PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESS
“All Is Well in Zion”?
Publishing Among the Gentiles
John Bennion
For nearly a year now, I've met with a
critique group led by Cheri Earl and Carol
Lynch Williams. The group focuses on writing
books for young people and publishing these
books in the national market. From these
people I've learned that occasionally my writing
is insular, clogged with exposition and
meditation, laden with dogmatic issues,
disconnected emotionally, and just too fussy; in
other words, it's academic prose, the product of
a system that naturally tends toward
constipation.
In addition to the problem of writing
from an ivory tower, a second cause of my
infirmity may be thinking of myself as a
Mormon writer, with the “Mormon” prior to
the “writer.” Despite my desire to write fresh
and excellent fiction, I recognize that because I
am an insider Mormon I sometimes feel
privileged, exempt from some of the practices,
principles, and restraints of excellent
storytelling throughout history. I'm sharing my
thoughts because I believe I'm not the only one
in need of a purgative. (I think it's time to flush
this metaphor). All of us—writers, readers,
critics, publishers, and booksellers—can learn
from the best of us who are publishing outside
Zion.
Of course there are problems with lusting
after the Gentile press (Is this metaphor any
1
better?): New York has been slow to appreciate
the universality in Mormon material; it's a
form of snobbery to claim that a writer hasn't
made it until she publishes outside Zion; and
the big commercial presses want slick, fast,
sometimes sensationalistic stories. Still, all the
kinds of problems I've listed depend on a
destructive opposition between those writing
and publishing inside the fold and outside.
(Even my title participates in that split.)
I identify at least five promising areas in
Mormon literature outside Utah: (1) play
writing and screen writing, (2) science fiction
and fantasy, (3) poetry, (4) writing for children
and young adults, and (5) literary short fiction.
Today I'm going to focus only on the
latter two categories because of time but also
because of my limited knowledge of the others.
In attention to voice, treatment of issues,
grounding in a Christian aesthetics, and play
with form and language, literary short fiction
and young adult writing are remarkably similar.
The pieces I've selected—Paul Rawlins's “Good
for What Ails You” collected in No Lie like Love;
Mary Clyde's “Jumping” from Survival Rates;
Darrell Spencer's “The Glue That Binds Us”
found in Our Secret's Out; Brad and Butter Play
Ball, a chapter book by Dean Hughes for lower-
grade readers; Carol Lynch Williams's novel
The True Colors of Caitlynne Jackson; and Louise
Plummer's The Unlikely Romance of Kate
Bjorkman—are innovative but also rely on the
best fictional traditions. I could have chosen
from several other writers, but these are
representative of the best writing done today in
these two forms.
VOICE
With each of these writers, the narrator's
voice overwhelms the story, not as a foreign
conqueror, artificially foisted on the story
through clever spelling and abbreviation, but
through the rhythm of the words, the angle at
which the story comes at us. In The True Colors
of Caitlynne Jackson, Williams's narrator, a
twelve-year-old girl, and her eleven-year-old
sister Cara are sitting on the beach near their
house, poking holes in the sand. It is early in
the morning and their mother is not yet awake.
“Last night I dreamed that Mom drowned.”
Cara glanced at me real quick and then back
at the holes she had made.
“Oh,” was all I could say.
“I was sitting on the slide, right by the top.
The water was black. Mom kept going up and
down in it. And then she went down for
good.”
I looked over to the slide, which stood in a
place that should be shallow because of its
nearness to the shore. We had it pointing to a
hole where a spring bubbled. The water there
was deep, so when we came off the slide we
were in over our heads.
Cara leaned close to me. Her voice
sounded soft. “Caity, I didn't even try to help
her.”
“Don't worry about it,” I said, “because fat
don't sink.”
“She's got bones and guts in there,” Cara
said. (2-3)
The two girls' ambivalence toward their mother,
who is verbally and physically abusive, is
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essential to their language, the way they put
words together. This ambivalence, whether
they need their mother, love her in some way,
or would rather have her gone, is the heart of
her story.
In similar fashion, Paul Rawlins's stories
arise naturally from the voice and attitudes of
the protagonist. A page into “Good for What
Ails You” the narrator gives readers the
following conversation:
“If he doesn't love me anymore, Boo,” Jean
Ann says, “the devil damn him. I never stop-
ped.” And at this moment she looks as fine as
she ever has, in her wet dress with all the little
blue and yellow flowers bleached almost right
out of it, and soft hair the color of tobacco,
with her blue eyes watering up around the
edges.
“He isn't dumb,” I say, though I catch
myself wishing right then he might do
something low to turn her against him and
somehow toward me forever. (85)
Iin this contemporary story, the tension grows
out of the character's admiration for this lovely
woman who is his best friend's wife. What was
true for Henry James in writing Portrait of a
Lady is true for us as readers of this kind of
voice-saturated, character-driven fiction. James
writes in his preface:
Trying to recover here, for recognition, the
germ of my idea, I see that it must have
consisted not at all in any conceit of a “plot,”
nefarious name, in any flash, upon the fancy,
of a set of relations, or in any one of those
situations that, by a logic of their own,
immediately fall, for the fabulist, into
movement, into a march or a rush, a patter of
quick steps; but altogether in the sense of a
single character, the character and aspect of a
particular engaging young woman, to which
all the usual elements of a “subject,” certainly
of a setting, were to need to be super-added.
(4)

At the end of his life, James turned to
rhythmical yet convoluted prose, but he is
identifying a truth, that storytelling has always
been about the listener's engagement with a
particular revelation of self in a particular
context. Mary Clyde's “A Good Paved Road”
shares, as if among friends a small epiphany
that the narrator discovers in a drugstore:
It's while I'm reading the label on a Rit dye
bottle in Osco that I notice Frances Bigelow
standing in front of the greeting cards. She's
flipped one open—maybe one of those funny
cartoon kinds—and tips her head back to read
it through her shell-rimmed half-glasses. Her
gray hair is held captive by a too-tight perm,
but her matching pants, shirt, and vest are a
diluted butterscotch. Subtle. An expensive
color. One of those handbags like a little
suitcase sits in the shopping cart baby seat.
She smiles a quick smile of private
amusement, tucks the card into an aqua blue
envelope, and wheels away, looking pleased
and perfectly content ten years after strangers
murdered her son in the desert.
It stops me right where I stand. I put the
bottle of 003 Pink back on the shelf. The
peace of Frances Bigelow's face unnerves me.
(35)
Suddenly it's as if we're at homemaking
meeting (or I guess we have to call it family,
home, and personal enrichment meeting now?),
or talking on the lawn after church, or in a bar,
or stopping at the door of an office mate.
“Guess who I saw today,” the narrator almost
says. This “I,” the teller of the story, her
attitudes and values, are more essential than
the simple action. The character's minor
epiphany at seeing a woman who has suffered
tremendously generates the story, which is
largely the narrator's meditation about the road
her life has followed. “How am I grappling
with the accidents of my life?” she seems to
wonder.
3
How do any of us grapple? Dean Hughes's
character is a third-grade boy whose father
expects him to be a great baseball player, as he
was in college. Butter is Brad's best friend, a
relief from the seriousness of his father.
Hughes introduces their friendship almost as if
the reader were a third child, hearing about the
experiences that made them close:
There was the time our kindergarten teacher,
Ms. Larsen, told us that she was getting
married. So Butter started kissing his arm to
make smooching noises.
I tried not to laugh. But Butter laughs like
a train—chug, chug, chug, chug. When he
starts laughing, so do I. Then neither one of
us can stop. (5)
They are getting ready to play baseball, their
first experience on an organized team. After
making jokes about the uses of wristbands—to
keep their hands on, use as slingshots, or hold
the coach's pants up—Brad begins to become
anxious.
I was laughing, too, but I told Butter, “You
know, tomorrow we can't fool around. We've
got to keep our heads in the game.”
Butter said, “I think I'll keep my head in
my baseball cap.”
I tried not to laugh that time. Dad always
says I have to be serious about baseball. He
wants me to be really good. Like maybe the
greatest player in the world.
That's what I want, too. I want to be a
shortstop in the major leagues. And hit
lonnnnnggg dingers.
That's what me and Butter call home runs.
But sometimes Dad makes me nervous. He
acts as if he wants me to be the best player in
the world right now—before I turn nine. (8-9)
For eight-year-old Brad, the dilemma is
how to play well but he must also know the
corollary of that physical knowledge—whether
to have fun with baseball or take it seriously,
the way his father wants. The voice, the way the
character forms words out of this inner tension,
produces the story.
In The Unlikely Romance of Kate Bjorkman,
Louise Plummer gives us an honest and
engaging young woman, more spirited than
Henry James's protagonist. Kate says in the
prologue:
This is one of those romance novels. You
know, that disgusting kind with kisses that last
three paragraphs and make you want to put
your finger down your throat to induce
projectile vomiting. It is one of those books
where the hero has a masculine-sounding
name that ends in an unvoiced velar plosive,
like CHUCK (although that is not my hero's
name), and he has sinewy muscles and makes
guttural groanings whenever his beloved is
near. In romance novels, the heroine has a
feminine-sounding name made up of liquid
consonants, like FLEUR, and has full,
sensuous lips—yearning lips. I think the word
“yearning” will appear at least a thousand
times in this book. The heroine also has long
silky legs and is a virgin. (1)
She lets readers know that hers is a happy
story about falling in love with her dream man
at Christmas time–a situation which is an
invitation to mushy, clichéd prose. Kate's wit
and ironic vision keep the story from that
slough. At the end of the Prologue she writes:
I'm giving this my best shot. I've got The
Romance Writer's Phrase Book right next to the
word processor in case I'm at a loss for words,
as they say. If you are jaded about romance or
have PMS or are on the downside of manic
depression and can't stand to read about
other people's happiness, then get real. This
book is not for you. (2-3)
In Plummer's writing, teller and what is told
cannot be separated. Also, as generally happens
with nonliterary conversations, the dance
between teller and listener involves
considerable play with the words that shape the
4
story. How should Kate describe and think
about love? Through the book she experiments
with the languages of romance books, literary
novels, and stable married love, seldom found
in any book, given to us through the voices of
Kate's parents.
That every story is also play with words is
especially true of Darrell Spencer's work. From
the beginning every teller struggles with the
impossible tangle of language. In each story the
voice of the narrator is practically the only
touchstone, but even his ability to speak truth
is uncertain. In “The Glue That Binds Us” the
gods have intervened in the character's life, but
also in his ability to get a story straight:
Mornings, I wake up, and glumness mugs me
before my feet hit the floor. In a fit, some
spoilsport goaty god has come down hard on
me. I'm Colfisch. The gods? They interfere, a
tort et a travers, without rhyme or reason. I
tiptoe along walls from corner to corner and
hope to avoid the ax. (134)
What is at stake is Colfisch's wife, who seems
to be leaving him for another man. How can
he use words, which are always unreliable, to
communicate to her his sorrow that their love
may be over? How can he hope to win her back?
His semi-mute convulsions in language are the
story; teller, mode of telling, plot, and the
issues raised are one entity.
TREATMENT OF ISSUES
The material which arises in both the
literary short stories and the books for young
readers is risky: impending adultery, child
abuse, loss of the love of wives, boyfriends, or
fathers. But stories told in Zion by insider
writers also involve risks. What is different is
the attitude toward the material and toward
the issues raised. The narrators and the
characters in the stories I've selected all have
clear values: Colfisch loves his wife; Boo resists
the impulse to love his best friend's wife; Brad
loves his father; Carol Williams's abused girls
know that their mother is significantly
disturbed; Kate is surrounded by stable familial
love; Clyde's character respects her stable and
efficient husband but also values the nature of
her former, laid-back husband. But each author
also chooses certain core issues through which
traditional values are reexplored. Neither writer
or narrator assumes that she has absolute
knowledge about how to pass through the
experience facing her characters. Each writer
recognizes that her knowledge of the truth is
limited and that answers are seldom easily
earned.
