“Marginality is becoming universal”: thus reads the pronouncement from Michel de Certeau which opens Democratic Personality, Nancy Ruttenburg's important study of how early Americans at the margins found a platform for democratic voice in antinomianism rather than in liberal philosophy.Footnote ¹ Mark Miller's Cast Down could be read as an elaboration on this theme, but rather than working through the theology and political theory important to Ruttenburg, Miller draws on psychoanalysis to investigate the experiential aspects – the affect and the psychology – of marginalization, understood as exclusion, low social status, and depression (3). Psychoanalysis functions here not as an interpretive method but as an archive, as Miller sees the circulation of Protestant martyrological discourse as a prehistory to Richard von Krafft-Ebing's and Sigmund Freud's accounts of masochism.

For marginalized groups between the period of the Great Awakening and the abolitionist movement, Miller argues, abjection became a brand of identity. It offered them possibilities for political participation which did not rely on their inclusion in a rational–critical public sphere or on any claim to the universal rights systematized by the Enlightenment. In Miller's telling, abjection was so attractive a style of group formation that it, much like Nietzschean ressentiment, acted as a creative force in history – but it is not always clear to what ends, because the social group claiming the badge of abjection changes from chapter to chapter: women and the poor in chapter 1, American Indians in chapter 2, white abolitionists in chapter 3, and a motley crew of readers of Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852) (German revolutionaries and sexual dissidents) in chapter 4. Readers will wish Miller had more clearly articulated the connective link, which could be summarized as the claim that the discourse of abjection allowed opportunities for circulation and publicity among social groups who, suffering the indignities of racialization, sexualization, and medicalization, were seen as unable to command their own will and thus to act as rational agents.

The first chapter, “Conversion, Suffering, and Publicity,” examines Jonathan Edwards's representation of the suffering Christian convert. For Edwards, the exemplary convert is neither the frenzied public rhapsode who, as described by George Whitefield, merely channels God's grace, nor the liberal subject who would remain in control of his or her will in the midst of a revivalist mania. This portrait of Edwards resembles that first drawn by Perry Miller, in his famous 1949 account of Edwards (not discussed here).Footnote ² But Mark Miller sees Edwards as a prophet less of twentieth-century social criticism than of psychoanalytic discourse. Edwards sees eroticized suffering as an internal psychic drama, and remains uncertain about whether the masochistic convert's joy in self-shattering subverts or affirms social hierarchies. As Edwards is positioned in relation to a half-dozen major thinkers from Edmund Burke to Judith Butler, his relation to his historical context is obscured, notwithstanding Miller's ambitious opening claim that “historicism and theory are complementary” (6).

A chapter on “Indian Abjection in the Public Sphere” offers a much clearer historical contextualization of its central figure. This is the Methodist Pequot William Apess. Because few American religious groups more closely aligned themselves with the social margins than Methodists, Miller's argument is historically credible. Wealthier Methodists, he observes, adhered to a liberal–rational style of reform based on sentimental humanitarianism, while poorer Methodists seeking social change from the margins invoked images of abjection and persecution. Miller's argument about Apess's relation to the discourse of abjection is implied rather than expressly stated: rebuffing those historians who represented Indians as drunken pagans, Apess rejected Indians’ imputed abjection, instead presenting them as agents of “ascetic self-control” (61), and affixed the label of intemperance on white colonists.

The contribution of the provocative third chapter, “The Martyrology of White Abolitionists,” is to draw attention to white abolitionists’ representations of their suffering bodies. While abolitionist representations of black bodies appealed to readers’ pity, the figure of the white male activist (such as Jonathan Walker, Elijah Lovejoy, or John Brown) was intended to inspire “admiration and imitation” as he sacrificed his body for the cause (93). White abolitionists’ abjection thus contributed to the racialization of bodies, as well as to American and British imperial expansion, which could now be presented as another example of Anglo-Saxons’ willingness to sacrifice everything for the advance of civilization and liberty. By contrast, white female abolitionists, most notably Harriet Beecher Stowe, presented black slaves, rather than white men, as martyrs. However, Stowe remains for Miller an ambivalent figure, since Uncle Tom suffers martyrdom on religious rather than political grounds, and is thus denied the platform for political speech she offers to “Black Sam,” who, however, in his turn remains a degraded, minstrel figure.

Chapter 4, “Masochism, Minstrelsy, and Liberal Revolution,” rightly sees Uncle Tom's Cabin as the central node in a “polyglot, multilingual, multitemporal” public sphere (119). Miller attempts here to connect the popularity of Stowe's novel to political developments in post-1848 Europe. Stowe achieved popularity among bourgeois readers by avoiding the eroticization of pain, yet also ironically contributed to the description of sexual perversion by enabling the voyeuristic consumption of sadism and masochism on a mass scale (138). Although his interpretive claims about the novel remain very obscure, Miller offers tantalizing connections between Stowe's George Harris (a figure of heroic resistance to slavery) and German and Hungarian revolutionaries, as well as between “perverse,” masochistic readings of Uncle Tom's Cabin and Krafft-Ebing's development of sexological discourse.

What Miller's epilogue says about the circulation of representations of the ficelle, the abject and orientalized child-as-pet, might be taken as a methodological key to the whole book: “the availability of these scenes for reproduction and viewing by a broad spectrum of readers depended on their circulation within moral reading publics” (156). Miller's book is persuasive insofar as it traces the circulation of cultural images of suffering among socially marginalized readers. The book's strengths are its theoretical sophistication and its attempt to reconstruct the ways in which cultural images were disseminated and read; its close readings and its organization, however, are often murkier than they should be. Had Miller included a chapter-by-chapter overview in either the introduction or the epilogue, readers would have been left with a clearer map to the argument; as it stands, signposts are often missing.