"I Consoled My Heart": Conversion Rhetoric and Female Subjectivity in the Personal Narratives of Elizabeth Ashbridge and Abigail Bailey

Harde, Roxanne, Legacy: A Journal of American Women Writers

When they touched their hearts, they touched their deepest faith. If
they could deceive others with their tongues, they could never deceive
themselves in their hearts.... Only there could self examination be
effective. Only there could God's will be known.
Norman Pettit, The Heart Prepared

Sometime before her marriage to Aaron Ashbridge in 1746, Elizabeth Ashbridge wrote the first-person account of her religious conversion to Quakerism. The narrative follows the general pattern of colonial New England conversion narratives, the particular conventions of the Quaker conversion account, and is inscribed by patriarchal ideologies; yet Ashbridge works within these circumscriptions to structure a conversion rhetoric that defines herself as the empowered speaking subject. Several decades later, after her divorce from Asa Bailey in 1793, Abigail Abbott Bailey wrote an autobiography that is a narrative of established faith but also placed within the pattern of conversion. The trials she suffers at the hands of her husband form an extended test of faith that is written, like that of Ashbridge, wholly within contemporary cultural convention and circumscription. While Ashbridge centers the "Self," of which she remains constantly aware, in the midst of seeking and being tested by God, Bailey enters into an earnest "I-Thou" discourse with God, through which she structures her own sense of self. Ultimately, my concerns lie in the projects these women undertake, Ashbridge on her way to conversion and Bailey after her conversion, to articulate their subjectivity and to understand the workings of their lives in the rhetoric of conversion and faith, and I see the essence of these projects as prefiguring today's feminist theology. (1) I argue that Ashbridge and Bailey rely on conventional religious rhetorical structures to define God as their key external referent and to define their hearts as the internalization of that referent. As these women embrace and claim patriarchal rhetorical strategies, they also claim an empowerment made evident by their resistance to adversity, subvert the circumscription of expected female behavior, and appropriate and integrate power into the feminine voice.

My reading of Some Account of the Fore Part of the Life of Elizabeth Ashbridge (1774) and the Memoirs of Mrs. Abigail Bailey (1815) begins with both women's reliance on the rhetoric of the "heart prepared," a rhetoric that Norman Pettit finds essential to the Calvinist conversion narrative. Specifically, I argue that Ashbridge and Bailey both position their hearts as logogic sites in a rhetoric of self-definition in relation to their husbands and in relation to God. (2) In their struggles with their husbands and their faith, the heart becomes, for Ashbridge and Bailey, the logical site for the confluence of sensual and spiritual meaning in the instance of Logos, the Word made Flesh. As Calvinist women in covenantal marriage, and with the heart culturally designated as the site of all sentiment, these women were meant to dedicate their hearts to their husbands. At the same time, the heart was also seen as the seat of faith--in keeping with its etymological bases since all ancient forms of the word "faith" define it as the resting of one's heart--and they were meant to rest it on God. I suggest that these women write the heart, instead of the mind or the soul, as logogic site, because their conflicts were rooted in both man-woman relationships and God-human relationships.

In terms of the heart as a secular site, Ashbridge's and Bailey's inheritance goes back to the Bible's positioning of the heart as the seat of all emotions, as it does in the Song of Songs, and to early Renaissance and American colonial literature that sets the heart as the particular site of romantic love, as does the poetry of Edmund Spenser or Anne Bradstreet. In terms of the heart as the site of faith and religious understanding, the meaning that Ashbridge and Bailey inherited from early Puritanism is best articulated by Pettit: "[B]eyond the voice, behind the conscience, the heart told them the truth about themselves and their relation to God" (1). (3) The connection between the heart and sacred experience continues today. As feminist theologian Elizabeth A. Johnson points out, "God is that on which you lean your heart, that on which your heart depends" (5). (4) In their use of Calvinist conversion rhetoric, Ashbridge and Bailey lean their hearts on God, but they also make the heart a discursive space in which they understand their faith by building a personal and authorizing relationship with God.