Several years ago on the AML-List, Paul-
ine Mortensen considered why Mormon
writing often offends the sensibilities of
national editors and readers:
If one writes with a tacit understanding of
truth that excludes most of what the non-Mor-
mon audience views as reality, I think the
writer will have problems. In other words, it is
the silent spaces in a text which speak the
loudest, the assumptions that one writer or
another believes to be true which need not be
spoken, but yet determine the outcome of the
plot. These can be most annoying even within
a culture. . . . In the end, I guess what I am
talking about is narrative technique and
closure. While your characters may come to
certain conclusions, your text should be more
careful about drawing small circles of
enclosure in a big world. (17 May 1995)
Making a story do the work of a sermon,
where answers are already known, produces
fiction which feels manipulative and lifeless,
like a game where the home team always wins,
or like a road trip on a freeway, where the
getting there doesn't matter. In the fiction I've
considered today, the characters may know the
traditional or dogmatic answers, but they
discover that those answers must be expanded,
seen in a new light, adapted to the new
situation the character faces. If a reader wants
stock answers, she must go elsewhere.
In True Colors the protagonist and her
5
sister live with their abusive mother, who one
day at the beginning of summer, simply takes
off. What should they do to take care of
themselves and provide for food? No social,
religious, or even familial system steps forward
with easy answers, so they must rely on
themselves, discovering nontraditional ways to
be a family.
Spencer's Colfisch believes his wife has
lost interest in him and is drifting toward an
affair with her Mormon friend. Once again
traditional answers, such as faith in the
institution of marriage itself or counseling, are
inadequate to deal with his problem.
Eventually he discovers that he had simply
misread the situation, but in the process he
grapples with the nature of communication
and of love, and with the ways cultural systems
affect both.
Kate Bjorkman, Plummer's protagonist, is
faced with competition for a young man she
admires. Kate's rivals each have a different
concept of love: one views sexual attraction as a
way of defining self; the other hardly
understands that sexual attraction and familial
love can unite in one person. Kate faces the
decision of how to love; and while she comes
to adopt traditional attitudes about that
complicated human phenomenon, Plummer
never allows Kate to take those values for
granted. Her traditional values are stronger
because she's honestly tested them.
In Rawlins's “Good for What Ails You”
the protagonist and his depressed friend, who
has not touched his beautiful wife for five
months, take off into the desert. Which is less
real—a love which is disappearing or Lake
Sevier, marked on the map as “Intermittent,”
but which may come back any time—when Lake
Bonneville returns? The protagonist's father is a
desert rover, wandering on the edge of society,
now living on the shore of the dead lake.
“And I've got a mine out there,” Dad
confides to us.
 “What kind?” Kingsley says. He leans over
to my old man like a partner.
“Bones,” Dad Says. “Whale. A big one, one
of the old buggers, with tusks.”
On this count, I think Dad might well be
full of bulldust.
“Where?” Kingsley says.
“Out on the lake,” Dad says. “A couple of
hours.”
“Hours?” I say.
“When's Lake B. due back?” Kingsley says.
“Any time,” Dad says. He's got an inflatable
raft strapped to the top of his truck.
“Readiness is all. You've heard the story of the
ten virgins?”
“Not since high school,” Kingsley says,
though it's two different stories they're talking
about. (92)
Characters and readers are led by
language to a place where reality is uncertain.
Perhaps only love is left, and even that is
waning. At the end of the story Kingsley
paddles away across Lake Sevier, which through
a storm the night before has become magically
full.
“You've got love back that way,” I remind
him to his face while I point up north. “What
else have you got to go off looking for?” But
Kingsley is on the raft with a pile of supplies.
(97)
As he floats away, the reader feels the loss of
his love for his wife, little else.
Dean Hughes's character faces a dilemma
far older than the story of the prodigal son—
how do children who love their parents make
their own decisions? Brad wants to play
baseball well and his father wants the same
thing, but his father's explanations of how to
stand and swing don't make sense. How will
they solve this dilemma? Mostly through the
help of Brad's friend Butter, who shows them
both how to relax about baseball and about life.
The solutions Hughes leads Brad to are creative
yet logical. A reader learns to be himself,
without rejecting the values of his parents.
6
In “A Good Paved Road” the woman
begins to reexamine her relationship to her
current husband, an absolutely reliable man.
His only flaw is that he has strictly conservative
values and basically a bland personality. She
compares him to her former husband, who was
lazy and irresponsible, but incredibly romantic.
Has she made a mistake?
In this and all the other stories I'm
considering, the dilemmas are not unique, but
no answer is swallowed unearned. Unusual
options are presented. If the ways in which the
issues are explored are nontraditional and
unique, then how are the stories moral?
Conventional wisdom in Zion says that
New York publications often destroy values,
but my sense of these Mormon writers is not
that they've sacrificed anything to write in the
national market but that they use narrative to
deepen and adapt their deepest moral impulses.
MORALITY
I believe that these works are moral in
three ways. First, the stories offer readers the
chance to experiment with making moral
decisions in confusing situations. Reading
good stories is like practice for reality. Readers
are invited to step vicariously into the place of
the characters because their dilemmas are true
dilemmas, not part of a Socratic game to
implant a sermon inside a narrative. When
readers experience these stories vicariously,
they exercise moral muscles in ways that
listening to truth in the form of epigrammatic
principles can't. We need both the sermonic
(“Thou shalt love thy mother and father”) and
stories which explore how that happens in a
chaotic world. Sermons are essential to
Mormon culture but they are listened to
differently than stories; the truths received
from storytelling are kinetic, enabling readers
to apply the principles of the gospel in their
own relationships.
 Second, the stories I've considered today
amplify and deepen our concepts of morality,
giving us human action in a complex manner
which is unavailable to the sermon. For
example, if we accept the fact that sexual
immorality and disobedience to parents are
both destructive, how do we respond when
those we love participate in those sins? Stories
can present us with a second-level moral
decision—how we can continue to love a sinner.
Given the fact that we know we are to feel
grateful for the gospel in the face of death,
what is left for us to feel? Stories can help
uncover cruelties we didn't know we were
perpetuating, subtleties of human love we
didn't know existed. They can help us apply
Christian charity in a sinful world. Instead of
destroying morality the stories we've been
exploring today seem to find moral decision
making in a wider range than we thought
possible.
Third, the moral dilemmas are given in
the context of a profound love for the
characters, manifested by the author's careful
attention to voice. Close attention to the words,
thoughts, and actions of even an imagined
character can be a kind of Christian empathy.
In the pieces we've looked at today the
difficulty of the choice is represented accurately
through careful attention to voice; a character's
dilemma is never belittled or ridiculed. Readers
who struggle with making decisions in their
own life will find these stories instructive but
also liberating. The stories don't lead characters
or readers to feel guilty or inadequate.
PLAY WITH LANGUAGE
AND FORM
One of the ways the stories help readers
deepen and expand traditional modes of
thinking is through their play with form and
language. Perhaps the best examples of play
with form are Louise Plummer's The Unlikely
7
Romance of Kate Bjorkman and Darrell Spencer's
“The Glue That Binds Us.”
Because she wishes to examine
conventional teen-aged (and adult) ways of
thinking about love, Louise Plummer questions
the ways stories of love are told. Her method is
to break narrative convention: readers know
the end of the story from the beginning, the
narrator admits that she is writing the book
held by the reader, and the narrator includes
her own revision notes in the book. In these
notes, the narrator looks at her story from
alternative angles, considers what had to be cut,
shows how emotion is determined by
traditional modes of speaking, and observes
how language breaks down. The narrator
herself is a student of language, both through
her father's profession as a linguist, and the
literature taught her by her English teacher.
Plummer's manner of narration takes into
account readers' traditional need for story but
also shows her readers that some stories are
unreliable.
In Darrell Spencer's world, all stories are
unreliable. In “The Glue That Binds Us” the
narrator's mind wrestles with how to interpret
two events—a self-appointed prophet has given
his wife some money, claiming it is a gift from
the Heavenly Parents, and his wife seems to be
moving toward an affair with her Mormon
friend Gust. In both cases, conventional modes
of telling break down. The journalist who
interviews his wife gets the story all wrong.
Utah ways of looking at love, morality, and fate
seem tangled and confused. His primary
concern is that her affection, like the physical
universe and like all ways of telling stories, is
subject to entropy. He knows his body is break-
ing down, and that physical fact is beyond all
the manipulation of any story he can imagine.
Even Colfisch, the narrator, is unreliable,
subject to suspicion.
Spencer's play is also on the level of
conversation and language. His narrator
switches in a strange and arbitrary manner
between spoken and written language,
floundering in his inability to hold his wife to
him. As she prepares to go out with Gust, the
narrator relates:
Inside I'm snarling. I've got the Cubs on cable
when Gloria comes out of the bedroom
wearing a sundress. Her shoulders are tan. In
the time we've been here, she's filled Gust's
closets with new clothes. They shop together.
They go to malls. She's added pottery to his
end tables.
“Can't you come?” she says, and she twirls,
really gets up on her toes and goes around
and around. “Get yourself out of the dumps,”
she says. She and Gust are going to a car show
then to dinner.
I say, “I don't mind the dumps,” and I hold
up a yellow legal pad as if to say, Can't you see
when a man's busy as hell? At the top of the pad
I've written, WHAT ARE TWO JEWS DOING
IN SALT LAKE CITY, UTAH?
Gloria lowers the sound on the TV. “Col-
fisch,” she says, “you're coming apart.” (141)
And the reader and language and our
overweening confidence in stories comes apart
with him.
While the other stories don't experiment
with form to the extent that Plummer and
Spencer do, all show characters playing with
language as a means of exploring
understanding of the dilemmas that face them.
In Mary Clyde's “A Good Paved Road,” the
conversation helps the narrator to see her own
culture in a fresh manner, through her first
husband's eyes:
We sit on a middle bench in sacrament
meeting the next day. The missionaries in
front of us have an investigator with them,
someone they're trying to convert—a large
woman with a dainty face who smells of
cigarettes. On the stand, a lacy tablecloth
covers the sacrament table. Behind it, teenage
priests cradle their heads in their hands.
Organ pipes cover the wall behind the choir
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seats, like rows of obedient whistles.
The first time I took Lowell to church he
whispered, “Where's the cross?”
“Don't have them,” I whispered back.
“Enjoy a cross,” he said, “always find them
stirring.” (49)
The character is forced to examine what she
finds stirring, safety or romance.
In Rawlins's story, the rhythm of the
repeated words seduces the narrator into
making a rash decision—quitting his job to help
save his friend's marriage:
I told my boss about needing some vacation.
“You're on vacation,” he said.
“I guess I quit then,” I said.
“I guess you do.”
“It's for a friend,” I said while he wrestled a
huge saucepan of refried beans onto a burner.
“So go,” he said. (85)
The narrator slips into an important decision
because of the rhythm of talk. Later in the story,
play on the edge of reality seduces his friend to
undertake a journey, leaving his wife behind.
Words are powerful and dangerous.
Carol Williams shows that the two girls
are closer than some sisters in more functional
families, simply because they must rely on each
other for refuge from their abusive mother.
When a boy asks the protagonist to a dance,
she begins a rite of passage that affects her most
dramatically but which also affects her younger
sister. How will they together adapt to this new
condition, and how will they deal with their
mother's reaction? Few twelve-year-old girls
could prepare for a dance, a magical dreamlike
event, without help from their mothers. But
this mother is cruel in unexpected ways. So the
problem Williams faces is the one the girls face:
What words will take us through this rite of
passage? What language systems will the sisters
adopt? The narrator says:
That night I washed my waist-length hair in
the kitchen sink with dish soap. I sat out in
the evening and let the wind dry it.
