor limited to an elect few—triggered charges of gender transgression, excessive and perverted sexual desire, and squandered emotional and economic labor (Abelove 31-‐33, 66-‐70, 73 n. 74; Anderson 18;). We can easily recognize the stereotype of the licentious and effeminate male Methodist in Fielding’s account of Hamilton’s first foray into the English countryside in male garb. Dressed as a male Methodist preacher, Hamilton is sexually assaulted onboard a ship by a similarly outfitted male Methodist preacher, who takes her for another “He Methodist” (Fielding 368). 38 In other words, she passes as a young, pretty boy because she is disguised as a Methodist preacher, a group already considered feminized (Castle, “Matters Not Fit” 31). Elsewhere in the pamphlet, Hamilton will also pass as effeminate and as a masculinity lacking in sexual potency. The first widow who rejects Hamilton’s assays compares him to a “Farinelli,” or castrato opera singer, then marries an ostensibly more potent military man (Fielding 370). A second widow, much older than Hamilton, does marry the doctor she believes to be a very young man. But even she has her doubts about Hamilton’s sexual ability, and hence, masculinity: prior to the scene of failed consummation, where Hamilton is found to be physically lacking in “werewithal” (Fielding 372), the 63 widow remarks at Hamilton’s sexual hesitancy with the comment, “I believe you are a woman” (373). This comment follows a conversation between the widow and a jealous female friend who “could not forbear inveighing against effeminacy in men” (372). In each of these cases, Hamilton’s masquerade is not revealed so much as confirmed: she passes as a Methodist man, a category already feminized in the popular imagination and associated with sodomy, same-‐sex love, and same-‐sex kissing (Anderson 72; Abelove 66-‐67 and 60, n. 59. Rather than outing her as a woman, any revelations that potential wives and sexual partners have about Hamilton’s femininity only further reinforce her Methodist and medical disguise. Comically, and importantly in terms of establishing Methodism as the privileged condition of her passing, Hamilton’s assault on the ship comes while both she and her Methodist counterpart are on their knees in prayer. In the throes of passionate and spirited devotions, the assaulting “He Methodist” reaches out to grope Hamilton’s bosom “in the exstasy of his enthusiasm,” rendering the scene with an air of opera buffo bumbling complete with Hamilton’s “so effeminate a squall” that the captain is convinced a woman is below board (Fielding 368). “ ‘I could have sworn I had heard one cry out as if she had been ravishing,…’” (368). Yet when he opens their cabin door, he sees only two ostensibly male Methodists “on their knees” (368). This “effeminate squall,” the storm that is Methodism, resonates with and renders discordant the Methodist hymn, often theologically and emotionally suspect even if not harmonically dissonant (Anderson 31-‐32; 171-‐174). It is often the voice that gives away the passing woman, yet in this instance, Hamilton’s “so effeminate a squall,” while threatening to reveals her as woman, confirms her as an 64 effeminate male Methodist. Noises such as squalls, shrieks and shouts, as well as hymns during worship that would have been out of place amidst an Established Church service, registered as Methodist offenses and markers of their false spiritual claims. Rather than revealing her as a woman, Hamilton’s “effeminate” shout helps her pass as a Methodist. It also sets up Hamilton’s next comic passing and reveal, in which a target of her affections rejects her as a femininely voiced and appearing “Farinelli”—effeminate, yet still recognizably male. In each of these cases, George/Mary Hamilton passes, through Methodism, as an effeminate man. Hamilton eventually strikes a bloody punch to the offending Methodist’s nose after he attempts to bestow “farther tokens of brotherly love to his companion, which soon became so importunate and troublesome to her, that after having gently rejected his hands several times, she at last recollected the sex she had assumed” (368). In this encounter, Hamilton crosses several thresholds of gender and desire complicated not only by masquerade, but more significantly, by enthusiastic devotion. Her masquerade as a Methodist preacher confers on her an effeminate masculinity that is not only open to the wanderings of the spirit and the accompanying desire of male Methodist for male Methodist, but is gentle in its rejections of such “brotherly love.” Ultimately, though, in order to strike the male Methodist and stop his advances, Hamilton must assume a masculinity that is different, and ostensibly more aggressive, than the masculinity of the effeminate male Methodist—she must “recollect[] the sex she had assumed” (368). Thus, Hamilton’s assertion of masculinity exposes the Methodist masculinity as itself already a false or lacking masculinity by its conflation with an effeminacy that 65 comes through her masquerade as a woman, even though she does not register as a woman. In effect, Hamilton’s disguise as a Methodist preacher enables her to pass as type of religious man considered simultaneously effeminate and sexually deviant. It is also a religious type suspect because of its mobility—a spreading faith, democratically available to an emerging working class also displaced through enclosure and fleeing rural areas, served by landed clergy, to industrial cities (Rack 1-‐10; Hempton 32-‐33). David Hempton explains how Anglican Bishop Edmund Gibson charged Methodists with violating church and state laws, in no small part because of their itinerant, outdoor preaching: “…;[B]y engaging in itinerant preaching and extra-‐parochial communion, Methodists infringed the principles of territorial integrity upon which all established churches depended for their security; and by encouraging the ‘rabble’ to meet out of doors they were inviting, even instigating, social instability.” (33) Wesley himself traveled 225,000 miles on horseback, preaching more than 40,000 sermons (Knox 423). It is no passing detail, then, that as a fake man, fake husband, fake doctor, and fake preacher, Hamilton also wanders. Yet she seems the opposite of Castle’s apparitional lesbian, for enthusiasm embodies her. While Methodism sets Hamilton and her unnaturally suspect desires in motion, these are decidedly wanderings of the flesh whose reliance on religious euphemism reinforces rather than obscures Hamilton’s enthusiastic spirit. When in Fielding’s version of events, Hamilton is finally apprehended for false 66 marrying a third wife—exposed to her finally through falsely consummating their marriages with “something of too vile, wicked and scandalous a nature, which was found in the Doctor’s trunk” (Fielding 876) that she has used to forge a sexual relation with her illegally married wife— she is charged under the Vagrancy Act of 1744 (17 George II, c. 5), which outlaws: using any subtil craft to deceive and impose on any of his Majesty's subjects" (Danby Pickering, The Statutes at Large from the 15th to the 20th Year of King George II, xvImI [Cambridge, 1765, qtd. in Baker 223, n. 30). A catch-‐all law, the Vagrancy Act of 1744 prohibited things like selling false cures, but also wandering and leaving behind wives and children. Sarah Niccolazo notes the Act’s focus on idleness (343), also citing connections that Misty Anderson makes between Methodism and “the refusal to work” (343). Although the majority of Enclosure Acts came after 1750, these local laws drove rural workers to urban centers by consolidating village farmland to the advantage of larger landowners and displacing or evicting rural farmers who migrated to urban industrial centers (fff.org; Rack 4) 39 Itinerant preachers ministered to this mobile and urban-‐migrating population by themselves traveling the country and preaching outdoors (Hempton 33). Methodists were also accused, in doing so, of violating several more acts that deal with religious practice: the Act of Uniformity, the Coventicle Act, and the Toleration Act (Edmund Gibson, Observations upon the Conduct and Behaviour of a Certain Sect Usually Distinguished by the Name of Methodists, 1744, qtd. in Hempton 33). Taking these developing legalities into account, Hamilton presents as not only suspect, but illegal in several ways under a 67 law like the Vagrancy Act: for being an itinerant quack doctor who both sells suspect cures and wanders; for passing as a man, unhomed in terms of her gender and sexuality; for leaving her wives, as well as for falsely marrying wives in the first place, given the unhomed-‐ness of her gender; and for moving from one place to the next to the next to escape both the law and her disgruntled spouses. Methodism—or we might say, itinerant preaching generally— is equally the target of such an act concerned as it is with forgery and wandering. Thus, it becomes difficult to disengage Hamilton’s Methodism from her gender passing and desire for women because Hamilton’s itinerancy is a necessity of practicing both “subtil craft[s].” Hamilton is forced to be itinerant both because of her need to escape the law and the supposed wrath of the women she fraudulently marries, as well as because of her position as a traveling preacher-‐doctor. And the enthusiastic preaching she is doing is linked with charges of sexual impropriety and excess, and with an oscillating temperaments, just as enthusiasm generally referred to encounters with a spirit felt bodily. This means Hamilton is illegal in several ways that are “subtil”y entangled with the several ways she is passing: as a Methodist preacher, practitioner, and doctor; as an effeminate boy and a husband. Because of these multiple entanglements, illegalities, and medicalizing discourse that makes historical, legal and cultural conditions into disordered temperament, Hamilton’s charges of vagrancy can read in a number of ways that are visible in confusion over Hamilton’s charges. Though Fielding seems to cite a portion of the “vagrant act” when describing Hamilton’s charges — "for having by false and deceitful practices endeavored to impose on some of his Majesty's Subjects” (380) 68 —newspaper accounts of the case suggest the exact nature of the legal charges against the real Hamilton were in dispute. In a formative 1959 account of The Female Husband by Sheridan Baker in PMLA that established the pamphlet as Fielding’s in part by establishing discrepancies between the fictional and factual Hamilton, Baker quotes the Nov. 12 1746 Daily Advertiser: “There was a great Debate for some Time in Court about the Nature of her Crime, and what to call it, but at last it was agreed, that she was an uncommon notorious Cheat” (qtd. in Baker 222). But there are further ambiguities built into Hamilton’s legal case, evident in the court’s confusion over the “Nature” of her transgression. While Baker dwells on the definition of “notorious” here—it seems to mean, for Fielding, not well known, but “‘notable’ or ‘remarkable’” (214-‐215)— I am more interested in “cheat.” As foregrounded earlier, that Hamilton is deemed a “cheat” is itself ambiguous. It could refer her quack doctoring. It could signify her practice of a religious piety that trucks in purportedly false assurances of grace and suspect knowledges apprehended through the emotions and the body. Or it could reference her false pretence to masculinity and all its privileges, including marriage and sex with women, which has been the focus of feminist readings of The Female Husband. Terry Castle notes the ambivalence in Fielding’s oeuvre that resonates here—his desire for strict gender divisions as it is at odds with his repeated comic employment of cross-‐dressing women. She links this ambivalence to eighteenth-‐ century understandings of male effeminacy that believed dandyism led to masculinization in women. In Hamilton’s case, Fielding creates a female dandy who passes through her performance of an effeminate masculinity. Castle’s analysis 69 emphasizes that Fielding had a gender trouble all his own—a conflict between the satirical and the theatrical, the moralist and the player. Castle notes Fielding’s “dwelling” on, and “false embellishment” of Mary/George Hamilton—the author’s use of euphemism, of the mock heroic, and of a “burlesque” that even involves constantly switching Hamilton’s pronouns (“Matters Not Fit” 611). “The little ‘he’s’ dotting the narrative are a constant comic reminder to the reader of the central feature of Hamilton’s unacceptability: her ‘unnatural’ and arrogant assumption of masculine rights,” Castle argues (611). Likewise, she emphasizes Fielding’s exaggeration—his use of “epic terms to describe [Fielding’s] spurious acts of machismo” (611). All this mocking by Fielding “invariably imposes a latent textual uncertainty” (611) on Hamilton’s masculinity—a gender trouble that wasn’t quite on the queer horizon when Castle was writing this article. She calls it a “psychological paradox” that “grants power to its target at the same time that it tries to minimize it. To elevate, even for the purposes of burlesque, is still always to elevate” (611-‐12). Thus pre-‐Gender Trouble, Castle suggests that the performativity of Fielding’s pamphlet unsettles binary gender. Hamilton is, in fact, multiply dragged in ways that relate to enthusiasm— by the excesses in tone, in dwelling, in exaggerated situation throughout Fielding’s pamphlet; by Methodism as it is marked by bodily and emotional excess; by anti-‐ Methodist polemic, as it trucks in connections to Catholicism, sexual excess, and male effeminacy; by gendered understandings of melancholy and temperament believed intemperate and hysterical; and finally by medical conceptions of religious melancholy that link it to emotional excess and mental illness. In the following 70 chapters, I explore the way that religious enthusiasm drags gender through recuperations of woundedness and melancholia in another eighteenth century example and two twentieth century ones. CHAPTER 2 “OH, I FEEL, I FEEL, I FEEL!” 40 : MORAVIANS, FREE GRACE, AND THE AFTERLIVES OF ENTHUSIASM On October 21, 1735, John Wesley and a small group of piously minded companions set sail from Gravesend, England, bound for Georgia on missionary trip, when their ship, the Simmonds, hit a series of life-‐threatening storms that would pivotally shake the future Methodist leader’s faith. “Prayed,” Wesley jotted in shaky journal notes on the evening of Sunday, January 25 as the wind roared and waves violently tossed the ship. “Storm greater: Afraid!” (Curnock 141). Several evenings earlier, waves had surged and crashed through the cabin windows, soaking Wesley, his companions, even their bedding. When eventually Wesley lay down to sleep on the cabin floor, he feared he might never awake. At the same, he felt intense shame at what this anxiety revealed about his spiritual state. “I could not but say to myself, ‘How is it that thou hast no faith?’ being unwilling to die” (HJWJ 28-‐29). Wesley practiced a highly disciplined form of piety that had earned his Oxford religious society, the Holy Club, the moniker “Methodists” (Teleford). There, as well as on board the Simmonds, Wesley and his small society of friends followed a rigorous daily schedule of prayer, Bible reading, instructing, preaching, study, and hymn-‐writing that began at 4 a.m. and lasted each night until 9 or 10 p.m. Wesley and his group gave up “flesh and wine” on the voyage, eating only “vegetable food— 71 chiefly rice and biscuit” (HJWJ 25), and met twice daily “to give an account of one another, what we had done since our last meeting, and what we designed to do before our next” (26). Such self-‐accountings before small peer groups would become the disciplinary backbone of the Methodist movement Wesley and co-‐founder George Whitefield would launch with field preaching soon after Wesley’s return from Georgia in 1739 (HJWJ 69-‐70, 84-‐86; Knox 427-‐429). They are also likely what Michel Foucault meant by the Methodist “method” he cites, in History of Sexuality, Volume One, as a Protestant version of the Catholic confessional, the predominant form of religious discourse Foucault establishes as the pre-‐secular precursor to those medical self-‐accountings whose proliferation both construct and delimit the modern sexual subject (116; 120). However Wesley’s Georgia journal, prefaced as it is by an epigraph from Romans (9:30-‐32) that privileges faith over law as the path to righteousness, establishes Wesley’s attention to discipline and church ordinance as a theologically flawed, works-‐based piety (Wesley “From His Embarking for Georgia”). Moreover, it is a lesson that Wesley comes to experience through his encounters with a small group of German Moravians, fellow travelers aboard the Simmonds, in whom Wesley recognizes a spiritual certainty and peace in stark contradistinction to his own anxieties. Members of a Lutheran Pietist-‐influenced sect from Herrnhut in eastern Saxony with far-‐ranging mission communities, including those in the American colonies, the Moravians would provide an ongoing source of spiritual counsel to Wesley, both in Georgia and in London, where he and his group would form a spiritual society with Moravians on Fetter Lane. Although Wesley eventually broke 72 with the Moravians, he frames his encounter with “the Germans” onboard the Simmonds as the beginning of his own spiritual awakening and subsequent conversion, one inspired by the Moravians’ calm assurance of salvation in the face of death. Indeed, what the Georgia journal most reveals is Wesley’s fascination with the spiritual peace he felt this small band of traveling Moravians manifested. This chapter will explore the import of Moravian understandings of grace, which influenced Wesley’s conversion and mark the beginning of the transatlantic Methodist movement. Yet I am not only interested Wesley’s encounter with Moravians, and the theology there represented, in its own historical moment. Neither will Moravian influence on Methodism, something well observed in historical and church scholarship, be my primary focus. Rather, the chapter will put this Methodist-‐Moravian encounter, and Moravian and Methodist enthusiasm broadly, into the context of twentieth-‐ and twenty-‐first century returns to both Moravianism and Saint Paul—the basis, through Luther, of the Moravian belief in grace that so influenced Wesley. I am most concerned with how this Pauline theology is taken up and employed, repeatedly, as a marker of both perversion and radicalism—in eighteenth century enthusiasm polemic; in early twentieth century social scientific and psychosexual returns to enthusiasm; and in modern and contemporary political theory that repeatedly returns to Saint Paul. Contemporary philosophical accounts of Paul— in effect, political queerings that purport to shear Paul’s Christianity from his political use value —read into the self-‐declared apostle’s notions of self and time a radical subjectivity and temporality that rejects the law in favor of a subjectivity-‐constituting faith. These critics apprehend the crucifixion as 73 the inaugurating event that constitutes a universal subjectivity (Badiou); that is in response to an interpellating call of faith (Blanton reading Breton; Critchley); and that ushers in a “messianic time” of the “already, but not yet” (Agamben; see also Taubes) or the “as if” (Heideigger; see also Critchley). Earlier anti-‐Moravian and anti-‐enthusiasm literature critiques the Moravians along similarly temporal lines— because of their wrong relationship to labor, a rejection of economic and spiritual work attributed to a Lutheran-‐Pauline understanding of grace. 41 In so far as these polemical interpretations of Moravian expressions of faith position the sect as antithetical to proper labor —emotionally excessive and anti-‐rational; economically idle and extravagant; spiritually passive and devotionally suspect in their quietism and rejection of church and social ordinance—and insofar as the markers of these improprieties manifest, and are read through, the body, Moravian grace also functions as a re-‐gendering. That is, these accounts of eighteenth-‐century Moravianism, along with the connections that anti-‐Moravian polemicists of the eighteenth and twentieth century make to Pauline and Puritan heresy, reveal the gender trouble of Moravian understandings of grace, which John Wesley will come to call “free grace.” In the second half of the eighteenth century, and again in the early twentieth, Moravians and Methodists faced repeated charges of an enthusiasm that included gender-‐crossing. While my last chapter concentrated on charges related to female masculinity and same-‐sex sexual relationships among women that satirical eighteenth-‐century accounts connected to Methodism, this chapter argues that a Lutheran-‐Pauline conception of grace such as the Moravians proffered and the 74 Methodists through Wesley took up, feminized and even cross-‐sexed male believers. This observation comes not only from anti-‐Moravian literature, but through recently uncovered historical accounts of Moravian devotional practices and the interpretations of contemporary historians Paul Peucker, Aaron Spencer Fogelman and Craig Atwood. Gender trouble, and its connection to sexual excesses and perversion, is a recurring charge against both Moravians and Methodists (Atwood Community of the Cross 11-‐19; Fogelman 73-‐104; Abelove 49-‐73; Hempton 137-‐ 150; Anderson 73-‐81). Because both groups took up a Pauline conception of grace, they were charged with enthusiasm and antinomianism (Hempton 14, 33). Antinomianism—the belief, following Saint Paul, that the grace received through faith suspended moral law—was an accusation made primarily against Moravian believers that troubled the sect’s relationship to gender and labor. Moravian beliefs about grace, and the practices that resulted, were understood as a lack of disciplined emotions and a rejection of spiritual work that manifested in the body. In accounts of Methodism, these instantaneous conversions or over-‐takings by the holy spirit included groanings, shakings and other physical and emotional symptoms, as well as the critique that Methodists eschewed work (Anderson 17-‐22; Hempton 34). Moravians were similarly critiqued for their lavish and wasteful spending, for sexual excess and impropriety that centered around their devotions to the blood and wounds of Christ, and for male femininity (Atwood, “Interpreting and Misinterpreting the Sichtungszeit” 181 and Community of the Cross 11-‐12 and 154; Fogelman 75-‐77). While the Moravians became less mystical in the nineteenth century (Atwood, Community of the Cross 227), I want to focus on the way that 75 Moravian notions of grace initially refigured the crucifixion wound of Christ in order to make connections to modern and contemporary understandings of gender woundedness that have themselves been connected to queer genders and sexualities. Moravian antinomianism embraced the body, its parts, and its fluids. Not surprisingly, this was the stuff of anti-‐Moravian polemic during both the eighteenth and twentieth centuries, when psychoanalytic discourse deemed Moravian heresy psychosexual perversion (Atwood, Community of the Cross 12-‐13, 93, 214-‐16). These early Moravians sang hymns to Christ’s crucifixion wound (Fogelman 78, 80); they celebrated marital sex by imagining that the wound at Christ’s breast, called the Seitenholgen or Little Side Hole, in the room during marital sex and ejaculating bible verses during climax (Fogelman 82). Most importantly to the argument of this chapter, I draw on historical accounts of Moravians to argue that Moravian notions of grace, which came through Luther from Paul, played a significant role in the early Moravian transubstantiation of the crucifixion wound of Christ from a site of suffering and violent penetration to one of communion and gender transfiguration, and that moreover, this refiguring resonates with queer understandings of cross-‐ gender woundedness. Yet given the materiality of both Moravian and Methodist devotions, I am also attentive to the way these cross-‐gendering beliefs—even as they may transubstantiate a space of suffering into a place of pleasure, or convert anxiety into peace—also make the bodies and feelings of these believers appropriable to larger disciplines (of the state; of empire; of capital in its various iterations). Rather than 76 wholly a site of resistance, then, I want to ask to what extent the crucifixion wound also functions as the site of a bodily discipline that, through its very materiality, is appropriable to the hail of these multiple calls. Thus, I will be putting these religious cross-‐genderings into conversation with contemporary philosophical returns to Saint Paul that themselves repeat the narrative gesture of enthusiasm to convert the self-‐proclaimed apostle’s image into a radical political figure. These enthusiastic theoretical returns to Paul, coupled with earlier modern psychosexual returns to the Moravians, make the Moravian example a timely investigation, one with import for thinking about the politics of these, and recent queer, backward turns and their accompanying impulse to both radicalize and universalize an unmarked white subject. This is troubling not only in the political sense, but also in the material: conditioned as some of these recuperative accounts are on performative subjectivity — on the subject performing faith, linguistically and bodily, as the condition of subjectivity and of subjective possibility —turns to Paul, and to the Moravians, also matter to a queer understanding of gender. Consequently in this chapter, I examine the affective, temporal, and material structures of Moravian and anti-‐Moravian uptakes of Paul, through Lutheran mysticism, to ask: how does the politics of Moravian grace matter? John Wesley’s Moravian Awakening John Wesley begins his Georgia journal, a spiritual autobiography that Methodist historiographers consider his conversion narrative, with the declaration that he and his companions left England with but one goal: “singly this—to save our souls” (HJWJ 25, 36-‐37). It is this anxiety about the state of his own soul that 77 consumes Wesley on what he frames as a faith-‐testing voyage to, and experience in, America—a journey that fails, in Wesley’s view, because of his over-‐reliance on good works and corresponding lack of faith, and a spiritual that narrative ends, perhaps unsurprisingly under Moravian influence, with Wesley’s conversion at Aldersgate in May, 1738 when, during a reading of Paul’s Letter to the Romans, as the speaker was “describing the change which God works in the heart through faith in Christ, I felt my heart strangely warmed” (66). Even before this heart-‐touching event, Wesley, on the advice of a German Moravian named Peter Bohler, had begun to preach what his brother Charles initially called "the new faith" (64), a doctrine Wesley himself would come to name “free grace” yet struggled to believe he possessed— a "free salvation by faith in the blood of Christ" (65) that was “free for all and free in all” (Wesley “Sermon on Free Grace”). Though Wesley doubts how he can “preach to others, who have not faith yourself?”, he follows Bohler’s advice in February, 1738 to “[p]reach faith till you have it; and then, because you have it, you will preach faith” (58-‐59). One after another, London churches respond to Wesley’s “strong words” by informing him that he is "to preach no more.” Yet he continues to exhort free grace, first in London churches and later, after his conversion, in the open fields, meadows, and highways of the working-‐class city of Bristol, where crowds of ten thousand gather to hear Wesley and his Calvinist counterpart George Whitefield preach "the true old Christianity, which under the new name of Methodism, is now everywhere spoken against" (HJWJ 84-‐85). 42 But in order for Wesley to reach this spiritual certainty, an unshaken faith, as it were, in “faith alone”; before he and Whitefield 78 would launch the transatlantic Methodist movement ridiculed as enthusiasm for its instantaneous conversions and their accompanying bodily manifestations—trances, convulsive fits, groans and tears, prophetic dreams and glorious visions; Wesley witnesses, and is ultimately awakened by, the spiritual peace and faith demonstrated by a group of twenty-‐six German Moravians who traveled with him to Georgia on the Simmonds during a treacherous voyage marked by a series of life-‐ threatening storms. Throughout the trip, Wesley has observed the humble, meek, and serious Moravians perform degrading services for other passengers without pay, never complaining. Pacifists, these Moravians shied from conflict, even if "pushed, struck, or thrown down.” As the third in a series of storms peaked, more violently than the previous two, Wesley noted, "There was now an opportunity of trying whether [the Moravians] were delivered from the spirit of fear, as well as from that of pride, anger, and revenge" (HJWJ 28-‐29). At 7 p.m., he joins the Moravians for their evening service and observes: In the midst of the psalm wherewith their service began, the sea broke over, split the mainsail in pieces, covered the ship, and poured in between the decks, as if the great deep had already swallowed us up. A terrible screaming began among the English. The Germans calmly sang on. I asked one of them afterward, 'Were you not afraid?' He answered 'I thank God, no.' I asked, 'But were not your women and children afraid?' He replied mildly, 'No; our and children are not afraid to die.' (29). 79 It would be another two-‐and-‐a-‐half years, again in the company of Moravians at their London community on Fetter Lane in Aldersgate, before Wesley “felt his heart strangely warmed”—an event that Methodist historiography positions as Wesley’s conversion. Methodist historians debate whether Wesley’s Aldersgate experience—and indeed his entire Georgia journal—should be considered representative of Wesley’s theology, given that Wesley rarely mentions this conversion in later writing. Others dismiss it as a period when Wesley was under Moravian influence, an association Wesley himself would later reject. Nevertheless in this early portion of his journal, which would come to span twenty-‐six unpublished and four published volumes (HJWJ vii), 43 Wesley clearly frames this instance of Moravian piety—Moravians enthusiastically singing hymns about God’s goodness in the middle of a storm on the Atlantic that might at any second capsize their ship and drown its passengers— not only as evidence of faith, but as an ideal state of spiritual peace he himself lacks. More importantly for the purposes of this chapter and the connections to gender-‐crossing that I will be drawing between Moravian piety and faith-‐based grace, Wesley attributes this lack of certainty about his salvation to his dependence on law rather than on faith—a Lutheran-‐Pauline interpretation of grace that Wesley will go on to further develop through contact with Moravians in Georgia and London. These encounters with Moravian piety will come to formatively influence Wesley’s concept of free grace and his own conversion experience, a heat he feels in his heart while hearing Luther’s commentary on a Pauline text. Thus, rather than entering into sectarian debates about the nature of Wesley’s conversion or focusing on the historical particulars of 80 Wesley’s Georgia experience, I am instead interested in the narrative and affective structures that Wesley’s Georgia journal, in its focus on the Moravians, call attention to. How does Wesley’s reframing the story of his failed Georgia experience and eventual spiritual awakening through Moravian bookends—their peace in the face of death that is contra to the anxious suffering of Puritan spiritual autobiography; Wesley’s embodied conversion under their influence, a touching felt in the heart that results from, and in, a performance of faith—shift our understanding of the temporality and materiality of those religious self-‐narratives that have been linked not only to the birth of both the modern novel, but also the modern sexual self? In this sense, Wesley’s awakening has a meta-‐frame: is not only the story of a self touched by faith, but of a self that has come to question its own faith in the works of a discipline Wesley does not so much give up as temporally reorient. Wesley will continue to emphasize, both for himself and followers who join Methodist societies, good works; continuous spiritual examination by peers, religious and lay leaders, and self; and an asceticism similar to his Holy Club days. However for Wesley, this discipline is only possible through a spiritual awakening based on faith: before he had such a felt faith, Wesley tells his family, he was not a real Christian. It is the experience of grace through faith as the precursor to a new or changed state at the bodily level—what I will call the enthusiastic awakening narrative—that I want to establish as a narrative precursor to modern and contemporary body narratives inverts and transsexuals by establishing the connections that a Lutheran-‐Pauline understanding of grace has to gender-‐crossing. 