Rodger M. Payne notes that early American conversion narratives adopted the conventional language of salvation but reformed these concepts into a discursive form that sanctified personal choice. As Ashbridge and Bailey consider their salvation, the heart becomes the center of a discourse between themselves and God, a discourse that eventually insists on the recognition of their subjectivity, their speaking "I" empowered by its experience with the divine "Thou." The heart, then, becomes the site of divine Logos, God's Word made flesh, the union made by Jesus of matter and spirit, bodily nature and heaven. I find that Bailey, in particular, relies on the christological Logos as the bridge between God and her heart, which in William J. Scheick's terms becomes her celebration of the Incarnation. As both women find their faith sorely tested, they reference all experience against their hearts in order to decide their course of action. In so doing, they become able to defy the wills of their husbands and yet remain within their chosen religious traditions.

My claim concerning Ashbridge's and Bailey's process is a strategy Nancy F. Cott finds in nineteenth-century women's conversion narratives. Cott argues that women's submission was consistent with social norms, but "this submission was also an act of initiation and assertion of strength by female converts" as they forged a direct relation with God that allowed them to bypass men's authority for God's (21). With the heart as a loaded cultural inheritance, Ashbridge and Bailey set their hearts as the referent by which they know God and their state of grace--before, during, and after conversion--and by which they know their husbands and the states of their married lives. As they examine their hearts to discover their relationship with God, they recognize themselves as worthy participants in their own state of grace.

While I find Scheick's discussion of the logogic site highly provocative, I question his argument in Authority and Female Authorship in Colonial America regarding the discomfort Puritan women experienced when they expressed their sense of identity (1). (5) Scheick describes these occasions as logonomic conflicts and finds in them "an author's uneasy attempt to negotiate between orthodox and personal authority" (3). Sacvan Bercovitch focuses on this sort of troubled negotiation when he discusses the exemplum fidei, the Puritan community, "who by faith alone were all one in Christ," and argues that "for both the believer and the organic body of believers the way to salvation lay in an internalized, experiential reliving of His life" (10). However, Bercovitch argues that although this awareness of interiority leads to a growing self-consciousness in Puritan writings, "self examination serves not to liberate, but to constrict; selfhood appears as a state to be overcome" (13). Instead of Scheick's and Bercovitch's suppositions that subjectivity is compromised to some degree in the process of conversion, I posit that their very submission to God empowers Ashbridge and Bailey in their spiritual autobiographies. (6) While Bercovitch looks to early Puritan Richard Baxter's mandate that "the very names of Self and Own, should sound in the Watchful Christian's ears as very terrible, wakening words" (17), Ashbridge and Bailey use those words with frequency and assurance; they bypass the terror and embrace the wakening. (7) As I will show in my reading, by centering their faith in their hearts, these women found that belief in a just God necessitated changes in their lives and that belief in Christ necessitated recognition of themselves as valuable and worthy of love.

ELIZABETH ASHBRIDGE'S "PROUD HEART"

Critical interpretations of Ashbridge's account tend to set the woman within her text as an autonomous subject and to read her rhetorical strategies as a fiction-like enterprise as she reconstructs her past self and history. (8) Approaching Ashbridge and Bailey in terms of feminist theology, however, suggests an alternative reading of these texts. I follow Johnson's definition of feminist theology as a "reflection on religious mystery from a stance which makes an a priori option for the human flourishing of women" and her argument that when women's suffering and its causes are analyzed and when women's agency is brought to light, "then conditions exist for a new interpretation of the tradition" (17-18). I see in both Ashbridge and Bailey new interpretations of their traditions.

Ashbridge's move to define and value her own subjectivity, through her religion and the autobiographical practice by which she assigns meaning to her life, is such a theology. While Daniel B. Shea suggests that Ashbridge's "narrative demonstrates that autobiography need not …

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Publication information: Article title: "I Consoled My Heart": Conversion Rhetoric and Female Subjectivity in the Personal Narratives of Elizabeth Ashbridge and Abigail Bailey. Contributors: Harde, Roxanne - Author. Journal title: Legacy: A Journal of American Women Writers. Volume: 21. Issue: 2 Publication date: June 2004. Page number: 156+. © 2008 University of Nebraska Press. COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale Group.

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