“What beautiful tresses,” Cara said, acting
 silly. She was on her way down to the lake. “O
sweet maiden,” she called, turning around
and walking backward. “Wilt thou swim with
thy dearest sister?”
“What are you reading in school?” I called
back. “The Bible?”
“Come, maiden,” Cara said, ignoring my
question.
“It'll get my tresses wet,” I said, but I ran
down to the water, anyway, in my shorts and
T-shirt. Cara and I played together till the sun
sank and the night sky filled up with lightning
bugs and the sound of crickets. Then we went
to bed. (22)
Again the language the girls use is the
locus of the story. The event that is coming is
like a fairy tale, the older sister's first dance, but
unlike some popular fairy tales this story can
end in tragedy. With their talk the girls move
the invitation to the dance into the realm of
dreams, partly to play with it, to adapt
themselves to this new mode of being, but also
to prepare themselves for the dream's failure.
The play is with words and with story; the girls
experiment with possibility, as the reader does,
through the language of a fairy tale.
What makes the stories so natural is that
we all play with language in every conversation;
it's how we adapt to new situations and
blunder closer to clarity. We start doing this
play in voice at a very young age. In Dean
Hughes's story, the character, despite coaching
from his father who played college baseball, has
just struck out in his first at-bat experience in
his first organized game. How will he, his father,
and his friend deal with the stress and
embarrassment?
Right after that, my dad came down to the
dugout. He talked to me through the wire
fence. He said, “Brad, you forgot what I told
you.”
“I got mixed up,” I said.
“Why were you so bent over?”
“I thought that's what you said to do.”
“No, not at all. Now listen closely. Next
9
time, hold your bat still. Keep your weight on
your back foot, but don't lean so much. Lift
your front foot and stride forward. Swing level.
And don't try to kill the ball.”
“Okay,” I said. But I was already forgetting.
Dad walked back to the bleachers. Butter
said, “He's right. We don't need any dead
balls around here.”
“Be quiet a sec,” I said. “I'm trying to
remember all that stuff. What did he say? I
have to keep my back foot—”
“You must be a dog if you have back feet.
My feet are next to each other.”
“Come on, Butter,” I said. “Don't mess
around. What did he say about lifting my
foot?”
“Don't do that, Brad! You know what a
dog does when he lifts his leg.”
Oh, brother. I couldn't remember anything.
And now Butter had me laughing again. (30-
31)
The joking reflects Butter's instinctive
wisdom that what the father expects language
to do is impossible. He cannot put into words
the complicated kinetic knowledge of how to
hit a ball. In addition, Hughes makes use of the
propensity of all humans to play with language
in conversation. Butter's double entendres are
not designed merely to make fun of Brad;
Brad's problem is precisely that he can't loosen
up. The narrative is so clear and unified that
the second-grade readers who are the target
audience will sense that what Brad and his
father need to do is just chill.
In Plummer's Unlikely Romance, the man
longed for by the narrator, has come home
from college with a drop-dead beautiful woman.
In one of her Revision Notes Kate tries to figure
out how to ask the woman, Fleur, concerning
the status of her relationship with Richard. By
the end of the section, the play with language
enables the narrator to reject the kind of
destructive malice required in main romance
novels:
. . . I asked her about Stanford and stuff
 about California, but really, I didn't hear any Hughes, Dean. Brad and Butter Play Ball. New York:
of the answers, because I was thinking all the Random House, 1998.
time about the THINGS I COULDN'T ASK James, Henry. Preface. Portrait of a Lady. New York:
FLEUR ST. GERMAINE: W. W. Norton, 1975.
a. Are you and Richard lovers? (Geez, I Mortensen, Pauline. The Association for Mormon
sound like I'm writing bad subtitles for an Letters-List Archive, 17 May 1995,
Italian movie.) http://cc.weber.edu/aml/archives.html.
b. Are you going to be lovers much longer? Plummer, Louise. The Unlikely Romance of Kate
(duh!) Bjorkman. New York: Delacorte P, 1995.
c. What is the chance that you might find Rawlins, Paul. “Good for What Ails You.” No Lie
someone else and that Richard will become Like Love. Athens: U of Georgia P, 1996.
my lover? (Sounds like a virgin's fantasy.) Spencer, Darrell. “The Glue That Binds Us.” Our
d. If there is a slim chance to no chance at Secret's Out. Columbia: U of Missouri P, 1993.
all of your changing lovers, is it possible that Williams, Carol Lynch. The True Colors of Caitlynne
you might have some horrific congenital Jackson. New York: Bantam Doubleday Dell,
disease that could cause your early (and yes, 1997.
very sad) demise?
e. Does psychosis leading to suicide run in
your family?
f. Why is it so hard to hate you?
I'm completely embarrassed by these
questions. Is it possible to make writing worse
with revision? (37-38)
A more important question is, “Can
mediocre writing be made better?” Perhaps the
recipe I've outlined today is as useless and
complicated as the advice given by Brad's father.
Let's see, saturate your story with voice, at the
same time remain open to the possibility of
flexible solutions to universal issues, have a
deep ethical awareness, and play with form and
language. Seems ridiculous now. Whether or
not my abstractions are useful, I know that
reading good fiction makes us better writers
and that the writers I've considered today are
worthy of emulation.

JOHN BENNION teaches creative writing, the

British novel, and Mormon literature at Brigham
Young University. He is the author of Breeding Leah
and Other Stories (Signature Books, 1991) and
Falling Toward Heaven (Signature Books, 2000).

WORKS CITED
Clyde, Mary. “Jumping.” Survival Rates. Athens: U
of Georgia P, 1999.
10
 The Adventures of Irreantum Magazine
Christopher K. Bigelow
I'm going to do a minimum of shilling up
here. But I did want to show you the new issue
of Irreantum, which is the magazine I'm
representing today. As an incentive to come up
here after and perhaps purchase a copy for
three dollars, the first one up here may have
this little coupon I just pulled off my drink:
Free ChickFil-A Char-Grilled Caesar Salad. It's
right here—first come, first served. I have other
dinner plans.
I've titled my paper “The Adventures of
Irreantum Magazine.” Irreantum is a Book of
Mormon word from somewhere in First Nephi
that means “many waters.” We thought it was a
nice symbolic name to play off of for a literary
magazine.
From the time I took Eugene England's
Mormon literature class at BYU in 1993, where
I first learned about Wasatch Review
International and the Association for Mormon
Letters, I have been fascinated by the idea of
Mormon fiction, drama, and film—I mean stuff
both by and about Mormons. That fascination
has been kept alive for me mainly through
AML-List, the active, well-moderated e-mail
discussion group sponsored by the Association
for Mormon Letters, which I highly
recommend if you haven't come across it yet.
About 30 posts a day go across this e-mail list,
and it's about all aspects of Mormon literature
you can imagine.
Irreantum, the literary quarterly I cofound-
ed last year and coedit with Benson Parkinson,
is very much an outgrowth of relationships,
ideas, and approaches that first arose—and
continue to arise—on AML-List. Irreantum skims
the cream off AML-List but offers things an e-
11
mail list cannot, mainly because of length
restrictions but also because of other strengths
print media still have over electronic media (I'd
much rather hold a paper magazine than read
one on screen). While the magazine is inspired
by AML-List, Irreantum is hopefully breaking
new ground by offering original fiction, poetry,
essays, reviews, interviews, and literary news
that hasn't appeared elsewhere.
The first issue of Irreantum in March 1999
was more or less a guest issue of the AML's old
paper newsletter, and it was put together by
AML-List columnists and subscribers. In fact, I
believe I responded to a call for volunteers that
went out over AML-List. We knew that Levi
Peterson, the previous newsletter editor, was
looking to retire and that our AML-List writers
and editors might turn into a permanent staff.
I have been doing small magazines as a
hobby since my teen years, when I got the
subscription for one of my fantasy gaming
magazines up over a thousand (Dungeons and
Dragons and that sort of thing). I had been
wanting to do some kind of Mormon literary
magazine for quite some time, because it would
reflect my main interests as an adult. I sat in on
the last few editorial meetings of Wasatch
Review International (some wonderful burrito
dinners as I remember), but the magazine was
sort of on the way out, and I hadn't yet tapped
into AML-List. I was offered the opportunity to
help as a managing editor as some kind, but I
wasn't quite ready yet, so I stepped aside, and
other people stepped aside, and that was the
end of the Wasatch Review.
Gradually I came to realize that the ideas
floating around on AML-List seemed exciting
and varied and deep enough that I was eager to
take a role in channeling those strengths into a
printed magazine. We have six staff editors, and
they were all recruited through AML-List. Many
of the reviews and essays that we run first
appear on AML-List before they get printed in
Irreantum; sometimes they're revised, sometimes
they're run as is. It's really hard for me to
imagine ever starting Irreantum without the
readymade communities of AML-List and the
Association for Mormon Letters, which
sponsors AML-List. I'm sure I wouldn't have
started a magazine without those to draw on.
Let me say a little about our audience.
Right now, another magazine devoted
exclusively to Mormon literature doesn't
currently exist, as far as I know. Irreantum
appeals to an educated, literate audience, but
my influences are as much Entertainment Weekly
and Book: The Magazine for the Reading Life as
high-brow literary journals. I don't consider
Irreantum an academic journal as much as a
general-interest magazine aimed at anyone who
reads, writes, or otherwise has an interest in
imaginative Mormon storytelling in all forms.
We are trying hard not to let Irreantum
become pigeonholed as either culturally liberal
or conservative. That is difficult when one issue
we have Dean Hughes on the cover, a successful
Deseret Book author, and we may have Brian
Evenson on another cover. That's a little bit of
a dichotomy, and it remains to be seen if we
lose or gain subscribers because of the broad
spectrum we're trying to cover. We try to give
orthodox books, authors, and presses as much
attention and respect as we give so-called liberal
books, authors, and presses. We consider
ourselves freer to explore a wide range of
Mormon literature than a magazine sponsored
by BYU, for example, and yet we do not want
to make mainstream LDS readers and writers
too uncomfortable with our publication. We're
seeking the middle ground, the temperate zones
12
between the equator of Church-sanctioned
publishing and—I hope I don't offend anybody—
the nether poles of Sunstone and Dialogue. This
temperate zone has room for active Mormons
writing orthodox literature, active or semiactive
Mormons writing culturally liberal literature for
the Mormon market, active Mormons writing
for national audiences (Orson Scott Card is
probably the most prominent), inactive
Mormons or people with some Mormon
heritage writing for national audiences (such as
Walter Kirn), and members of other faiths
writing about Mormon characters and themes
(Tony Kushner and several others).
Irreantum has a large potential audience, as
long as we don't alienate everyone by trying to
please everyone. So we try to include reviews,
essays, interviews, poetry, and fiction from a
wide variety of cultural perspectives. We hope
that if readers encounter something that is
either too spicy or too bland for their tastes,
they will trust the magazine to offer an overall
satisfying mix as time goes forward. We're trying
to do a roundup of all kinds of literary news
related to fiction, film, and drama, which is
pretty wide ranging and interesting. Personally,
I am most interested in how Mormon authors
and subjects are breaking into the national
literary scene. But I and other Irreantum staffers
are also keenly interested in the large and
healthy industry that publishes for the
mainstream LDS audience, and we hope that
Irreantum can influence the developing tastes of
those readers.
So far the magazine is available in about
20 bookstores that carry LDS products. That's
not a lot, but it's something. Total circulation
through these retail sales, subscriptions, and
also AML memberships which include
Irreantum, is nearing 500 now.
