The Tears of Rachel: Lament and Affective Improvisation in Mary Carey's Spiritual Dialogue, Meditations, and Poems

This paper places seventeenth-century writer Mary Carey's elegies for her lost children in the context of her complete manuscript, a life narrative that combines elements of the mother's legacy and the confessional narrative with a dialogue between body and soul. My goal is to examine the poems' emotional work in a devotional context that dramatizes the regulatory power of Carey's "emotional community." Using recent work on affect theory, I argue that embodied "affections" that are pushed to the margins (literally) of her prose work find expression in her poems--even at the cost of contesting the poems' own explicit semantic meanings--by way of powerful distortions and blockages at the prosodic level. These features, which I associate with the tradition of performed oral lament (and particularly maternal lament), create a contestatory space for Carey's silenced maternal body to make itself felt as a force that has the potential to disrupt deeply ingrained aspects of her emotional habitus.