81 Several recent philosophical monographs have turned back to Saint Paul to locate a radical politics and temporality. Ward Blanton, introducing Stanislaw Breton’s A Radical Philosophy of Saint Paul, renders the call of Pauline faith an interpellative hail, an Althusserian “performative speech act” (6). Simon Critchley, following Heidegger, also calls faith “a declarative act, [as] an enactment, a performative that proclaims,” noting that “[f]aith is an announcement that enacts, a proclamation that brings the subject of faith into being” (161). In this sense, the Moravian Peter Bohler’s advice to Wesley to “preach faith until you have it” is akin to engendering a Christian subjectivity through the performative utterance of faith; it is a turning around, albeit in anticipation of the call, that constitutes that call. Potentially, the call of the Christian into subjectivity could create a dissonance with the call of the state; this seems to be the basis of radical readings of Pauline subjectivity as hailed and constituted by the call of faith. In responding to a supernatural or sublime hail, the faithful disengages with, or turns from, the call of the law. This radical break between law and faith in Paul creates, for Badiou, a universal subjectivity; for Agamben, it inaugurates a radical and apocalyptic temporality; but for Critchley, it runs the risk of a solipsistic Marcionism that withdraws from the tainted world and its politics. Bernard Knox, in his massive, mid-‐twentieth-‐century history of enthusiasm, which itself repeats eighteenth century cyclical narrative that put Methodism and Moravianism into a line of Pauline heresy from the first century to the eighteenth, frames his examination of enthusiasm in a vein similar to Critchley’s. In it, Knox renders Wesley’s Methodism the apogee of the Pauline. Written in the wake of psychoanalytic reframings of 82 Moravian spirituality and first and second century heresy as perversion, Knox contends that Paul’s call to reject the law applied not to moral (here chiefly sexual) law, but rather only to church ordinance. Wesley, who never renounces discipline even as he embraces faith, thus never completely snips the precarious thread in Paul that connects faith and law, as Critchley’s critique of the Marcionians alleges, becomes for Knox the authentic and lauded enthusiastic subject. I am interested in the coextensive discipline and antinomianism of both Methodists and Moravians, groups that both troubled and enabled state and economic forces. How is the feeling body mobilized in each case? How do these ways of doing Pauline faith contribute to the constitution of an embodied epistemology that becomes appropriable not only biopolitically, but also to what we might call queer awakenings—felt recognitions of gender difference conditioned by bodily encounters with a Pauline faith? For some male Moravians, these calls to Pauline subjectivity doubled as calls to what they believed was the inner female nature of all souls. This recognition and embrace of their femininity by a group of Moravian brothers in the 1740’s is what Moravian archivist Paul Peucker has called a “gender-‐changing event” conditioned by the Moravian belief in Bernardine bridal mysticism and the female soul (“Wives of the Lamb” 1). However even Methodists, who did not practice bridal mysticism, were often feminized; as I argued in my first chapter, this feminization was connected to their belief in, and expression of, grace. Thus I will be arguing that it is a Lutheran-‐Pauline understanding of grace, rather than bridal mysticism alone, that feminized Moravian believers. Furthermore, while Methodist and Moravian calls to 83 spiritual discipline and expression may well have harmonized with the aims of the British empire, especially in terms of their mission projects in the American colonies, I also want to allow that their calls to faith could also have been experienced as multiple and dissonant. Yet I also want to direct attention to a difference in the vehicle of the call in Moravian understandings of faith. Rather than discursive, the Moravian call to faith is delivered to and through the body. Moravian faith constitutes the enthusiastic subject through sensation—a part-‐affective, part-‐haptic feeling in the heart that is also a bodily knowledge of communication with Christ. 44 Because of the embodied way that the enthusiastic subject comes to feel called and know Christ, I will refer to Moravian and Methodist experiences and expressions of faith and grace as “awakenings,” which overlaps with Puritan conversion. Awakening and Conversion The Georgia section of Wesley’s spiritual narrative ends with his own conversion at Aldersgate in May, 1738, when, during a reading of Paul’s Letter to the Romans, as the speaker was “describing the change which God works in the heart through faith in Christ, I felt my heart strangely warmed” (HJWJ 66). As mentioned, it is significant that Wesley also uses a Pauline text to frame his Georgia journal: Paul’s attention to faith over law as a means to righteousness frames Wesley’s fraught journey; faith is also the cause Wesley posits as the source of the Moravians’ spiritual peace and certainty of salvation, which he witnesses amidst the storm on the voyage to Georgia; and ultimately, being touched by faith signals Wesley’s own conversion, the feeling in his heart that he is saved, a hybrid epistemology that is 84 part-‐affect, part-‐sensation that Moravian historian Craig Atwood has called “the heart’s way of knowing.” Atwood describes the “heart” or Herz as not only the seat of emotions, but of a person’s life-‐force, will and personality (Atwood, Community of the Cross 44). Prior to this touching of the heart, however, Wesley doubts, and when he doubts, he repeatedly turns to Moravian spiritual leaders to assuage those doubts. In this passage, Wesley confronts Moravian bishop August Spangenberg soon after the Simmonds land in Savannah. He is troubled about his spiritual state after his near-‐death experiences on the journey to Georgia, and seeks counsel. But Spangenberg asks Wesley a series of questions that trouble Wesley’s faith in his faith even more “ ‘Do you know Jesus Christ?’” Spangenberg asks. “[Wesley] paused and said, ‘I know He is the savior of the world.’ ‘True,’ replied he; ‘but do you know he has saved you?’… ‘Do you know yourself?’” (30) I am interested in these moments of enthusiastic awakening—of felt, embodied knowledge and belief—as well as Wesley’s moments of doubt because he does not feel such an embodied certainty, for a trinity of interrelated reasons that both bespeak the differences between awakening and conversion and also are the grounds for the connections I will later sketch between enthusiastic awakening and gender awakening. First, I want to draw attention to the affective state of the awakening moment—calm, steady, certain. This is in contradistinction to the anxious Puritan conversion narratives that truck in despair, a religious melancholy I 85 connected to gender melancholy in my first chapter. Moravian historian Craig Atwood notes that Moravian leader Count Nicholas Ludwig von Zinzendorf did not believe, as Pietists did, that struggle or suffering was a necessary precondition of conversion (Community of the Cross 48). Second is the importance of the present-‐ focused and immediate temporality of the moment of conversion Wesley describes—his heart is touched, and he instantaneously knows and is changed. Finally, and most crucial for connections to gender crossing is the embodied nature of this knowing—Wesley feels his heart strangely warmed. Perhaps it is a flutter, a slight brush at the breast, or a sudden heat; a flush of the cheek; a warmth under the collar. Regardless, it is a touching of some thing that is of the flesh by some thing that is of the spirit; that transforms the flesh into something wholly new; and that, in this transubstantiation, renders—rends, we might even say—the law irrelevant. These three factors— affect, time, and embodiment—distinguish what I am calling the enthusiastic awakening narrative influenced by Moravianism. Wesley’s Journal and the struggle to attain the certain faith that he witnesses in the Moravians on board the Simmonds does reflect the structure of evangelical conversion narratives that Bruce Hindmarsh describes as despair from guilt relieved by faith (16, 31). In Wesley’s conversion, I am interested in the attention drawn to the moment of felt change, the heart is warmed, what I will call the awakening. This transformation is instantaneous (Hempton 33), i.e., without spiritual “work”. But Misty Anderson notes that Methodists are also critiqued for their lack of economic labor in favor of spiritual labor (17-‐18). 86 In Bristol, for example, Wesley and Whitefield's "exhorting, instructing and awakening" led to falling down fits, trembling, convulsions, groans, dreams and visions, all of which were suspect (HJWJ 82;75). Importantly, this was also an objection to the temporality of the Methodist conversion. "You deny that God does now work these effects," Wesley responds to his objectors, "at least, that he works them in this manner. I affirm both, because I have heard these things with my own ears and have seen with my eyes. I have seen (as far as a thing of this kind can be seen) very many persons changed in a moment from the spirit of fear, horror, despair, to the spirit of love, joy, and peace; and from sinful desire, till then reigning over them, to a pure desire of doing the will of God. These are matters of fact whereof I have been, and almost daily am, an eye-‐ or ear-‐witness" (HJWJ 74, emphasis mine). Note the two varying temporalities of “present” apparent in Wesley’s account of these transformations and their critiques—the suspicion of Methodist conversion both because it can happen now, in the present historical moment, and now, in an instant. Also, I want to mark Wesley’s aside— “(as far as a thing of this kind can be seen)”—which suggests that the senses Wesley employs to prove these spiritual awakenings (sight, sound) are insufficient to apprehend the workings of the spirit in these affected bodies. The transformation in awakening both affects the material bodies and effects changes in the body that are unobservable through empirical methods based on those senses most commonly employed in scientific observation. Nevertheless, Wesley is able to “witness,” through hearers’ affective states, how an instantaneously received faith transforms them. 87 For the Moravians as well, the temporality of encounter with the crucifixion wound of Christ is present-‐focused and present in a material, felt sense. Not only does this temporal and material reorientation of the wound transubstantiate it from a space of suffering to a space of refuge, but Moravian encounters with the wound and the gender-‐queer Christ that wound represents also cross-‐gender Moravian believers. In my subsequent sections, I consider the way that Moravians take up the Seitenholgen, or “Little Side Hole,” a crucifixion wound of Christ, as what Sara Ahmed has called a “reorientation device” that allows them to refigure a space of suffering into a space of pleasure, possibility, and both spiritual and gender transformation. Sidehole Time and the Labor of Grace In The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1905-‐1930), Max Weber raises the specter of Count Nikolaus Ludwig von Zinzendorf, Eighteenth Century leader of the Moravians, a German Protestant sect that settled communities in London, Georgia, and Pennsylvania, among other mission sites, and was influential in the transatlantic evangelical Great Awakening, especially via the Wesleyan Methodists. Weber diagnoses Zinzendorf’s theology, a combination of Lutheran orthodoxy and mystical German Pietism, as productive of a religious mindset whose relationship to time and affect was at odds with that of the developing capitalist. Specifically, Zinzendorf’s focus on “letting people experience bliss… in the present,” Weber argued, “and to experience it emotionally, instead of instructing them to be sure of enjoying it in the hereafter through rational work” stood in contradiction to the Calvinist asceticism he linked to the “spirit” of the industrial capitalist who 88 methodically, and rationally, devotes himself to work in a calling—what we have since come to call the Protestant work ethic (128). Weber’s understanding of the Protestant, or more specifically Puritan, work ethic differs from his conception of the Lutheran mindset of the mid-‐Eighteenth Century Moravians. Weber argued that the Puritans accumulated wealth as a means of “testifying” to their salvation as they strove to achieve “the certainty of grace” (113). Conversely, Moravians under Zinzendorf’s influence believed that grace was not earned or known through “good works” or rational means, but instead experienced immediately through faith; felt rather than confessed (Sessler 139). In this section, I explore the way that Zinzendorf’s focus on feeling combined with a mystical Lutheran understanding of grace, influenced perceptions of the labor and gender of Moravians during the 1740s and early 1750s during a period scripted by nineteenth century church historiography as a time of excess and testing Moravians called the Sifting Time (Atwood, Community of the Cross 11-‐19). During this period (and Atwood argues, for years afterward), Moravian devotions focused on a wounded, maternal Christ and on erotic practices centered around the crucifixion wound at Christ’s breast they worshipped as the Side Wound or Little Side Hole (Atwood, Community of the Cross 14-‐18; Fogelman 73-‐86). Although the Moravian Church became “just another Protestant denomination” in the nineteenth century (Atwood, Community of the Cross 5), Zinzendorf’s ideas and persona surfaced in secular twentieth-‐century accounts of the Moravians, the most notable of which pathologized Zinzendorf for perceived sexual abnormalities (Atwood, Community of the Cross 12-‐13; Peucker, “’ ‘Inspired by Flames of Love’” 32) 89 and explained the Sifting Time practices as detracting from the sober attention to work that was necessary to the maintenance of the Moravian’s communal Bethlehem, Pa. economy (Sessler 180-‐81). It is this perception of Moravians as a threat to proper labor—bodily, emotional, economic, and spiritual—that is my interest. That they do it in service to, through fixation on, the side wound of Christ— in effect, reorienting the wound from a space of suffering and death to one of pleasure and new birth, but moreover reorienting and refiguring themselves in terms of a messianic wound with which they both empathize and feel inter-‐ corporeally merged—queers their gender and the gender of their Christ, I contend. Several contemporary studies have examined the beliefs and practices of the early American Moravians from the perspective of gender and sexuality—notably the work of Paul Puecker, Craig Atwood and Aaron Fogelman. With the exception of anti-‐Moravian pamphlets from the 1740s and 1750s, much of the archival material on which I draw in this chapter comes their scholarship. In his history of the eighteenth-‐century Bethlehem Moravian community, Craig Atwood details how Zinzendorf’s embrace of medieval bridal mysticism—a belief that the soul was female and that believers metaphorically united with Christ as his Bride—as well as Zinzendorf’s focus on the blood and wounds of Christ, led to erotic, anti-‐rational practices that centered around a knowledge perceived by the heart rather than by the head—an embodied, feeling epistemology Atwood aptly refers to as the “heart’s way of knowing” that was central to the bodily awakening of the heart that signified to the believer both the presence of Christ and his grace. Moravian archivist and Sifting Time expert Paul Puecker notes the way that Moravian bridal mysticism 90 cross-‐gendered male believers who felt they everyone had a female soul, regardless of their physical sex, and so a group of brothers in 1748 briefly declared themselves “sisters” (“Wives of the Lamb 1); similarly, Zinzendorf preached that Christ also had a female soul (“Wives of the Lamb” 39-‐54). 45 Following this gender-‐crossing, the Brethren began to act effeminately and call themselves “Sister” (Peucker “Wives of the Lamb” 39-‐54); they formed a band called the “Sweethearts” or “Schatzel” of Christ, who considered themselves wives of Christ, effecting effeminate ways that Peucker compares to molly culture (“ ‘Inspired by Flames of Love’” 55-‐59). Eventually, the church put a stop to the brother’s practices and countered their belief they were sisters (Peucker, “ ‘Inspired by Flames of Love’” 63). Zinzendorf did preach that Christ, like the Brethren, were “ ‘maidens in male housing’” (qtd. in Peucker, “Wives of the Lamb” 39-‐54), contending “ ‘although bodily we are still men, we are no longer men in the spirit, because in faith we are all sisters’ (qtd. in Peucker, Wives of the Lamb” 39-‐54), he believed this would happen in the afterlife (“Wives of the Lamb” 39-‐54) While Puecker contends bridal mysticism was the focus of the Sifting Time hymnody and likewise responsible for the cross-‐gendering of the Moravian brothers, I would argue that the Sifting time excesses—which include cross-‐ gendering and a troubled relationship to work— are also importantly influenced by Zinzendorf’s subscription to an orthodox Lutheran understanding of grace as achieved through “faith alone” rather than through works. Craig Atwood notes that this line of argument was used by Gerhard Reichel in the early twentieth century to answer charges that blamed Zinzendorf’s pathology on Moravian Sifting Time 91 practices; Reichel connected the Sifting Time hymns and liturgy with Lutheran hymns of the previous century (Community of the Cross 12-‐13). Atwood also notes that the Moravian church leader who immediately followed Zinzendorf in the eighteenth-‐century, August Gottlieb Spangenberg, connected Moravianism to Lutheranism, downplaying Zinzendorf’s ideas in an attempt to make Moravianism seem more orthodox (“Spangenberg’s Idea Fidei Fratrum 55). 46 Similarly a recent economic study of the mid-‐Eighteenth Century Bethlehem Moravians by Katherine Carté Engel details the way the Bethlehem Moravians’ communal economy and system of living was not incompatible with their religious beliefs, and in fact demonstrated their subscription to Weber’s understanding of the Lutheran calling. 47 I do not discount the connection that Peucker makes between the Sifting Time practices of bridal mysticism and the Moravian brothers gender-‐crossing practices and beliefs (“Wives of the Lamb” 39-‐54). Nor do I contest Atwood’s contention that Zinzendorf’s theology, especially his focus on the wounds of Christ, continued after the Sifting Time and Zinzendorf’s death (and so, he argues, was not what later church officials censored as related to the Sifting Time) (Atwood, Community of the Cross 14-‐15). However, the role that the Moravian’s (and Methodist’s) faith-‐based piety plays in the Eighteenth-‐Century polemic I will reference in this section suggests the importance of a Lutheran-‐Pauline understanding of grace to the Moravian’s purportedly heretical affect, devotions, relationship to labor, and importantly, gender crossing. The accusations contained in these anti-‐Moravian tracts connect Zinzendorf’s understanding of grace as unearned to those practices and beliefs contemporary Moravian scholars identify with Zinzendorf’s bridal 92 mysticism and wounds piety—namely, a hyperfocus on the Sidehole, but also sexual impropriety, excessive feeling, and effeminacy. Not only have these connections influenced the narratives about the Sifting Time developed by nineteenth Century church historians, but they have also shaped the ideas of twentieth-‐century secular social scientists and literary figures for whom these early Moravians became a touchstone of pathology and possibility, connections that Atwood and Peucker’s work on the Sifting Time has made clear. I want to begin, therefore, with Eighteenth Century charges that Moravians were religious enthusiasts and antinomians. Enthusiasm relates to the suspicion of Moravian emotionality and direct spiritual encounter by other Protestant groups and an increasingly rational, secular culture. Enthusiasts’ direct encounter with the spirit of god, felt bodily, often in the heart, rather than understood or confessed to rationally, challenged secularizing religious and non-‐religious authority. The pamphlet writers of the anti-‐Moravian tracts and responses I now turn to include an Anglican bishop and an ex-‐Moravian from Pennsylvania who spent time in the Moravian’s Herrnhag community, the site of heretical practices in the late 1740s that resulted in charges of antinomianism, popery, and blasphemy; these take issue with the Moravians’ classification of certain Protestant devotional practices such as scripture reading and self-‐examination as “works” meant to earn grace. However, the focus in these tracts is on the Moravian practices, or lack thereof, even as that piety is imbricated with Moravian beliefs about grace. Likewise, Moravian hymns and liturgies of the 1740s and 50s period reflect Moravian theology through an emotional, sensory focus on the wounds of Christ, describing believers’ union with 93 the Side Hole in mystical and erotic terms (Peucker “The Songs of the Sifting” 51-‐ 71). For example, the Moravian Litany of the Wounds of the Husband describes Christ’s crucifixion wounds as “glistening,” “juicy,” and “Warm.” (Atwood, Community of the Cross, 236-‐7). Believers lick the wound and rest inside it like a small child with a pillow, or a bed or table inside the wound (Atwood, 236; Sessler 163). These verses touch on Zinzendorf’s admonition that believers should become like little children; this idea surfaces in the 20 th century as charge that such childlikeness and devotion to the side wound interfered with the physical and economic labor of running the Bethlehem community (Sessler 161-‐62). Under Zinzendorf, Moravians developed a particular poetic language that read as nonsense to outsiders and often employed diminutives like little fools, chickens, worms, doves and bees; believers were “ ‘little fish swimming in the bed of blood,’ or ‘little bees who suck on the wounds of Christ’” (Sessler 163). In an influential 1933 account of the Moravians that borrowed from 19 th century church historiography and 20 th century psychoanalytic accounts of Zinzendorf, John Jacob Sessler reports that Zinzendorf organized a society of “little fools” whose members “no longer had heads but only hearts. The mind was no longer necessary” (162). According to Sessler’s account, the American Moravians “cultivated childish play” just as their German brothers had; this led them to forget “frugality and thrift,” build elaborately, neglect their fields and farms, and as a result, have to spend on food and essentials. (180-‐ 81). While Atwood casts suspicion on such an interpretation, based as it is on later church and secular accounts, it is notable that both eighteenth-‐ and twentieth-‐ 94 century polemic critique the Moravian’s misguided devotions, for reasons related to work or works, both spiritual and economic. The debt Moravians feel to Christ, metonymized as the Sidehole, leads the church into actual debt and what is perceived as an extravagant lifestyle; it also becomes their sole focus. Zinzendorf’s piety was an anti-‐rational one that apprehended knowledge through feeling, as in this hymn: “To believe, is, without seeing,/Jesus’ death and life to feel:” (Sessler 139). Many of the hymns from this time focus on the believer’s desire to encounter the Side Hole; on licking or tasting the Side Hole; or entering and taking refuge in it; going deep into the Side or having the Side Hole penetrate deeply into the believer. The language is erotic and sensual, for example: “A little bee am I,/Who on thy Side’s shrine lie,/And without cessation/Thy fragrant wounds enjoy” (Sessler 168) or “Holy Side-‐wound, pierced Pleura,/…Ever sure a rock-‐ hole/Art thou to my man-‐soul” (172). Aaron Fogelman has described the Moravian’s use of devotional cards that depict Moravian domestic scenes as happening inside the Sidehole, which believers often envisioned as being inside (82). Sessler describes something like a performance of this devotion when he observes: With transparent pictures, colorful illuminations, living pictures, and tableaus, [Moravians] pictured the wounds, blood, and suffering of Christ. They interpreted in all its hideous literalness the conception of regeneration by the Holy Spirit in the blood of Christ. It is said that a niche covered with red cloth was built into the wall of the church, into which children were placed to symbolize their lying in Christ’s Side wound, and that Christian 95 Renatus, Zinzendorf’s son, built a ‘Side Wound’ through which the congregation marched. (166-‐67) Sessler is taking his information here from an early twentieth-‐century psychoanalytic study of Zinzendorf by German psychoanalyst Oskar Pfister, who much to Moravian church leaders’ dismay and objection, diagnosed Zinzendorf a sadomasochist and homosexual (Atwood, Community of the Cross 12, 93). Sessler himself would comment that the mystical marriage between the Moravian believer’s soul and Christ the Bridegroom was “vividly portrayed in sexual terminology,” and that “Students of psychoanalysis will readily recognize in this extravagant enthusiasm common symbols of psychopathic fixations” like the Moravians fixation on the blood and wounds of Christ, a pathology he claimed “dominated the whole community” (176). I point all this out for several reasons. First, to emphasize the intertextuality of Moravian critique and apologia from the Eighteenth through the Twentieth Centuries, as well as to show the latter’s positioning from within a modern psychosexual discourse that accounts for what was characterized as antinomian in the eighteenth century in modern sexual terms. Secondly, Sessler’s description of a super-‐sized, walk-‐through Sidehole; or of the congregation swaddling infants in scarlet and tucking them into rock-‐slits in the church wall— whether or not these stories are apocrypha— nevertheless accords with what contemporary scholars like Atwood, Fogelman, and Puecker have described as Zinzendorf’s “blood and wounds theology” that seeks union, comfort and protection—felt bodily—in a sensually described and experienced Sidehole that stands in for Christ. That is, both psychoanalytic and apologetic accounts of 96 Moravian devotion recognize the troubling potential of its feeling form of knowledge. Moravian devotion to the Sidehole is considered wasteful, momentary, and purposeless—it neither “works” to earn a believer salvation nor is it “work” that is productive to the maintenance of the community. This brings me to my third point about the Sessler account: the hymns and letters it cites clearly reveal that grace is found in Christ’s blood: Moravian brothers were, according to Zinzendorf, “ ‘little blood-‐worms in the sea of grace’ “ (176); sins were drowned in blood and sinners washed in it (173); and one Moravian leader wrote of the American congregations “’there were blowing bloody breezes of grace’” (171). 48 Moravian liturgy and hymns from the Sifting time also portray the intimacy of a believer’s sensual, felt encounter with a savior they that perceived as their own, personal Jesus. These hymns served as an enacted theology that structured church practice (Peucker, “Songs of the Sifting” 54-‐55). Many of the most erotic and controversial hymns to the Sidehole, as well as accounts of these devotional practices, were destroyed by church leaders who sought to reshape the image of the Moravian Church as one that was not Zinzendorfian, but in accord with Lutheran orthodoxy (Atwood, “Idea” 63). However Peucker recently uncovered a copy of a hymn book that contained some of the more controversial Moravian hymns that been destroyed or expunged from church records. Many of these hymn verses, translated and interpreted by Puecker, read like pop love songs and were believed to have been sung to bawdy tunes of the day. In just one example, a believer prepares for his marriage bed with Christ-‐as-‐Sidehole: “His [Christ’s] hot darling-‐ kisses pulse through my veins,/from my head to my toes/…I am losing my senses./I 97 am out of breath to say it./I am sick with love.” (Peucker,“The Songs of the Sifting, 79). Another, titled simply, “I feel,” repeats that sentiment about sentiment as its predominant lyric, opening and closing with the exhortation, “Oh, I feel, I feel, I feel,/and indeed I know what I feel//” (Puecker, Songs, 74). Feeling in Moravian hymnody and liturgy is not only erotic, sensual, personal and present-‐focused, but importantly linked, through its hyperfocus on the Sidehole, to the experience of grace. A verse of a litany called the Pleurody, for example, links Doubting Thomas’s coming to faith by feeling “the side and the nail marks//Which moved him so much/That he paid the first homage” to the “feeling congregation” that worships the Sidehole (255). Thomas, of course, is the disciple who doubts Christ’s resurrection after crucifixion, and only believes in the encounter after he puts his hand inside Christ’s wounds. This connection between bodily knowing and religious knowing is likewise depicted in an Eighteenth Century painting (1758) Moravian artist John Valentine Haidt titled “Thomas Doubting” (http://bdhp.moravian.edu/art/paintings/thomas.html). While in the gospel passage, Christ merely instructs Thomas to penetrate his side, Haidt’s image shows Christ lightly holding Thomas’s wrist, guiding his hand inside the Sidehole. In effect, the penetration figured here is a self-‐penetration, one we might call a “passive penetration.” Christ himself does the penetrating, which is more of a gentle leading of the fingers Thomas literally offers up to Christ. Thomas stares not at Christ or the side wound, but into space, almost as though sightless. Conversely Christ, eyes downcast, smiles slightly, suggesting the encounter is a pleasurable one for an already-‐knowing Christ. In both cases, feeling is the 98 privileged sense. Moreover, it is a “heart” connection operating from both sides of the hole. This is a relational intimacy that asks us to see spiritual community in the space of sexuality, and sexuality in the space of spiritual community. Such an image also resonates with Moravian ideas about passivity: methods of evangelism that instruct them to wait for potential converts to approach them, as well as charges of quietism that led Wesley to break with them. This passivity is gendered as the female soul and Bride of Christ in a hymn verse like, “I am lying in his arms/as his spoiled darling,/and when he wants to kiss and embrace me,/I am passively his wife” (Peucker, “Songs of the Sifting” 87). Such passivity also connects to the Moravian theology of grace and Moravian quietism, which is cited in polemics that link a faith-‐based understanding of salvation to antinomianism. While many of contemporary explorations of Moravian belief and practice center around Zinzendorf’s mysticism—particularly his “blood and wounds” theology and deification of the Sidehole—I understand this mysticism in the context of Eighteenth Century charges of antinomianism against the Moravians that stem from Zinzendorf’s return to what is essentially a Lutheran-‐Pauline understanding of grace. 