“I Took Up the Hymn-Book”: Rhetoric of Hymnody in Jarena Lee’s Call to Preach

Abstract

Through examining Jarena Lee’s employment of hymns in her spiritual autobiography, The Life and Religious Experience of Jarena Lee, a Coloured Lady, Giving an Account of Her Call to Preach the Gospel, I demonstrate how hymnody, a largely understudied literary genre in rhetorical studies, proved a critical instrument in authenticating her spiritual conversion and validating her qualifications to serve as a ministerial leader. Using Chaim Perelman’s concept of “presence” and recent research in neuroscience (on the brain and music) I show how Lee’s excerpts of the nineteenth century’s most popular hymns create an aural ambience reminiscent of a worship service that engages her Christian readers’ pathos and sense of piety in order to disengage their prejudice against her race and gender.

Notes

1. Like Collins (1996), Lisa Shaver (2012) argues that Methodism deserves more critical study because during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries it stood as the largest religious group and the most pervasive institution in the United States outside of the government (4).

2. See Douglass-Chin 2001; Bassard 1999; Pope-Levison 2004; Williams 1993; Grammer 2003; Moody 1999; Boots 2013.

3. My analysis of Lee’s hybridic narrative engages recent scholarship that illuminates the “complexity of the Methodist women’s rhetorical situation.” I show how Lee strategically negotiated her right to preach despite the resistance of prominent men and institutions that played significant roles in encouraging, regulating, and silencing women’s discourse (Collins 1996, 352). This study also complements Lisa Zimmerelli’s (2012) discussion of nineteenth-century women who employed the apologia tradition to legitimate their rhetorical agency in religious communities (357) by demonstrating how Lee uses hymns as a “strategy of participatory engagement” (355) within her text. In addition, my analysis of Lee’s characterization of her singing during a deathbed conversion scene complicates Lisa Shaver’s (2012) examination of nineteenth-century women’s “deathbed pulpits,” where women exerted “transformative power” as symbolic “icons” of piety (37). Finally, my argument engages Alan Gross and Ray Dearin’s (2003) and Nathan Atkinson, David Kaufer, and Suguru Ishizaki’s (2008) recent interpretations of Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca’s (1969) rhetorical frame by examining the “cumulative effect of heterogeneous rhetorical devices for creating global presence” (Atkinson, Kaufer, and Ishizaki 2008, 362) in Lee’s hybridic personal narrative.

4. The term psalmody, as the title of Watts’s hymnal shows, indicates that certain hymns derive from David’s Psalms in the Old Testament of the Bible.

5. According to Marini (2002), as the “only book besides the Bible that evangelicals typically owned and shared,” hymnals contained songs that Christians learned by heart, recited, and shared in diverse social and private settings (285).

6. The phrase “body of Christ” is often used among Christians to describe their collective membership, as articulated in 1 Corinthians 12:12, 27: “Just as a body, though one, has many parts, but all its many parts form one body, so it is with Christ… . Now you are the body of Christ, and each one of you is a part of it.”

7. See Andrade and Bhattacharya 2003; Zatorre and Halpern 2005; Yao, Belin, and Scheepers 2011.

8. According to Jerome Mahaffey (2007), Whitefield circulated a “rhetoric of community” that significantly promulgated a “common conceptual system among the variegated colonial cultures, establishing a ‘we-ness,’ a sense of personal and collective identity” among American and British evangelicals and potential converts (17).

9. Davidson’s (1993) racialized reading of “race” in this psalm is also dubious, given the numerous instances of this term in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century hymns written by British hymnists. Recall the phrase “Adam’s lost race” that appears in the hymn cited by Livermore (1826).

10. Robinson’s autobiographical “Come Thou Fount of Every Blessing” renders his conversion story in a way that captures the hearts of many reverent Christians, which explains its wide popularity among various denominations in England and the United States during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (Marini 2002, 280).