Let me tell you a little bit about the
mechanics of the magazine. Although Irreantum
is a traditional printed magazine, it is put
together completely by e-mail. The editorial
staff is scattered from California to Levan, Utah,
to Wisconsin to Atlanta to New York City. All
collaborative work among the editors is done
via e-mail. All text is shuttled back and forth via
e-mail. Our fiction editor just got one of his
first hard-copy stories in the mail to consider,
and it's been difficult for us to figure out what
to do with that—I think he's going to have his
son type it or something. The magazine is so
reliant on e-mail that we have a stated policy of
not accepting submissions except in electronic
form, but we make exceptions, of course. We're
into our second year, and I don't think we've
yet run a story or article that we didn't receive
via e-mail, so it's really the central way that we
run.
The magazine is typeset electronically, of
course, and we use the DocuTech printing
process, which allows us to go from a disk to
final output in a single step. We're about as
paperless as you can get a print magazine to be.
The printer keeps our files on a tape that we
rented, and we're able to print back issues on
demand for the same price as the original run,
even if it's in small quantities. That's nice for a
small magazine to be able to do.
As co-managing editors, Benson Parkinson
and I are about equally involved in managing
the magazine's overall vision, organization, and
approach. When first recruiting the editorial
staff, I originally set things up as a loose
confederation of fiefdoms. Benson came on
board and helped organize things into more of
a developed nation-state, with democratic
safeguards against despotism. To avoid burnout,
I delegated the different departments to trusted
editors, and I don't even personally read the
magazine until it's being copy-edited. The
department editors are responsible for making
contacts, going out and soliciting material—
which we still need to do a lot of because we
aren't exactly overwhelmed with unsolicited
manuscripts yet—getting it ready for publication.
13
So if you or anyone else you know has stories or
reviews or essays, we're very much in a mode of
reading everything closely, almost with an
attitude of “we'll print it unless we see a reason
why not to.” Maybe not quite that bad, but my
point is we're not overwhelmed yet.
Ben Parkinson—he's the one who founded
and ran AML-List for five years, so he's been
deeply involved with things—acts as the first
reader of the material gathered by our
department editors and works with them as
needed to refine the material. It's nice to have
him doing that because I just was going to say,
“You send me the stuff, and I'll read it on the
way to the press.” That was to protect myself
from having to do too much work, because the
burnout issue is a big one. I personally so far
handle most of the magazine's backend stuff,
such as paginating, line editing, and getting
stuff ready to go to the copy center. I would
love to get a reliable desktop publishing
volunteer on the staff.
To keep things from getting too mundane
for myself, I did take one editorial department:
I coordinate the magazine's interviews, which
have been a lot of fun and which are, I think,
one of the magazine's most valuable offerings.
We have some interesting interviews planned
for upcoming issues: we're going to do Robert
Kirby, the humorist, and Dave Wolverton, the
science fiction writer who doesn't yet rival
Orson Scott Card, I think, but is on the way to
getting as much of a readership and a
reputation. It seems like what I've done most is
stuff envelopes, and I recently have been trying
to hold postal parties to get some other
volunteers to help stuff envelopes.
I also do as much as I can find the time
and energy for on the publishing end, such as
promotional mailings, trying to round up
retailers and advertisers, and applying for
nonprofit grants. The Utah Humanities
Council and the Utah Arts Council have both
been hesitant to support the magazine because
of the church-state concern.
That brings up the issue of funding. I've
recently read with great interest about the
founding of both Sunstone and Dialogue. In
comparison with those, our origins have been
considerably lower key. The Association for
Mormon Letters has actually been around for
20 years. I believe Eugene England and Stephen
Sondrup were among the founders. AML has
been quite cooperative about spending more on
the magazine than I believe it was initially
expecting to. I think the officers had envisioned
a glorified newsletter; but the magazine has, I
feel, become a real magazine, at least in page
count and quality of content if not yet in
graphics and production values. I hope that
we've returned some value to the AML by
tripling its membership since the magazine's
been going.
It remains to be seen if the magazine will
continue to be in line with the AML's goals as
an organization. It does cost a lot of money
even at the level that we're doing it. The AML
has been largely an academic organization. It
holds an academic conference annually that's
quite scholarly. I think that Irreantum is helping
it branch out beyond the academic crowd.
We're trying to go into all kinds of Mormon
literature instead of just the more so-called
literary or academic. I believe there's something
for everyone in the magazine who has any
interest in reading imaginative Mormon
storytelling.
One of the nice things about working with
this association is that I just turn in the receipts,
and all of the checks and mail go to the
treasurer of the AML, and I honestly don't
know and don't want to know what the
financial health of the magazine is. We cut costs
everywhere that we can, and we don't spend a
whole lot on promotion yet. I can't imagine
doing what the staff of Wasatch Review
International did by taking the full burden of
14
financing the magazine on their own backs. Not
that I don't feel responsible for drumming up as
much advertising revenue as I can, but it's just
nice to work from the base of an association. If
any of you are interested in publishing
magazines, it's the way to go—to find some kind
of a group or organization that wants some
kind of magazine.
Our goal is for Irreantum to reach 1,000
circulation within a year or two. We hope that
we can upgrade to nicer printing—maybe a color
cover, at least. We'd like to get more of a
bookstore presence, maybe even circulation in
some of the national bookstore chains that
carry literary magazines. I hope to see people
writing more provocative reviews, essays, and
fiction just because they are stimulated by
Irreantum, are excited that there is a venue for
imaginative Mormon literature, and want to get
more aggressively involved. We'd like to see
Irreantum be in the middle of a broad-based
cultural movement, which I believe God's Army
is also part of and leading the way in, from the
heart of Mormonism.
Q: If Sunstone and Dialogue are the nether
regions and Irreantum is the temperate zone, is there
a body of literature that's too orthodox or too
conservative for you to consider real Mormon
literature?
A: I would hesitate to put any kind of a
limitation on it. In the current issue of Irrean-
tum, we have a chapter excerpt from a new
Deseret Book novel by Margaret Young and
Darius Gray. You don't get a lot more orthodox
than Deseret Book. I believe that's indicative
that we will go in the direction of so-called
orthodox literature, but we've also run some
other things that would not pass muster for
Deseret Book.
We've turned away one item that was too
explicit about temple rites. That discussion
actually caused some controversy on the staff,
so we set up a system of democratic voting.
When a story is of concern, the whole editorial
board votes, and I think that's probably the best
way to handle it, because there's no right or
wrong answer.
Q: Is the magazine going to be large enough to
include plays?
A: We've done one long one-act play by
Eric Samuelsen, and it was a wonderful
opportunity and a very good play. Doing it did,
frankly, strain our resources page-count-wise at
A: I think in this issue we have five or six
pages of poetry, which is a pretty good
proportion, I believe, for a 64-page magazine.
Q: How much Mormon content must writing
have for Irreantum?
A: We call Irreantum a magazine of
literature by Mormons and also about
Mormons. That would mean that if a Mormon
novelist who wrote in a genre such as mystery
or romance sent us a chapter from an
upcoming novel that did not have any Mormon
characters in it, we would still seriously consider
it because the author has identified himself or
herself as having a Mormon background. We
feel that Mormonism can't possibly help but
come out in their writing in less explicit ways
sometimes.
At the same time, I have to say that if we
had two submissions from LDS writers, active
or not, and both were well written, and one of
them had more explicit Mormon content than
the other, I think as a magazine we would tend
to lean toward that one. But if the other were
far and above better in writing style, I think
we'd run that one.
Q: What kinds of costs are involved with
producing Irreantum? And what about the
magazine's page size?
A: This is a 76-page issue, just stapled. We
paid to have it trimmed so it looks a little sharp-
er, but just on one edge. This is done on Docu-
Tech, which I think is basically like a large
Xerox machine that has laser-print quality. The
15
our present level. We're not talking about a
huge magazine yet. I think we would need a
larger page count, which means a little bit more
money, to be able to run plays. But I could see
us setting a goal of one or two plays a year. It's
something we're very much paying attention to
because we count it as part of our editorial
focus.
Q: What about poetry?
cover photo looks quite good, I think, for
essentially a glorified photocopy. This probably
cost about $1.80 per copy in a quantity of 400.
We don't have bells or whistles; we have one
photo inside. I laid this out myself in Quark
Express, which I have access to at work. It's a
desktop publishing program that probably costs
eight or nine hundred dollars to buy, so I
wouldn't ever buy it on my own. I've recently
come across an interesting group called the
Small Press Co-op that has a very organized
approach to helping small magazines join their
print runs in such a way that they can reduce
their costs. The price I saw for a 64-page, white-
wove magazine in a quantity of 1,000 is about
700 dollars. That's a direction we might go if we
can figure out what to do with 1,000 copies of
our magazine—we're only mailing 300 or 400
now.
I frankly haven't shopped around much,
and so I'm not sure we're getting the very best
deal, but we like the flexibility of DocuTech,
where we can keep running smaller quantities
later. When you get around 500, it's more cost
effective to go offset printed as opposed to
photocopied or DocuTeched.
We started out using 8.5x11 paper folded
over, but then we went to legal-sized paper
folded over. I think we just wanted to look
more substantial, not so digest sized. Sometimes
when we go to get it printed, they don't have
that size of paper in stock. With this size we get
some more words in, and the cost isn't much
higher. It's a nice size for us now. It gives us two
columns instead of one, which is reader
friendly. I don't know if we'll go to the full size
or not—no hurry, I don't think.
Q: Does Mormonism need another magazine
right now?
A: It's kind of a sensitive point for me
because the AML just edited the new issue of
Dialogue and may have siphoned off some nice
material we could have used in Irreantum. I
think we're trying with Irreantum to start a little
bit of a fresh brand name. It's been funny:
When I've called some of these LDS bookstores
around the country, they'll ask, “Is this like
Sunstone?” The honest answer might be, “Well,
maybe not yet.” But there is some branding that
goes on, and some people are uncomfortable
with both the Sunstone and Dialogue names. I'm
a faithful subscriber to both magazines and
quite enjoy them, but there are some articles
that I'm just not as interested in. I look at
Sunstone and Dialogue in the Mormon
community as being sort of the general-interest
intellectual magazines, sort of like Look or Life
were to this country on a more popular level in
the earlier days of magazines.
But magazines have been specializing more
and more over the years, and I think there's
Traditions of LDS Publishing
Gideon O. Burton
“Mormonism began with a book,” William
Mulder once reminded us, “and the Latter-day
Saints . . . became pre-eminently the people of a
book” (208). To this I would add: Mormons
have also become a people of the press–publish-
ing and being published about at every station
of their cultural odyssey, alternately sustained
and drained, maligned and refined, maintained
16
room even in the Mormon intellectual
community for a magazine devoted only to
literature. All of our interviews are with
imaginative authors who write fiction or poetry,
and all of our news is about film, fiction, or
drama only. We are a little bit of a house organ
for the AML; we run AML news and award
citations. We're hoping to create a little bit of a
community.
Personally I think it's dangerous to get out
there in the doctrinal and the historical areas.
That is where you run afoul more, I think, with
Church administration. Not that the arts are
free of pitfalls as well, but it's just nice not to
have to worry about reinventing Church history
or doctrine or policy—not that it's not
interesting.
CHRISTOPHER K. BIGELOW, the founding
coeditor of Irreantum magazine, is a graduate of
Brigham Young University with an M.A. in English.
He is a former assistant editor of The Ensign. He
presented this paper at the 2000 Sunstone
Symposium in Salt Lake City, on a panel titled
“Little Mormon Magazines: Sinking, Swimming,
and Treading Water.” Also presenting in the same
session was Tory Anderson, founding editor of
Wasatch Review International.
and stained by Gutenberg's mighty engine.
Certainly much of the ink spilled by or about
Mormons has not been “literary” in the strict
sense of that word. And conversely, many
literary works written about Mormons have not
been particularly “Mormon” in character. I am
hoping to shed light on the curious character
and history of “Mormon literature” by
identifying four separate traditions of LDS
publishing as these have emerged, blended, and
transformed over time.