49 According to Zinzendorf’s Lutheran-‐Pauline understanding of grace, good works were unnecessary—even dangerous—to salvation 50 —a view echoed in less polite and nuanced terms by anti-‐Moravian polemics of the mid-‐Eighteenth Century such as Lavington’s “The Moravians Compared and Detected” (1755), Henry Rimius’ “A Candid Narrative of the Rise and Progress of the Herrnhuters, Commonly Call'd Moravians, or Unitas Fratrum” (1750), and Pennsylvanian Andreas Frey’s “true and 99 authentic account” of his time spent in a German Moravian community under the authority of Zinzendorf’s son, Christel (1748; trans. 1753). 51 This trinity of overlapping anti-‐Moravian pamphlets critique Moravians for excesses that are bodily and economic—licentiousness, debauchery and merrymaking; wasting the alms money on raucous and extravagant birthday parties with bawdy music, thousands of candles and an enormous cake, gilt signs and fine linens; inappropriate bodily jokes; and a general extravagance and mirth beyond what Frey in particular believes appropriate to a pious Christian. The pamphlets also describe gender transgressions that stem from a belief in a female soul and in a metaphorical sexual union with Christ that was enacted among believers, who stood in as Christ’s proxy. These accounts accord with the historical work of both Puecker and Atwood about the practices and beliefs of the Sifting Time. However I want to focus here on the way that all of these accusations are framed in terms of an anti-‐works-‐based piety— that is, thorough the lens of antinomianism. Frey, for example, alleges that the Moravians believed even spiritual work like reading scripture, examining one’s conscience, and adherence to the commandments to be “pietistical Hobgoblin” (Frey 64). 52 These tracts write of Zinzendorf’s ideas about grace in a tone that makes them seem radical and outrageous — for example, that doing anything rational at all to prepare to be “awakened,” or in a state of grace, even reading Scripture, was “work” and to be eschewed; that scripture was suspect and not necessary for faith; that through faith and the grace received through Christ’s atoning death on the cross, one could no longer sin and the law was null and void (the antinomian charge). Yet they can also 100 be explained in terms of a faith-‐based rather than a works-‐based piety that shifted the temporality of salvation from something futural that is anticipated and worked for, and something instantaneous, present-‐focused, and experienced through the senses, in the now. Thus in Eighteenth Century anti-‐Moravian pamphlets like Lavington’s, Moravians are branded as antinomian because they followed the heart and preached the gospel rather than the moral law or commandments (Lavington 68). Lavington quotes Zinzendorf, who cites Romans to argue that “it appears that one’s Husband is one’s law. But the Savior is our Husband, and henceforth he is the Law” (69). Here Zinzendorf combines a mystical concept of metaphorical union between believer and Christ-‐as-‐Bridegroom with a New Testament, faith-‐based belief system. While Lavington will go on to equate Zinzendorf’s skepticism about scripture with Catholicism, the focus of his critique, at least initially, remains on antinomianism rather than on mystical marriage to Christ: Moravians distrust the Bible; they focus on Christ’s death on the cross and on the Sidehole to the exclusion of all else; their rejection of the law in favor of the gospels and faith in Christ alone leads to accusations of licentiousness, adultery and bigamy. “The all-‐atoning sacrifice of Christ is made the very motive and reason for their debauchery, rioting and drunkenness,” Lavington concludes (136-‐7). Their “amorous Enthusiasm” include a “kissing theology, and Embracements between the Savior and his Moravian Handmaid” (Lavington 85). Lavington further raises Puecker’s point about the way that bridal mysticism cross-‐genders Moravian brothers—yet he brings this critique through the context of a Moravian theology of grace that centers on the cross as 101 payment for sins—in other words, as the precondition to grace. He quotes Zinzendorf as explaining “… and yet [the Savior] is our Husband… we become women in his embrace as a man, in his human nature at his future great marriage” (116-‐117). Likewise when Peucker writes about Moravian brothers who in 1748 declared themselves sisters, he notes that the incident is precipitated by Christel Zinzendorf’s release of the brothers of all past, and future, sins— especially, notes Peucker, sexual sins (“Wives of the Lamb” 8). This would seem to connect an antinomianism of the type charged in Lavington’s account that is related to a mystical and feeling, yet still faith-‐based grace, with the theology of bridal mysticism. This is also, I think, what Zinzendorf means when he preaches that “ ‘in faith, we are all sisters,’” even though Moravian Brethrens’ bodies were still male (qtd. in Peucker, “Wives of the Lamb” 7). He does not say “through faith,” but “in faith,” a reference to the belief that a Christian believer is a believer “in Christ”: Christ does not just dwell in him, but he and all believers in the body of Christ. They are all parts of Christ’s body; Christ is the head. To an extent, this is analogy, but Moravians’ communal worship practice as well as their hyperfocus on the Sidehole materialized these metonymies—visioning them through art and devotional cards (Fogelman 80-‐ 82); performing them in ritual acts of kissing and embracing each other during communion (Peucker, “ ‘Inspired by Flames of Love’” 48-‐49, 52), as well as in sexual acts within marriage and, possibly, among same-‐sex pairings or groups (Fogelman 82; Peucker, “ ‘Inspired by Flames of Love’” 59-‐64; singing and reciting them in 102 hymn, litany, and prayer (Peucker, “Songs of the Sifting” 51-‐87; Atwood, Community of the Cross 233-‐256). We can see the way a similarly shared “head” (desire for Christ) bound believers by examining a short excerpt from a letter to Christian Renatus. Englishman Benjamin Latrobe writes to Renatus, who he affectionately called Christel: “But every day I feel most often as if I had my heart’s Christel with me and how could it be different, my heart is surely glued to his heart with my heart’s Lamb and with this feeling I kiss you many, many times with the lips of a sinner, who stays glued to Jesus’ wounds.” (qtd. in Puecker, “ ‘Inspired by Flames of Love’” 46). It is difficult to tell, in this passage, where either bodily or spiritual boundaries begin and end. The word “glued” also appears in the teachings of Zinzendorf when he describes the believer’s soul and Christ as “ ‘glued together…so that something new comes out.’” [This is also described as “ ‘the dying of both corpses in one another.’” (Peucker, “Inspired by Flames of Love” 50-‐51). Besides the obvious association of “dying” with “orgasm,” the language also suggests both how corporeal and intersubjective this Moravian communion ritual was. Corpses die “in” each other; they are “glued together,” suggesting individual boundaries melded and traversed. For these Moravians, Christ was present in every sexual encounter: the phantasy of Him and His wound became both its focus and the adhesive that fastened believers to the church, husbands to wives, brethren to brethren, hole-‐to-‐hole. Likewise, this is an example of the way in which a devotion directed toward a shared object of desire (Christ) creates a connection across bodies—a horizontal, physical linking in 103 the here-‐and-‐now that is enabled by the vertical, shared longing toward a spiritual goal. In Queer Phenomenology, Sara Ahmed examines such directional lines of orientation, disorientation, and reorientation as they relate to, among other things, sexual orientation. She approaches sexual orientation phenomenologically, theorizing sexual orientation as the “sexualization of space, as well as the spatiality of sexual desire” (1). “Straight” sexual orientation, for Ahmed, becomes a way of “reorienting” a queer desire that is “out of line” with a normative, vertical, or “in line” sexual orientation (65-‐66). 53 It is this notion of queer sexuality as off-‐kilter—or, in the case of the Brethren, horizontal—that is most useful in demonstrating how what we might call a sideways erotics operates in Zinzendorf’s interpretation of the gospel story of Doubting Thomas, the disciple who refuses to believe in the resurrected Christ until he has “thrust” his hand into Christ’s side wound (KJV, John 20:27), which privileges the side as a site of recognition of Christ’s divinity. In this 1742 sermon preached to Moravian Brethren in Philadelphia, Zinzendorf turns to this passage in his sermon in order to mobilize the side wound as what Ahmed has called a “reorientation device” (61)— the “reorienting” of an object for a purpose other than which it was intended. In a similar way, Zinzendorf reorients the side wound for not one, but two different purposes. Initially, the side wound marks a place of violent penetration. Drawing on the Doubting Thomas tale, Zinzendorf in a 1742 Philadelphia sermon makes the side wound a “sign,” “the Marque by which we will know him [Christ] on his day” 104 (Zinzendorf, A Collection of Sermons 126). Zinzendorf thereby re-‐positions the side wound not as a sign of penetration or death, but instead one of divinity and rebirth. Thus Zinzendorf repurposes the sidehole, from wound to womb. At the same time, when we take into account the materiality of the sidehole, we see how Zinzendorf repositions the sidehole from a site of pain to a site of pleasure (or from “gory hole” to “glory hole,” if we take into account Puecker’s speculations that some Moravian Brethren engaged in same-‐sex relations as part of their devotions.) Although Zinzendorf’s sermon appears to focus on the visual aspects of conversion—on seeing the side wound and therefore believing—further explication of the Thomas passage reveals that touch becomes the necessary precondition of belief. Thomas believes in Christ’s resurrection only after he feels inside the side wound. Such a reliance on feeling as an essential part of the seeing that is believing resonates with the idea of heart and awakening I established earlier in the chapter. Thus we see the way in which the Sidehole becomes the space of the believer’s personal connection with Christ—a place where, as one Sifting Time hymn exudes, “Oh, I feel, I feel, I feel!” (Peucker, “Songs of the Sifting” 74). Yet it is this very intercorporeality—a melding with each other and, in later uptakes of enthusiasm, other Others—that will make early twentieth century queer returns to enthusiasms such as Moravianism as politically problematic. My final chapters examine two modern narratives of white female masculinity that contain affective remnants of such enthusiasms—in one case, Moravianism specifically. To argue for recognition of gender alterity, these modern enthusiastic texts construct messianic narratives predicated on merging white cross-‐gendered subjectivities with racialized bodies. 105 As I move into these chapters, I want to keep in mind Alain Badiou’s claim that the Pauline initiates a universal subjectivity. I will go on to recognize cautions that queer critics have raised about the way such moves to queer the material participate in, and simultaneously obfuscate, the racializing processes inherent in these refigurations. 54 I have only had the space here to suggest that something like this may be at work in the temporal moment of Moravian and Methodist enthusiasm. However my next two chapters specifically explore the way that white cross-‐gendered modernist women return to enthusiasm in order to seek recognition for a gender-‐otherness that depends simultaneously upon exceptionalism and appropriation—or more precisely, incorporation— of the subjectivities of religiously racialized Others. CHAPTER 3 MELANCHOLIA IN DRAG: RELIGIOUS ENTHUSIASM AND INVERSION IN THE WELL OF LONELINESS “And what of that curious craving for religion which so often went hand in hand with inversion?” —Stephen Gordon, The Well of Loneliness (405) In this epigraph from The Well of Loneliness, the novel’s protagonist, Stephen Gordon, remarks on an intense religiosity intimate to inverts like her. Although critics often overlook or ignore it, Stephen’s religious desire manifests in excessive, and excessively melancholic, ways throughout this canonical LGBT novel about a British aristocrat’s coming to understand herself through an admixture of scientific heterodoxy and religious enthusiasm. Stephen is a female invert, a sexological type that in the late nineteenth century named both cross-‐gender identification and 106 same-‐sex desire. Thus, it seems to Stephen “curious”—as in odd, strange, even queer— that inverts would continue to harbor such an intense desire for religiosity, and likewise for the church’s embrace, given the way that dominant strains of Christianity failed to recognize them as “part of nature”: And what of that curious craving for religion which so often went hand in hand with inversion? Many such people were deeply religious, and this surely was one of their bitterest problems. They believed, and believing they craved a blessing on what to some of them seemed very sacred—a faithful and deeply devoted union. But the church’s blessing was not for them. Faithful they might be, leading orderly lives, harming no one, and yet the church turned away; her blessings were strictly reserved for the normal. (Hall, Well 405) That institutional and orthodox forms of Christianity would take up a position against the invert, granting approval only to the psychosexually “normal” and their couplings, is perhaps unsurprising given that many forms of Christianity remain intolerant of homosexuality and same-‐sex marriage. 55 Equally unsurprising are Stephen’s ill-‐fated attempts throughout the novel to love both women and god: inevitably these result in misery, rejection, self-‐sacrifice, and in some interpretations, suicide. Like the blessing-‐craving invert she purports to find “curious,” Stephen ends the novel martyred to a spirit-‐filled future in which inverts might have a place in the kingdom. Stephen’s recognition of inversion as category of gender and sexual alterity that is itself marked by an intense desire for god—a god she addresses in the book’s final supplication to “Give [inverts] also the right to our existence!” [437]—suggests 107 the presence of what historian Molly McGarry identifies as one of the untold “spiritual histories of sexuality” that operate in tandem with medical and literary narratives of inversion. 56 McGarry is one of the few critics who have read The Well through a nonsecular lens. 57 Notably, she and Terry Castle have read Spiritualism as one such spiritual history present in The Well, and they read The Well’s final scene as Stephen’s encounter with an immanent world of spirits that Spiritualists like Radclyffe Hall believed continued to haunt the modernist present. I do not discount these readings, and in fact take from them a recognition of the nonsecular in The Well that coexists with both the sexology that Stephen uses to define her inversion, as well as with psychoanalytic readings of Stephen’s woundedness, martyrdom, and melancholia, especially those that recognize in them Christian narrative and emotional structures. 58 However I also want to extend this recognition of nonsecularity in The Well to consider Spiritualism’s presence as the mark of a broader category of Christian heterodoxy that both encompasses and predates Spiritualism; that has a history of engagement with Catholicism and those political others whose religion has been represented as gender troubling; whose explanations, religious and secular, have included diagnoses of melancholy since at least the seventeenth century; and that relies on a martyr-‐savior understanding of Christianity whose resurrections emerge from woundedness: religious enthusiasm. All of these spiritual and medical histories are multiply present in The Well and the literature of inversion, I argue following from the work of Ann Taves and Molly McGarry, and further, these earlier understandings of cross-‐gendered affect continue to influence cultural representations of transsexuality and cross-‐ 108 genderism, especially those that have taken Stephen Gordon and The Well as their narrative prototypes. While this chapter is not meant as genealogy, the texts referenced here are, however, representative of literary and medical forms of self-‐ telling that have been influential to contemporary Western understandings of female masculinity. The Well, for example, has served as a historical touchstone for the understanding of lesbianism and female masculinity in the contemporary, as “something of a narrative map for transitioning transsexuals” (Prosser, Second Skins 140). In Second Skins: The Body Narratives of Transsexuals, Jay Prosser notes that Radclyffe Hall derived aspects of Stephen Gordon’s character from a case study I examine in this chapter, Case 166 of Richard von Krafft-‐Ebing’s Psychopathia Sexualis (158). Hall’s canonical novel incorporated not only the intense religious devotion of the case study’s subject, Countess Sarolta/County Sandor Vay, but also, Vay’s religious argument for the recognition of inversion. This is an argument that, as my chapter demonstrates, Krafft-‐Ebing authorized at the same time as he medicalized it, typologizing the female invert. As both the Vay case study and Stephen Gordon’s narrative will demonstrate, the religious structures of inversion are not only narrative, but equally—and more importantly in terms of their connection to enthusiasm— affective. These enthusiastic structures of religious feeling condition an embodied epistemology that, I argue, continues to influence narratives of female inversion and the emotional logics that undergird them. Part of the difficulty in recognizing the continued influence of Christianity and its heterodoxies on Western constructions of sexuality stems from a related oversight that Molly McGarry underscores in Ghosts of Futures Past: a failure to 109 recognize that the Euro-‐American history of sexuality itself is a secularization narrative that obfuscates these ties (155) 59 , connections that critics have recently begun to make visible. Queer cultural critics such as McGarry have begun to explore the ways that narratives of secularism and sexuality are entwined and have influenced our understandings of earlier forms of queerness. However most of this literature emphasizes sexuality rather than gender. Conversely those critics who explore connections to gender in The Well have made useful interventions for trans and gender-‐queer readings, yet these critics tend to occlude religion. 60 Yet Stephen Gordon clearly recognizes the desire for religion and for religious recognition as persistent among inverts like herself, even in the face of their continued rejection by church, law and polite society: that is, in Stephen’s despondent musings and experiences, we can recognize connections between religious enthusiasm and gender-‐crossing, in both the medical and the literary realms, that prompt the questions: what is the connection between inversion and religious enthusiasm? And how did melancholia come to mark both? By answering these questions, we can begin to parse the ways these early forms and embodiments describe the religiously inclined, cross-‐gendered melancholic in a way that prefigures her modern iterations, yet how differently, in those later moments, her melancholia signifies. Melancholia in Drag In Freudian terms, melancholia is the pathological incorporation of a lost love-‐ object into the ego, rather than letting it go, as would happen in “normal” grief. This splits the ego, so that part of the ego becomes a “diseased conscience” (in Freud’s later theorization, the superego) that violently and sadistically attacks the self as a 110 proxy for the internalized object, as well as for its perceived and excessive ambivalence toward the lost love-‐object. The result is depression, apathy, sleeplessness, low self-‐esteem, and potentially—if a melancholic’s ambivalence doesn’t loosen her bonds to the lost love object and launch all that freed-‐up desire-‐ energy into a mania—suicide. Interestingly, Freud twice uses the metaphor of a wound to explain the excessive energy required to keep melancholia going, energy which can then be unleashed into mania: “The complex of melancholia behaves like an open wound, drawing investment energies to itself from all sides…” (212); “The conflict within the ego which melancholia exchanges for the battle over the object must behave like a painful wound requiring an extraordinarily high counterinvestment” (218). In the next chapter, I explore connections between psychoanalysis and an enthusiastic sect’s devotion to the Christian crucifixion wounds that is not unrelated to the way that Hall figures Stephen Gordon’s messianic and exceptional suffering. However for now, I simply want to mark the way that woundedness figures in Freud’s initial description of melancholia, and the way that the wound of melancholia both demands and draws an excess of attention and energy toward a self that is figured here as something bodily. 61 While both mania and ambivalence can be normal states, and while ambivalence is also present in normal grief, according to Freud, both are excessive in melancholia. Throughout “Mourning and Melancholia,” melancholia functions as grief’s pathological other. Recuperations like Judith Butler’s in The Psychic Life of Power attempt to show Freud’s eventual conflation of grief and melancholia—to assert their fundamental sameness, or at least, to blur the distinction a bit. And 111 Freud does admit that the two reactions to loss do share similar processes and conditions. However, a strategic return to Freud’s earlier writing demonstrates his emphasis on a normal/abnormal dichotomy that puts melancholia firmly on the side of the pathological, and that demonstrates the connections between mid-‐eighteenth century mockeries of melancholy and religious enthusiasm, and late-‐nineteenth century pathologizations of sexual inversion. Unlike mourning’s losses, which are “real”—someone has actually died— melancholia’s losses (a lover’s jilting, or an ego’s slight, for example) are lesser, and moreover less authentic. Notes Freud, “For this reason, the exciting causes of melancholia are of a much wider range than those of grief, which is for the most part occasioned by the real loss of the object, by its death” (138, emphasis added). While later in this essay, Freud concludes that, like melancholia, mourning can also be triggered by the loss of an ideal in addition to the loss of a person, it is still the case overall that the standards of loss are relaxed and diffuse for the melancholic, who is presented as unnecessarily excessive and overreactive to a loss that is not really a loss.62 At the same time, melancholia’s losses are not always—or not wholly— conscious, just as they are incompletely grieved. All this makes melancholia’s “work” harder to fathom. 63 Like the enthusiast and the melancholic, whose troubles are largely accountable to an idleness that may be literal but is also understood as spiritual, melancholia as a disorder doesn’t do any recognizable work. 64 Butler’s theorization of gender melancholia negatively recuperates the gender melancholic by deeming heterosexuality melancholic. This is because heterosexuality’s binary structure requires the foreclosure of same-‐sex desire and 112 cross-‐gender identification. In other words, the little girl must give up identifying with her father and desiring her mother, while the young boy must do the opposite. But these are losses that must be disavowed and, therefore, that can’t be grieved, hence the need, melancholically, to incorporate them into the ego. Thus the straight woman prohibited from desiring the mother or another female who also identifies with femininity becomes “the ‘truest’ lesbian melancholic” (147). Conversely, drag puts that disavowed loss on display: the drag queen performs the loss of the possibility (at least for the heterosexual man) of male femininity. For Love, who is writing an affective queer history, Butler’s project to extend melancholic subject formation to normative genders and sexualities, though politically well-‐intended, comes at the expense of recognizing the feel-‐bad experiences of melancholic cross-‐identified lesbians such as Stephen Gordon—a recognition she positions as crucial to queer historiography. This allows Love to recognize the bad feelings in The Well and the backward turns they condition as queer structures of feeling. I contend that those “backward feelings” Love has identified as constituting Stephen Gordon’s queer melancholia can also be recognized as religious feelings. I therefore read Stephen’s melancholia as an enthusiastic structure of feeling I will call “melancholia in drag”—an enthusiastic melancholy that hyperbolically exceeds the secular. Melancholia in drag involves both the “temporal drag” of putting gender melancholia into an earlier frame of religious enthusiasm as well as the more traditional associations between drag and an excess of embodied affect that I want to reveal here as extra-‐secular in order to recognize enthusiasm’s troubling 113 potential as well as the trouble with enthusiasm. Drag as a framework of analysis, in other words, does not come with a particular ethics attached to it, and in fact its affect and excesses may well mark its participation in problematic logics of queer exceptionalism at work as its strategy of recognition. Enthusiasm’s drag on, and drag of, melancholia is its affective ambivalence— an instability and excess that can likewise be read into anti-‐enthusiasm literature and trans-‐historical understandings of melancholy and melancholia that allow for the recognition of a more expansive category of queerness—one not only marked by sexual and gender alterity, but also by other differences that are economic, religious, political. Enthusiasm was such an aggregate category, and a return to it can offer possibilities for thinking queerness as encompassing more than sexuality and gender, as well as explain the tendency to analogize gender to race that repeatedly surfaces in movements to extend normativity to gay people while advancing a religious argument on behalf of both. I contend we can also recognize a particularly female camp, religiously accessed, by recognizing the affective ambivalence in The Well—that wavering between mania and despair that conditions, and is the condition of, the gender-‐crossing enthusiast and congenital female invert. Borrowing Judith Butler’s concept of a “logic in drag” (Psychic Life of Power 149) that similarly exaggerates its claims, this chapter reads enthusiastic excess as operating through a drag logic: it mobilizes the affective ambivalence that roams troubling through these texts, oscillating between despair and ecstasy, anxiety and prophetic vision, that can be historically contextualized through a return to versions of religiously imagined gender crossing and religious melancholy. 114 Dragging melancholia in this way cites both the obvious link Butler has made between melancholia and the drag queen, but also Butler’s positioning of melancholia as foundational to heterosexuality. It is a melancholia fundamental, then, both to gender and to gender trouble, one queer and lesbian literary critics have repeatedly recognized in Stephen Gordon; it is an affect Heather Love has connected to butches generally and Stephen Gordon specifically, and that Sally Munt and Kathryn Bond Stockton have analogized, via Stephen Gordon, to the Christ narrative. Melancholia in drag is a religiously derived enthusiasm that performs and inhabits excess, especially in terms of its melancholic devotions—to love, to god, to literary production, and perhaps most troublingly in its relation to those others it tends to appropriate in the service of its self-‐resurrections—to its own exceptional, even messianic status. In short, melancholia in drag is that gender-‐ troubling masculine female affect commonly read as tragic, hopeless, and never-‐healing— what in twenieth century lesbian parlance might be called the “butch wound.” Yet it is one whose logic of tragic exceptionality can elucidate shifts in understandings of class and race that accompanied the medicalization, and secularization, of female masculinity. These logics are still remnant in “born this way” arguments for gender and sexual difference, especially those that analogize civil rights to gay rights, often mobilizing liberal religious arguments in the process. However they are also historically present in ostensibly more radical recuperations of queer gender, both those predicated on negativity and on pleasure. This chapter seeks to make some of these presences visible by recognizing the ways that thinking the subject through 115 psychoanalytic and Foucauldian frameworks constitutes gender identity concurrently with melancholia. Case 166, Psychopathia Sexualis: Count Sandor/Countess Sarolta Vay My first chapter explored the eighteenth-‐century connections between religious melancholy, enthusiasm, and gender crossing, particularly Henry Fielding’s portrayal of an effeminate female form of Methodist masculinity in The Female Husband. In its transfiguration from legal case to a fictional account that I have argued prefigures the medical case study, The Female Husband resembles a late-‐ nineteenth century account of forgery and false marriage, that of Hungarian Countess Sarolta/Count Sandor Vay, whose legal case became the subject of a medical article, and subsequently, of sexological and fictional accounts of inversion such as Krafft-‐Ebing’s Case 166 in Psychopathia Sexualis and Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness. A Hungarian aristocrat and author charged with swindling his father-‐in-‐law out of 800 f., Vay’s real crime, it becomes clear in Krafft-‐Ebing’s retelling of her story as a sexology case study, is passing as a man and marrying this duped father-‐in-‐ law’s daughter, Marie. Vay’s case was taken up by sexologists as “representative, even prototypical of the lesbian” (Mak 2), while more contemporary gender theorists have returned to the case an example of pre-‐transsexuality (Prosser, Palatable Poisons 129-‐144) or a female masculinity (Halberstam, Palatable Poisons 145-‐161) or inversion (Doan, Palatable Poisons 162-‐178). Although far more limited in number and scope, the debates around understanding Sandor Vay’s masculinity and desire for women mimic the critical debates of the 1980s and 1990s around 116 how to identify and understand The Well’s invert protagonist, Stephen Gordon, who not only reads Krafft-‐Ebing to discover herself as an invert, but who, as a particular invert, also shares many traits with Sandor Vay. Notably, Stephen and Sandor demonstrate similarly enthusiastic religiosities and espouse an identical religious argument for the recognition of inverts, an argument not unlike the one that continues to be mobilized in popular pleas for GLBT tolerance: namely the contention that, in the words Lady Gaga, they were “born this way.” 65 In a 2004 article that examines the 1899 Sandor/Sarolta Vay case not only from the medical perspective of sexology, but also alongside the original medical forensic report of the legal case, Geerttje Mak reads these ambivalences in the context of typical nineteenth and pre-‐nineteenth century narratives of passing women and tribades that distinguish Vay’s case as marking the shift from acts, fraud and immorality, to identity, aberration and pathology. Yet even within the context of that shift, heretical religious beliefs and moral judgments connected to melancholy continue to figure importantly in the case. Sexology’s construction of Vay as the “prototypical” masculine female invert that Mak and others have understood as a lesbian “archetype” is predicated on the religious melancholy of Sandor/Sarolta Vay. And just as it has been since the seventeenth century medical literature on melancholy, Vay’s religious melancholy is conflated with romantic desire (Taves 16). Mak amply demonstrates the variety of often conflicting accounts of Vay’s life and loves, including Vay’s own accounts of how the way that that s/he lives—as an “adventurous, deceitful, flirtatious, loving, traveling, drinking, and publishing” passing woman were “transformed into a pathological object, who can only 117 legitimate her love and life by labeling it ‘inborn sexual inversion’” through the shift from legal to medical discourses of passing women (Mak 2). These do, as Mak suggests, summon a sense of the personality and particularities erased in the medical language of physical examination, etiology, and diagnosis of a medical article that was Krafft-‐Ebing’s primary source, that of C. Birbacher, district court physician in Klagenfurt, Austria (Mak 2). Yet I want to read that shift as more ambivalent, narratively as well as historically, by returning to Krafft-‐Ebing’s medicalization of Vay’s account in the sexology narrative. It is this narrative that, ultimately, is the affective structure and character type that Radclyffe Hall takes up to create her infamous invert protagonist Stephen Gordon, who subsequently becomes a prototype of her own for a range of twentieth century female same-‐sex-‐ desiring and cross-‐sexed/cross-‐gendered identities and narratives. 