Imagining Methodism in 18th-Century Britain: Enthusiasm, Belief and the Borders of the Self by Misty G. Anderson (review)

This book declares that it examines how eighteenth-century “popular representations” of Methodism—mostly satires—“functioned in the British imagination” to consolidate a national, secular identity (2). The form of its rich, provocative argument, however, reveals that it is more and something other than that. The author not only examines satires of Methodism but also puts them in dialogue with Methodist thinkers. On the one hand, Misty G. Anderson argues that satirical representations of Methodism are motivated by both fear and fascination. She emphasizes the threat this “heart religion” poses to an “autonomous, cognitively confident, and legally accountable self,” as well as the unsettling proximity of what John Wesley termed an “experimental religion” to Lockean epistemology (57, 4). At the same time, she contends that these satires betray a “longing for intimate connection” (3). They are drawn to Methodism’s openness to the body and the passions, to its less rigid gender and sexual discourses, to the pleasures of a fractured self open to “ecstatic self-resignation,” and to the “democratic, even anarchic” political possibilities of a self asked by “Methodist discourse to reopen its boundaries” (51, 37, 57). In response to this seductive threat, satirists construct a Methodist other against which “the reasonable, modern British self” can be defined (2). This modern self, however, remains tantalized by the liberating possibilities of Methodism.

On the other hand, Anderson does more than track how satire constructs Methodism to demarcate a modern British identity. In this study, Methodism writes back. The chapters document how Methodist leaders, such as John Wesley and George Whitefield, respond to satirists’ exaggerations of Methodist doctrines and practices. The structure of the argument both resists a progressive secularization narrative and undercuts the differences that satires seek to make between Methodist and modern selves: Anderson repeatedly demonstrates how both are concerned with negotiating the anxieties and promises of being a porous self. This structure also implicitly argues for the legitimacy of religious desire—or perhaps not so implicitly, since the book’s introduction is titled “Longing to Believe.” Imagining Methodism positions itself between satires of Methodism and defences of it, between Methodism as a revelatory constitutive other of modernity and as a cure for what ails modernity.

Anderson’s most intriguing rejection of “emancipation qua secularization” is her claim that Methodism “muddl[es] the sex/gender system and its working draft of modern sexuality” (42, 75). She argues, for example, that Henry Fielding’s The Female Husband (1746) uses Methodism “like a sexuality” to make sense of Mrs. Mary/George Hamilton, who passed herself off as a male to marry multiple women (99). Representing Hamilton in terms of the “New Man” of Methodism, Fielding deploys the “Methodist conversion narrative … to explain a series of same-sex relationships for which he has no clear identity category” (73). Instead of anachronistically applying modern sexual identity categories, Anderson approaches eighteenth-century sexuality through religious categories to “better understand” these earlier “epistemologies of the desiring self” (72). Anderson also finds in Methodism some “flexibility within [an] emerging sex gender system” (72). The “feminine tropes and female subject positions” that describe Methodist religious experience, for example, insist on a “passivity and openness to transformation” that ultimately extend “gender boundaries to include their own dissolution” (52, 78). Less persuasively, Anderson argues that John Cleland’s Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure (1748) is also structured by Methodist tropes and narrative techniques of somatic immediacy. Readers will have to decide for themselves whether Fanny’s whipping at the hands of Barvile is an example of “Christian fortitude” (124). But Anderson’s analysis of how Cleland’s narrative relies upon religious eroticism to redeem sex from mechanism is one of several provocative interpretations that open up new ways of thinking about gender and the formation of the secular.

The ambitious, broad engagement of Imagining...