These four publishing traditions are: first,
official LDS publishing; second, regional or
cultural publishing; third, national or
international publishing; and fourth, self-
publishing. Each of these traditions has its own
dynamics with respect to intended audiences,
potential literary value, marketing, distribution,
and literary or religious reputation; and all of
these traditions have been present–sometimes
overlapping, sometimes competing, sometimes
at odds with each other–throughout Latter-day
Saint history.
THE BOOK OF MORMON
All four of these traditions can be
discerned in the publication of the Book of
Mormon itself. Obviously the Book of Mormon
inaugurated the publication of official Mormon
literature. The care with which the printing
process was overseen by Joseph Smith and his
successors in subsequent printings reflects the
heightened respect that Latter-day Saints have
for official LDS publications generally. At the
same time, the Book of Mormon also began the
tradition of regional or cultural publication.
Like so many later LDS publications, both
official and not, the Book of Mormon both
represents and reinscribes LDS culture,
establishing the cultural parameters that it
fulfills. However, the Book of Mormon is
clearly intended to reach beyond a single people
to both Jew and Gentile. And certainly the
distribution and translation of the Book of
Mormon within its long proselyting history
qualifies it as a national and international
publication.
I've always been a bit jealous that Joseph
Smith was able to secure a New York publisher
with his first book! And yet the Book of
Mormon is not a national publication, for that
term is used today to refer to well-established
17
publishers in the broader culture whose high
literary standards make publishing with them a
sign of aesthetic merit and approbation within
the national or international public. The
opposite extreme of a nationally published
book is the self-published book. Anyone who
doubts that the Book of Mormon was also a
self-publishing venture should ask Martin
Harris his opinion. Although self-publishing is
tainted with the notion of a vanity publication,
this tradition of publishing draws dignity from
both American and Mormon mores. Many an
independent, self-reliant, and entrepreneurial
Latter-day Saint or American has started up his
or her own press, occasionally surprising us
with unexpected riches.
1. OFFICIAL LDS PUBLISHING
More literary types of people are often
suspicious of the aesthetic qualities of official
Church publications. Sneering at the doggerel
dogging the pages of official journals and
awaiting the Great Mormon Novel as the Jews
await the Messiah, they ask themselves, Can
anything good come out of Salt Lake City? A
tradition of dissatisfied Mormon readers has
accompanied official LDS publications from
the beginning.
Take, for example, the Evening and Morning
Star. This, the first official LDS periodical,
began publication in Independence, Missouri,
under the editorship of W. W. Phelps in the
summer of 1832. Seven months later, a
disgruntled Saint in Kirtland wrote a letter to
the editor expressing his wish that Phelps would
make the Star more interesting. The reader
found the official Church paper too doctrinal
in its content, and he strongly urged Phelps to
include a dramatic narrative “setting forth the
rise, progress, and faith of the Church as well as
the doctrine; for if you do not render it more
interesting than at present,” this reader warned,
“[the paper] will fall, and the Church suffer a
great loss thereby.” The letter was signed Joseph
Smith Jr. (720). Phelps complied, including in
future issues narratives about the rising Church
and about the experiences of elders abroad, as
well as hymn texts in nearly every issue.
While official LDS publications have
clearly treated literary works as ancillary vehicles
to support the doctrinal core of LDS faith, we
ought to recognize the way that, from the
beginning, official publications have recognized
the cultural significance of encouraging such
literary endeavors. Hymns don't just recast
doctrine for popular consumption; they build a
18
sense of shared experience. And as folklorists
and anthropologists have long noted, narratives
do not merely teach or inform communities;
they establish them. Is it any accident that
Joseph insisted to W. W. Phelps that the first
official periodical include more than just
doctrinal essays? He was building a people, not
just a theology, and a literary means was
necessary to that end.
Twenty years following Joseph's letter to
Phelps, Orson Pratt encouraged John Lyons to
compose a high-quality volume of poetry
around the theme of Zion. The British Mission
would underwrite the cost of producing a
leatherbound, gilt-edged monograph, and
Lyons volunteered not only to shape the poetry
toward a Zion theme but also to donate all
profits to the Perpetual Emigration Fund. I
have never seen a more literal example of
poetry being a vehicle for the Church. The
Harp of Zion was published in 1853 with much
expense and fanfare, and nearly a thousand
copies were sold that year. In 1860 George Q.
Cannon, arriving in the mission office in
Liverpool, would lament that some 3,500
copies of Lyon's book still cluttered the office,
along with 2,600 copies of Eliza R. Snow's
poetry (Bitton 109). Could this be why the
Church doesn't have a grants program for
artists?
I'm joking, of course, but the Church has
indirectly sponsored and encouraged literary
works through official publications. For decades
the pages of the Contributor, the Woman's
Exponent, the Improvement Era, and especially
the Relief Society Magazine included short stories
and poetry. The Relief Society Magazine
sponsored regular writing contests and
instructional lessons that, to my delight and
surprise as I recently studied these, could pass
muster with current academic courses in
creative writing. The Church has established a
literary culture through its official publications–
despite the middling quality of so much of the
poetry and prose and despite the clear intent to
use literature as illustration or homily. If we are
dissatisfied with the products from that
tradition, consider the fact that one of the
products of this tradition is a people literate
enough to be critical of itself.
2. REGIONAL PUBLISHING
Many of the periodicals I just mentioned
were quasi-official, and might more accurately
fit within the tradition of regional or cultural
publication. The tradition of regional or
cultural publishing is mostly a product of sec-
ond-generation Mormonism, when it became
both acceptable and desirable for Mormons to
publish literary works designed for their own
people but generally outside of official Church
publishing. In 1879 George Q. Cannon launch-
ed a “Faith-Promoting Series” of books, mostly
biographies, including an account of Cannon's
first mission, a selection from Wilford
Woodruff's journal published in 1881, and a
biography of Jacob Hamblin.1 Cannon was
joined by B. H. Roberts, Emmeline B. Wells,
and Susa Young Gates, among others, and the
result was a virtual flood of moralistic and faith-
promoting stories that became the staple of
Church magazines in ensuing decades.
Mormon literary historians such as Eugene
England have referred to this as the “Home
Literature” period, after Orson Whitney's
seminal address by that name in 1888. I resist
this name because what it has labeled does not
reflect what Whitney was calling for. Whitney
was indeed playing off the notion of home
industries so familiar to the Saints from their
efforts to become economically self-reliant and
independent. However, as I have argued
elsewhere, Whitney was urging an engagement
with literature that would take Mormons
beyond their own culture in both their broad
reading and their refined writing (Burton).
“Home literature,” as a publishing
19
phenomenon beginning in the 1880s and, as a
term for literary criticism still used today by
critics such as Eugene England and Richard
Cracroft, has come to label a scope for Mormon
literary efforts much narrower than Whitney
prophesied in calling for Miltons and
Shakespeares of our own.
George Q. Cannon & Sons was sold to
the Deseret News in 1900, thus absorbing–some
might say domesticating–into official Church
control an independent publishing firm that
had become broadly influential in the culture.
This pattern was repeated 99 years later when
Bookcraft was acquired by Deseret Book's
parent company. It was in 1944 that Bookcraft
was launched by John K. Orton, former
business manager of the Era, when the Church
decided it would not publish John Taylor's
Gospel Kingdom through Deseret Press. Long
before a press like Signature came along, there
had been a tension between official and
unofficial regional publishers.
By “regional” publishing, I do not mean
just LDS publishing in Utah or the western
United States. From the 1830s Mormons have
clustered in various geographical and ethnic
groups that have achieved their own history,
folklore, and literary traditions. The Millennial
Star began in Liverpool in 1840 as a monthly,
became a weekly with a circulation ten times
the current circulation of Dialogue and an
annual page count of up to 800 pages. The
Skandinaviens' Stjerne was published in
Copenhagen for thirty years in Danish,
beginning in 1851. For several years a Welsh
periodical, Udgorn Seion, was published at
Merthyr Tydfil in Wales.
Regional Mormon publishing in the
United States has not been restricted to the
Mormon corridors from Alberta to Mexico or
from Kirtland to Utah. John Taylor edited The
Mormon in New York; Orson Pratt The Seer in
Washington, D.C.; and George Q. Cannon the
Western Standard in San Francisco. All of these
Church periodicals were primarily vehicles for
doctrine and news, but they all provided,
besides support for proselyting, cultural
cohesion among the Saints and invaluable
We commenced our publication, not because
we had means to do it, but because we were
determined to fulfill our mission. . . . How
long we shall be able to continue, I don't
know. . . . I find it one thing to preach the
gospal [sic] without purse or scrip, and another
thing to publish a paper on the same terms.
(Roberts 245-46)
George Q. Cannon would use the editing
and publishing experience acquired in San
Francisco when he later founded the company
that would become Deseret Book.
Of course, we are all familiar with regional
and cultural publication coming into its own
during our own time. I refer you to the Fall
1999 issue of Dialogue in which Neal Kramer
and I give a detailed account of the various
regional publishers and their main
contributions and evolutions during the last 20
years (Burton and Kramer). But I will highlight
certain turning points in Mormon regional
publishing here.
At a BYU Writers Conference held in
1976, James Mortimer and the management of
Deseret Book talked about the purposes and
goals of the company. “We try to make a profit,
but we are not seeking a gold mine. Our
question is ‘Will it fit the bill as a gift for the
newly released Bishop?'” (qtd. in “If” 122-23).
They also reported their customers to
be ”browsers" with an orientation toward the
scriptures. That orientation would change
dramatically over the course of the next quarter
century as LDS customers caught the fiction
bug.
Two years later, Shirley Sealy, who had
published two fiction titles in Provo through
the Seventies Mission Bookstore, convinced
Deseret Book to publish Forever After. Early
20
literary experience for their editors. A letter
from John Taylor to Brigham Young in 1855
reflects this hard-won experience as Taylor
struggled to publish The Mormon in New York:
successes by Sealy, Jack Weyland, and the
Yorgason brothers convinced not only Deseret
Book but other regional presses that fiction
could sell. In the early 1980s the LDS
Booksellers Association was formed and has
helped to professionalize Mormon retail and to
secure lines of distribution, advertising, and
marketing. Mormon retailers and Mormon
publishers together vie for a market that
currently spends close to $100 million annually
(Riess). If Joseph had seen that dollar figure in a
vision, he would have scrapped the Kirtland
Safety Society idea and somehow arranged for
Gerald Lund to be transported back in time to
keep the Church afloat.
As anyone who has been to the carnival
known as the LDS Booksellers trade show
knows, an alarming percentage of what is
marketed through LDS bookstores has a very
tenuous relationship with pages and ink. In
August 1999 at the trade show as I was
examining Book of Mormon action figures next
to the “I'm an 8 cow wife” T-shirts, a tornado
ripped through the adjacent building, shutting
down the show and warning us of the
desolation of abomination due to follow this
hedonistic bacchanalia of kitsch. Somehow the
show opened up with extended hours the next
day, and I knew it was a sign of the times.
The silver lining to finding an Angel
Moroni hood ornament or a gold-plated bust of
LaVell Edwards in an LDS bookstore is that
one will also find there books from many new
publishers. And the prosperity of Mormon
publishing and marketing is also making
possible efforts by Deseret Book, Aspen, and
other regional publishers to reach other
mainstream and Christian markets. I will be
watching eagerly to see if Deseret's Shadow
Mountain imprint succeeds outside LDS retail
stores.
