Awakening the Inner Light: Elizabeth Ashbridge and the Transformation of Quaker Community

Of the many Protestant sects that emerged from the Reformation, the Society of Friends—commonly known as the Quakers—was one of those most aware that living language could ossify when formalized in rote prayers, tired rituals, or formulaic narratives. At least in principle, they relied wholly upon the spontaneous illumination of the "Inner Light" to prompt their members to speak, and to give those speakers a fresh and vital language with which to break their silence, and then to preach or pray.¹ In doing so, they rejected the liturgical and homiletic practices of churches whose reformations had settled into administrations, whose fiery critiques had droned into worn refrains, and whose prophecy itself had become univocal with the culture it set out to reform. In both Catholic and Protestant churches, Friends had seen the words of living religion become estranged from their original meanings and from the spiritual uses for which they were created. However, the writings of these early Quakers did not anticipate that the Quaker testimony could itself ossify into an empty terminology under the pressure of historical developments.

In what follows, I will argue that such pressures in the American colonies did threaten to eclipse this model for religious testimony by the middle of the eighteenth century, and that the Quaker autobiography of Elizabeth Ashbridge counters these pressures by taking the tired language of the Society and making it strange, once again.² Ashbridge (1713–55), a Quaker preacher, wrote Some Account of the Fore Part of the Life of Elizabeth AshbridgeS in the 1740s or early 1750s in colonial Pennsylvania.³ It dramatically recounts a young female immigrant's troubled early life and eventual conversion in the Protestant American colonies, which, sociologically, were fast changing. During the years of the Awakening, there arrived in Quaker meetings religious enthusiasts, often itinerants of poorer backgrounds, who, much as Quakers had done nearly a century earlier, called for reform, disrupted assemblies, and behaved in ways that both disregarded and challenged the norms of established Quaker culture. Such arrivals illuminated the gap between the respectable middle- and upper-class citizens many Quakers had become, and the scrappy outsider community they once had been and still considered themselves, in many ways, to be. As I shall argue, Ashbridge's Life, like the Awakening's evangelists, addressed this change by using Quakers' midcentury discourses of "otherness" and the "Inner Light" in ways that recalled these terms' earlier meanings. Simultaneously, her Life presented a new exemplum of Quaker piety. To do so, it reapplied the rhetoric of "otherness" and the "Inner Light" to claim prophetic rhetorical authority within the community for a working-class immigrant woman whom 1740s Quaker society was less willing to accept than its theology might have suggested.⁴

Recently, scholars have assessed Ashbridge along other lines of inquiry. Etta M. Madden has focused upon the "unique bodily experiences" portrayed in Ashbridge's text, arguing that these not only differentiate her Life from other Quaker autobiographies, but that they also exemplify an important common feature of Quaker discourse—that Quaker beliefs allowed physical bodies, as well as inscribed texts, to speak truths and be read by others (172, 174–75). To make her case, Madden must contend with William J. Scheick, whose recent discussion of Ashbridge argues that despite Quakers' expanded role for women, Ashbridge reinscribes patriarchal authority through "semiotic equivocation[s]" in her treatment of theatricality, obedience, and disobedience (99). Both readings extend our understanding of Ashbridge's text and the discursive practices available to Quaker Life writers. However, neither discussion, nor those of Ashbridge's few earlier readers, considers the ways in which her text directly engages its historical moment, using her "unique bodily experiences" to address colonial Quakers' faltering midcentury piety.⁵

In contrast, my argument rests on a historical fact that sets Quaker religious practices within a specific context: Ashbridge wrote at a time when colonial Quakerism labored under multiple cultural strains. The Great Awakening, the Indian crisis in Pennsylvania, and the developing Quaker reform movement simultaneously drew Friends' attention to troubling developments within their society...