66 As previously established, Vay’s case comes to be known to Radclyffe Hall through Krafft-‐Ebing, who constructs his Case 166 in Psychopathia Sexualis from a medical study based on the legal testimonies and medical examinations of the Vay case rather than from his own medical examination and interaction with Vay, or as he claims in the case study, “from the autobiography of this man-‐woman” (428), a case of “gynandry” and congenitally abnormal inversion of the sexual instincts” (438), meaning it is inborn rather than acquired. Vay’s appeal to the divine echo Stephen Gordon’s arguments for social acceptance of inversion in The Well of Loneliness. Stephen Gordon’s last lines, which are also the last lines in the novel— “Acknowledge us, oh God, before the whole world. Give us also the right to our existence!” (437)—echo both Vay’s writings, 118 cited in his medical/legal case, and also Krafft-‐Ebing’s validation of Vay’s contention that, because God’s will was his motive, he is not guilty of any crime. For Vay, as for Stephen Gordon, if God “created me so, and not otherwise”—that is, as a masculine-‐ feeling female who himself feels love for women—then there is no moral guilt attached to what presents as an inversion that is divinely (or naturally, in the opinion of Krafft-‐Ebing) caused. Within this sexology narrative then, acts do become identity, but Vay’s conversion also naturalizes a religious argument that is enthusiastic in its heresy: what God directs through the heart, through feeling, is divinely authorized—indeed, is divine encounter—even when those feelings manifest bodily in inverted sex and gender or perverted desire. Thus Vay’s own words—that her love for Marie and the cross-‐gender “forgery” she has illegally perpetrated by passing as a man and marrying Marie were religiously, hence morally, justified because “God put it in my heart”—are validated with a medical diagnosis of inversion that naturalizes cross-‐gender presentation and same-‐sex desire in the genes, body, and psyche of Vay. Melancholia evokes sympathy with Vay by marking inversion as part of the a natural world that, while scientific, is still God-‐created. Krafft-‐Ebing conclusions about the case further authorize Vay’s religious enthusiasm as not only natural, but also moral. Krafft-‐ Ebing determines that “S.’s characteristic expressions—‘God put love in my heart. If He created me so, and not otherwise, am I, then, guilty; or is it the eternal, incomprehensible way of fate?’—are really justified” (438). Thus, scientific knowing validates religious knowing. 119 Krafft-‐Ebing’s analysis and judgments are based as much on Vay’s narrative and statements as they are on legal and medical narrative. He emphasizes the heretical as constitutive of the pathological: an inherited religious enthusiasm in Vay’s medical history that includes a “line of the family” on her father’s side that “gave itself up almost entirely to spiritualism”; a maternal great-‐aunt who “had the whim that a certain table in her salon was bewitched”; and a nervous mother who “could not bear the light of the moon” (Krafft-‐Ebing 428-‐29). Furthermore, Vay’s own excessive religiosity is portrayed as an enthusiastic melancholy that manifests as a symptom of her inversion and is expressed in supplications for relief from her martyred condition such as, “ ‘O God, Thou All-‐pitying, Almighty One! Thou seest my distress; Thou knowest how I suffer. Incline Thyself to me; Extend Thy helping hand to me, deserted by all the world. Only God is just” (433-‐34)). Thus, Krafft-‐Ebing’s incorporation of heretical and mystical religious beliefs and practices into Vay’s family history, his presentation of these religious experiences as evidence of inheritable pathology, and his further emphasis on Vay’s own religious and romantic devotions as enthusiastically expressed demonstrates the way that heretical religion becomes incorporated into sexological accounts that would pathologize the female invert. By recognizing the traces of religious enthusiasm in Krafft-‐Ebing’s case study of Vay, we can see how the affect I am calling melancholic enthusiasm becomes essential for the female invert to effect, or for the sexologist to emphasize, in order to both garner sympathy the female sexual invert and to situate her in exceptional position between genders. Thus if we look at those bits of Vay’s autobiographical writing that Krafft-‐ 120 Ebing relies on both to make his diagnosis of congenital sexual inversion and to evoke sympathy and understanding for Vay’s plight, we recognize that Vay’s account of herself reads like a religious awakening: because God “put love in my heart,” Vay claims, she has no will at all; instead, she must rely on fate. Writes Krafft-‐Ebing of Vay, “S. complained of her heart, that would allow no reason to direct it; she expressed emotions which were such as could only be felt—not simulated. Then, again, there were outbreaks of most silly passion, with the declaration that she could not live without Marie” (433). Krafft-‐Ebing’s use of “silly passion” here resonates with earlier descriptors of Vay’s father as “foolish” in his indulgence of his daughter’s gender-‐crossing, in his own extravagant spending, and in connection to his family’s spiritualist and occult beliefs. The passage continues, with Vay noting the ability of Marie’s tone to “raise me from the dead,” and the ability of Love to lead him. Here, Love is conflated with God, and with spiritual love “which is the foundation, the guiding principle, of His teaching and His kingdom” (433). It is interesting that when Jay Prosser cites this passage on Love’s leading, he makes no mention of God, nor even of spirituality generally, as a factor driving Sandor’s desire. So while Prosser’s reading of the Vay case is important in its attention to Sandor’s cross-‐gender embodiment and desire, it neglects what both Sandor and Krafft-‐Ebing situate as the causal factor of these desires: divine (or, in the case of sexology, “natural”) leading. Notes Mak in explaining the shift from criminal guilt to medical cause that the court-‐appointed medical examiner emphasizes in the case’s narrative shift from legal to medical narrative: “Birnbacher did not look for the cause on a metaphysical level, however, but tried to find a ‘natural’ explanation,” 121 ultimately determining Vay “ ‘mentally ill’” due to a “ ‘congenital, hereditarily determined disorder of the whole nervous system’” (Mak 6). While it is certainly true that Birnbacher explained Vay in terms of the natural rather than the metaphysical, it is also the case that medical accounts like Birnbacher’s and Krafft-‐ Ebing’s naturalized, and thus embodied, the spiritual by positioning Vay’s inherited heresy—a spiritualism imbricated with both her female relatives and with nervous disorders often associated with femaleness (paralysis, hysteria) that were believed religiously caused—as an etiology of female congenital inversion. What Vay inherited was a tendency to religious enthusiasm, a mental disorder of the spirit that influenced her inversion. It is not only that Krafft-‐Ebing draws heavily on Vay’s autobiography to make his case for tolerance of inverts, but also that he reproduces and affirms Vay’s religious arguments by naturalizing these in Vay’s psyche and body, as well as in a character he takes pains to emphasize as religious and moral. That is, Vay presents in Krafft-‐Ebing’s rendering as not only an intellectually and artistically gifted individual, but also an exceptionally moral and religious one. Thus, the case study becomes an example of the natural not only aligning with the moral, but being justified by it. Krafft-‐Ebing emphasizes the fact that Vay is moral and religiously devoted (moreover, enthusiastically so) in order to make his case for acceptance of, and sympathy for, the congential invert, whose very constitution predisposes her to enthusiastic devotion. Furthermore, Vay’s religious devotion is entwined with her romantic devotion to her Marie, just as in earlier medical understandings of melancholy in which religious melancholy is a type of love melancholy (Taves 16). 122 Emotional swings from exuberance to despair, typical in eighteenth century medical understandings of religious melancholy and correspondingly, in cultural understandings of religious enthusiasm, as I have shown in my first chapter, also mark the behavior and description of Vay. Vay is enthusiastic in a number of ways: First because of her excessive religiosity, a non-‐rational religious passion felt in the heart, somatized in the case study, and conflated with romantic passion in her own narrative; second, because of his financial excesses—overspending, the tendency to “make debts,” charges of forgery and swindling. Krafft-‐Ebing presents both of these tendencies as inherited. Her father is repeatedly described as “foolish” in a way that conjoins his family’s spiritualist and occultist practices with his wasting of the family fortune. That he is also marked as foolish for raising both of his children, Sandor and her brother, as the opposite sex until well into their teens appear intertwined with his financial “foolishness,” as if both are symptoms of the same “foolish” type. In Sandor’s case, that her father squandered the family inheritance means there would be no fortune to inherit even if she were legally male and could inherit, and hence, support a wife, though there would still be a title; even her brother, were he to prefer men’s rather than women’s clothes, would have no assets to pass onto the next generation through a legitimate marriage. As my second chapter has shown, there is a connection between debt and enthusiasm that relates to a heart-‐based, or intuitive belief system; or rather, such felt belief systems are often characterized as foolish in terms of economics just as they are also characterized as irrational in terms of emotions. Sexual excess and financial excess intertwined in the youthful behavior of 123 Vay, encouraged and abetted by her father, a traveling and spending and brothel-‐ going companion for much of her youth. It is true that a significant part of Vay’s moral superiority is intimately entwined with masculinity, as Mak points out. But this is a masculinity also connected to what Juliana Schesari has recognized as positively valued forms of melancholia predicated on genius or on artistic giftedness (7). Women have also used this melancholic trope to authorize their artistic talent (Lawlor 44). What seems like a conflicting account of two oppositely tempered people—the youthful, carefree, morally lax young Vay and the religious, melancholic, devoted married one—can therefore be read as an attempt to narrate Vay’s emotional and moral life according to an established affective structure of masculinity. And yet, Vay also exemplifies a feminized religious melancholy, spiritually inherited, that is equally important to her presentation as a congenital invert. Melancholia of both types, artistic and religious, is emphasized in both Krafft-‐ Ebing’s narration of Vay’s case and Hall’s narration of Stephen Gordon’s life. The latter establishes Stephen’s masculinity by putting her feelings and artistic giftedness into the context of a familiar literary narrative of spiritual autobiography (Sim 114-‐136), which Stuart Sim links to novelists such as Defoe, Richardson, and Sterne and their protagonists of both genders. In The Well, Stephen’s melancholia overlaps both with her literary talent and her moral uprightness. In fact, Laura Doan calls the unfolding and progression of Stephen’s perspectives on inversion in a scene mid-‐way through the novel, in which Stephen discovers her inversion through the marginalia of the sexology texts her 124 dead father keeps in his study, as “a kind of pilgrim’s progress” (168). Both Stephen Gordon and Sandor Vay’s religious enthusiasms become, in these medical and fictional texts, a marker of godliness rather than of heresy. Of Vay, Krafft-‐Ebing writes: “She was religious,…and was very sensitive to the opinion others entertained of her morality” (436). This description of Vay seems in sharp relief to an earlier account, contained in the same case history, of the often-‐intoxicated youth spent frequenting cafés of “doubtful character” and brothels where she boasted of having “a girl sitting on each knee” (430). While seemingly counter to the later description of Sandor, this description of Vay’s youthful debauchment can be read as part of a bachelor narrative that would excuse—and even require—such youthful, male indiscretions; it functions here to authorize Sandor’s youth as a masculine one. However, it is evidence of her inversion-‐as-‐medical history that seems more environmental than innate: as Australian court doctor C. Birnbacher wrote in his medical opinion, “Her father had let her wear boys’ clothes from childhood on and educated her as such; it pleased him that she liked her role as a boy” (qtd. in Mak 52; Krafft-‐Ebing 428, n. 1). That Vay's youthful passions are excessive and mobile also mark them, and her, as enthusiastic, especially as this enthusiastic desire becomes conflated with a religious and romantic devotion for her ultimate “wife,” Marie, whose father exposes Sandor as female and brings forgery charges against him. Just as Sandor’s excessive womanizing bachelorhood authorizes the naturalness of her masculinity, so too Sandor's conversion into faithful marriage and at least the fantasy of procreation with Marie are necessary for garnering sympathy for her inversion: in order for 125 Krafft-‐Ebing's readers to recognize Sandor as an upstanding man, she must first be shown to demonstrate an early and natural enthusiasm for women, then settle into a conventional paradigm of devotion to god, marriage, and family. Thus melancholia plays a central role in the shift from sin to sickness, for in order to have sympathy for the congenital invert, she must first be presented as moral. Melancholic devotion, an enthusiasm for the spiritual and for her beloved, humanizes Sandor. It allows her pleas for recognition to be heard. Dragging The Well Because they are descended from a set of textual relations to the psychosexual and the literary, contemporary queer theoretical formulations of gender continue to engage with the premise that cross-‐gendering and melancholia are linked. 67 Heather Love’s Feeling Backward reclaims the queerness of “loneliness” through a reading of The Well that recognizes “the identification between gender cross-‐identification and melancholia” and connects this bad feeling specifically to Stephen Gordon (121). In a move that names Stephen’s character as resonant with a present-‐day version of female masculinity, the butch, at the same time as it acknowledges the range of Twentieth-‐Century female masculinities and same-‐sex sexualities that have been claimed on Stephen’s behalf beyond butch, Love recognizes in Stephen “the melancholic image of the butch lesbian” (114-‐115)—that is to say, a long-‐standing, even stereotypical association between melancholia and female masculinity. While Love and queer literary critics before her have turned to the Twentieth-‐Century, psychoanalytic term, melancholia, in their theorizations of gender and butch lesbian-‐ness, Stephen’s suffering affect also overlaps with, and is historically 126 informed by, a prior category of otherness that shares a prehistory with psychoanalytic melancholia, with creativity and the literary, and with romantic and religious devotion, including religious melancholy: enthusiasm. Such “backward turns” to enthusiasm put the affect of the latter-‐day gender melancholic, of which Stephen Gordon serves as the ür-‐example, into the historical and epistemological frame of religious enthusiasm—an excessive, embodied performance of gender and desire rooted in the transatlantic First Great Awakening that, I argue, continues to be present in The Well. Stephen Gordon’s melancholic female masculinity draws on, and performs to excess, conflations between religious and romantic devotion. Stephen’s love of God, in other words, is inseparable from both her love of women and her demand for gender and sexual recognition. These enmeshments of spiritual and medical affect become visible in the frame of conversion narrative, or as I have defined this form in Chapter 2 according to an eighteenth century enthusiastic template, awakening narrative. My second chapter explored the affective structures of awakening narrative and the role that a Lutheran “free grace” played in religious attempts to refigure Christian woundedness. This section summons these premodern connections between religious awakening, romantic devotion, and the female body as they inform inversion narrative and psychoanalytic understandings of gender melancholia that have been used to explain Stephen Gordon’s inversion. It is certainly not difficult to identify the lost romantic love objects of Stephen Gordon: Collins, the Welsh housemaid she falls in love with as a child; Angela Crossby, the American married woman with whom she gets involved in a failed love 127 affair that results in her rejection from Morton; the Scottish Mary Llewelyn, her third and final lover, who Stephen gives up in an act of paternalistic martyrdom. The parental losses, too, are easy to spot: the Celtic mother who never loved her; the British aristocratic father who did, but died before revealing the secret of Stephen’s, and all inverts’ “maimed, hideously maimed and ugly” beings. There are even non-‐ human losses that, in many ways, overshadow the people losses for Stephen: her childhood companion, the horse Raftery named after an Irish bard, with whom she communicates and communes in a near-‐spiritual sense; Morton, Stephen’s equally sacred home and homestead, its land, trees, animals and stables, not to mention the servants who populate the scene as not-‐quite-‐humans in the primitive ideal of Stephen’s aristocratic imaginary. Likewise, Stephen physically and ecstatically feels the losses of those people that her world considers outside the human: the wounded knees of her beloved housemaid, Collins; the racial pain of two black brothers’ as they sing spirituals; the poverty, artistic failure, illness and suicide of her Scottish friends Jaime and Barbara; the accusations of male inverts, accompanied by the relentless pointing of their “shaking, white-‐skinned, effeminate fingers” causing Stephen “burning rockets of pain—their pain, her pain, all welded together into one great consuming agony” (437) of fire-‐laced possession—part resurrection, part revelation— in the novel’s last scene. But all of these losses can be incorporated in what is, for Stephen, a more foundational loss, one on which the possibility of redemption for these other losses rests: the loss of god. Stephen does not so much lose faith in The Well as return to it. More importantly, and true to religious awakenings of the enthusiastic kind, she feels it, 128 again and again until her final, embodied spiritual encounter with the invert ghosts of past, present and future. In fact, we can read the novel as a series of spiritual encounters with the non-‐human—wounds, ghosts, scars, books, animals, the natural world, her family homestead, and those people her world does not include in the category of the human, yet who Stephen needs to feel through in order to transcend her maimed earthly body and gain spiritual recognition for her kind. These queer spiritual awakenings ultimately result in a new invert birth where Stephen also figures multiply: as convert, herald, mother, and messiah. For this reason, I will read The Well of Loneliness as a queer spiritual autobiography in the enthusiastic tradition: as a spiritual awakening. When the religious is recognized in The Well of Loneliness, which itself is rare, it is usually read as the story of tortured, Christlike suffering felt through a body martyred for love and for Love—Stephen suffers on behalf of the happiness of her lover Mary and of all inverts, past, present and future. Several critics have recognized the Christian in Stephen’s suffering. Sally Munt’s “The Well of Shame,” for example, reads Stephen’s story as a Christ narrative, psychoanalytically interpreted. In a more recent twist on Stephen’s religious suffering, Kathryn Bond Stockton sartorially embodies Stephen’s martyrdom, making her into a “martyr to clothes,” where clothes function as a skin. Skin is also a marker in transsexual autobiography, according to Jay Prosser; this includes The Well of Loneliness functions insofar as it has functioned as a “narrative map for transitioning transsexuals” (Second Skins 140). 68 Skin in Prosser’s account becomes a liminal and material aspect of the self (61-‐98)— a form of knowing in excess of the rational, just 129 as other non-‐rational forms of knowing (feeling, spirit, and heart, for example) similarly mark awakening narrative. Molly McGarry also sees the nonsecular in The Well, reading its last scene as a Spiritualist possession, as did Terry Castle in The Apparitional Lesbian. Both critics note that Hall was a practicing Spiritualist, but McGarry’s analysis puts this scene in a much fuller context of nineteenth century Spiritualism, which she demonstrates is intertwined with sciences such as phrenology and sexology (154-‐176). Prior to the 1928 obscenity trial that resulted in the novel’s ban in Britain, Hall was the subject of another court battle where the press emphasized her Spiritualism over her sexuality. The “headline writers gave the spirits bigger billing than the Sapphists,” McGarry maintains (173). Adapting McGarry’s claim here, I want to suggest that an interest in spirits of the enthusiastic type were also central to Hall’s 1928 obscenity trial; my reading of the scathing review of The Well by James Douglass of the Sunday Times in August, 1928 reveals that the anxieties that led to the trial and suppression of The Well, at least in Douglass’s rendering, were also as much about enthusiastic Christianity as inversion. While I would consider Spiritualism a later day manifestation of religious enthusiasm that is present in the novel and connected to inversion, it is not the only lens through which to read Stephen’s enthusiasm. Putting Stephen’s narrative into the context of a preexisting discourse about religious enthusiasm reveals the way that her religious melancholia works to counter charges of both heresy and deviance that are contained in the language of inversion case studies and in the obscenity charges against The Well. 130 A “moral poison [that] kills the soul” 69 Initial reviews of The Well were mixed and focused more on critique or praise of its writing style than its content (Palatable Poison 5-‐7). While its language was “often irritatingly Biblical,” Vera Britain wrote in Time and Tide: Miss Hall’s dignified challenge, presenting without sentimentality or compunction the dreadful poignancy of ineradicable emotions, in comparison with which the emotions of normal men and women seem so clear and uncomplicated certainly convinces us that women of the type of Stephen Gordon, in so far as their abnormality is inherent and not merely the unnecessary cult of exotic erotics, deserve the fullest consideration and compassion from all who are fortunate enough to have escaped one of Nature’s cruelest dispensations. (49-‐50) Even its preceding commentary, by British sexologist Havelock Ellis, was understated to the point of obfuscation (Doan and Prosser, Palatable Poison 2-‐3): he lauded the book as the first to present “one particular aspect of the sexual life as it exists among us to-‐day,” and “the relation of certain people—who, while being different from their fellow human beings, are sometimes of the highest character and the finest aptitudes—“ (Ellis, Palatable Poison 35). These two opinions reference the connections between Christianity, sexology, and morality that would come to mark the charge against the book. Britain’s remarks also reference the text’s style, either a hindrance or an advantage depending on perspective, of emotional excess that directly relates to its classification as awakening narrative. 131 Britain’s review links compassion for the invert on a “dispensation” that is natural rather than chosen; divinely sanctioned, rather than a mere “cult” (49-‐50). On August 19, the editor of the Sunday Express, James Douglas, would call for the suppression of The Well based on similar grounds. Hall’s brand of Christianity, he implied, smacks of a heresy whose manifestations (inversion, perversion, melancholia) are chosen, not inspired. Douglas wrote: This terrible doctrine may commend itself to certain schools of pseudo-‐ scientific thought, but it cannot be reconciled with the Christian religion or with the Christian doctrine of free-‐will. Therefore, it must be fought to the bitter end by the Christian Churches. This is the radical difference between paganism and Christianity. These moral derelicts are not cursed from their birth. Their downfall is caused by their own act and their own will. They are damned because they choose to be damned, not because they are doomed from the beginning. (Douglass, Palatable Poisons 38) By characterizing The Well’s “paganism” as a pretender to Christianity, and the only proper and acceptable Christianity as one that embraces a doctrine of free will, Douglas’s diatribe is reminiscent of earlier century’s anti-‐enthusiast polemic, one intimately enmeshed with anti-‐Catholicism. Also of interest is Douglas’s designation of sexology as pseudoscience, as suspicious in its claims for inversion as natural, if abnormal, as it is of Hall’s claims for inversion as part of God’s creation. Douglas’s language positions inversion and The Well as an anti-‐Gospel, in which “The decadent apostles of the most hideous and most loathsome vices no longer conceal their degeneracy and their degradation” (54). “The consequence is 132 that this pestilence is devastating the younger generation. It is wrecking young lives. It is defiling young souls” (54). He culminates his rant with an anti-‐Gospel passage of its own, very Old Testament-‐focused, wishing to rid British society of this plague and pestilence: “Perhaps it is a blessing in disguise or a curse in disguise that this novel forces upon our society a disagreeable task which it has hitherto shirked, the task of cleaning itself from the leprosy of these lepers, and making the air clean and wholesome once more” (55). Of interest here is the way the Christianity-‐laden critique of Douglass is downplayed in literary criticism and historical accounts of the trial. Douglass appealed to the British home secretary, the Conservative William Joynson-‐Hicks, known not only for his prosecution of communists and vice, but who also “fervently and effectively opposed the ‘revised Prayer Book’ during the very months that saw the condemnation of The Well of Loneliness” (Britain 24). The book’s subsequent trial found The Well to be obscene; an appeal failed. However the book was distributed by American and French presses, through which it eventually became available in England. Hall, who may have been a practicing Spiritualist, was also “deeply religious and implicitly believed in Catholicism” is either way the enthusiast in this discourse. “Radclyffe Hall, a deeply religious woman, believed implicitly in the Catholic faith, which she loved, and never regarded death as the end” (Britain 44). I propose understanding Douglass’s charges of obscenity in the context of earlier debates about enthusiasm. Just as the Christianity in The Well is often overlooked by later-‐day literary critics, these critics also tend to bypass Douglas’s 133 Christian critique of the novel, zeroing in on his broadside’s one sentence that evokes disorder rather than faith: “I would rather give a healthy boy or a healthy girl a phial of prussic acid than this novel” (16). But in a subsequent sentence, Douglas frames The Well as a spiritual, rather than a scientific danger: “Poison kills the body, but moral poison kills the soul” (16). In fact, the soul is what is at stake for both Douglas and Hall. It is a battle not only about whether Christianity and a Christian nation should accept and feel compassion for the invert, but also a not-‐ insignificant skirmish over which brand of Christianity should triumph as the established one—a free-‐willed and rational one or mystical and martyred (see Douglas, Palatable Poisons 38). This was not a new debate: in Stephen’s suffering narrative, we can recognize the despair, and the inspiration, of awakening structures of feeling that allow for the possibility of encounter with the divine and, not unproblematically, with the Other. Radclyffe Hall was not the first to bring together religious enthusiasm and inversion. Sexology case study and the discourse about sexology had been using religious language to describe sexual inversion since the late-‐nineteenth century, a phenomenon that continued into the early twentieth century. My earlier section has already remarked on the way that Krafft-‐Ebing’s Case 166, a lengthy case study of congenital female inversion that was formative to the character of Stephen Gordon, narrated an inherited religious enthusiasm and heterodoxy as an etiology of inversion. But the religious influences on inversion extend beyond the structure of its case study to the very structures of feeling that condition cross-‐gendered experience. 