Among the alternatives to Deseret Book
and Bookcraft, special mention must be made
of Signature Books. Since its inception in 1981
Signature has been a significant outlet for more
“literary” LDS literature, several biographical,
theological, and historical studies of literary
importance, a Mormon Classics Series that
includes three long out-of-print works by
Virginia Sorensen, and several influential
compilations and anthologies. In 1989 the
Association for Mormon Letters presented
Signature Books with a Special Recognition
award for providing a much-needed venue for
more literary sorts of LDS publishing. As an
“alternative” press, Signature has dared to
publish what the official and quasi-official
presses could not. Its more liberal editorial
policies have made possible publication of
works of a high literary quality, but such
policies by no means guarantee literary quality
and can in fact prove very narrowly liberal, as
Eugene England argues in his review of
Signature's In Our Lovely Deseret that appears in
the fall 1999 issue of Dialogue. The press's
liberal reputation has not only estranged
mainstream LDS audiences, but many authors
and academics who are uncomfortable with the
ways LDS leaders and culture are not respected
in some Signature titles. Signature has thus
both filled a gap and created another.
3. NATIONAL PUBLISHING
Publishing nationally is another LDS
publishing tradition. The first strictly literary
LDS publication to appear in a prominent city
was Parley P. Pratt's The Millennium, which
included a long narrative poem and hymns.
Pratt also published the first Mormon short
story, “Dialogue between Joseph Smith and the
21
Devil,” in the New York Herald in 1844. These
were not popular, of course, in contrast to the
many romances and pulp novels featuring
Mormons that began appearing in the 1850s.
Because of our disdain for and embarrassment
over the caricatures of rapacious polygamists
and such, we may not realize just how
prominently Mormonism came to figure in the
literary world at this period–however distorted
it might be.2
Mark Twain was more humorous than
inaccurate in the Mormon portions of Roughing
It. However, Arthur Conan Doyle featured
stereotypically dreadful Mormons in his Study in
Scarlet in 1904, and Zane Grey drew on
Mormon lore in at least five of his novels, most
infamously in his Riders of the Purple Sage (1925).
In 1912 the renowned German poet, Martin
Greif, published his Die Mormonen in Dublin,
one of the most literary and most slanderous
treatments of Mormons. The novel relates the
story of Mormon agents in Ireland in the style
of Edgar Allan Poe, with intrigue, murder, and
abduction at the hands of Mormon
missionaries. A few years before, Heinrich
Balduin Möllhausen published a three-volume
thriller in Berlin whose name pretty well sums
it up: Der Fanatiker (Leipzig, 1905).
This exploitative and sensational tradition
of Mormon culture as a national publishing
staple has abated only somewhat. As late as
1979 Pocketbooks issued G. M. Warren's
Destiny's Children, a fast-moving, violent, and
sex-riddled novel based on seamy and steamy
fantasies of Nauvoo. Of course polygamy is an
inexhaustible mine for tabloid fiction; and even
Scribners could not resist publishing Elisabeth
Macdonald's Watch for the Morning in 1978,
detailing the torments of polygamy.
There have been substantive and
thoughtful representations of polygamy and of
the Mormon story more generally that have
succeeded in national markets to critical praise.
Maurine Whipple's Giant Joshua was published
by Houghton Mifflin in 1941, and Virginia
Sorensen's A Little Lower than the Angels came
from Knopf the next year. Rejected by Latter-
day Saints in their day, they have been
reevaluated and embraced by a new LDS
audience, and we should commend Edward
Geary, Gene England, Bruce W. Jorgensen,
Susan E. Howe, Veda Tebbs Hale, Mary
Lythgoe Bradford, and others who have
carefully read and interpreted these works as
among our most valuable in our Mormon
literary canon.
Today many more authors are succeeding
nationally and in widely divergent genres:
Orson Scott Card and Dave Wolverton in
science fiction and fantasy; Anne Perry in
mystery; Terry Tempest Williams in biography
and environmental writing; Judith Freeman,
Walter Kirn, Brady Udall, Brian Evenson, Mary
Clyde, Darrell Spencer, and others in literary
fiction; Dean Hughes, Lael Littke, and others in
adolescent and juvenile fiction; and a slew of
Mormon poets who have succeed in placing
their work in such venues as Poetry, Kenyon
Review, New Republic, Hudson Review, Tar River
Poetry, Paris Review, Shenendoah, the Literary
Review, and the New Yorker.
4. SELF-PUBLISHING
Finally, the tradition of self-publishing
continues strong among Mormons. Carol Lynn
Pearson proved that one could make and sell
one's own books of poetry in the 1970s; and
with the advent of online marketing, the field is
opening up for new means to advertise and sell
self-published works. Works of literary merit
but limited appeal might find a new life online
as the Internet accommodates niche marketing.
Furthermore, new means of inexpensive
reproductions, both electronically and
22
conventionally, mean the return of works once
lost to dusty shelves or gone prematurely out of
print. Tabernacle Books, for example, has
resurrected some of our finest fiction and essays
from 25 years ago in its Mormon Literary
Library; and Signature has brought Virginia
Sorensen's works back into print. Eborn Books
is republishing many home literature titles in
inexpensive reprint editions, too. Had I more
time I would review the innovative trends in
electronic publication quickly developing, but I
refer you once again to the article in Dialogue
where Neal Kramer and I are more specific on
this point.
CONCLUSION
The four literary traditions I have
identified—official, regional and cultural,
national, and self-publishing—each carry
connotations that may falsely prejudice us for
or against them and should not. As I have
shown, these traditions have blended, evolved,
and overlapped. Together, they show that
Mormon literature is a viable and growing field
both as new authors and publishers pioneer
new subjects and markets, and as critics
rediscover the riches as yet unmined in our
culture's rich history.
GIDEON BURTON is Assistant Professor of
English at Brigham Young University where he
teaches Renaissance literature, rhetoric, and
Mormon literature and now serves as president elect
of the Association for Mormon Letters. The 2000
AML awards are included in the accompanying
summary of awards, but this article, written prior to
their presentation, does not refer to them.
NOTES
1. George Q. Cannon edited five works: A
String of Pearls, Second Book of the Faith-Promoting
Series (Salt Lake City: Juvenile Instructor Office,
1880); Leaves from My Journal: By President W.
Woodruff, Third Book of the Faith-Promoting Series
(Salt Lake City: Juvenile Instructor Office, 1881);
Gems for the Young Folks, Fourth Book of the Faith-
Promoting Series (Salt Lake City: Juvenile Instructor
Office, 1881); Fragments of Experience, Sixth Book of
the Faith-Promoting Series (Salt Lake City: Juvenile
Instructor Office, 1882); Early Scenes in Church
History, Eighth Book of the Faith-Promoting Series
(Salt Lake City: Juvenile Instructor Office, 1882).
Other authors in the series included James Little's
biography of Jacob Hamblin (1881) and Scraps of
Biography, Tenth Book of the Faith-Promoting Series
(Salt Lake City: Juvenile Instructor Office, 1883.)
Many of these titles are currently being republished
by Eborn Books.
2. Terryl L. Givens is addressing this myopia
through his scholarly works on the popular
reputation of Mormons in 19th-century America.
WORKS CITED
Bitton, Davis. George Q. Cannon: A Biography. Salt
Lake City: Deseret Book, 1999.
Burton, Gideon. “Toward a Mormon Criticism:
Should We Ask, `Is This Mormon Literature.'”
Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 32.3
(Fall 1999): 33-43.
England, Eugene. “Danger on the Right! Danger on
the Left! The Ethics of Recent Mormon
PANEL
“There's a Multitude of Children All Around”:
Children's and Young Adult Fiction
in the Mormon Literary Tradition
Sharlee Mullins Glenn, Rick Walton,
Carol Lynch Williams, and Dean Hughes
PARTICIPANTS
Moderator SHARLEE MULLINS GLENN has
a long-standing interest in children's literature
dating back about thirty-five years. Like so many
23
Fiction.” Rev. of In Our Lovely Deseret. Dialogue,
32.3 (Fall 1999): 13-30.
Givens, Terryl L. The Viper on the Hearth: Mormons,
Myths, and the Construction of Heresy. New York,
Oxford UP, 1997.
“If It's Written By a Living General Authority, It
Will Sell: A Report on Mormon Publishing.”
Dialogue 10.3 (Spring 1977): 122-25.
Burton, Gideon, and Neal Kramer. “The State of
Mormon Literature and Criticism.” Dialogue:
A Journal of Mormon Thought 32.3 (Fall 1999):
1-12.
Mulder, William. “Mormonism and Literature.” A
Believing People: Literature of the Latter-day Saints.
Eds. Richard H. Cracroft and Neal E. Lambert.
Provo, UT: BYU Press, 1974. 208-11.
Riess, Jana. “Mormon Publishing Comes Into Its
Own.” Publishers Weekly, April 4, 2001.
http://www.publishersweekly.com/articles/20
010404_95095.asp
Roberts, B. H. The Life of John Taylor. Salt Lake City:
G. Q. Cannon & Sons, 1892.
Smith, Joseph, Jr. “Letter to William W. Phelps.”
Times and Seasons 5.22 (January 1833): 720.
Whitney, Orson F. “Home Literature.” Contributor
(July 1888). Rpt. in A Believing People, 203-07.
others, she discovered Mormon literature in a class
caught by the venerable Richard Cracroft who has
since publicly proclaimed that he taught her
everything she knows. Children's literature and
Mormon literature came together for her and
resulted in the writing of Circle Dance (Salt Lake
City: Bookcraft, 1998). A picture book is
forthcoming in 2000 from Cornerstone Publishing,
and she recently sold another picture book
manuscript to G. P. Putnam Sons.
RICK WALTON is the author of over thirty
books for children including Once There Was a
Bull . . . frog, So Many Bunnies, Dance, Pioneer, Dance!,
and Pig Pigger Piggest. He has also published riddle
books, activity books, and educational software. His
work has been featured on the IRA Children's
Choice List, Reading Rainbow, and CBS This Morning.
Rick and his wife, Ann, are the parents of four
children and live in Provo.
CAROL LYNCH WILLIAMS has published
extensively in both the LDS and national markets.
Her most recent titles include Victoria's Courage, one
of eight books she has published as part of the
Latter-day Daughter series, The True Colors of
Caitlynne Jackson, If You Forget, I Remember, and My
Angelica. Her books have been honored as ALA Best
Books for Young Adults, Quick Picks, and IRA
Teacher's Choice books. Carol and her husband are
the parents of five daughters and live in Springville,
Utah.
DEAN HUGHES, author of the successful
CHILDREN OF THE PROMISE series, has published
more than eighty books for children, young adults,
and adults. Dean received his B.A. from Weber
State College in Ogden, Utah, and his M.A. and
Ph.D. from the University of Washington. After
seventeen years of full-time writing, he has returned
to the classroom to teach creative writing at BYU.
He and his wife, Kathleen, live in Midway, Utah.
They are the parents of three children and
grandparents of three.
CHRIS CROWE teaches young adult
literature, creative writing, and English education
courses at BYU. He earlier taught for four years at
BYU-Hawaii, three years at a university in Japan,
and ten years at McClintock High School in Tempe,
Arizona. His most recent books are Presenting
Mildred D. Taylor (Twayne, 1999), and from the
Outside Looking In (Salt Lake City: Bookcraft, 1998).
24
He is currently working on a young adult historical
novel.
QUESTION: What is the place of children's
fiction within the Mormon literary tradition? Where
have we come from? Where are we now? And where
are we going?
RICK: I think that LDS publishers are
trying to figure out their focus where picture
books are concerned. I've had them tell me that
they want books designed specifically for the
LDS market; and then a couple of years later,
I've had them tell me that they'd like to reach a
national market. Yet a whole class in a New
York school was reading Dance, Pioneer, Dance!
and I was in a school in San Diego where the
principal's office was decorated with scenes
from Dance, Pioneer, Dance! So perhaps this
distinction we make between the LDS market
and the national market isn't as hard and fast as
we sometimes think it is.
The other fact of life about publishing
picture books is that it's a huge financial risk.
