Beyond Narrative: The Conversion Plot of John Dane's A Declaration of Remarkable Providences

The privileged place in early American literature currently held by personal narratives seems secure, despite the fact that extant texts do not often render a view of interiority that is familiar (or even intelligible) to the modern, secular reader. The earliest accounts of Puritan conversion prove particularly resistant to creating a sense of individual identity, largely because these narratives exhibit, in Edmund Morgan's words, a "pattern . . . so plain as to give the experiences the appearance of a stereotype" (91). The oral "confessions" required for membership in early New England gathered churches virtually guaranteed that at some point every Puritan "saint" would have cause to describe his or her own unique spiritual journey in terms of a recognizable, orthodox morphology.¹ The brief, apparently formulaic, sometimes incomplete lay "confessions" pose the most extreme version of the problem that seems to stymie all modern readings of Puritan conversion narratives at some point or another. Whether composed by minister, poet, or virtually anonymous lay person, early autobiographical testimonies appear to emphasize scriptural proof-texts, vague details, and orthodox interpretation over the personalized rendition of experiential phenomenon, leading to the conclusion that the successful narrative of conversion is the one that subordinates subjective interpretation and biographical idiosyncrasy to scriptural citation and soteriological predictability.

With lay confessions, such as those recorded by Thomas Shepard, John Fiske, and Michael Wiggles worth, the problems of narrative coherence and psychological legibility are particularly noticeable due to several factors. First, the primary function of these confessions was as testimony for admission to membership in gathered churches. Although they held that election was known only to God, New England Puritans sought to create communities of "Visible Saints," those who had offered a convincing account of their faith and spiritual state. Accordingly, applicants for full membership in the early New England churches had to convince ministers, elders, and laity of their grounds for assurance. There could, of course, be no absolute formula by which an individual could recognize the signs of redemption, but ministers in New England came to identify and preach a predictable morphology of conversion that corresponded with the "ordinary means" of God's saving his elect. The clerical role in preaching, ministering, and recording conversion constitutes a second problem in reading early narratives. The extant narratives often break off abruptly—presumably when the elders and ministers are satisfied with the testimony—and frequently seem to reiterate the theological and pastoral emphases of the recording minister himself. Consequently, these narratives may preserve the most pivotal expressions of personal, spiritual experience in writing, but the very act of preservation appears to mute the individual speaker.

Even more detailed, unmediated narratives tend to disappoint our current preference for the assertive subjectivity of modern "selfhood."² Regardless of the idiosyncratic attractions of some longer texts—Thomas Shepard's vulnerably narcissistic guilt complex, Anne Bradstreet's clear-toned negotiations of family, gender, and sainthood, Anne Hutchinson's seditious and inspired certitude—all seventeenth-century Puritan narratives demonstrate fundamental adherence to still-vexing generic considerations. One important approach to this problem has treated conversion narratives as documents that either confirm, deny, or qualify an understanding of intellectual history.³ The other main approach, which considers these narratives as primarily literary texts, variously seeks to justify the claim of early American (and particularly Puritan) writing to constitute a "genuine literary realm" (Caldwell 36). Two pioneers of this approach, Daniel B. Shea and Patricia Caldwell, illustrate competing modes of establishing the literary claim of early narratives. While Shea's foundational study tends to assess spiritual narrative in relation to other literary examples, often in anticipation of later developments in the genre of autobiography (along with the attendant connections to the development of the early novel), Caldwell seeks to establish, with the much more restricted set of "confessional" texts, the New England difference of expression and "some of the first faint murmurings of a truly American voice" (41). Ultimately, approaching lay narratives as primarily autobiographical writing—deviating from or anticipating later developments of the genre, as the case may be—places frustrating...