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Abstract
Scholarship often views 18th-century criminal and execution narratives (sermons, last words), as hegemonic texts; this project looks at their more fluid interplays of power, affect, and performativity. Overall, I argue, we must situate the execution genre amidst a growing culture of sentiment, and consider the genre's complex deployments of affect and sympathy.
Ch. 1 offers a historical and theoretical overview of the 18th -century American genre. Ch. 2 analyzes how Samuel Danforth's execution sermon Cry of Sodom (1674) shapes sexual discourse in the colonies; extending Michael Warner's insights into the homosocial possibilities of Covenant ideology, I compare the sodomitical behavior that the sermon seeks to condemn to the affective zeal between men that the sermon works to celebrate. Chapter 3 analyzes "rhetorics of concealment" in two waves of execution narratives by or about women convicted of neonatal infanticide. I contrast 1690s-era narratives, which express cultural anxiety over female "hard-heartedness," to Great Awakening-era narratives, which celebrate the "naked" power of the spiritually-receptive woman. The Narrative of Esther Rogers (1701) demonstrates the genre's increasing willingness to use the condemned as a vehicle of identification and desire.
Chapter 4 explores the complex meaning of Indian death by mid-century. The Faithful Narrative...of Patience Boston (1738) and Eliphalet Adams's A Sermon Preached on the...Execution of Katherine Garret are multivocal texts that, on one hand, stage scenes of "imperialist nostalgia" for white audiences. Conversely, both Indian servants use their role as "vehicles of affect" for different ideological ends, articulating their feelings of loss and displacement and protesting colonization's effects on their Indian bodies. By 1770, scholars argue, the genre embodied the "social turbulence" borne of increasing cultural pluralism. But, I argue in Ch. 5, we need not privilege the narratives of disadvantaged white men to see the "revolutionary" impulses of late eighteenth-century execution narratives. Mohegan minister Samson Occom's Sermon on the Death of Moses Paul (1772) testifies to the social tensions affecting late eighteenth-century Native communities. Occom deploys a counter-rhetoric of sympathy meant to challenge the patronizing outpouring of "downward sympathy" so common in revolutionary-era sentimental discourse.