Pat Bagley's I Spy a Nephite has been very
successful, but many other picture books by
LDS authors for the Mormon market have been
only moderately successful.
DEAN: In 1975, I sent a young adult
novel to Bookcraft and got it back with a letter
from George Bickerstaff saying Mormons don't
read fiction. Now, that was just twenty-five years
ago, so the point I'm making is that modern
Mormon fiction is a comparatively recent
phenomenon. In the late seventies, the
Yorgasen brothers and Shirley Seely began
publishing, and things began to change. In
1978, I sent a children's historical novel set in
Jackson County to Deseret Book. That was
Under the Same Stars. I guess if you're talking
about seminal works, I made a small donation
to the semen bank— (laughter). Hey, that's what
seminal means!
 CAROL QUIST (from audience): How
about “germinal”? That's inclusive.
DEAN: Okay. So that was the first work of
children's or young adult fiction published for
the Mormon market in contemporary times,
but it didn't turn the world upside down. Jack
Weyland is the one who really got Mormon
young adult fiction going. I know we gather
together in AML to condescend, and a lot of
people condescended to Charley, but it was a
remarkably irreverent book for its time. It
taught teens that it was fun to read about
Mormons.
One of the problems in publishing LDS
young adult fiction is financial. Ten years ago, I
sold the Lucky series of ten books. They were
five dollars apiece for a paperback, which
doesn't sound like much now; but ten years ago,
young adult paperbacks on the national market
were selling for three to three and half dollars.
There's no question that the price made it more
difficult to sell.
But over time, Mormon young adult books
have established themselves. There's some
confidence on the part of the audience that you
can pick up a Mormon young adult book and
it'll really be entertaining. I can remember when
all that was available for the Mormon children's
market were coloring books and little books
about preparing for baptism. I think there's
some trust now between readers and writers
that you can pick up a young adult book at
Deseret Book and it won't be a preachy, corny
thing.
Where is young adult fiction going in the
LDS market? I think writers are building a
tradition. I'm teaching really fine writers at
BYU, writers like Gordon Laws, Anne Billings,
Laura Torres, and quite a few others—and they
aren't just talented. They're finishing projects.
They're moving ahead. They're serious about
becoming writers.
25
And the final thing to remember is that
the young adult novel has been dying since it
was born. It's a very precarious art form. High
school students don't read young adult novels.
They either read best-sellers or they read
nothing. The kids ages twelve to fifteen in
middle school are reading young adult novels.
That's the bad news, but the good news is that,
in Mormonism, young adult readers constitute
an expanding market. I can do a young adult
novel for Mormons and adults will read it too.
I finally sold a book with a full-blown
Mormon character to Jonathan Canman of
Atheneum. It should come out in 2001. I've
always fought to write about Mormons, and my
editors have always been nervous about it, up
till now. It's a World War II novel about two
characters at the Battle of the Bulge, and one of
them is a Mormon kid from Brigham City. I
told the editor about my CHILDREN OF THE
PROMISE series and that it was selling well so
that there's a good market among Mormons, at
least for this; and they know that there's a new
national interest in Mormons, so they're willing
to take a chance on it.
CHRIS: Under the Same Stars opened the
doors for young adult fiction. Another
landmark event was that the New Era about the
same time began publishing fiction every
month, usually two pieces. Brian Kelly, who was
the managing editor then, did a lot to develop
writers, create a market, and familiarize readers
with authors' names so that they'd buy books
after reading their stories. A third development
was the publication of Charley. I don't think
there's any way to underestimate its importance
for Mormon teenagers. I know publishers don't
like to release sales figures, but I understand
that Charley has sold at least 250,000 copies. If
you figure that one book goes to one family,
and that there are four or five children in that
family who grow up and read Charley while
they're in their teens, in the English-speaking
Church, that's almost universal coverage. It was
the first real Mormon young adult blockbusters.
I lived out of Utah for a long time, and my
students were really glad to discover books for
Mormon teenagers.
What are the trends? Well, one publishing
quirk in the LDS young adult market is that
they publish young adult books in rack size.
Nationally, rack size is reserved for children's
books. They're a little longer, a little wider.
National publishers of young adult fiction use
standard paperback size. A few years ago, LDS
publishers tried using standard size, but the
sales apparently didn't go well and so they went
back to rack size. I think there's an unconscious
perception in that decision that affects
marketing.
Where is young adult fiction going? I
think that the Mormon market is becoming a
regional market. Our gifted local writers
publish a book or two regionally, and then
enter the national market. I believe that the
regional market is more robust as a
consequence.
QUESTION: Mormon young adult fiction
seems to be flourishing right now with authors like
Jack Weyland, Chris Heimerdinger, Cheri Crane,
Rachel Anne Nunes, Lael Littke, and others. How
do you account for the lesser success of literature for
younger children?
CHRIS: I think the Mormon picture book
market is flat because there's no perceived need
for it. Publishers nationally are just as anxious
to provide benign reading experiences for
children as LDS publishers. Kids' books are not
offensive. So there's no threat from the national
market.
In contrast, I've got teenagers and they
scare me to death when they're dancing close to
the edge. Rather than have them read
something and take the chance that it might tip
26
them over the edge, I'd rather have them read
books that are safe. I think a lot of parents are
in my position. I think there's a tacit agreement
with LDS publishers that they can go into
Deseret Book or Seagull Books and pick a book
off the shelf for their teenager without even
looking at it themselves because they know it'll
be safe. Richard Peck says that a young adult
novel should entertain on every page and
offend on every third page. Well, I don't think
that's true of Mormon young adult fiction.
Furthermore, a lot of teens buy their
books at Deseret Book because they want to be
safe. They're heard all the warnings about not
watching R-rated movies and not getting close
to pornography. They have their standards.
They don't swear, and they don't want to read
books that contain swearing or anything else
that violates their standards.
DEAN: Well, as an author, I'm not sure I
want to be considered “safe.” I think that part
of the job fiction is supposed to do is to
unsettle, to ask questions. Kids need to think
about things they wouldn't ordinarily think
about. But I think another reason is financial.
Mormon popular fiction often comes out in
hardback editions. In paperback, the actual cost
of producing the book isn't that much less per
volume unless you can greatly increase the print
run; but the regional market is such that it's
hard to make a print run large enough to
significantly lower the price. That means we sell
mostly hardbacks, and they're expensive
compared to the paperbacks more widely
available on the national market.
CAROL: I think some contributing
reasons are that paperbacks for children
published by LDS publishers are that they're
more expensive than the national market, they
have fairly unattractive covers by comparison
with those of national publishers, and the
editors seem less willing to help develop writers.
The national editors I've worked with are
willing to stand behind me. They told me that
they expect to lose money on my first couple of
books, but they're going to work with me
because they expect to make a lot of money
eventually. I don't see that attitude with local
publishers.
RICK: Picture books for young children
are slightly cheaper on the LDS market than
nationally, but it's harder to break into. The
Mormon market hasn't come to terms with who
they're publishing for and what they're
publishing for. I Spy a Nephite is fun, interesting,
and educational, but there aren't many like that.
I think we could do well in the area of well-
done schmalz—such as Susan Wojciechowski's
The Christmas Miracle of Jonathan Toomey—writ-
ing that communicates a powerful emotional
message. I think we've got the ability to do it
but just haven't figured out how to do it yet. I'd
like to see picture books do in literature what
the Homefront series is doing on TV—a non-
sappy tug at your heart.
And I'd agree that part of the problem is
financial. It's the “buy-by-the-pound syndrome.”
If you can get a 500-page book by Gordon B.
Hinckley for $20 or a thirty-two page book, the
text of which would all fit on one page, for $15,
and you're a middle-class Mormon family with
six or seven kids, two of whom are on missions,
then you're probably going to buy the Hinckley
book and look at garage sales or discount stores
or the library for children's books.
QUESTION: How knowledgeable are
Mormon publishers in children's and young adult
fiction?
CAROL: I've worked with some really
good local people, but I've also had the
experience of either being completely rewritten
or of having nothing done. I think both
approaches are wrong. I've had editors tell me
that there weren't enough spiritual experiences
27
in my novels. Well, I can't end every chapter
with “And then she knew . . . ” or “And the
Holy Ghost bore witness that . . .” I think,
when we do that, we're teaching our children
things that don't happen. I'd love to have a
spiritual epiphany every day, but that's not
reality.
When it comes to marketing, I think
there's also a long way to go. I write for eight-
year-old girls. If the marketing director is a
forty-five-year-old male, it's been my experience
that he knows nothing about eight-year-old
girls—not that I want to offend any forty- five-
year-old men.
RICK: I think the LDS children's and
young adult market is growing and that it's
improving, but I also think that it's been
something of a captive market so it hasn't
recognized what other publishers in other
markets are doing in terms of contracts,
marketing approaches and so forth. I think that
the local publishers do some things different
from national publishers out of naivete. I've
done four children's books for one local
publisher and I worked with four different
editors. They were all good; but the fact of the
matter is that this situation produces editors
who are jacks of all trades and masters of none.
I think Mormon publishers should have an
editor who specializes in children and young
adult books, and this person should go to ALA
and IRA conferences, talk to agents, read the
literature, get the children's literature edition of
Publisher's Weekly—in short, there should be
some expertise.
DEAN: I think there's also a tendency in
this market to create self-fulfilling prophecies.
When salespeople believe that children's and
young adult fiction won't sell, they just don't
put much emphasis behind promoting it. I
couldn't believe how much more Deseret Book
was willing to do in terms of promoting
CHILDREN OF THE PROMISE than it was willing
to do for any of my children's or young adult
books.
On the other issue, I have to say that
Deseret Book has a really strong editing staff.
Emily Watts is one of the best. They've just
hired Timothy Robinson from Dell children's
division, and those two are going to be over
fiction. But all New York publishers have a
youth division that's separate from the other
divisions. They're experts. I know that Deseret
hired Jim Jacobs at BYU as a consultant on
some of their projects, but I think they need
somebody full-time.
CHRIS: I think they should hire me full-
time at twice what they're paying Jim. (laughter)
It's been my experience that editors locally
mostly do copy editing: punctuation, spelling,
things like that. But in the national market,
editors demand major rewrites and demand it
more than once. They're not satisfied with stuff
that's pretty good. They want it to be excellent
and they can tell the difference. Now obviously
that's a situation that demands more work, so
maybe it also demands more rapport with the
authors.
I also think there are some marketing
National Trends in Poetry
Lisa Bickmore
28
problems on something as simple as shelving.
At Deseret Book and also at BYU Bookstore (I
couldn't get them to listen to me at BYU
Bookstore, so maybe I wouldn't be any good as
a consultant), in the main fiction section, the
children's and young adult fiction is in a
separate place from the adult fiction, so a kid
can go in and browse among books targeted at
his or her age group. But when you go to the
LDS fiction section, it's all there together—adult,
children's, and young adult on the same shelves.
I've asked, “Why not separate them?” and the
answer I get is, “Well, they're all LDS books.”
But why make them hard for the buyer to find?
DEAN: I should say that Deseret Book
editors always make me rewrite everything
extensively—children's and adult.
QUESTION: Do we even need our own
children's literature? Why not just publish in the
national market?
CAROL: I like writing for the Mormon
market, but I think it should be more like the
national market. We should be able to go into a
bookstore and not be ashamed to pull a
Mormon book off the shelf. And I think local
publishers need to start treating authors really
well.
 I. PROLOGUE
As I talked to my husband this week about
what I might say to you about contemporary
trends in poetry, he very helpfully contributed a
title, since the title in your program is only a
placeholder, one I never got around to
amending. His title: “Toward the
Incomprehensible: A Postmodern View [of
National Trends in Poetry]”—the kind of
pompous title one might intone in academia. I
have toyed with and tweaked this title until I
found one that would express my reticence to
anatomize, categorize, and/or euthanize the
contemporary poetic scene. That title—“Toward
the Horizon of the Indescribable: A
Postmodern View [of National Trends in
Poetry].”