134 Molly McGarry notes that the concept of the “trapped soul” —“women’s souls trapped in men’s bodies and vice versa”—appears throughout late-‐nineteenth and early twentieth century sexology narrative, including the Krafft-‐Ebing through which Stephen recognizes her inversion and the Havelock Ellis preface that Hall solicited to authorize her novel—spiritual residuum of two Calvinist-‐descended phenomena that trucked in the ghostly: Spiritualism and Theosophy, which Hall practiced (170-‐74). Just as “[s]piritualism…functioned as a residual discourse in the language of sexology” (McGarry 174), this language found purchase in narratives of cross-‐gendering that similarly employ the trope of being “a man trapped in a woman’s body,” or a woman in a man’s, along with understandings of the self that are extra-‐Cartesian—those inarticulable places of knowing through feeling that have been sublated into psyche, skin, spirit, or heart. Prosser and Britain both remark that The Well became a template or reference for transsexual autobiography and lesbian coming outs. This sort of “contamination” through literary form was also one of Douglas’s fears about the novel. While many critics, including modernist writers of that time period such as Virginia Woolf, regarded Hall’s novel as sentimental and stylistically inferior to a modernist aesthetic (Doan and Prosser 6-‐7). Yet Douglas argued that it was The Well’s literary merit that made it more insidious. This “palatable poison” threatened British literature writ large, putting “literature as well as morality…in peril” (Palatable Poison 38). At the turn of the twenty-‐first century, after decades of literary and lesbian debate about the worth, the shame, and the identities represented and not 135 represented in The Well, the novel’s “uncanny rhetorical power” is something literary critic Terry Castle unwillingly admits to in the afterword to the aptly titled Palatable Poison, a collection of essays about the by-‐then canonical lesbian text. Even the novel’s “manifest failures as a work of art,” Castle concludes, do not detract from its ability “to activate readerly feeling at an extraordinarily powerful level. As virtually every contribution to this volume shows, The Well of Loneliness forces us to confront, over and over and with a sometimes astonishing corporeal immediacy— our deepest experiences of eros, intimacy, sexual identity, and how our fleshly bodies relate to the fleshly bodies of others. Something in the very pathos of Stephen Gordon’s torment—something in the very magnificence of her confusion—provokes an exorbitant emotional identification in us. Whoever we are, we tend to see ourselves in her” (400, emphasis mine). Ironically, what Castle describes as having happened is exactly what Douglas’s move to suppress the novel most feared: that The Well would function as an evangelical text, inspiring gender and sexual conversions of an enthusiastic type. It is this idea of “readerly feeling” that triggers “exorbitant emotional identification” with a text—feeling in excess. More than this, the text touches us, bodily, in our present. We are aware not only of our own “fleshly bodies,” but how these bodies “relate to the bodies of others.” Likewise, such feelings of interrelation, indeed intercorporeality, allow Stephen to identify with those other “lepers” in her text by framing herself, and by extension them, as exceptional freaks and outcasts in a structure of feeling I want to characterize as enthusiastic. 136 Like her subsequent novel, Master of the House about a French Catholic carpenter, The Well of Loneliness contained a messianic figure in invert Stephen Gordon. The Well follows both the narrative structure of the Christ story and the affective structure of conversion narrative: it ends before a redemption that will come only for future invert because of Stephen’s sacrifice. However rather than identify Christian plot points in the novel, I instead want to recognize multiple affective encounters of enthusiastic awakening that eventually culminate in a final resurrection of Stephen as a tortured savior. Importantly, these encounters are intersubjective: Stephen needs other Others in order to feel an embodied connection with them. This is what makes them enthusiastic awakenings. The intersubjectivity of melancholic feeling in these examples conditions the exceptionality of the invert. Stephen must feel loss through the already recognized sufferings of other Others in order to experience the spiritual awakening that marks her as invert messiah. Each of Stephen’s awakenings happens thorough connection with the suffering of others; she repeatedly takes on their pain as her own through the novel until, in the final scene of self-‐recognition, the pain of these other selves posses and overtake her. Encounter With the Wound Perhaps the Christianity in The Well of Loneliness is so often overlooked because it is so overt, at least in its early chapters. The novel’s first pages read as a troubled annunciation of Stephen’s birth—an almost-‐boy born just shy of Christmas, willed into masculinity by the father who created her. Try as Stephen’s mother might, she can’t shake the foreboding that the unborn Stephen might not be the son her husband unknowningly has longed for all his life. “Sir Philip never knew how 137 much he longed for a son until, some ten years after marriage, his wife conceived a child; then he knew that this thing meant complete fulfillment, the fulfillment for which they had both been waiting… It never seemed to cross his mind for a moment that Anna might very well give him a daughter” (12). But of course, Sir Philip remains only partially fulfilled: for Stephen is born a “narrow-‐hipped, wide-‐ shouldered, little tadpole of a” daughter (13), named a boy’s name anyway, raised to ride, fence and hunt; a daughter who grew, in her mother’s words, into a “caricature of Sir Philip; a blemished, unworthy, maimed reproduction” (15). And so Stephen’s first wounds come, unsurprisingly, from her rejecting mother even as she seems to embody the disfigurement that is reflected in her mother’s sentiment. This same image, of maimed reproduction, will literally come back to haunt Stephen at the novel’s close as she herself becomes the savior and reproducer of a legion of inverts clamoring for recognition. But before this awakening, other wounds accumulate. Even as a boy-‐girl of seven, Stephen is an enthusiastic believer in the power of prayer to transubstantiate her body. “Do you think I could be a man, supposing I thought very hard—or prayed, Father?” (26). For young Stephen, praying trumps thinking, and through prayer, sex change is possible. That this scene comes directly after Stephen has had a disastrous encounter with the footman-‐boyfriend of her beloved housemaid, Collins. Young Stephen has fallen in love with Collins and spends hours on her knees praying, also, to take on Collin’s knee injuries. When this doesn’t work, and Stephen later catches the footman kissing Collins, Stephen throws a pot at his head and wounds him, foreshadowing Stephen’s own facial scar. Sir Philip, in response, fires Collins and swears Stephen to secrecy about both the 138 incident and, it is implied, her own inverted desires. Enmeshed with this event and the firing is Sir Phillip’s announcement that from then on he will “treat [Stephen] like a boy, and a boy must always be brave, remember” (29). The proximity of these events—Stephen’s desire for, and jealously over, her female housemaid; her father’s annunciation of her masculinity; the possibility of prayer as transubstantiation— emphasizes the connection between religious piety, masculinity, and same-‐sex desire in Stephen’s coming to understand herself. Earlier in the novel, Stephen fervently prays to Jesus to let her suffer a housemaid’s knee in Collins’ stead, even dreaming that Collins’ puffy, water-‐filled knee is grafted onto her own. “I’d like to be awfully hurt for you, Collins, the way that Jesus was hurt for sinners” (21)… “I would like to wash Collins in my blood, Lord Jesus—I would like very much to be a Saviour to Collins” (21-‐22). In addition to praying, she kneels for hours on the carpet to get housemaid’s knees, but receives only holes in her stockings in the process. And yet while neither the physical wound nor the sex change Stephen is praying for ever arrive, the wounds of desire and gender change do. After all this non-‐transformative suffering, Stephen asks her father the question— could I pray my way to manhood? Her father, recognizing Stephen’s same-‐sex desire and her desire to become a boy, answers by deciding to treat her as one. In effect, then, Stephen’s prayers are answered; because of her enthusiasm for Collins, a devotion Stephen expresses by projecting herself into the Christ narrative, Stephen’s father confirms and continues from then on to construct her gender as boy. 139 It takes a second love affair, this one equally disastrous, to remind Stephen she has not been transformed into a man in the eyes of English society at large. Stephen’s affair with a married American woman, the aptly named Angela Crossby, ends with Angela’s haunting question, resonant with Stephen’s earlier question to her father: “Could you marry me Stephen?” In both of these queries, the conditional is employed. As a question, it becomes a tense of possibility, sharing with prayer the temporality of hope, a suspension between supplication and deliverance. Faith remains in the emphasis of these questions— could I?—no matter if such transformations be fantasy or madness, divine inspiration or a masculinity complex. Though wounded repeatedly throughout the novel as, one by one, Stephen loses the ones she loves (Collins, Angela, her horse, her father, her mother, Mary), Stephen never loses faith that faith in god will deliver her and her invert kind. That Stephen Gordon suffers because of her inversion is clear throughout the text and has been well remarked on. That Hall herself suffered on behalf of the novel is also the story that her lover, Una Troubridge, advanced in her biography of Hall. According to Troubridge, Hall wrote her next tome, Master of the House, a Christ narrative about a French carpenter, in atonement after she was charged with obscenity for writing The Well of Loneliness (104). So tortured was Hall over the trial and the accusations of blasphemy against her that she developed a nail-‐shaped stain on the palms of both hands that eventually spread down her wrists so that it looked “as though some liquid had been poured into the palms and had run towards the wrist, leaving a trail of inflammation” (105). A radiologist was flummoxed and could not explain these mysterious, wound-‐like marks; x-‐rays and medicine did not 140 remove them nor Hall’s pain, a sourceless suffering Troubridge portrays as a manifestation of the stigmata that eventually disappeared as Hall continued to work on Master of the House (105). Troubridge presents this anecdote as evidence not only of the repentance of Hall and penance she was undergoing for writing The Well, but also of the suffering that absolved her of the wrongdoing she was accused of at trial (104-‐5). That is, the anecdote underscored Hall’s religious exceptionalism as she was clearly Christ-‐like enough to bear the stigmata. Like Christ and like her character Stephen, Hall also suffered for those others who would come after her and be saved by her literary and physical sacrifice. Encounter with Holy Books As many critics have noted and my explication of Case 166 from Psychopathia Sexualis has suggested, The Well of Loneliness was strongly influenced by sexology, and Hall’s citation of this science has been used to recuperate Stephen’s gender-‐ otherness as itself something other than lesbianism. 70 Early in the novel, we witness Stephen’s father, Sir Phillip, as he retires to his study and secretly opens a locked desk drawer, where late into the night, he reads and make notes in the “immaculate” margins of work by Karl Heinrich Ulrichs, a German sexologist. That it is “a slim volume, recently acquired” (26) suggests the newness of its ideas Sir Phillip is grasping for as a way of understanding the child he pities (15-‐16), but who her mother angrily, and shamefully, considers a “blemished, unworthy, maimed reproduction of her father” (18). Stephen’s father has recognized Stephen in these pages and responded with a marginal discourse of his own, an interpretation through which Stephen will 141 eventually come to understand the “queerness” for which her father has already found a scientific name. He reads the text and notes in Stephen “the curious suggestion of strength in her movements, the long line of her limbs—she was tall for her age—and the pose of her head on her over-‐broad shoulders” (26); “that indefinable quality in Stephen that made her look wrong in the clothes she was wearing, as though she and they had no right to each other” (27). All this propels him to his study to read sexology late into the night. After such study sessions, “He would come to bed late, but keep what he had been reading a secret, and then “[T]he next morning, he would be very tender to Anna—but even more tender to Stephen” (27). By the middle of the novel, when Stephen herself comes to discover and to name her masculine condition through her father’s books and notes, Ulrich’s urnings have been replaced with Krafft-‐Ebing’s congenital sexual inverts. Stephen’s father’s locked desk drawer and the sexology discourse contained in it has multiplied into a locked bookcase containing volumes of sexology he has been annotating all the years Stephen has been growing, queerly still, to adulthood. There, scribbled in the margins of Richard von Krafft-‐Ebing's Psychopathia Sexualis (Hall 232), Stephen finds her own name in her father’s handwriting and discovers the “truth” of what she is: a congenital sexual invert. Because the case of Sandor/Sarolta Vay so closely parallels Stephen’s—both are aristocrats; both ride and fence; both are inverts of the most inverted type; both are religious enthusiasts—and because Vay’s case is by far the most substantial case of female inversion contained in the volume, it is likely this is one of the cases Stephen’s father 142 has annotated, and that Stephen, in coming to recognize herself through her father’s recognition of her in case studies of inversion, is likewise influenced by Vay’s narrative. Laura Doan reads this scene as a sexologicial Puritan conversion narrative for Stephen, who by the end of it, comes to the possibility of the invert’s exceptionalism. The scene presents, claims Doan, “three distinct and opposing positions on female inversion (as degeneration, as sin, and as advantage)” (166). Krafft-‐Ebing’s Psychopathia Sexualis, in Doan’s understanding, is inversion-‐as-‐degeneracy, while Stephen responds to her father’s sexology with a “biblical discourse of sin” (167-‐8). Ultimately, through the governess character Puddle, also an invert, Stephen hears what Doan identifies as sexologist Edward Carpenter’s ideas, in The Intermediate Sex, about the better-‐than-‐average physical, intellectual, and moral capabilities of the invert (165). This includes the “ ‘higher moral possibilities of homosexuality’ “ (Carpenter, qtd. in Doan 169). While Doan is careful to note the continued influence of the earlier, more pathologizing sexual science, she links the “metaphysical seer” (174) Carpenter’s influence on Hall to the novel’s last scene in which Stephen is positioned as and exceptional messiah: “Stephen thus stands apart from—and above— normal intermediaries as a new kind of savior who demands on behalf of the entire race ‘the right to our existence!’ (437)” (Doan 173). I want to thicken the metaphysical aspects of both Stephen’s recognition scene and her final encounter with invert spirits by suggesting that the “biblical discourse” Hall employs throughout not only the first scene, but even more intensely, the last allows us to read an overtly Christian mystical discourse into Hall’s understanding of inversion. 143 Reading enthusiasm into these scenes reveals that Stephen not only comes to understand herself, as Doan suggests, as one of Carpenter’s “ ‘extreme’ intermediate type[s]’” (172), but also as an intermediary between the scientific and spiritual, her body the liminal space where both discourses literally manifest. 71 That is, Stephen understands herself through an enthusiastic spirituality that, through an incorporation of the natural, remakes scientific pathology into a spiritual exceptionalism that depends not only on scientific superiority, but also biblical chosenness. Melancholy, suffering, and despair in the Puritan conversion narrative, an analogy Doan has made to Stephen’s journey through sexology, prepares and is necessary for conversion; Stephen’s conversion from abject to exceptional, and exceptionally moral, is likewise conditioned on her melancholy suffering and martyrdom. We might further see this seen as an awakening in the enthusiastic sense— that is, as a direct and embodied communion with the divine— if we read it as Castle does, as Stephen’s “liberating communion” with the spirit of a dead father Stephen talks back to (Apparitional Lesbian 49-‐50). While Castle downplays the Christianity of her lesbian apparitions, she does read this scene, as well as the novel’s last, in the context of Spiritualism, noting that Radclyffe Hall was: for most of her life an ardent spiritualist—a participant in seances and table rappings in the teens and twenties, a believer in apparitions, and a contributor on several occasions (with her lover Una Troubridge) to the Journal of the Society for Psychical Research. For almost twenty years, much in the manner of patients consulting a psychoanalyst, she and Troubridge communicated 144 regularly with Hall’s deceased lover ‘Ladye’ (Mabel Batten) through a spirit medium, Mrs. Leonard. In Batten’s words from beyond the grave Hall and Troubridge seem to have found not only day-‐to-‐day solace but a kind of mystic sanction for their own sexual relationship. (49) Given that Hall bases Stephen Gordon’s character on another invert hereditarily inclined to spiritualism through her father’s side of the family, Sandor Vay, the very sexology narrative that conditions both Stephen’s gender and sexual awakening and, if we are to accept Castle’s reading of the scene, communication with her father’s ghost—we might also recognize, in Vay’s father’s sisters, the same kind of enthusiasm for the spirit world evidenced by Hall. On Vay’s “father’s line of the family that gave itself up almost entirely to spiritualism” was “an aunt who believed a certain salon table was bewitched and would shout “bewitched, bewitched!” whenever anybody tried to place an object on it, locking away all objects that touched it into a room not opened until after her death; another “who could not bear the light of the moon” (Krafft-‐Ebing 429). Ultimately, Stephen interprets this scene of self-‐discovery after her father has died, her mother has sent her away from Morton, and she has had to put down her beloved horse, not through sexology but through Christianity. “God’s cruel,” she announces after reading her fathers marginalia in the sexology texts. “He let us get flawed in the making.” She finds her father’s family bible and “[t]here she stood demanding a sign from heaven—nothing less than a sign from heaven she demanded. The Bible fell open near the beginning. She read: ‘And the Lord set a mark upon Cain…; “ (204-‐5). Stephen throws the bible, babbles about the mark of 145 Cain and wallows in Old Testament punishment until Puddle, her invert governess, finds and reminds her of her “curious double insight” that “[N]othing’s completely misplaced or wasted, I’m sure of that—and we’re all part of nature. Some day the world will recognize this.” It is up to Stephen, gifted as not all inverts are gifted, to “have the courage and make good” (205). While we might be tempted to view this as a shift from religious to scientific or natural understandings of inversion, as natural rather than immoral, I suggest that Stephen never leaves the religious behind. This accords with an enthusiastic understanding of grace that would extend salvation to all rather than few, and that, in conjunction with an understanding of inversion as natural, promised to correct mark of inversion. If according to Christian theology the mark of Cain, connected to original sin (the biblical passage Stephen cites in the sexology scene), is forgiven through Christ’s sacrifice, then inversion’s bodily flaws—here for the second time, a foreshadowing of the scar Stephen will earn as an ambulance driver in World War II—also needs an invert redeemer. Thus the “sign” that Stephen’s plea to god demands is not only to open her father’s bible on the verse about Cain’s mark; it is also a New Testament-‐like promise of a redeemer, savior and messiah. Puddle here functions as a John the Baptist figure, the invert who announces Stephen’s coming: “For the sake of all the others who are like you, but less strong and less gifted perhaps, many of them, it’s up to you to have the courage to make good, and I’m here to help you do it, Stephen” (205). Animal Encounters From early in the novel, Stephen evidences a special connection with the natural world of her family’s homestead, Morton—its dignified, Georgian house; its 146 stables and pastures; its hunting grounds and hills; its meadows and woods; its horses, foxes and birds. 72 Stephen is especially close to her horse, Raftery, named after the famous Irish bard who writes, “I am Raftery, the poet, full of courage and love.” Stephen is repeatedly being told to have courage—first by her father, then by Puddle—when one by one, her loves fail because of her maimed body. Raftery the poet, as well, is maimed: blind, he “tak[es] my way by the light of my heart,” not unlike the kind of intuitive spiritual encounters Stephen has throughout The Well. One such significant “animal encounter” follows soon after the death of Stephen’s father. Stephen, astride Raftery on her way to a hunt in a neighboring village, feels her father’s absence, yet also his presence beside her, in a state where: “[h]er mind was a prey to the strangest fancies” (125). She and Raftery begin chasing a fox, and “[a]s Raftery leapt forward her curious fancies gained strength, and now they began to obsess her,” working herself into a frenzy of imagining she herself is the hunted and hated “creature who had nowhere to turn for pity or protection” (126). Stephen begins to feel the terror of the fox, bodily: “She, who had never lacked physical courage in her life, was now actually sweating with terror, and Raftery divining her terror sped on, faster and always faster” (126). This marks the place where Stephen identifies with the fox that the Meet is hunting, also terror-‐filled and, Stephen thinks in a line oft-‐quoted in Well scholarship, “looking for God Who made it’ (126).” This moment of identification with the maimed fox is well remarked on, but it is what follows that more interests me in terms of reading this scene as an enthusiastic encounter. Stephen experiences “an imperative need to believe that the stricken 147 beast had a Maker, and her own eyes grew bright, but with blinding tears because of her mighty need to believe, a need that was sharper than physical pain, being born of the pain of the spirit” (126). The spiritual pain and grief Stephen is able to experience here accord with Puritan spiritual autobiography: she feels a desire for a belief and a grace that have not yet arrived at the same time as she is overwhelmed by the despair that grace and belief might never come to her. Though Stephen believes her flaws to be physical (her maimed body), she is akin to the sinner; imagining her father, she offers the fox the mercy she realizes her father has also extended that mercy her, then realizes she can no longer kill or cause suffering to “any poor, hapless creature. And so it was that by dying to Stephen, Sir Philip would live on in the attribute of mercy that had come that day to his child” (127). In this example, Sir Phillip’s death becomes the sacrifice that allows Stephen to feel a grace that extends to, and forces her to incorporate into her view of the human, hunted animals by imagining herself in their place. But this means giving up the hunt, and her hunting time with Raftery, an almost sexual communion she longs for even as she still feels the horse “between her strong knees” (127). In their initial coming together as horse and master, they recite marriage-‐like vows: “Raftery had said: ‘I will carry you bravely, I will serve you all the days of my life.’ [Stephen] had answered: ‘I will care for you night and day, Raftery—all the days of your life’” (220). When Stephen must finally shoot the aging Raftery, she asks his forgiveness and believes she hears him reply, “ ‘Since to me you are God, what have I to forgive you, Stephen?’” (222). When Stephen does put down the horse, her aging, and somewhat touched groomsman, Williams, confirms what readers have already 148 intuited: “They’ve been murderin’ Raftery! Shame, shame, I says, on the ‘and what done it, and ‘im no common horse but a Christian” (222). Through spiritually rendered encounters with Stephen, his God, Raftery has become recognized as a Christian, i.e., a being deserving of grace. This becomes apparent in the hunting scene after Stephen encounters the dying fox, triggering grief for her father and for herself. Raftery, carrying Stephen and ostensibly able to feel her emotions through their bodily connection, catches Stephen’s melancholia and responds empathically: “And because in his own way he had understood her, she felt his sides swell with a vast, resigned sigh; heard the creaking of damp girth leather as he signed because he had understood her” (127). It’s safe to say Hall did not mean this as animal porn although it is easy enough to read humor into these overwrought and over-‐earnest scenes of sexual-‐spiritual communion with beasts burdened and pursued, in the same way anti-‐enthusiast satire might ridicule religious enthusiasm. 73 However what seems more difficult for us to read with a straight face is not the sexual innuendo, unintentional as it likely is, but rather Stephen’s “sudden illumination of vision,” the sudden receipt of “mercy that had come that day” to Stephen, the “moment of spiritual insight” that left both Stephen and her sympathetic horse “infinitely sad” (127). What is most difficult for our secular, sexual selves to take is Stephen’s sudden religious awakening. Immediately following Stephen’s own experience of grace twinned with sadness because of, and in the wake of, her father’s death, Hall immediately projects readers into the psyche of Raftery, a courageous war horse longing for the chase he 149 loved even as he is still in the midst of the hunt with Stephen. “So now he too felt infinitely sad, and he sighed until his strong girths started creaking, after which he stood still and shook himself largely, in an effort to shake off depression” (127-‐28). In this step of Stephen’s spiritual awakening, she and her horse are both melancholy, the horse catching it, like hysteria, from Stephen. But this is an inversion of traditional spiritual autobiography, wherein God’s grace is perceived as a gift and a saving. Here, both Raftery and Stephen continue to experience the mercy that Sir Phillip’s death brings as a loss: a loss of the hunt, a loss of hunting companions, and eventually, the loss of Morton and Raftery himself. As the novel continues, Stephen’s losses mount: her mother, her home, her horse, her country. She leaves England for France and a stint in the ambulance corps during World War I, where she meets and falls in love with Mary Llewellyn, and becomes a wandering writer herself, still melancholy not because inversion prevents from literary, or even romantic, success, but more so because it prevents her from being accepted by her mother at Morton, by aristocratic society, and ultimately, by God. Reluctantly and on Mary’s behalf, Stephen takes up with a community of equally maimed inverts and degenerates, woeful and pitiful types of various addictions, impoverishments, physical and emotional ailments, and cultural exclusions. 74 During one such party, the subject of Jean Walton’s article “ ‘I Want to Cross Over into Camp Ground’: Race and Inversion in The Well of Loneliness” (Palatable Poisons 278-‐299), the entertainment for the night is a pair of African American brothers, Lincoln and Henry Jones, who sing spirituals that “stir[] to the depths” all the partygoers with their “queer, half defiant, half supplicating music” 150 (363) and effect a conversion in even the “pagan” Valerie Seymour: “And all the hope of the utterly hopeless of this world, who must live by their ultimate salvation, all the terrible, aching, homesick hope that is born of the infinite pain of the spirit, seemed to break from this man and shake those who listened… they who were also among the hopeless…” (362-‐63). Walton reads this passage as uniting various audience members who “identify with rather than pity the ‘hopelessness’ expressed in the songs,” linking black and invert suffering and connecting it to “a congenital defect of the body” (286). However for Walton, the spiritual as a musical form becomes both a manifestation of the brothers’ “racial primitivity” as well as “the means by which the white subject… might experience a ‘return’ to an idealized, premodern state” (287). Ultimately, Walton contends, Well’s narrator “appropriates the spirituals, borrows them to ‘speak’ on behalf of its white protagonists” (288). In another passage Walton quotes to connect the brothers to the primitive, Hall compares Henry to “[a] crude animal” whose drinking and womanizing is a “primitive force” (363). This passage also resonates with another scene in the novel in which Stephen encounters a dying fox on a hunt; Stephen’s governess, Puddle, has earlier referred to Stephen herself as “this sorely afflicted creature” who “Thine hands have made” (218). At the same time, Puddle has also anointed Stephen as a “true genius in chains, in the chains of the flesh, a fine spirit subject to physical bondage” (218), marking her exceptionality, which Stephen’s melancholia confirms. In the scene with the black brothers singing spirituals for an audience of white inverts, Walton’s reading suggests, Hall imagines a scene of suffering and grace experienced intersubjectively through these men she needed to first make primitive 151 and animal in order to prepare them Stephen and inverts more broadly for redemption: “Yet as he sang his sins seemed to drop from him, leaving him pure, unashamed, triumphant. He sang to his God, to the God of his soul, Who would some day blot out all the sins of the world, and make vast reparation for every injustice” (363). This is followed by a hymn Stephen hears as a challenge, its refrain, “Didn’t my Lord deliver Daniel, then why not every man?” she immediately applies to herself and the other inverts in the room, “Why not?... Yes, but how long, O Lord, how long?” (364). While Stephen is able to feel a moment of communion with the men by projecting her suffering onto theirs (appropriating it, Walton contends), as soon as the music ends, Henry and Lincoln become “just two black men with black skins and foreheads beaded with perspiration” who head for the whisky (364). Conflating gender and sexual difference with racial difference continues to happen in the contemporary, expressed for example through the conjunction between civil rights and gay rights. But the pattern evoked here by Stephen Gordon and Hall— one repeated in gay rights discourse and even contemporary pop music— is a spiritual conflation, one that trucks in a queer exceptionalism. 