Sacred Estrangement: The Rhetoric of Conversion in Modern American Autobiography by Peter A. Dorsey (review)

78Rocky Mountain Review enterprise incidentally help to clarify the need for quite different discourses in literary and cultural study, such as do draw their explanatory power from present-day intellectual developments and do incorporate awareness of their own identities as modes of discourse. LOUISE SCHLEINER Washington State University PETER A. DORSEY. Sacred Estrangement: The Rhetoric of Conversion in Modern American Autobiography. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1993. 214 p. In her recent book on American women's conversion narratives, Virginia Liesen Brereton calls for a comprehensive investigation of the "effect of conversion language on the rest of culture" (From Sin to Salvation: Stories of Women's Conversions, 1800 to the Present [Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 1991], 125). Peter A. Dorsey's Sacred Estrangement: The Rhetoric of Conversion in Modern American Autobiography goes a long way to meeting this challenge, and it does so meticulously and eloquently. Tracing the use of the conversion narrative from its Christian prototypes through its AngloAmerican Puritan adaptations to its emergence in secular autobiography, Dorsey shows how a specific narrative tradition of self-conception has come to dominate not only the field of American self-writing but, more significantly , the way in which ordinary individuals construct their identities vis- à-vis social authority in American culture. Thus, for example, the essentially private, unarticulated experience of conversion to Christianity of St. Paul, expanded in the Book ofActs into a rhetorical/ideological model for proselytizing individuals, later to be developed by St. Augustine into a much emulated genre of self-writing becomes, for New Englanders, both a prerequisite to church membership and (for male converts) the key to vote in colonial elections. Not surprisingly, Dorsey locates the secularization of the spiritual autobiography form in Rousseau's Confessions which, he argues, introduces the problem of reconciling a growing emphasis on the individual with the social necessity of acculturation. Rousseau uses conversion rhetoric to subvert its original socializing function, breaking from the restrictions of the community in order to reveal an authentic, solitary self. The conversion narrative thus takes on an "antisocializing" function which shifts its deployment from that of a "metaphorical equation" to one grounded in "metonymy." The self now becomes split from its socializing ground, making any number of variants of self possible, revealing the emptiness of the rhetorical construct itself . One such variant can be found in DeQuincey's Confessions ofan Opium Eater in which, Dorsey argues, a bit oversimplistically, divine authority becomes substituted by opium. If DeQuincey's addiction initially produces a socializing impulse, it inevitably betrays its promise and leaves its narrator Book Reviews79 despondent and suicidal. Dorsey draws another example of the secular writer's failure to convert from Melville's Typee. A fictional autobiography, Typee illustrates more imaginatively the danger of submitting to a specific social ideology. Melville's protagonist, Tommo, wants to be accepted by the cannibalistic Typee society in which he finds himself. However, at the moment of initiation, he rejects his "conversion" as false. Here the process of acquiring culture is appropriately linked to inscription on the body; Tommo's "fear of being tatooed" indicates his aversion to being permanently inscribed within any given set of practices and beliefs. Dorsey's distinction between individuation and socialization in this and subsequent chapters certainly highlights how conversion narratives function differently in secular self-writing than in traditional spiritual autobiographies . Yet it seems to me somewhat misleading to polarize the social and the individual without coming to terms with the social value of "antisocialization ." After all, writing an autobiography is not really an antisocial act. Rousseau's hatred of Parisian culture, DeQuincey's interminable addiction , and Tommo's uncritical primitivism are all manifestations of the desire for an alternative form of social life, perhaps only to be adumbrated reader by reader, in some imagined future. Dorsey further traces the use of the conversion narrative in secular selfwriting through the "empirical reformation" of nineteenth-century writers like J.S. Mill, Harriet Martineau, and Elizabeth Cady Stanton. Mill's adaptation of conversion discourse, if somewhat ironic given Mill's dislike for "transcendental and mystical phraseology" (Autobiography of John Stuart Mill [New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1924] 172), is fitting because, according to Dorsey, it signifies...