Simon Diss 6

Systems of Self Autobiography and Affect in Secular Early America by Katie Simon A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English and the Designated Emphasis in Women, Gender, and Sexuality in the Graduate Division of the University of California, Berkeley Committee in charge: Professor Mitchell Breitwieser, Co-Chair Professor Hertha D. Sweet Wong, Co-Chair Professor Dorri Beam Professor Michael Mascusch Fall 2012 Copyright 2012, Katie Simon for Quinten Patrick McManmon i Table of Contents Introduction iii Acknowledgements x 1 The Importance of Being Equiano: Authenticity and Earnestness in Gustavus Vassa’s Interesting Narrative 1 2 The Slave Morality of Benjamin Franklin’s Secular Virtue 31 3 Thoreau’s Secular Dirge: Cruelty, Optimism, and Affect in Cape Cod 56 4 Mezmerized Subjects of Gender: Mary Baker Eddy’s Mental Mind Cure 90 Notes 106 Works Cited and Consulted 117 ii Introduction: Autobiography and Affect in Secular Early America The central argument of this dissertation is that American autobiographies from the eighteenth through the nineteenth centuries typically promote ideological programs, and that with the rise of secularism these programs are haunted by the many negative affects they must necessarily disavow. While secularism may not yet have an adequate language for the negative affects—what used to be called sins or demons—it is true that they are everywhere present, even if we can only glimpse their traces. Autobiographical texts in early America struggle to emit these affects within a new world that no longer recognizes them.1 Each of the texts I consider here embodies a particularly dense node of affective resonances, both for considering past moments in which self-narration and political/ideological programs so clearly mesh, but also for thinking through the moment we presently find ourselves in, a moment in which religious and secular world views—despite long-standing latent schisms— now seem polarized to such a degree as to form an almost “incommensurable divide” (Mahmood 64). The events of the first years of the twenty-first century—from 9/11 to the war on terror; from wars in Iraq and Afghanistan to the Arab spring—make clear the need for a new paradigm, for a different language and conceptual framework that could help negotiate, rather than replicate, this intense polarity. This dissertation contributes to recent intellectual debates about the role of religion and secularism in a post-9/11 global economic world, even as it traces the debate back to earlier affective moments of self-narration in early America, moments when the divide was just beginning to emerge. The writers in my study—Gustavus Vassa, Benjamin Franklin, Henry David Thoreau, and Mary Baker Eddy—all found themselves straddling this crucial emergent divide between secular and religious models of self-transformation. They actively sought new modes of expression in a secular world, and worked to reconstitute and reconfigure their systems of self and their modes of self-narration and expression to cover terrain that no longer had a clear language or categories. I believe we can learn much from the messiness of this process, and from the constitutive exclusions their systems and narrations necessarily entail. As Saba Mahmood points out, “[a]ny academic discussion of religion in the present moment must countenance the shrill polemics that have become the hallmark of the subject today” (64). The “shrill polemics” she cites here suggest that it is structures of feeling, as opposed to debatable concepts or ideas, that give the present moment its unique atmosphere.2 But getting at the “feelings” underlying the polarized discussion can be difficult in that the very terms we have to discuss the topic force us down dead roads that depict religion as unthinking emotion and iii secularism as unfeeling thought. Two faulty assumptions have by now been widely discredited by scholars theorizing secularism. The first discredited assumption is that the secularization narrative is true. The secularization narrative or thesis, long promoted by historians, critical theorists, and philosophers, posits not only that the world in general has increasingly become more secular and most certainly will continue to do so, but also that this process would install an apogee of progress and emancipation for all. According to Janet R. Jakobsen and Ann Pellegrini, the “developmental aspect of the narrative” first came into question under the scrutiny of postcolonial and post-1960s critics, and in the context of a world-wide recession in the 1970s. “Were postcolonial nations ‘developing’ through the adoption of modern capitalism? . for many people in many parts of the world this narrative did not accurately describe their realities” (Jakobsen and Pelligrini 9). The second widely held assumption taken to task by most theorists of secularism (Taylor; Brown; Jakobsen and Pelligrini; Mahmood) is that secularism is not only binaristically opposed to religion, but also that in that binary “secularism represents rationality, universality, modernity, freedom, democracy, and peace” and that “religion (unless thoroughly privatized) can only present a danger to those who cherish those values” (Jakobsen and Pellegrini 9). Here the affective atmosphere of “shrill polemics” can be seen to reside in the high stakes attached to any discussion in which religion is mentioned or secularism is queried. For to question the deeply entrenched conflation of secularism with universal progress, or to query binaristic definitions that admit no nuance, in this atmosphere, is tantamount to attacking values like peace, freedom, and intellectual critique. It seems particularly crucial to understand terms like religion and secularism now, and to think through these narratives and assumptions, in light of the irrationality of the discussion on all sides. To do so, we may need to think about the key terms mobilized in this dissertation: affect, secularism, and autobiography. In considering the topic of the “shrill polemics” underlying the present discussion of religion and secularism, for example, and in order to understand the various earlier historical moments this dissertation focuses on, we need to move away from thinking of emotion as the privatized domain of individuals and consider the very different valence that the term “affect” evokes. The term “affect” is meant much more broadly than the term “feelings”—it is a capacious term whose theoretical implications are only recently being explored, and much work remains to be done.3 Affects are energies mobilized by ideas or underlying structures of thought; they are “transmittable” from one body to another; they are physical presences sensed in a room, a crowd, or a text; they cannot be reduced to the container of the bounded individual, nor can they be understood merely within the framework of psychoanalytic theory. Indeed, to engage with the critical discourses of affect theory, as this project does, is to ask “[h]ow might emotion—taking on then iv decidedly affectual qualities—be reconsidered without requiring place-positions for subject and object as the first condition?” (Seigworth and Gregg 8). From the mid-eighteenth century on, American autobiographical texts attempt to organize emotion for the purpose of reasonable, rational self-reform, self- consciously adopting what critics have only recently been theorizing as “secular affect” (Mahmood). Moreover, they do so in a way that explodes the commonsense distinctions between subject and object that a genre like the autobiography would seem to rely upon. Like earlier spiritual autobiographies in which religious affect structures a teleology of conversion, these systems of self, as I call them, are meant to sway converts to the cause, be it capitalist accumulation, secular reason, or the promotion of nationalistic agendas. Systems of self bundle subjectivity, ideology, and affect into attractive lures, creating model subjects to be admired and emulated. To this end, they provide readers with concrete methods offering the promise of self- transformation, giving them practical steps to take so that they, too, can achieve the idealized secular subjectivity advertized by the autobiographical narrator. Just as these texts mobilize affect towards teleological ends, I argue, they are themselves mobilized by the affect they must necessarily deflect, a move that is all but invisible when one adopts a critical lens assuming that the secular stands binaristically opposed to the religious. The constitutive disavowals of secular and religious modes of being give systems of self an alternative structure, one that can contradict or compete with the sequential presentation of a life story advertising teleological ends. Haunting the ideology of progress in these autobiographical texts are the traces of unrecoverable losses, wells of unacknowledged, incalculable affect. I read these traces as the sorrows that capitalism, industrialism, and the rise of secular civil society leave in their wake, and as the aspirations for a better world than the narrative of secular progress would seem to provide. American literature is replete with the figure of the optimistic, idealistic, and earnest autobiographical narrator—a subject able to ingeniously and benevolently reflect the infinite possibilities of secular progress. My study argues that such optimistic autobiographical presentations are often constituted in tandem with an intense negativity driven

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