75 The shared melancholia that Stephen imagines with other Others in the room through the singing of spirituals happens through the wound of slavery, expressed through song, which resonates with her own wound. Already, the brothers’ hymn references an analogous miracle, Daniel, delivered of the lion’s den, issued as an impatient challenge to God. Stephen will take up this tone of impatient demand, will feel again the aching pain of the spirit in her own final spiritual encounter, which she cannot experience except through the accumulation of these previous encounters with 152 similarly wounded, outcast, and subhuman creatures she also feels herself repulsed by and yet steadfastly exceptional to. Stephen both sees herself as part of these outcasts, but also as an exception to them—because of her aristocratic blood, because of her literary “true genius,” because she has been both anointed by father and invert governess even as she was cast aside by her mother and mainstream society. She disdains the others with whom she feels forced to cast her lot, longing for the conventional and the normative, for a title, a homestead, servants, a wife and family even as she ultimately takes up a position as messiah to those inverts whose pain she has encounter and continues to encounter and who will continue to come into the world after her. Or rather, these inverts of the past, present and future overtake her: The Well’s last scene is a spiritual awakening more akin to demonic possession. These invert spirits drag Stephen down in order to raise themselves up. In the process they anoint Stephen as the chosen one through a biblical drag narrative of effeminate masculinity. Awakening in Drag Just as they are throughout the novel, romantic devotion and religious devotion continue to be entwined in the final three scenes of The Well of Loneliness and especially in the book’s final, revelatory final scene. The novel’s penultimate scene, for example, is of one of betrayal cloaked as self-‐sacrifice. Stephen convinces her friend, Valerie Seymour, to pretend they are lovers so that Mary Llewellyn will leave Stephen for another friend, Martin Hallam, who has fallen in love with Mary. Stephen views this move as a “gift” that will lead Mary “out of the darkness” of living life as a partner of an invert and “into the light” of normative heterosexuality and all 153 of the benefits that come with it such as children, social standing, and public acceptance. Valerie, however, thinks Stephen’s plan is most “curious” and urges her to reconsider: “Aren’t you being absurdly self-‐sacrificing? For God’s sake keep the girl, and get what happiness you can out of life.” “No, I can’t do that,” said Stephen dully. Valerie got up: “Being what you are, I suppose you can’t—you were made for a martyr!” (433-‐34) Perhaps what is most curious here, given that we in the contemporary understand inversion as a secular condition, is Valerie’s equation of martyring sacrifice, melancholy, and suffering with congenital inversion. Not only does Valerie recognize Stephen as constitutionally incapable of happiness in love because of these associations, but she uses the term “martyr,” overlaying Stephen’s inverted constitution with a religious cast. 76 As in medical traditions of religious melancholy that is a sub-‐type of love melancholy, Stephen’s melancholic constitution marks both her romantic and religious devotion, and all of these factors are recognized here as conditions of inversion. Part of what Valerie Seymour sees as Stephen’s excessive and foolish morality regarding the need to sacrifice her own happiness for her lover renders Stephen constitutionally incapable of forgoing the sacrifice she feels she must make at the end of the novel, a sacrifice that results in her spiritual death and a resurrection that is more demonic possession than ascension into heaven to be seated at the right hand of her dead father. It is a sacrifice Stephen also makes on behalf of other inverts who will come into social acceptance (literally) through her. 154 Just the night before, Stephen has arranged for Martin to stay in town so that he can take Stephen’s place at Mary’s side once Stephen confesses her fake affair with Valerie. Although the time sequence of these last scenes is somewhat unclear. It does seem as though Stephen’s encounter with Martin, the initial scene of her betrayal, happens three days before she will break things off with Mary and experience what I read here as an inverted awakening. But first, Stephen must betray her lover and experience a death of her current self in order to be reborn as an invert savior. The other-‐wordliness in this scene sequence begins when Stephen narrates her meeting with Martin at a Paris restaurant as an out-‐of-‐body experience. Early into their meeting, “[Stephen] found that she was holding [Martin’s] hand. Or was it someone else who sat there beside him, who looked into his sensitive, troubled face, who spoke such queer words?” (432) Afterward Stephen effects what she sees as her own death, a refrain she will repeat several times throughout the book’s last scenes. Immediately after her meeting with Martin, Stephen visits a Catholic church, gazes at the “silver Christ with one hand on His heart and the other held out in a patient gesture of supplication,” and hears praying of the Hail Mary: “They were calling upon the Mother of God…maintenant et a l’heure de notre mort” (433). Likewise, as she lies to Mary about her affair with Valerie Seymour, and watches as Mary runs straight into the arms of Martin, Stephen again relates the scene from a place removed from herself: “But who was it who brushed that silence aside? Not Stephen Gordon…[]… Stephen Gordon was dead; she had died that night: ‘A l’heure de notre mort…’ Many people had spoken those prophetic words quite a short time 155 ago—perhaps they had been thinking of Stephen Gordon” (435). These experiences—of viewing herself as dead and apart from her “self”; of references to the holy mother and of impending death; of the “silver” of Judas’ betrayal—foretell Stephen’s own symbolic death of a self which will become a wholly other being in the last scene’s daemonic “new birth” where Stephen will play multiple biblical roles: traitor, virgin mother, herald of a reign of invert acceptance-‐to-‐come, and invert messiah, or perhaps the anti-‐Christ. Admittedly, The Well’s last scene has been read to death (pun of course intended), its critics split over whether Stephen actually dies (as in suicide) or merely hallucinates the inverts who overtake her and invade her sterile womb (as in crazy). A few critics, situating Radclyffe Hall in the context of Spiritualism, do characterize the scene as spiritual encounter (notably Molly McGarry and Terry Castle). This scene has been read in terms of both Spiritualism—the “possession” of her womb by inverts like mediumistic trance (McGarry 174-‐76; Castle 50-‐52)— and Edward Carpenter’s metaphysical sexological treatise, The Intermediate Sex, with its “soul trapped in the wrong body” and evolutionary exceptionalism that would hold up the invert as the most evolved (Doan 162-‐78). Contrary to Valérie Seymour’s belief that would position excessive religiosity as the invert’s “bitterest problem,” Hall makes of it a strategy for recognition by bringing together sexology with a heresy that is already inherent in sexology narrative. As I have established earlier, Spiritualism is syncretic and thus compatible with reading this scene as religious awakening in the enthusiastic Christian tradition. But because of Hall’s, and Stephen’s, investment in mystical Catholicism 156 especially of the French and Irish/Celtic traditions, there is something additional to be gained by putting this last scene into the frame of specifically British and transatlantic religious enthusiasm of the First Great Awakening: its connection to an embodied emotional excess with direct ties to melancholy, to romantic devotion, to sexual excess, and to gender crossing and the feminine that can provide a fuller understanding of Hall’s modernist expression of white female masculinity whose structures of religious feeling persist in twentieth and twenty-‐first century white lesbian and trans narratives. The Well’s last scene plainly evokes the Christian crucifixion and resurrection. Likewise, Hall cites biblical chapter and verse throughout, especially citing texts from the Old Testament book of Isaiah that have New Testament resonance. A “legion” of male inverts with “shaking, white-‐skinned, effemininte fingers” accuse Stephen and “her kind” of stealing their birthright, of “tak[ing] our strength and [giving] us your weakness!” They proceed to possess Stephen’s “barren womb” until it “ache[s] with its fearful and sterile burden…the fierce yet helpless children who would clamour in vain for their salvation. They would turn first to God, and then to the world, and then to her… accusing: ‘We have asked for bread; will you give us a stone?’… “you, Stephen, who have drained our cup to the dregs’” (437). The reference here to draining their cup to the dregs comes from Isaiah 51:17: “Awake, awake! Rise up, Jerusalem, you who have drunk from the hand of the Lord the cup of his wrath, you who have drained to its dregs the goblet that makes people stagger” (New International Version). Related New Testament passages, in Matthew (20:22), Ephesians (5:14), and Revelation (14:10, 16:19) position Christ as the foretold 157 messiah; Hall employs them here to figure Stephen as an invert savior and inverts as the new Jerusalem. Yet another related passage that precedes it in Isaiah begins, “Awake, awake, arm of the Lord, clothe yourself with strength!” (51:9). And the verse that immediately follows it asserts that “[A]mong all the children she bore there was none to guide her; among all the children she reared there was none to take her by the hand” (Isaiah 51:18). The Well’s last scene will reference the “stolen birthright” that Stephen and other female inverts have stolen, which I read, in light of these earlier passages, as an evocation of the Jacob and Esau story that positions Stephen as the chosen and messianic figure who assumes her exceptional position through drag. The idea of inverts as suffering and needing God’s grace; as being captive or kept out of the kingdom, but about to be freed are further reinforced by Hall’s reference to “The walls fell down and crumbled before them; at the cry of their suffering the walls fell and crumbled” (437). And yet, that these inverts will ultimately drag Stephen down and possess her as a “legion”—a reference to Mark 5:9, “My name is Legion, for we are many,” where Jesus casts a multitude of demons out of a possessed man—signals Stephen may function more as an anti-‐Christ, the scene as an inverted spiritual awakening in which those inverts ultimately pull Stephen under, impregnate her, and force her into the sterile, suffering, sacrificial birth/death that is necessary for their salvation. She is becoming possessed by male invert rather than being spiritually relieved of possession. And it is clearly this male inverts who have the most beef with Stephen and “her kind.” They demand that Stephen act as their intermediary to “‘your God,” 158 asking god “why He has left us forsaken!’” (436). They “point[] at her with their shaking, white-‐skinned, effeminate fingers: ‘You and your kind have stolen our birthright; you have taken our strength and have given us your weakness!’” (436-‐7). Stephen’s “kind” here, we can assume, means female inverts; the “stolen birthright” a reference to the masculinity that male inverts lack and female inverts possess (though without, in must be noted, access to an actual “birthright”—a place in the patriarchal legal order of succession, inheritance, and title). Yet this passage’s reference to the Old Testament story of Jacob and Esau further complicates its implications. The biblical story of brothers Jacob and Esau is the story of an effeminate mama’s boy who prefers the indoors, to stay inside the tent rather than roam the fields and romp the outdoors. With the help and direction of his mother, Jacob steals his older, hairier, beefier brothers’ birthright by, in effect, dressing in drag. Boy Jacob is not yet a man, nor even a manly youth, as his brother is, so his mother must drag him up—piling onto Jacob his brother’s hairy skins that smell and feel like Esau. Like the female invert or butch lesbian whose high voice is often the unwilling gender reveal, Jacob’s voice threatens his ability to pass as his brother, and thus to receive his father’s blessing. Elsewhere in the biblical passage Jacob, again with his mother’s help, tricks Esau out of his birthright. Jacob, of course, becomes Israel, after a famous wrestling match with an angel. In the same way female inverts, this passage suggests, having undergone a struggle for recognition and acceptance, hope to achieve God’s grace through the romantic sacrifices of Stephen, and as their literary Holy Mother. My 159 reading here conflates these two interrelated events—birthright and blessing—as Hall’s scene does: Stephen, like Jacob, steals the male inverts’ birthright and, garbed in their stolen masculinity and “strength,” asks for God’s blessing on behalf of inverts of both genders who will ostensibly descend from her invert line, miraculously birthed from her “barren womb” and clamoring for recognition. Whether that clamoring will remain “in vain,” or whether Stephen’s God will answer her demand for recognition is left undetermined. Hall is also excessive with her biblical references, which resonate multiply in this scene just as Stephen herself figures multiply. Sterile wombs and miraculous births are also a repeated trope throughout Old and New Testaments—Sarah, Rachel, Elizabeth, and of course the Virgin Mary. Stephen figures as forger and as savior; as the start of a new line of chosen people; as herald, as mother, and as messiah. What is clear in all of this biblical overlay is that Hall’s use of the Jacob/Esau story is meant to authorize the perceived fraudulence of female inversion through the drag of religious enthusiasm. Although Stephen’s narrative ends before grace for inverts is received or certain, what Stephen demands for inverts is spiritual recognition. She, and they, have never lost faith. Stephen’s last words are, in fact, a confession of faith, and it is that reaffirmed belief— in faith alone—that conditions Stephen’s demand for invert recognition and acceptance: “ ‘God,’ she gasped, ‘we believe; we have told You we believe… We have not denied You, then rise up and defend us. Acknowledge us, oh God, before the whole world. Give us also the right to our existence!’” (437) In this way, the novel’s last lines also function as an accusation against the evangelical bargain that inverts feels cheated by: only believe and you will be saved. Inverts, 160 Stephen reminds her god, have believed, have not “denied” god. Where, then, is their salvation? Ultimately, it is Stephen’s belief in belief as the means to salvation that makes The Well an awakening narrative. Its narration of Stephen’s experience and knowledge of god, and of gender-‐otherness, through the body and the bodies of other Others is what links religious melancholy in this text to gender melancholia. Yet something else is revealed in Hall’s employment of religious structures of feeling in The Well: she makes Stephen into an exceptional figure—a melancholic genius, aristocratically birthed, spiritually martyred, and morally superior to the other “degenerate” queers and outcasts with whom she associates. In doing so, Hall creates Stephen as a religion unto herself, a savior of inverts and an effeminiately masculine Christ whose atoning “death”—her paternalistic sacrifice of Mary to Martin—leads to spiritual rebirth for inverts past, present and future, “the quick, the dead, and the yet unborn” (436). More insidiously, the structures of wounded exceptionalism on which Stephen’s narrative turns become the emotional stations of the cross that subsequent cross-‐gender narratives will take up in order to tell their stories of female masculinity. Although Stephen as an exceptionally spiritual figure has the ability to experience the pain of ethnic, racial, class, and even nonhuman others, and to suffer on their behalf, it is ultimately her whiteness, her class privilege, and her artistic giftedness that allow for these spiritual encounters and that serve to reconfirm her own exceptionalism through her gender melancholia. In the last chapter, I will examine another modernist narrative by a queerly gendered female writer, the poet H.D., who takes up an eighteenth century Christian enthusiasm, Moravianism, to similarly figure herself a spiritually gifted messiah. 161 H.D. imagines an awakening encounter with a Native American woman that resonates with The Well’s awakening encounters; both writers dabble in Spiritualism, yet draw also on specifically Christian enthusiastic spiritual traditions. My next chapter tries to answer the following questions, which The Well’s employment of queer spiritual exceptionalism brings up: What happens when what was always already a transatlantic structure of Christian religious feeling re-‐crosses the Atlantic to the former British North American colonies that are now part of a mid-‐twentieth century American landscape perceived as secular? What happens to melancholia and to gender woundedness in this, and subsequent, American queer refigurings of awakening narrative? And how do Native Americans come to figure as the primary “primitive” others that cross-‐ gendered narratives of American female masculinity employ to figure themselves as queer exceptions? CHAPTER FOUR “[A] REMEDY, BY WHICH ONE NATION SHALL BE THE WOMAN” 77 : LENAPE AND MORAVIAN SPIRITUAL GENDER CROSSINGS IN H.D.’S THE GIFT In the final scene of her World War II memoir The Gift, Imagist poet H.D. melds her harrowing experience during a London bombing raid with scattered childhood memories spent in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania among the Moravians, the German Lutheran Pietist sect of her maternal ancestors (274-‐78). Drawing on historical and polemical accounts of the Moravians that reference the sect’s belief in a female soul and maternal holy spirit, H.D. vividly imagines the eighteenth-‐century Moravian’s peace-‐making ceremonies with the Delaware Indians, known metaphorically as “women” in the eighteenth century. The Delaware, or Lenni 162 Lenape, were the Native American targets of the Moravians’ Pennsylvania missions, and it is these early American Moravians and their encounters with the Delaware that overlay, and enable, H.D.’s spiritual and gender becoming in The Gift. Jane Augustine’s 1998 introduction to the complete version of The Gift makes important connections between Moravianism, gender, and Native American culture that draw out the spiritual implications of H.D.’s memoir, what Augustine presents as a vision of restored peace between early American Moravians and Lenape in which H.D. positions herself as the messianic conduit for a broader world peace in her war-‐torn present. 78 Yet what Augustine also suggests in her introduction, and what I will try to extend in this chapter, are the more implicit connections in The Gift between Moravians and Lenape that reveal how particularly Moravian figurations of gender shape not only H.D.’s impulse toward cross-‐racial communion, but also historical accounts that name the Delaware as “women” intermediaries tasked with maintaining peace among the Iroquois nations. These Moravian missionary and church histories would also influence a later American literary rendering of a “Moravian Delaware,” James Fenimore Cooper’s Tschoop, or Chingachgook, from The Leatherstocking Tales, a figure who also appears in The Gift (Augustine 16; H.D., “Notes to The Gift 239-‐242”; Newman 1). Both Moravian understandings of the soul as female and conceptions of the Delaware as “women” have been the subject of recent historical attention, and some of these studies gesture toward their overlap in a way that allows me to take this up explicitly in this chapter. 79 Following Augustine, I argue in this chapter that H.D.’s project in The Gift was to conflate Delaware and Moravian spiritual history and 163 ancestry in order to render herself spiritually exceptional. This hews close to Augustine’s claims. However I will also I put H.D.’s move for recognition of her own spiritually gendered modern self— what I am calling her enthusiastic gesture—into conversation with contemporary queer indigenous studies, particularly the work of Mark Rifkin, Andrea Smith, and Scott Lauria Morgansen, who have argued a version of the claim that queer attempts to gain visibility and rights depend upon earlier racializations, sexualizations, and cross-‐genderings—queerings—of Native Americans. Thus I want to extend the work of Augustine and other H.D. scholars such as Susan Stanford Friedman, who has usefully identified H.D.’s “Moravian gynopoetics” and “gynocentric vision” in The Gift (Penelope’s Web 352; 353), and who has likewise considered H.D.’s racial politics with at least a gesture toward, if not an explicit uptake of, her Moravianism (see “Modernism of the Scattered Remnant”). I do this in order to place H.D. in a contemporary queer studies frame that would re-‐understand her female-‐centered spiritual visions, through the Moravians, as a cross-‐gendering—and yet, a cross-‐gendering that is also a whiteness whose exceptional status depends and builds upon earlier queerings of the Delaware. While H.D. is not explicit about Delaware gender, her evocation of their peace treaties with the Moravians, coupled with her own dreamlike projection of herself onto a maternal Moravian ancestor who serves a peacekeeping a role, suggest and refer to associations between peacemaking, alternative kinship formation, and femininity that surface in early American texts about both Delaware and the Moravians, as well as the contemporary historical, literary, and cultural scholarship 164 about those texts upon which I will draw throughout this chapter. For example Gunlog Fur’s recent monograph, A Nation of Women: Gender and Colonial Encounters Among the Delaware Indians, explores the moniker “women” among, and to describe, the early American Delaware, while Paul Peucker, Craig Atwood, and Aaron Fogelman have written about the early American Moravian mystical belief in a female soul referenced in The Gift. Puecker’s work explores a period in the 1740s and 1750s when these mystical beliefs cross-‐gendered some German Moravian brothers (“Wives of the Lamb” 1-‐11); according to Fogelman, early American Moravian beliefs feminized their Christ as well (77-‐86). Most recently, Andrew Newman explores the way that “the Delawares’ history,” much of which comes from a Moravian mission history that has formatively shaped subsequent cultural production about the Delaware, is “also American history” (1-‐2). My intent in this chapter is to use existing early American scholarship to put Moravian and Delaware gender-‐crossings into direct conversation in order to explore their overlap and influences on each other. These observations, largely drawn from preexisting historical scholarship about the early American Moravians and Delaware, will form the backdrop for H.D.’s twentieth-‐century enthusiastic gesture back to her Moravian ancestors and the Delaware as the Moravians, and she, imagined them. I also include modernist critique about H.D. in this examination and, importantly, queer Indigenous studies scholarship that will help me frame H.D.’s enthusiastic returns to both the Moravians and the Delaware. Enthusiasm, as this project understands it, is both an affective discourse and a temporal logic, both of which have material manifestations. Enthusiastic religions 165 of the First Great Awakening such as Moravianism understand faith and spirit as experienced bodily through a feeling, which is also a touching of the heart. Moravian understandings of grace, at least in their mystical iteration in the mid-‐eighteenth-‐ century during a controversial period of church history known as the Sifting Time, resulted in accusations of antinomianism that included financial, spiritual, and sexual excesses. 80 As sectarian reform, enthusiasm seeks to return believers to a purer, even apostolic time. Thus, I understand Moravian church leader Count Nicholas Ludwig von Zinzendorf’s desire to unite an “invisible church” of believers across faiths through a shared belief in Christ rather than an institutional organization—his aim in America, in addition to missionary work among the Native Americans (Sessler 142; Fogelman 106-‐109)—as an enthusiastic gesture that seeks a purer faith and spiritual community structure. A similar enthusiasm can be seen in the connection that Zinzendorf, Quaker William Penn, and some Moravian mission histories make between Native American tribes such as the Delaware to the lost tribes of Israel (Penn 41-‐42; Hutton, History of the Moravian Missions 90-‐91); this gesture back to biblical origins positions Native Americans as spiritually exceptional, and thus the Moravian mission project as preordained. Moravian historiography of the Delaware, then, seeks to authorize its mission project, and the related settlement of Pennsylvania and other British colonies, through an enthusiastic gesture—Christianizing the spiritual origins of the Native Americans. A non-‐secular framing of literary nationalisms such as H.D.’s that depend on a Christianized or otherwise spiritualized Native figure, I contend, elucidates such entanglements. 81 Viewed through the affective and narrative frame of enthusiasm, 166 H.D.’s memoir and the mission histories and literary texts upon which it draws suggest the importance of Moravian influences on American cultural figurations of the “Indian” that extend the work of writers such as Newman and bring it into conversation with queer indigenous studies. Recent work on affect and the logics of American settlement as it pertains to queer subjects by Mark Rifkin and Greta LaFleur understands indigeneity, gender, and settlement as a felt belonging. Rifkin’s settler phenomenology analyzes queer claims for recognition that depend on settlement through an affective logic he calls “settler common sense”; this notion will be particularly useful to the chapter’s understanding of enthusiasm as a non-‐secular form of a similar affective and materially felt structure of queer identification with Native people and land (Settler Common Sense xv-‐xvi). Likewise, Scott Morgensen’s explications of the way that settler colonialism queers the Native will also figure importantly in my analysis. Morgensen recognizes the way that modern queers mobilize what he calls “non-‐ Native queer modernities” that “naturalize settler colonialism when they confront queer differences as racial or diasporic in a manner that sustains Native disappearance” (3). For Morgensen, such a modernity “signifies not a racial or ethnic identity but a location within settler colonialism” (3). Andrea Smith’s “Queer Theory and Native Studies: The Heteronormativity of Colonialism” investigates not only how queer theory might be useful to Native studies, but also how white, and even non-‐white but non-‐Native, queer theory participates in vanishing the Native as a queer subject (Smith 43-‐65). 167 I intervene in this discourse by bringing a non-‐secular frame to Indigenous Studies understandings of the queer, or in Rifkin’s broader terms (he is writing about nineteenth-‐century canonical writers such as Melville, Hawthorne and Thoreau), the “counterhegemonic” white settler subject and those accompanying white queer forms of contesting settlement—like H.D.; like the Moravians (26). Although these authors, works, beliefs, and practices do trouble and resist norms of gender, sexuality, and kinship, they also simultaneously depend upon settler colonial logics (25-‐32). I argue in this chapter that they also depend on the logics of enthusiasm, and therefore put Americanist and American Indigenous Studies scholarship into conversation with studies of British and transatlantic enthusiasm by Jordana Rosenberg and Ann Taves, both of whom recognize a First Great Awakening shift in enthusiasm discourse that occurs in the eighteenth-‐century, when enthusiasm moves from a strictly sectarian designation and contestation of religious orthodoxy to one of broader social application and, as Rosenberg explains, a means of political belonging (Taves 17, Rosenberg 43-‐47). Rosenberg’s work, which considers enthusiasm’s enmeshment in the development of modern historiography and capital accumulation, will be especially useful when considering the Moravian mission historiography upon which H.D.’s memoir draws, but more broadly, which influences later literary figurations of the “Indian” such as Cooper’s Leatherstocking Tales (Newman 1). Likewise, Taves’ history of enthusiasm in the context of British and American Methodism, as well as the connections she makes between enthusiasm and later psychology and medical discourse, has been formative to my thinking about the way that twentieth-‐century literary figures such 168 as H.D. figure their gender and sexual alterity through the psychosexual and the spiritual—in H.D.’s case, through a return to eighteenth-‐century Moravian enthusiasm. This chapter extends and combines existing scholarship on enthusiasm and indigeneity to ask whether a similar shift in understandings of enthusiasm occurs in early America beginning in the mid-‐eighteenth century, as American iterations of religious enthusiasm—feelings of affinity with Native spirits that appear in white marginalized religious groups such as Moravians on contested bodies of land such as Pennsylvania—form and are formed by settlement. 82 “Home” to Bethlehem: Queer Nationalism in The Gift Although H.D. is primarily known a modernist poet, her memoir The Gift, is particularly American in not only its return to both early American and nineteenth-‐ century versions of Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, but also as previously noted, to nineteenth-‐ and twentieth-‐century tropes of indigeneity that Native Studies scholars such as Andrea Smith, Scott Lauria Morgensen, Mark Rifkin, and Chris Finley have recognized as queering Natives in relationship to the settler colonial state, and in contradistinction to norms of settler citizenship. This allows H.D. to figure both the Moravians and herself as spiritually gifted (Augustine 6-‐7). 83 H.D. writes the memoir at the height of a world war she fears she may not survive and during which she doubts her own spiritual gifts (Augustine 22). At the time, Augustine notes, H.D. was also a practicing Spiritualist with a Native American “spirit guide” who she believed put her in contact with an early American Moravian with a Mohican name. Augustine relates H.D.’s contention that “Native Americans came through the medium with the specific intention to communicate with her 169 because she was American, baptized Moravian, and gifted with her maternal great-‐ grandmother’s legacy of ‘second sight’” (Augustine 17-‐18, emphasis mine). Importantly, as Augustine points out, this memoir marks the beginning of H.D.’s own return “home”—to the faith of her Moravian mother’s ancestors and their spiritual and cross-‐gender lineage (6-‐8); to the physical space of the Bethlehem Moravian community where H.D. was born (7); and to the larger early American Moravian community’s relationship with the Lenni Lenape or Delaware Indians (17). Those Native spirits by whom H.D believes herself called are primitive to both nationalist and enthusiastic discourse; H.D. is both American and Moravian, and furthermore, her memoir narrates these histories as conjoined, and contends that her belonging to both communities can be accessed through a Native American intermediary who deems H.D. an exceptional spirit. Through the Moravian histories H.D. consults, as well as through her own queer reimagining of Moravian-‐Delaware encounter in The Gift, H.D. participates in the vanishing and effeminizing of the Delaware. While some critics argue that “woman” was not a pejorative term, but a term of honor among the Delaware and Iroquois (Fur 162), others interpret the use of “the Delawares-‐as-‐women metaphor…to emphasize their weakness and dependency” in European terms (164). Therefore, I read The Gift not only as H.D.’s recognition of her own spiritual, literary, and gender exceptionalism through the Delaware, but also as H.D.’s reclamation of herself as “American, baptized Moravian” (Augustine 17-‐18) to consider the import of such a queer nationalism. 84 It is this enthusiastic return to Bethlehem—a gesture back to a freely chosen and democratically available union via a championing of 170 Moravian antinomianism and spiritual communion with Lenape—that H.D. needs to authorize her own spiritual and gender-‐otherness. The Gift moves associatively and temporally between a series of burnings— bombs that shook H.D.’s London apartment; lighted Moravian beeswax candles after a Christmas Eve service; the crinoline skirt of a student at her grandfather’s Bethlehem seminary igniting; and importantly to the memoir’s final vision of world peace and restored Moravian-‐Delaware amity, a neighboring Moravian settlement set aflame by Delaware cheated out of land, including Bethlehem, in the infamous Walking Purchase of 1737. Through female Moravian and Delaware avatars, H.D.’s memoir advances a vision of world peace and spiritual communion with the Delaware that, to H.D.’s mind, will restore not only a peaceful relationship with the Native nation, but also bring about peace among the currently warring world nations (Augustine 15). Her memoir’s conjunctions between past and present, Native and non-‐Native, narrated as visions that are part psychoanalytic dream work, part Spiritualist séance (Augustine 3, 17-‐18; Friedman, Penelope’s Web, 330-‐34) serve to confirm H.D.’s own spiritual giftedness, passed down to her through her grandmother from her great-‐grandmother (Augustine 1). Susan Stanford Friedman has called this H.D.’s “Moravian gyno-‐poetics” and her “gynocentric vision” (Penelope’s Web 352-‐3). Key to this vision, as Freidman’s description suggests, is the female spirit of those Moravian and Delaware ghosts H.D.’s memoir summons. Yet these imaginings are also carefully researched; H.D. annotated the manuscript with a section of detailed “Notes” culled from various eighteenth-‐, nineteenth-‐ and early twentieth-‐century historical sources, most of them Moravian missionary histories 171 and anti-‐Moravian polemic. 