Hard-Hearted Women: Sentiment and the Scaffold

To dramatize his argument about the disappearance of torture as public spectacle, Michel Foucault juxtaposes the graphic drawing and quartering of Damiens the regicide in 1757 with a regimented schedule for penitentiary inmates published eighty years later. Flesh torn, wounds doused with molten liquid, Damiens’s tortured body horrified onlookers into submission. In this way, public execution served as a “moment of truth,” a scene of public expiation that solidified state power by publishing the prisoner’s “crime and the justice meted out to him by bearing [the truth of what he had been charged with] physically on his body” (43). A century later, Foucault argues, the object of punitive discipline had shifted from the body to “the modern soul,” the product of a new economy of punishment (23). Subsequent histories of American punishment have followed Foucault’s model, tracing the historical shift from a colonial-era display of the body to a nineteenth-century discipline of the soul.¹ This contrast usefully distinguishes colonial-era punishment from the modern penitentiary’s technologies of power, architecture, space, and disciplinary regimes.

But Foucault’s theory of public punishment does not adequately explain the tenor and purpose of colonial American execution accounts, which sought to produce “a moment of truth” not by torture, nor through the mere spectacular display of the body, but by promising access to the soul of the condemned. The condemned galvanized spectators because she or he stood seemingly on the precipice of eternal salvation or damnation. Ministers overseeing a public execution strove desperately to (re)produce this feeling of immediacy both in the condemned and in the spectators, which meant making both parties open and receptive to God’s saving grace. While modern readers tend to find these ritual performances rote and formulaic, ministers, spectators, and often the condemned themselves expressed deep interest in the persuasive and affecting qualities of execution sermons and confessions. It was not enough to have the condemned confess guilt or recite the familiar narrative of sin’s slippery slope from disobeying one’s parents or failing to observe the Sabbath to committing murder. Instead, the narratives sought to assess and convey the sincerity and felt urgency of the condemned’s spiritual readiness for death.² This meant a complex rendering of the body on the scaffold, one with both a surface (capable of expressing gesture, posture, and other semiotics of penitence) and an interior, defined most crucially by the heart—the seat of both emotion and spirituality and, hence, an invaluable space for representing the process of religious conversion. As a result, the execution rituals that developed in colonial New England were variations on early modern anatomy theaters, laying bare the interior—the heart—of the condemned in order to move spectators to self-examination and spiritual knowledge.³

While any prisoner on the scaffold served as a potential vehicle of affect, women were more frequently used to dramatize both the hard-heartedness of sin and the heart-melting processes of religious conversion and confession. This is especially evident through the 1740s, the period when Protestant spiritual practice heavily shaped the form and function of published execution accounts prior to the genre’s gradual secularization. Thus, modifying Foucault, I argue that execution’s gendered power effects shape its power affects, its ability to produce an affective response in the condemned and in those watching her or his execution. Replacing the body of Damiens with the bodies of Sarah Threeneedles, Esther Rodgers, and Margaret Gaulacher allows us to see the lesser-understood mechanisms of affective exchange at work in early American execution rituals, transactions grounded not only in Protestant spiritual practice but also in shifting scientific and medical understandings of the body. By asking scholars of punishment to think more rigorously about what it means when the body of a woman becomes a figure not merely of public shame but also of communal identification, embodying the wider social body’s possibilities of reform and redemption, this essay complicates modern theories of punishment that are shaped by the assumption that the ritual of the scaffold can produce a kind of truth.

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