85 While H.D. contests some of that historiography in order to recuperate the image of the Delaware and the Moravians, she also accepts a romantic and heroic version of those Moravian missionaries her memoir imagines as its central characters and, in some cases, “ ‘spirit doubles’ ” (Augustine 22). Doing this allows H.D. to recuperate the eighteenth-‐century polemical renderings of these Moravian “antinomians” and refigure them as sexually, spiritually, and politically progressive through their peaceful relations with the Delaware and their belief in a female nature and godhead. Thus, while H.D. is able to affirm part of her vision of peace and kinship with the Delaware through the gender alterity and enthusiasms of the early American Moravians, equally a factor, I will argue, is the Delaware’s perceived status as “women” among the Six Nations even though H.D. does not address this specifically. I explore how H.D.’s spiritually exceptionalist gender narrative was influenced not only by nineteenth-‐century literary and cultural notions of indigenity, but also and formatively by eighteenth-‐ and twentieth-‐century Moravian and Delaware historiography that understood this Pennsylvania nation as feminized and spiritually antecedent, and for both of these reasons, preternatural. Both H.D. and the Moravian missionary historiography on which her memoir draws employ common nineteenth-‐century mythoi of Indigeneity—“Indian” ghosts; Natives as a spiritual and “vanishing race” (Trachtenberg 14 and 17); and the possibility of the way that Delaware were figured sartorially and behaviorally as “women” as, if not a “third gender” designation, an effeminizing one that “introduced [sexuality] into this discourse as a consequence of power struggles in these colonial confrontations, as 172 different interpretations of what it meant to be a man were used to convey different claims of authority and dominance” (Fur 192-‐96). This suggests, more broadly, that these mission and political histories in which the Moravians and Delaware-‐as-‐ women played a part also influence nineteenth-‐century narratives and tropes of indigeneity, and that a non-‐secularly framed resurrection of these collective gender identifications, which bear both the dissonance and the trace of competing and shifting understandings of gender and race across the century, across the Atlantic, and across European and Native cultures, can unsettle our understandings of a developing American nationalism. 86 Mark Rifkin describes relationships to home and to the land, often felt in the quotidian and as a physical extension of the body or “phenomenological surround,” as what he calls “settler common sense”—a logic of affective and embodied relationship to property that feels natural and marks the settler colonial subject even in those white-‐authored nineteenth-‐century literary texts he examines that do not directly figure the Native American (SCS, xv-‐xvi). “My felt sense of possession of my property, such that my senses seem to extend over it as if it were contained within my individual body schema,” Rifkin explains in terms of his own feeling of home ownership, “can be conceptualized as coming at the expense of Indigenous claims to that same space…”(xvi). While H.D.’s narrative is not one of possession, it is one that envisions and feels the land—Bethlehem— as an origin place of her own spiritual and artistic giftedness, as one that is inhabited by Lenape spirits. In this sense—a non-‐secular one informed by both Spiritualism and Moravianism—to what extent does H.D.’s memoir, in its evocation of Native presence unsettle land claims 173 to Bethlehem that would contest settlement? Or do the Delaware function instead, as the origin story for the Moravians, and through the Moravians H.D.’s own, spiritual claims that both encompass and transcend Bethlehem? Here I draw on the use of “unsettled” in a recent Nineteenth-‐Century American literary studies anthology, Unsettled States, edited by Dana Luciano and Ivy G. Wilson, which views “[U]n-‐settlement…not [as] a definitive space-‐clearing gesture, but the critical remapping of multiple formations onto the ‘same’ space in order to activate it differently” (Luciano, “Introduction: On Moving Ground” 10). This collection describes itself as “minoritarian,” defined as “always on the move” and, importantly for my purposes here, as “transformative work [that] takes place through the multiplication of aesthetic, political, and ethical encounters” (6-‐7). This includes encounters with the ghostly and those spatio-‐temporal reorientations Luciano notes are characteristic of haunting in queer studies, critical race studies, and postcolonial studies, and that allow the collection’s essays to “confront[] historical phenomena such as slavery and genocide that defy reckoning… Ghosts not only mark unsettled pasts, but by doing so they unsettle time, undermining linear, singular models of history and causality as they underscore the hybridity of the present and the radical uncertainty of the future”(11-‐12). Luciano’s accounting here of a spectrally informed, and multiply realized, minoritarian nineteenth-‐century American literary studies opens the possibility of a similar return to, and refiguration of, the “Indian” and Moravian spirits in H.D.’s work that would overlay—or rather, unsettle— already critically present, non-‐secular frames of analysis such as psychoanalysis and Spiritualism with a mystical and antinomian 174 Christian enthusiasm descended from German Pietism. Both Renée Bergland and Molly McGarry’s understandings of Native spirits inform my thinking here and will allow me to do, as Luciano suggests, a “critical remapping of multiple formations [of the spiritual] onto the ‘same’ space.” Bergland understands Native American hauntings in nineteenth-‐century literary texts as a cultural “uncanny” that manifests as national guilt around Native violence and removal. As Molly McGarry’s work on nineteenth-‐century American Spiritualism has similarly recognized, Spiritualist conjurings of “Indian” spirits are “ambivalent” exactly because, once conjured, these Native spirits have been summoned and figure into present moment (15; 67). 87 This chapter both pushes backward and forward on these nineteenth-‐century spiritual encounters to consider an American memoir of an expatriate modernist who conjures both Christian and Native American spirits and imagines them, haunting a contested ground, through a spiritual return to Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. Yet given that those Moravian histories on which H.D. draws to write her memoir translate, if not overwrite, Native voices; and furthermore, given that H.D.’s project of authorizing her own spiritual giftedness necessitated a recuperation of not only the Moravians’ mysticism, but also their relationship to the Lenape, to what extent does The Gift’s ghostly unsettling participate in the process of queer settlement? Gender Homes and Middle Grounds The trope of “home” is not limited to employment in nationalist and enthusiastic figurations. It also figures prominently in transsexual narrative, Jay Prosser’s work makes clear—the recognition of a gender category such as “woman,” though “mythic,” a “fictional investment [that] makes desire for locations no less 175 powerful” (205). J. Jack Halberstam raises just such a connection when he cautions that the trans employment of the trope of “home” echoes colonialist discourse; trans “wrong body” narratives of “coming home” and crossing into the “right body,” he notes, also indicate a mobility to which not all gender variant people have access (170-‐171). Related to trans discourse is H.D.’s psychoanalytic understanding of herself as “bisexual,” or both-‐gendered according to Freudian psychoanalysis of the time, but which H.D. understood as un-‐homed (Friedman, Penelope’s Web 310). Yet bisexuality also figures in a Freudian developmental gender and sexual narrative as developmentally infantile and evolutionarily original in a manner similar to the way enthusiastic and nationalist understandings of the “Indian” figure the Native as “primitive.” 88 In a letter H.D. writes to her long-‐time partner and lover Bryher on November 24, 1934, written during H.D.’s analysis with Sigmund Freud, she notes, “ ‘I have gone terribly deep with papa [Freud]. He says, ‘you had two things to hide, one that you were a girl, the other that you were a boy.’ It appears that I am that all-‐ but extinct phenomena, the perfect bi-‐’ (PW 310-‐11). Susan Stanford Friedman’s explication of this conversation concludes, “What Freud’s interpretation freed H.D. to do was stop hiding that she was ‘girl-‐boy,’ the nearly extinct bisexual in a sexually polarized world. As androgyne, she was perfect” (311). Claire Buck emphasizes the uncertainty of “ ‘what [H.D.] hides—her gender or her sexuality’ ” (87, qtd. in Collecott 80). Nevertheless, both H.D.’s analysis of her exchange with Freud, and Stanford Friedman’s unpacking of H.D.’s revelations, emphasize the primitive nature and exceptionality of H.D.’s androgyny and bisexuality. Because it is “nearly extinct,” 176 a pre-‐historical gender in a gender paradigm that has evolved into dimorphism, H.D. is not only special, but “perfect.” Freud himself will connect the phallic valuing of both genders to a “perfect” religion during H.D.’s analysis. In Tribute to Freud, H.D. recalls telling Freud, during one of their sessions, about her Moravian grandfather’s Christmas Eve service. At these services, all children were given a lighted beeswax candle; H.D. describes their ruffled bases of green and red crepe paper in The Gift, as well as the process of using the previous year’s burned-‐down candle stumps to make the coming year’s Christmas putz, or nativity. “The girls as well as the boys had candles?” Freud asks H.D., concluding, “ ‘If every child had a lighted candle given, as you say they were given at your grandfather’s Christmas Eve service, by the grace of God, we would have no more problems… That is the true heart of a religion.’” (H.D., Tribute to Freud, 124). As these examples suggest, “home” for H.D. is a gender androgyny, and a valuation of both genders, that is not only psychoanalytic, but also Moravian. I make these connections to gender in a psychoanalytic discourse that would not develop until the late nineteenth century because my larger project troubles separations between science and religion that allow for the recognition of earlier, more capacious categories of difference such as enthusiasm in which gender alterity plays a queering role. Enthusiastic returns, especially those that seek to reclaim an earlier gender through an earlier faith, are marked by prior racial entanglements that, previously cited scholars have observed or suggested in the secular realm, would link feelings of belonging to nation or land to “feeling Indian” (Trachtenberg 10-‐11). In all of these senses, then, H.D. is returning home in The Gift—to the 177 enthusiastic faith of her ancestors; to her childhood home which became the Moravian’s home after Pennsylvania’s theft of it from, and removal of, the Delaware; and to the “female nature” and androgyny that both her psychoanalytic and spiritual practices believe in as a gender origin story. It is this enthusiastic return to Bethlehem and to the Moravians that H.D. both uses to resurrect, and inveigh against, early American settler violences against, and land-‐grabs from, the Delaware Indians, but that she also needs to authorize her own spiritual and gender-‐ otherness. Her feeling of home, therefore, is a non-‐secular “settler common sense” that depends on both queering and spiritualizing the Delaware. 89 Her enthusiastic return to a geographically materialized gender, spirit, and race perceived as both original and preternatural functions as a queer nationalism 90 that depends upon a resurrection of Moravian-‐Lenape encounters as imagined in Moravian missionary accounts that already figured the Lenape (and the Moravians through the Lenape) as queerly gendered. H.D.’s return to early Moravianism to understand herself as “bisexually” gendered and spiritually gifted—exceptional because of her gender and her genius—depends upon a resurrection of eighteenth-‐ and nineteenth-‐century understandings of native peoples as spiritually gifted and androgynously gendered that are present in the historical and literary accounts on which she draws to write The Gift. I therefore want to put H.D.’s memoir into a trope newly recognized by queer Indigenous scholars: modern and contemporary queer re-‐purposings of Native gender, which are used by the GLBT movement and by queer literary figures to assert and gain recognition for their own alterity. Scott Lauria Morgensen, Mark 178 Rifkin, Andrea Smith, and Chris Finley have recognized these queer mobilizations of Native “third genders,” kinship practices, customs, or spiritualities, which may seem on the surface to be recuperative, as instead troublingly reliant on Western colonial understandings of Native gender and, importantly, on prior centuries’ Euro-‐ American queerings of Native kinship, customs, and gender/sexuality in relation to a settler colonialist state. In other words, these author’s critiques reveal, contemporary queer claims to state recognition and citizenship rights are conditioned upon earlier Native queerings; they further participate in another “Indian removal”—the displacement of Indigeneity from the category “queer” through a political and literary erasure that uses Native difference for the purposes of propping up the exceptional queer. Chris Finley and Morgansen note the way that both Western anthropology and the contemporary GLBT movement have appropriated Native figures of gender alterity such as the berdache and other “third gender” terms that are imposed rather than Native-‐generated to make cross-‐cultural comparisons to the U.S., or use the notion of universal gender and sexual variance as the means of recognition for whites in the GLBT movement. Mark Rifkin contends that, because imperialism has attempted to “make [Natives] ‘straight,’” Native kinship and custom become “a counterhegemonic symbol of resistance to hetero homemaking, queering the norm by citing native customs as a more affectively expansive and communalist model for settler sociality” (When Did Indians Become Straight?” 8). Yet recuperations of Native custom that rely on such Native counterhegemonies have often thwarted “indigenous self-‐determination,” Rifkin cautions. “Both the denigration and 179 celebration of native social structures depend on interpreting indigenous social dynamics in ways that emphasize their cultural difference from dominant Euroamerican ideals as opposed to their role in processes of political self-‐definition” (8). 91 In a similar vein, Scott Lauria Morgensen draws Jasbir Puar’s concept of “homonationalism” in which Puar claims that the white queer subjects’ calls for state recognition happening in the wake of 9-‐11 mobilize a nationalism that queers the Muslim or “terrorist” body. Morgensen applies homonationalism to settler colonialism to “argue that in a white settler society, queer politics produces a ‘settler homonationalism’ that will persist unless settler colonialism is challenged directly as a condition of queer modernity.” In other words, Morgansen claims, “settler colonialism [is] a key condition of modern sexuality on stolen land” that “produces… ‘non-‐Native modernities,’” which he defines as “a settler colonial logic that disappears indigeneity so it can be recalled by non-‐Natives as a relationship to native culture and land that might reconcile them to inheriting conquest” (2-‐3). In all of these critiques, the logics and structures of settler colonialism depend upon figuring the Native body, custom, or practice in a queered relation to land and nation—to the colonial state as both a geographic and political body. Because indigeneity exists in a queered relation to what comes to connote Americanism, citizenship, and the sexualities, genders, and kinship relations on which such logics depend, queer calls for state recognition and citizenship that depend on a “like Native” logic will necessarily reenact “Indian removal” from the queer categories that are seeking recognition, marking them as settler and as non-‐Native, if not white. 180 I consider H.D.’s The Gift as one such example of this second, queer-‐led disappearing act. H.D.’s example, however, is complicated by her mobilization of the Moravians, who I will frame here as early queer exceptionalists. That Moravian missionary John Heckewelder’s history of the Delaware influenced James Fenimore Cooper’s Leatherstocking Tales (Newman 1), which H.D. refers to in her notes to The Gift (237) suggests that H.D. was picking up on a prior melding of Moravian and Delaware. Both “Moravian” and “Delaware” in The Gift figure as a kind of overlapping queerness that encompasses gender and exceeds it. As Morgensen notes, “[m]odern sexuality comes into existence when the heteropatriarchal advancement of white settlers appears to vanquish sexual primitivity, which white settlers nevertheless adopt as their own history” (1). Thus we need to understand Delaware and Moravian gender concurrently, I contend, as their encounters in Moravian histories and in H.D.’s literary re-‐imagining of those encounters suggest an overlap and mutual influence, even though these are not equivalent genderings. For these reasons, just as H.D. did in The Gift, I juxtapose eighteenth-‐century historical associations of the Delaware as “women” with those accusations of enthusiasm and antinomianism against the Moravians that most attracted H.D. to this early American brand of mystical Moravianism, and that I have argued in Chapter 2, prompted the sect’s gender-‐crossing practices, in order to recognize H.D.’s participation in queering of the Delaware through her queering of the Moravians. In The Gift, I argue, “woman” becomes the point of contact between 181 H.D.’s perceptions of Delaware and Moravian spirituality, a double-‐queering she requires in order to envision her own quasi-‐Messianic status. The Walking Purchase When the Moravians—a German Pietist sect who established communities in the North Atlantic colonies to proselytize to the native Americans—shifted their mission activity to Pennsylvania in the 1740’s, they encountered the Lenni Lenape, who they called the “Delawar” or Delaware Indians 92 and who inhabited the area at the intersection of the Delaware and Lehigh Rivers in eastern Pennsylvania known as “Forks,” an area under state control through the Walking Purchase of 1737. 93 Before the Quakers colonized Pennsylvania in the late 1600’s, the Forks region had been the target of attempted colonization by the Dutch and the Swedes in the 1620’s and 1630’s (Spady 19). James O’Neill Spady explains the way that Quakers projected European notions of gender and politics onto the Lenape in their writings, ignoring, for example, Delaware matrilineal kinship networks in which women had political power (28-‐29). Conflict also arose over Lenape and English conceptions of land use: Penn thought he was purchasing “absolute proprietary rights” over land while the Lenape thought they were going to receive periodic, regular payments from Penn in exchange for the right to use their land. Violence between colonists and Lenape resulted (36-‐37). Spady’s account of Quaker-‐Delaware relations contests the more benevolent “elm tree” treaty version of Penn’s Treaty and peaceful relations with the Lenape (20). The Moravians arrived in Bethlehem in the 1740’s, purchasing a 500-‐acre tract of land along the Lehigh River known as the “Allen tract” (Levering 54). There, 182 two days before the Moravian’s first Christmas Eve in Bethlehem in 1740 (57), a small group of Moravian men “shouldered their axes and strolled down the woods through to the Lehigh to look about the “Allen Tract” (57). Anticipating the purchase, they felled the first tree at the place selected by them as a desirable building site, some distance from the river, aside of the “Indian path” that led up from the ford into the north-‐west trail to the mountains” (57). This property was, according to historical accounts, individually owned, having been purchased as part of a larger land grant from William Penn (54). However the Walking Purchase in 1737 removed all Delaware claim to the land of only a few years prior to the Moravian’s arrival, part of a 65-‐mile tract that encompasses the current-‐day Lehigh Valley in eastern Pennsylvania north of Philadelphia (Leiser; “A Walking Purchase”). While the Moravians arrival followed both the Elm Tree treaty and the Walking Purchase, Bethlehem was part of both Penn family land-‐grabs from the Delaware. The Pennsylvania government enlisted the Iroquois to help remove the Delaware from the Walking Purchase lands (Starna 149-‐152). Not surprisingly, the Delaware were resistant to leaving this part of Pennsylvania (50). By the time the Moravians arrived, only a small settlement of Delaware at Welagameka remained in the area known as the Forks of the Delaware (50). Levering describes them as an “obstinate remnant loitering behind” (50)— a “little band,” “suspicious” and “sulky,” “doggedly clinging to Welagemeka as their own, defying legal ejectment and looking upon every white man north of the Lehigh as an intruder” (59). Prior to arriving in Bethlehem, the Moravians had preached among the Mohicans in the Hudson Valley region of New York (Levering 59; Schutt 88). At the 183 same time, Euro-‐Americans in the Hudson Valley were distrustful of both the Mohicans and the Moravians, who they thought “were in league with the Indians in a Roman Catholic plot to support the French” during King George’s War (Schutt 88-‐ 89). These same suspicions about the Moravians and their alliances with the French Indians would contribute to the events at two massacres, both in Moravian settlements called Gnadenhütten, or “Habitations of Grace”—one in Pennsylvania in which Delaware burned alive Moravian missionaries in 1755, and another in the Muskingum Valley (now Ohio) where the Pennsylvania militia slaughtered ninety Moravian Delaware in 1782 (Schutt 89; H.D., “Notes” 272-‐74). H.D. mentions both of these Gnadenhüttens in her “Notes to the Gift,” emphasizing the “white savages” of the second massacre (273). Later in the chapter, I will discuss the way that H.D.’s accounts of Gnadenhuetten downplay the influence of the Walking Purchase as what prompted the first Delaware attack on Moravians. Instead, she repeats a historical account (Levering’s History of Bethlehem) to dispute suspicions that Moravians were under the influence of the French, using the justification that the first Gnadenhuetten was carried out by a “band of ‘French Indians’” (272). Drawing on church histories and missionary accounts, and anti-‐Moravian polemics, which date from the mid-‐eighteenth through the early twentieth centuries 94 , H.D.’s “Notes” recall the mythically rendered story of the Moravian spiritual leader and patron, Count Nicholas Ludwig von Zinzendorf’s July 1742 peace treaty with the Iroquois or Six Nations. At this meeting, Zinzendorf was presented with a belt of white wampum, symbol of peace and “even more, a pledge or pact, thy people shall be my people”) (H.D., “Notes,” 237). 95 This peace-‐pact was 184 the “Promise” made between the Moravians and the Lenape, broken in the “scandal” of Gnadenhütten, the site of a Delaware attack during the French and Indian War in 1755 (Augustine 17-‐18). 96 In this way, Augustine notes that H.D. positions the first Gnadenhütten, near Bethlehem, as the reason both the “Promise” between the Moravians and the Lenape was broken as well as the reason H.D.’s family lost its spiritual “Gift” that seems to represent both spiritual vision and cross-‐racial communion (1-‐4). 97 Contemporary historical accounts suggest that Delaware anger over the Walking Purchase sparked the first Gnadenhütten (Schutt 89; “Walking Purchase [Indians] Historical Marker”). H.D.’s account of the Moravian founding of Bethlehem, copied directly from a translation of George Henry Loskiel’s History of the Mission of the United Brethren Among the Indians in North America (1794), makes no mention of the Walking Purchase when describing Moravian settlement of Bethlehem four years after the 1737 Walking Purchase, noting instead that “a respectable merchant offered to sell [the settling Moravians] a piece of land about ten miles south of Nazareth in the forks on the Delaware,…they resolved unanimously to buy this land and make a settlement upon it. It was wild and woody, at a distance of eighty miles from the nearest town, and only two European houses stood in the neighborhood, about two miles up the river. No other dwellings were to be seen in the whole country, except the scattered huts and cottages of the Indians. In this place, the Brethren built a settlement, called Bethlehem, which by their perseverance, industry and the accession of several colonists from Europe, increased considerably from time to time” (qtd. in “Notes” to The Gift 227). 185 Loskiel’s conclusion, parroted without commentary by H.D., that “no other dwellings” beyond the dismissible “scattered huts and cottages of the Indians”—in other words, a pristine land ripe for settlement, its growth wholly attributable to Moravian “perseverance” and “industry”—also recalls Levering’s description of the Moravians felling their first Bethlehem tree days before Christmas Eve, 1741, beside “the ‘Indian path.’” Levering’s passage continues: It was on a wooded slope crowning a bluff that descended to the Monocacy, Where the most copious spring of the region gushed out of the lime-‐stone bed at the foot of the declivity. Its flow could not be barred by the frost that browned its fringe of ferns, stripped its canopy of birch and maple, and set the rippling surface of the near-‐by stream in a frigid glaze. Perhaps, as they noted the volume of its crystal jet forcing a passage upward through the snow, marked where an easy path descended to the spot and inspected the banks of the creek with a view to constructing the first bridge at that point, they thought not only of a house but of a future town on the ridge above supplied by this abundant fount where multitudes through generations to come, prizing this primitive boon of their goodly place, like the ancient king whose name four of those first settlers bore, would often crave “water to drink of the well of Bethlehem which is by the gate.” (57-‐58) Here, Levering reinforces some of the same themes as H.D.’s description—that the Moravian’s first purchase on the land was proximate to a Native presence, yet one that was discounted in both accounts. H.D., via Loskiel, overlooks the Delaware’s “scattered huts and cottages,” to render the Bethlehem landscape “wild and woody,” 186 virtually deserted because it was unsettled by Europeans; she/Loskiel attributes the growth of the town solely to Moravian “perseverance.” Conversely, the Levering passage does note that missionary David Zeisberger “ ‘felled the first tree at a place selected by them as a desirable building-‐site, some distance from the river, aside of the ‘Indian Path’ that led up from the ford into the north-‐west trail of the mountains” (Levering, A History of Bethlehem 57, qtd. in “Notes to The Gift 270). This passage from Levering’s History of Bethlehem notes a Native trace—a path from river to mountains that suggests the Lenape’s continuing use of a water source and a land the Moravians have just “purchased” and gotten “purchase” on. In all of these accounts, through their traces—paths, huts, cottages—the Delaware make their presence felt and contest historical and literary attempts to disappear and remove them. Yet the Levering passage importantly overlays the American Bethlehem with the biblical Bethlehem, imputing the scene with a “primitive” landscape that is not just natural, but also spiritual. Here, Levering evokes the presence of Christ drawing water, which might also symbolize the holy spirit. This religious myth is then conflated with the Moravian Christians—“like the ancient king whose name four of those first settlers bore”— who are literally named Christian (58). H.D.’s role here both resurrects and memorializes the Lenape. H.D.’s account also shifts the focus of the mission historiography of the Delaware from land theft to broken peace treaties between the Moravians and the Delaware without providing the larger context for Delaware action—the colonial land theft from the Delaware on which Pennsylvania, and Bethlehem, were founded. 98 Yet her account also takes on the enthusiastic gesture of mission histories such as Levering’s to view the 187 Moravian’s mission and geographical presence in Bethlehem as a spiritual mission, a return or rebirth of a primitive, biblical Christianity in the spirit of a Christ whose presence is evoked by the very water source these missionaries have just usurped from Delaware who were in the process of being illegally forced from their land. One of the Levering mission histories on which H.D. drew also remove Delaware of responsibility for the first Gnadenhutten, but also Delaware agency, by blaming the French. Levering’s account does acknowledge the suspect nature of the original 1686 deed that purportedly gave William Penn’s son’s the authority to stage the Walking Purchase that occurred just prior to the Moravian’s arrival in Pennsylvania and that Levering frames as one in a series of Delaware “grievances [that] had accumulated” until, eighteen years hence, “the Indians were cunningly beguiled into alliance with the French and furnished their opportunity, they carried those threats into awful execution with tomahawk and torch…” (30). Levering’s telling acknowledges the wrong done to the Delaware to oust them from their lands, yet paints the Moravian settlers, who arrive in Pennsylvania post-‐Walking Purchase yet settle land that is encompassed in the fraudulently acquired parcel, as removed from responsibility for the swindle (and thus, later, innocent victims of the Gnadenhuetten massacre). In Levering’s words, the Moravians are “pioneers who most particularly had come to the region with peaceable and benevolent intentions towards the savages,” yet “were especially subject to annoyances and even danger from some of this obstinate remnant loitering behind” (30). This “obstinate remnant” were Delaware who lived in a village called Welagameka until 1742 (30). 188 Because it attests to the validity of the Delaware’s “grievances that had accumulated” and simultaneously seeks to absolves the Moravians of blame, Levering’s account must then paint the Delaware as “cunningly beguiled” into partnership with the French. This malleability, and absolution, seem necessary preconditions for the Delaware’s subsequent Christanization and further, for their status as pacifist peacekeepers. In subsequent sections, I explore how Moravian church and mission historiography depends on establishing the Delaware as a liminal figure between settler and Native, a link in a human peace chain, which Delaware called the Chain of Friendship between themselves and William Penn and that, like a link in a wampum belt, connected Moravians and other European settlers to the Iroquois, but as also acted as a buffer against the perceived violences of the Six Nations (Fur 177). Missionary Histories Throughout the memoir, H.D. characterizes the Moravian relations with the Lenape as peaceful and non-‐exploitative. Yet while she does question sentimental nineteenth century narratives of Native Americans such as James Fenimore Cooper’s rendering of Chingachgook or Tshoop, the native American from The Last of the Mohicans, H.D. simultaneously weaves new nostalgic romances about Moravian missionaries and spiritual leaders, sentimental feelings that are, arguably, present in the modern mission histories on which she relies (The Gift 16). Exploring some of these portrayals, as well as the Moravian theology and history of the Sifting Time upon which H.D. draws, will provide a better understanding of the way her narrative may be doing a double duty of recuperation and re-‐colonization. 189 H.D.’s memoir relies on several Moravian histories and mission accounts for its historical information. Most of these are nineteenth-‐ and twentieth-‐century texts, such as one of her main sources, Joseph Mortimer Levering’s 1903 Bethlehem history, and two other twentieth-‐century histories of the Moravian Church and of Bethlehem by Joseph Edmund Hutton. As such, they include church whitewashings of the Sifting Time, a controversial mid-‐century period of “enthusiasm” and mystical antinomianism that Moravian church leaders rejected in the nineteenth century; Atwood describes the way that such historiographical revisioning sought to bring the Moravian Church into line with a more mainstream Lutheranism (“Interpreting and Misinterpreting the Sichtungszeit” 31-‐47). 99 H.D. also turns to James Fenimore Cooper’s fictional account, The Last of the Mohicans; Cooper read another Moravian missionary account by John G.E. Heckewelder, An Account of the History, Manners and Customs of the Indian Nations, Who Once Inhabited Pennsylvania and the Neighboring States (1819) (The Gift 281; Newman 1). Laura Mielke describes the type of sentimental nineteenth-‐century encounter between, for example, the Moravian Delaware Tschoop in Cooper’s Last of the Mohicans as a “moving encounter” —“scenes in which representative of the two ‘races,’ face-‐to-‐face in a setting claimed by both, participated in a highly emotional exchange that indicated their hearts had more in common with their external appearances or political allegiances suggested” that “proposed the possibility of mutual sympathy between American Indians and Euro-‐Americans , of community instead of division”(2). Following Mielke, I consider The Gift’s last scene of ritual communion and name exchange between Lenape and a Moravian who is a stand-‐in 190 for H.D. as such a “moving encounter,” and further, an enthusiastic one. This is because H.D.’s turn in The Gift to a nineteenth century sentimental literary trope of sympathy between Native and Euro-‐Americans itself is predicated on an enthusiastic turn in early American Moravian writings about the Delaware—a spiritual gesture that queers their gender and renders their spiritual lineage “primitive” and exceptional. I will draw on these nineteenth-‐century and modernist tropes of indigeneity, especially as they are figured in H.D.’s memoir through spirit, memory, or ghost, but I also want to return to those late-‐eighteenth-‐century histories and mission diaries that H.D. invokes and that, pre-‐nineteenth-‐century, in the wake of the American revolution, began the historical and theological work of queering and disappearing the Pennsylvania Delaware. H.D. is moving back and forth between earlier and later accounts and understandings of native peoples, and because her memoir seeks to identify with and take the position of the Lenape, showing violences against them, H.D. does undercut some century romantic notions of the “Indian.” An example of this in The Gift might be H.D.’s story of the conversion of Tschoop (Cooper’s Chingachgook), in which the Mohican Delaware fixates a single word of Moravian missionary Christian Rauch’s evangelizing message: blood (“Notes” 239-‐42). H.D. uses a number of sources to recreate this encounter, but the text from which she takes Tschoop’s fascination with blood is J.E. Hutton’s A History of the Moravian Missions (Augustine 282, n. 68.) In an article that compares the overlap in spiritual belief and practice between Moravians and Delaware, Jane Merritt explains that the Delaware 191 gravitated to the Moravian Christ because of his bloody suffering (“Dreaming of the Savior’s Blood: Moravians and the Indian Great Awakening in Pennsylvania” 742). According to Merritt, the Delaware described Christ as “sweating blood” from his crucifixion wounds and therefore considered him “the ultimate warrior captive” (742). The Delaware considered blood, including menstrual blood, dangerous and powerful (742). The power of Christ’s blood figures in both Levering’s and H.D.’s accounts of the encounter between Tschoop and Rauch. Hutton’s account identifies Tschoop as the model for James Fenimore Cooper’s Chingachgook in The Last of the Mohicans (86, note). Not only does Hutton’s commentary proclaim Tschoop a “renowned…drunkard,” his dialogue includes Tschoop expressing doubt that Christ’s blood will cleanse his sin because “I am so given to drink” (86). His conversion happens within the week, and his public account of that conversion in Bethlehem, five years later, positions Moravian missionary Christian Rauch as exceptional in his message, which focused on Christ’s sacrifice on the cross rather than on how to behave (86-‐87). Tschoop tells the conference at Bethlehem, “I could not forget his words. They constantly recurred to my mind. Even when I was asleep, I dreamed of the blood which Christ shed for us” (87). H.D.’s account picks up on Tschoop’s fascination with blood, but largely ignores his conversion. Instead, she begins by juxtaposing Hutton’s history with the final lines of James Fenimore Cooper’s The Last of the Mohicans (Augustine 281, n. 61), a passage in which she depicts Cooper’s representation of Chingachgook as a “half-‐mythical chief and patriarch of the Delaware” (H.D., “Notes” to The Gift 238). 192 She follows with a contradictory image of the novel’s Shekomenko, a trader’s station where Moravian missionary Christian Rauch encountered “a scene of degradation with little or nothing of the picturesque, ritualistic trimmings so dear to the early 19 th century romantic” (238). Taking Tschoop’s point of view, H.D. also focuses Tschoop’s fixation on the word “blood”—but it is a fascination that, in H.D.’s account, centers as much on the rhythm and pulse of the repeated word, and on the lure of Rauch’s poetics, more so than the message the Moravian missionary exhorts (“Notes” 240). It is still the case, however, that Rauch is romanticized in H.D.’s account, still exceptional. H.D.’s account does give voice to Tschoop that is more poetic than the dialogue Cooper puts into the chief’s mouth, a complex interiority with meter, image, and music. Yet it is also still H.D.’s imagining, drawn from a Moravian twentieth-‐century source that is its own imagining. At the same time, H.D.’s “Notes” to The Gift do some work to counteract nineteenth century church revisions to the Sifting Time by reading against the grain of eighteenth century polemics—treating these critiques, in other words, as positives. I read such a strategy as a queering of the Moravians that depends on their earlier queering of the Delaware. Delaware as “Women” In the late seventeenth century, the Delaware began to be referred to as “women,” as a group, in “the diplomatic records of early Pennsylvania” (Fur 161). According to Gunlog Fur, author of A Nation of Women: Gender and Colonial Encounters Among the Delaware Indians, this becomes a common reference by the mid-‐eighteenth-‐century, one that historians have typically understood in two ways: 193 as a slur against the Delaware designed to connote political subordination to the Iroquois, or as a designation that engendered respect and responsibility in Native culture (161-‐171). Fur’s exploration of the various uses and changing meanings of the Delaware moniker “women” in early America, as European ideas of gender enter histories of Delaware, Moravians, and colonial encounters and political negotiations. According to Fur’s analysis in “Metaphors and National Identity,” the book’s fifth chapter, which draws on several previous studies that examine the Delaware’s designation as “women,” 100 early uses of “women” to describe the Delaware as agricultural, skirt-‐wearing peacekeepers who remained fixed on their lands and refrained from warfare began to appear in Euro-‐American accounts as early as 1690 and became common by the mid-‐eighteenth century; this understanding of Delaware gender connected it to kinship and a set of roles and responsibilities that were respected rather than denigrated, and that the Delaware arguably willingly took on in agreeing to be the “woman” to keep peace among the Six Nations (160-‐61). Gender roles were complimentary rather than opposite, and women held the power to both make kin of strangers, a common practice among the Delaware and other nations, as well as to make peace. By the time of Moravian contact with the Delaware, modern European understandings of “woman” as a pejorative term, and women as a subjugated class, had begun to replace earlier understandings of “woman” in accounts of the Delaware (as evidenced by Canestoga’s 1742 speech), especially as the Iroquois aligned themselves with the English and became themselves agents of Delaware 194 removal from Pennsylvania (160-‐168). While probably not a group cross-‐gender, or “third gender,” designation, Fur concludes, the conception of the Delaware as “women” still indicated a non-‐binary gender role, yet one based on responsibilities and kinship rather than on sex and sexuality (194-‐5). The original event reported as changing the Delaware nation’s gender from men to women is reported in a Moravian mission history, George Loskiel’s History of the Missions of the United Brethren. 101 According to Loskiel’s account, the Iroquois nations were fighting and feared they would soon kill one another off. It was agreed, therefore, that one of the nations—the Delaware—would be deemed “the woman” and positioned between other nations in order to keep and negotiate peace. While the Delaware contended it was they who were more powerful than the Iroquois, it was the Iroquois who sent the Delaware this message: It is not profitable, that all the nations should be at war with each other, for this will at length be the ruin of the whole Indian race. We have therefore considered of a remedy, by which One nation shall be the woman. We will place her in the midst, and the other nations who make war shall be the man, and live around the woman. No one shall touch or hurt the woman, and if any one does it, we will immediately say to him, ‘Why do you beat the woman?’ Then all the men shall fall upon him, who has beaten her. (Loskiel 124-‐25) Furthermore, the other (purportedly “men”) nations who did engage in violence against each other could be chastised by the “woman” Delaware nation and they would have to listen, as the final statement of the Iroquois’ message to the Delaware was: “The men shall then hear and obey” (125). 195 Although Loskiel’s telling suggests the Iroquois may have manipulated the Delaware into being the group who would be “women,” it still seems to be an agreement in which they both participated. In declaring the Delaware “women,” then, the Iroquois invited the Delaware to a “great feast,” and announced to them, “ ‘We dress you in a woman’s long habit, reaching down to your feet, and adorn you with ear-‐rings;’ meaning, that they should no more take up arms.” They also anointed them with medicine so that they could heal others and “incline their hearts to peace,” as well as told them to practice agriculture, which was considered the work of women (125). Yet in 1755—the same year as Gnadenhütten and, Loskiel says, the year of an unspecified war between unspecified “Indians and white people, into which the Delaware were enticed by the Iroquois,” another treaty raised the Delaware’s dress to their knees and they were given a hatchet for “defense” (126). At this time, the Delaware protested getting involved in the fighting, asking the Iroquois, “Why do you want to rob the woman of her dress? I tell you, if you do it, you will find creatures in it ready to bite you” (126-‐27). This angered the Iroquois, who were instigated by the English to attack the Delaware, destroying their towns, killing their cattle, and taking captives (125). What is most interesting here, especially in relation to H.D. and the Moravians, is the Delaware’s pacifism, expressed as a reassertion of themselves as “woman.” However, Fur describes a shift that occurred in the mid-‐century as European understandings of gender that were hierarchical rather than egalitarian began to enter the discourse (162). “Woman” in this sense became a slur used to control the Delaware’s role in land negotiation and occupation, claims Fur (162-‐64). 196 In one such widely cited occurrence, a Philadelphia treaty conference around the Walking Purchase in 1742, around the time the Moravians settled in Bethlehem. A Native speaker named Canasatego, representing the Iroquois, employs “women” as a slur against the Delaware to scold them into leaving their Pennsylvania lands after the Walking Purchase: “You ought to be taken by the Hair of your Head and shak’d severely till you recover your Senses and become Sober…We’d conquer’d You, we made Women of you, you know you are Women, and can no more sell Land than Women…” (qtd. in Starna 151; Fur 162). As women, Canastego here contends, the Delaware do not have the power to sell land. While the Delaware had the rightful claim to this land, pre-‐Walking Purchase, the Iroquois in 1742 are allied with Pennsylvania and become the agent of removal of the Delaware from the Walking Purchase lands (Starna 151; Fur 162-‐64). Jane Merritt argues the Iroquois mobilize a European understanding of gender as hierarchical and of woman as “subordinate” through their use of the “Delaware-‐as-‐women” trope to authorize the Walking Purchase (qtd. in Fur 164). Following Merritt then, and taking into account that “purchase” also means to gain power—literally, a foothold—here, the Iroquois use “woman” as a power play against the Delaware to de-‐authorize their “purchase” on the land being claimed by the Walking Purchase. The Delaware are further described as out of their “Senses,” which would seem to be an accusation of drunkenness commonly made against Natives, but could also mean filled with an enthusiastic spirit, a connection to a gendered kind mania that my first chapter connected both to women and to enthusiasm. 197 For these reasons, I want to put this discourse into the context of Sifting Time Moravian enthusiasm, which encompasses understandings of a female soul across an entire group of believers (79), as well as Moravian pacifism (Atwood, Community of the Cross 115). In 1742, the year Conestega employs the term “women” as a slur to scold the Delaware, Moravian leader Zinzendorf makes his peace pact with the Six Nations, which H.D. cites in The Gift, in which he is presented with a belt of white wampum that H.D. declares “a peace-‐treaty, a safe-‐conduct, and even more, a pledge or pact, thy people shall be my people” (H.D. “Notes” 237). This seems similar to the “Covenant Chain” or “chain of Friendship” metaphors of relationship between the Iroquois and Delaware and Pennsylvania leaders such as William Penn that Fur describes as breaking down over the Walking Purchase and that aligned the Iroquois with Pennsylvania officials against Delaware interests (177). While Augustine locates H.D.’s quote in the biblical book of Ruth, such kinship creation among disparate and unrelated groups also reflects both Moravian and Delaware practice (Augustine 9-‐10 and 281, n. 57; Fur 180). One strategy of employing and interpreting the “Delaware-‐as-‐women” metaphor that Fur describes, besides as a way of shaming or subordinating the Delaware, or as “uneasy subservience” of Delaware to Iroquois (Fur 179), is of making friends, or kin, of strangers (180); Fur notes that the English and Moravian meanings of “friendship” meant kinship (181). In 1742, the Moravians had just settled in Bethlehem after having been themselves removed from the neighboring Nazareth, Pennsylvania settlement of Methodist leader George Whitefield because of rumors of their enthusiasms (Levering, History of Bethlehem 51-‐52). Writing The Gift, H.D. is reading anti-‐ 198 Moravian polemic that raises similar charges, and while the Bethlehem version of Moravian enthusiasm, led by the missionary Cammerhof who figures in The Gift, will not ensue until several years hence, there are still ample rumors of enthusiasm and antinomianism around Moravians—sexual excess, financial extravagance, heresy, even sodomy (H.D., “Notes” 259; Atwood 79-‐80). Also at issue was Moravian belief in the Holy Spirit a mother (Atwood 76) and the excessive sensuality they demonstrated (79). 102 All of these associations were in play at the time that meanings of Delaware “women” were multiplying and shifting (Fur 175-‐184). Therefore, my next section looks to Moravian notions of gender and kinship during a controversial period of church history known as the Sifting Time (1743-‐50) (Atwood, Community of the Cross vii). Eighteenth-‐Century Moravian Gender and Practice When fashioning a utopian, cross-‐racial, post-‐national, and arguably post-‐ gender vision of world peace that is The Gift, H.D. looked not only to her childhood memories of Moravianism, but to an earlier, more “enthusiastic” form of Moravianism practiced in the mid-‐eighteenth century that formed the basis of her identification with the Lenni Lenape. Jane Augustine picks up on H.D.’s use of “antinomianism” in Chapter Five of The Gift and connects it to a controversial Moravian Church period in the 1740s known as the Sifting Time (20-‐21). Historian of the Bethlehem Moravians, Craig Atwood, describes the Sifting Time, as church historiography frames it, as a period of “being tested” that the church faced, but overcame (Community of the Cross 11)—an anomalous period of excess in which there was an intense focus on the blood and wounds of Christ, bridal mysticism, and 199 the Holy Spirit as a mother (Atwood, “Interpreting and Misinterpreting the Sichtungszeit” 181 and Community of the Cross 11-‐12 and 154; Fogelman 75-‐77). 103 Moravian theology during the Sifting Time, in particular what Atwood calls “Zinzendorf’s ‘theology of the heart,’” combined bridal mysticism with a hyperfocus on Christ’s crucifixion wounds, blood, and sacrificial death (Community of the Cross 6). Atwood describes the “heart” or Herz as not only the seat of emotions, but of a person’s life-‐force, the center of personality (44). Religious experience, then, involved sensation, state of mind, experience, and feeling, which for Zinzendorf was like intuition, or as Atwood describes it, “the heart’s way of knowing” (44). One subjectively experienced God or other spiritual objects by feeling God in her/his heart (44-‐45). Zinzendorf also incorporated a form of bridal mysticism that dates to the erotic mysticism of 12 th century mystics like Bernard of Clairvaux, who used erotic love imagery from the Song of Solomon to describe the relationship between the believer’s soul and Christ as bride and husband (Peucker, “Wives of the Lamb” 5). German Pietists of the seventeenth century also took up mystical ideas (Peucker, “Wives of the Lamb” 4). In Jesus Is Female, Aaron Spencer Fogelman describes how Moravian beliefs about gender, the Trinity, and ecumenicalism threatened orthodox Protestantism, sometimes resulting in violence against Moravians (6-‐7; 8-‐9). Moravian liturgy described the Holy Spirit as a mother (Atwood 5). While Zinzendorf’s conception of the Trinity was one of “Father, Mother, and Bridegroom,” God also functioned as a 200 Grandfather (Atwood 84). Fogelman argues that Moravian figurations and depictions of Christ also feminized him (80). Paul Puecker has connected Moravian mystical beliefs in a female soul to a cross-‐gendering of some Sifting Time Moravian brothers in Herrnhut, Germany, who came to think of themselves, and even of Christ, as women or “maidens in temporary male housing” (“ ‘Inspired by Flames of Love’” 54; “Wives of the Lamb” 10). Rather than living in nuclear or extended families, the Moravians at Bethlehem lived in a community separated into “choirs”—groups who lived, worked and worshipped segregated by gender, age and marital status (Fogelman 86-‐87; Atwood 8). I conclude, based on the historical work of Puecker, Atwood, and Fogelman, that Moravians during the Sifting Time operated through an erotics of relationality and community that depended on the gender fluidity of not only themselves, but of their Christ and Holy Spirit. In addition to viewing the Holy Spirit as a mother, Moravians also viewed Christ as a comforter and mother who birthed souls through his Side Hole (Fogelman 76-‐80). Fogelman explains that the Moravians depicted Christ as both male and female: Moravian images of the Sidehole resembled “female genitalia”; Christ as also described as motherly and as birthing believers through his Sidehole (77). Moravians of the time also believed in a female soul (79). Peucker writes of a sermon in which Zinzendorf also preached that Christ, too, was “a maiden locked in a male housing” (“Wives of the Lamb” 10). Moravian devotions to the “Side Hole” conjoined believers to Christ and to each other, metaphorically and sometimes literally. Paul Peucker describes how Sifting Time Moravians united with the Side 201 Hole during a mystical communion service; while this was a metaphorical union, there were corresponding physical rituals believers performed such as kissing each other while envisioning kissing the Side Hole and lying on top of one another (“Inspired by Flames of Love” 48, 60). Zinzendorf’s teaching that all souls were female (anima) complicated this erotic communion with the Side Hole as did the sex/gender of the Moravian Christ (Peucker “Inspired by Flames of Love” 53). Because both men and women were believed to have female souls, this allowed Moravian men to “envision their intense love for Christ in the same erotic manner as women did,” using homoerotic imagery and words to depict their longing for Christ (Peucker, “Inspired by Flames of Love” 54). According to Puecker, this desire for Christ was so strong and so sexual that these men “could almost physically feel” his “embrace” during Communion (Peucker, “Wives of the Lamb” 5; see also “Inspired by Flames of Love” 50). Puecker also suggests some Moravian brothers engaged in ritual homosexuality, considering the anus a Sidehole stand-‐in (62). Fogelman confirms both metaphoric and “‘ritualized homosexuality’ in which an inner circle of young men in Herrnhag closely connected to Christian Renatus Zinzendorf penetrated the side-‐wound-‐anus of Christ in spiritual ceremonies” (79). Although in The Gift, H.D. does not explicitly refer to ritual homosexuality among Moravian brothers and instead seems more to focus on the status of all souls as female — the real “secret” of her memoir—she would have been at least familiar with accusations of sodomy and other “antinomian” excesses through the polemical pamphlets she was reading. Jane Augustine concludes that H.D. was drawn to these 202 Moravian mystical expressions of excess and “extremes,” and that she felt “these attitudes signified mystical insight and an entrée into the unconscious, the shared inspired condition that, to H.D.’s distress, disappeared from later Moravianism. She saw joy and celebration and the union of human beings—sexual, social and religious—as part of the “Plan” that she wished to see renewed and carried out in the modern world” (21). Here Augustine’s introduction has just described one such excessive scene of Sidehole worship—one Puecker will also reference and depict as an example of the Moravian brethrens’ literal “penetration” of an illuminated representation of the Sidehole (“Inspired by Flames of Love” 48). During a 1748 choir festival, Moravian brothers projected an “illuminated display of the Sidehole” onto the choir house wall, then walked through it into the choir house (48). Augustine’s account describes a similar scene: the construction of candle-‐lit dioramas of the Side Hole that Moravian Brothers built large enough to climb into (Augustine 21; Sessler 166-‐67). Augustine’s comment suggests that part of H.D.’s intent in The Gift was to recuperate critiques of Sifiting Time Moravianism found in the polemical literature of the eighteenth century, as well as nineteenth-‐ and twentieth-‐century historical and psychological accounts of Sifting Time Moravianism, some of it the church-‐ generated. 104 For example, H.D. cites Henry Rimius, author of several eighteenth-‐ century anti-‐Moravian pamphlets (Augustine 19; 286, n. 191). Many of these critiques center around practices in the Moravian community of Herrnhaag, Germany, where Zinzendorf’s son, Christian Renatus, headed the Young Men’s Choir (Atwood, “Interpreting and Misinterpreting the Sichtungszeit” 174-‐75; Fogelman 203 89). Moravian opponents during the Sifting time cited the group’s same-‐sex practices (79-‐80). H.D. also works with later Moravian histories to reinterpret perceptions of one of the Sifting Time and some of its main players. For example, she takes issue Joseph Mortimer Levering’s harsh remarks, in A History of Bethlehem (1903) about Moravian missionary John Cammerhof, a main character in The Gift who is targeted in two twentieth century accounts of the Moravians as the source of “infecting Bethlehem with the Herrnhaag contagion” (Atwood, “Interpreting and Misinterpreting the Sichtungszeit 180). 105 H.D. both points out Cammerhof’s good qualities and dismisses Levering’s accusations of his “childishness” “foolishness” during the Sifting Time, as Cammerhof, H.D. tells us, was responsible for bringing Christian Renatus’ “enthusiasm” to Bethlehem, albeit in a purportedly muted form (“Notes” 262-‐264). Zinzendorf’s hymns, H.D. notes, “offended many by regarding every woman as a symbol of the Church, as literally Christ’s Bride. There is beauty and poetry in many of these mystical ideas but undoubtedly, the world at large, then as now, is not ready for this revelation” (263). These Moravians’ personal “heart” relationship with Christ also resonates with what Susan Stanford Friedman has identified as H.D.’s personal identification with “ ‘the scattered remnants’ at the fringes of culture”… “Her texts craft a honeycomb, a coral shell, that reaches out toward a broader community of the exiled,” writes Stanford Friedman (“Modernism of the ‘Scattered Remnant’” 210). Two things are interesting about this passage. First is H.D.’s use of “scattered remnant,” which refers to the biblical book Isaiah and its “promise of redemption for 204 the ‘scattered remnant’ of exiled Jews” (210). While Stanford Friedman briefly mentions H.D.’s Moravianism as a reason for her identification with others like the Jews (her reasoning: H.D. learned the Moravians were a similarly persecuted sect), a second, more important point to make here is that Zinzendorf considered the native Americans to be those very Jews-‐in-‐exile; he expressly founded Bethlehem to proselytize to these “lost tribes.” Both Zinzendorf and seventeenth-‐century Quaker and Pennsylvania founder William Penn surmised that Native American tribes were descendants of the ten lost tribes of Israel who migrated to America from Asia across the Bering Straight (Penn 41-‐42; Hutton, A History of the Moravian Missions 90-‐91; Johnson 8; Newman 25). Penn and Zinzendorf compare Native American language to Hebrew (Penn 22; Hutton, History of the Moravian Missions 91) and Native American customs and bearing to Jewishness (Penn 41-‐42; Zinzendorf 19). Zinzendorf further connects the Native Americans of the British North American colonies, especially their “yellow colour prophesy’d in Deuteronomy” (28.22), to this fifth biblical book of Moses that begins after the Israelites have wandered in the wilderness for forty years and ends when they enter the promised land (Deut. 1-‐3, 29, 34). The passage above that Zinzendorf cites to connect Native American skin tone to a lost Jewish people comes amidst a list of blessings and curses the Israelites will reap and suffer, Moses exhorts, if they do, or don’t, follow God’s commandments. A note to the Zinzendorf text translates verse 28.22 as “The Lord shall smite thee… with mildew,” or alternately, as “with yellowness, with jaundice,” with “rust,” or “with an ochrus tint” (Reichel 18). For both Zinzendorf, who noted the Native Americans were “thought to 205 be partly mixed Scythians, and partly Jews of the 10 lost Tribes, which thro’ ye great Tartarian wilderness wandered hither by way of hunting, and so they came farther and farther into ye country (18-‐19)”; and Penn, who believed the Lenni Lenape or Delaware to be “of the Jewish Race, I mean, of the stock of the Ten Tribes, and that for the following Reasons; first, They were to go to a Land not planted or known, which to be sure Asia and Africa were, if not Europe; and that he intended extraordinary Judgment upon them, might make the Passage not uneasie to them…from the Easter-‐most parts of Asia to the Wester-‐most of America” (Penn 41); it is the Delaware’s wandering journey from East to West, from Asia to America, that suggested a Jewish lineage. Zinzendorf and Penn’s gesture to connect the Native nations of North America (in Penn’s case, the Lenape specifically) to the lost tribes of Israel renders the Delaware biblically primitive in a way that would seem to overlap with larger nationalist narratives of Native primitivism that employed Natives Americans as central to a national origin story post-‐Revolutionary War (Trachtenberg 13). In these understandings, Native nations such as the Delaware were considered original, “natural,” and “first Americans” (Trachtenberg, 10). However, one influential nineteenth-‐century Moravian account of the Delaware complicates such an understanding. Andrew Newman notes that an influential Moravian account of the Delaware, John Heckewelder’s An Account of the History, Manners, and Customs of the Indian Nations that Once Inhabited Pennsylvania and the Neighboring States (1819), contains a similar origin story in which the Lenape have wandered from Western America, joined forces with the Iroquois, crossed the Mississippi, fought and 206 defeated the Alligewi tribe who lived on the other side of the Mississippi, then settled on four eastern U.S. rivers— the Delaware, the Hudson, the Susquehannah, and the Potomack (Newman 26; Heckewelder 47-‐51). 106 Newman argues that this “migration tradition,” which Heckewelder claims is based on what Delaware told him (28), “lent itself to an interpretation that supported the cause of Indian Removal” west of the Mississippi. “It allowed scholars to portray the Indians not as autochthones but as arrivistes,” unsettling Native land claims based on indigeneity (30). 107 Such wanderings do not necessarily discount a belief in the Delaware’s “lost tribes” lineage; in fact, they seem to support it. Andrew Newman notes the similarity in “late eighteenth-‐century reception and production” between migration and lost tribe accounts and their influence on Delaware land claims over Iroquois ones: “The migration account recorded by Heckewelder charters the Delawares’ claim to Lenapehoking [the eastern American territory they settled around the four rivers mentioned above] in the same way that Genesis and Exodus charter the Jewish claim to Israel: it was ‘the country destined for them by the Great Spirit’” (Heckewelder 51, qtd. in Newman 29). This comparison suggests that a lost tribes discourse, and the “migration tradition” (Newman 28) that supplanted or coexisted with it rendered native tribes such as the Lenape primitive in the enthusiastic sense: they were the original members of a chosen nation (Israel) that was pre-‐Christian, ye