But even the placeholder title makes me
want to italicize, put in quotation marks, or, in
postmodern fashion, put brackets around, each
of the puffy, self-important words. What nation
might we speak of, in what appears to be, for
better or for worse, a moment of erasure, the
blurring of the national into the global? What
would be the nation of poetry? If there is such a
nation, it speaks many languages and translates
even more. Many of the most interesting poets
these days are polymath, writing without
prejudice in a lucid and perpetual bilingual
form.
Trends? Poetry is simultaneously radical
and conservative—it wants its past and lives in
and through it, at the same time desiring
nothing more than to abolish it—at once to fill
the vessel and to crack it. And when has it not
been thus? And what is poetry, anyway? I have in
the last years listened to performances,
monologues, raps, readings. I have read lyrics,
epics, narratives, prose poems. I have been a
part of slams, meltdowns, literary magazines,
arts councils, and writing groups. Before I even
start this project, I would like to announce my
29
failure and my resignation. I quit.
II. METHOD
To write this paper, I gathered my books
and magazines, little and otherwise, the poets I
love, the poems that engage me, or annoy or
provoke me, the work I come back to. I
sketched a list which had no order, no
compelling narrative or taxonomy, like the
items in the Borges story Foucault cites in The
Order of Things. Items like “on-line,” “Jorie
Graham,” “performance” “who've left us,” and
“Who is essential? What is essential?” do not
comprise an orderly account. So, in a method
of composition one might describe as “Open
the book and see what is there,” I have written
an adventure of poetry reading and reflection,
one that is mine.
It goes without saying that, were you to
read deeply in poetry—and perhaps you already
have—, your adventure would likely be different
than mine. Here it is—borrowing Borges's fictive
Chinese encyclopedia's categories: the poetry
“(a) belonging to the Emperor, (b) embalmed, (c)
tame, (d) sucking pigs, (e) sirens, (f) fabulous, (g)
stray dogs, (h) included in the present
classification, (i) frenzied, (j) innumerable, (k)
drawn with a very fine camelhair brush, (l) et
cetera, (m) having just broken the water jar, (n)
that from a long way off look[s] like flies”
(“Preface” The Order of Things xv).
III. RATIONALE
It is difficult
to get the news from poems
yet men die miserably every day
for lack
Of what is found there.
—William Carlos Williams
IV. “WHO'VE LEFT US”
I will start with people we've lost. Dead
poets, particularly if they're white and male,
have a seedy reputation among certain of us,
but there are some without whom I cannot
imagine describing the present. Both of these
poets have been my teachers, one by allowing
me to learn from his books and workshops, the
other by the plenitude of his work alone.
Larry Levis was my generous teacher. He
died in 1996, unexpectedly. This poem comes
from his posthumous book Elegy, edited by
Philip Levine, who was once his teacher:
Photograph: Migrant Worker,
Parlier, California, 1967
I'm going to put Johnny Dominguez right here
In front of you on this page so that
You won't mistake him for something else,
An idea, for example, of how oppressed
He was, rising with his pan of Thompson Seedless
Grapes from a row of vines. The band
On his white straw hat darkened by sweat, is,
He would remind you, just a hatband.
His hatband. He would remind you of that.
As for the other use, this unforeseen
Labor you have subjected him to, the little
Snacks & white wine of the opening he must
Bear witness to, he would remind you
That he was not put on this earth
To be an example of something else,
Johnny Dominguez, he would hasten to
Remind you, in his chaste way of saying things,
Is not to be used as an example of anything
At all, not even, he would add after
A second or so, that greatest of all
Impossibilities, that unfinishable agenda
Of the stars, that fact, Johnny Dominguez. (12)
James Merrill has been the subject of my
own study for many years. He died in 1995.
Here is a poem from the last volume of poetry
collected while he was alive, A Scattering of Salts:
body
Look closely at the letters. Can you see,
30
entering (stage right), then floating full,
then heading off—so soon—
how like a little kohl rimmed moon
o plots her course from b to d—
as y, unanswered, knocks at the stage door?
Looked at too long, words fail,
Phase out. Ask, now that body shines
no longer, by what light you learn these lines
and what the b and d stood for. (64)
V. SPOKEN WORD, PERFORMANCE,
ON-LINE
David Lehman, series editor of The Best
American Poetry, year by year notes that he “can't
help thinking that the rapid proliferation of
poems in unexpected quarters (bus and subway
placards, highway billboards, TV sitcoms and
commercials) and unusual forms (competitive
slams) from unconventional bards (rock-and-
roll troubadours, rap artists) argues for the
vitality of poetry today. Doesn't poetry belong as
much in bars and breweries as in classrooms
and libraries? And if the bad poems declaimed
at such venues outnumber the good, is that not
true of all venues?” (10) That said, poetry out-of-
the-box is a phenomenon. The Taos Poetry
Circus and the Nuyorican Poetry Café, the
Poetry Olympics, recorded spoken word artists—
all play a part in the liveliness of language that
seems now to fit under the hip and generous
umbrella of poetry.
On-line work, including webzines and on-
line journals, as well as websites devoted to
poetry and an on-line presence for nearly every
little magazine you can think of, has also altered
the contemporary face of poetry. Hypertext
contributes its own tropes, as well: new poems
written explicitly for web technologies invite
multiple directions for reading, although I
cannot imagine performing—as I am speaking to
you now—these poems, they are so wholly web
artifacts. Lehman notes: “According to Lycos,
poetry was that search engine's eighth most
popular `search term' in 1999, behind
Pokemon and Star Wars, but ahead of tattoos,
golf, Jennifer Lopez, pregnancy, guns, and Las
Vegas” (15) And Poetry Daily, at poems.com, is
itself an education in the form, a daily missive
from poetry world.
VI. THE EPISTEMIC
Here is a poem—and a poet—that enacts
what it may mean to know in this world:
Steering Wheel
In the rear-view mirror I saw the veil of leaves
suctioned up by a change in current
and how they stayed up, for the allotted time,
in absolute fidelity to the force behind,
magenta, hovering, a thing that happens,
slowly upswirling above the driveway
I was preparing to back clear out of—
and three young pine trees at the end of that view
as if aghast with bristling stillness—
and the soft red updraft without hesitation
aswirl in their prickly enclosing midst—
and on the radio I bent to press on,
a section with rising strings plugging in,
crisp with distinctions, of the earlier order.
Oh but I haven't gotten it right.
You couldn't say that it was matter.
I couldn't say that it was sadness.
Then a hat from someone down the block
blown off, rolling—tossing—across the empty
macadam,
an open mouth, with no face round it,
O and O and O and O—
“we have to regain the moral pleasure
of experiencing the distance between subject
and object,”
—me now slowly backing up
the dusty driveway into the law
composed of updraft, downdraft, weight of
these dried mid-winter leaves,
light figured-in too, I'm sure, the weight of light,
and angle of vision, dust, gravity, solitude,
and the part of the law which is the world's waiting,
31
and the part of the law which is my waiting,
and then the part which is my impatience—now;
now?—
though there are, there really are,
things in the world, you must believe me. (5-6)
As many have noted, Jorie Graham’s is not
always the friendliest poetry, but its weight, its
gravitas, give it its place in contemporary poetics.
In a more comic vein, but nonetheless as
serious, I would place the phenomenal “The
Bob Hope Poem,” by Campbell McGrath. A
virtuosic pastiche, collage, and walk-in-the-world,
the poem is an examination of capitalism and
American culture, and is unlike any other
seventy-page poem I've ever read. Here is an
excerpt:
They say in this issue of People that Bob Hope is in a
hot dispute about a piece of real estate in
Southern California.
As he likes to joke with Jay on Johnny he owns at
least half of everything left out there,
the yucca flats and salt pans beyond Antelope Valley,
the chaparral and scrub oak of the Santa
Monica Mountains,
dry hills and canyons so far out it must have seemed
nuts to imagine the city could ever reach them.
But now it has, and it's his, and he wants a
championship golf course and hundreds of
beautiful ranch-style homes
to replace this particular oasis above the smog line,
he likes developers more than conservationists,
doesn't understand the theory, really, old school,
rights of property, it's his and he'll do what he
likes,
so what if he's a nonagenarian he wants that extra
twenty-five million bucks so bad he can taste it.
There are those who cannot comprehend this line
of reasoning.
What does he want with more millions, such a rich
and ancient man?
What's driven him to this desire for money beyond
 all rational definition of need?
What does he think it can buy that he doesn't
already have?
What is it with this generation of white men from
Southern California, the oil barons and water
hoarders,
the highway builders, the golf players, the dream
merchants and the oligarchs and the last
frontiersmen,
Uncle Walt and the Duke, Nixon's Committee of
100 and the whole Reagan crew,
who willingly testified to their fondness for none
but former Marines and self-made millionaires
like themselves?
They are such fossils!
I mean that constructively. (11-12)
VII. SPEAKING PLAINLY
American poetry has always had a soft spot
for the plain speaker—the kosmos, the roughs.
Among these are eminent practitioners such as
Philip Levine, whose What Work Is (1992) is a
beautiful and grave book, from start to finish:
The Sweetness of Bobby Hefka
What do you make of little Bobby Hefka
in the 11th grade admitting to Mr. Jaslow
that he was a racist and if Mr. Jaslow
was so tole rant how come he couldn't
tolerate Bobby? The class was stunned.
“How do you feel about the Jews?”
asked my brother Eddie, menacingly.
“Oh, come on, Eddie,” Bobby said,
“I thought we were friends.” Mr. Jaslow
banged the desk to regain control.
“What is it about Negroes you do not like?”
he asked in his most rational voice,
which always failed to hide the fact
he was crazy as a bed bug, claiming
Capek's RUR was far greater than Macbeth.
Bobby was silent for a long minute, thinking.
“Negroes frighten me,” he finally said,
“They frighten my mother and father who never
saw them in Finland, they scare my brother
who's much bigger than me.” Then he added
32
the one name, Joe Louis, who had been
cutting down black and white men
no matter what their size. Mr. Jaslow
sighed with compassion. We knew that
before the class ended he'd be telling us
a great era for men and women was imminent
if only we could cross the threshold
--into humanitarianism, into the ideals
of G. B. Shaw, Karel Capek, and Mr. Jaslow.
I looked across the room to where Bobby
sat in the back row next to the windows.
He was still awake, his blue eyes wide.
Beyond him the dark clouds of 1945
were clustering over Linwood, the smokestack
of the power plant gave its worst
to a low sky. Lacking the patience to wait
for combat, Johnny Mooradian had quit school
a year before, and Johnny was dead on an atoll
without his name. Bobby Hefka had told the truth
—to his own shame and pride—and the rains
came on. Nothing had changed for a roomful
of 17 year olds more scared of life than death.
The last time I saw Bobby Hefka he was driving
a milk truck for Dairy Cream, he was married,
he had a little girl, he still dreamed
of going to medical school. He listened
in sorrow to what had become of me. He handed
me an icy quart bottle of milk, a gift
we both held on to for a silent moment,
while the great city roared around us, the trucks
honking and racing their engines to make him
move.
His eyes were wide open. Bobby Hefka loved me.
(72-73)
Add to this the gorgeous strong lyrics of
Louise Gluck in The Wild Iris, or the quirky
statements of Billy Collins, or the jazz-soaked
inventions of Yusef Komunyakaa, or even the
shambling and hilarious monologues of David
Kirby. This remains a powerful tradition, one
that rewards in surprising utterances.
VIII. FORMALISM
You'd have to include the relatively recent
embrace of formalism—often called “the new
formalism,” I suppose because it has reasserted
itself as progressive rather than a reactionary
aesthetic—in the contemporary landscape.
Sonnet sequences, blank verse, pantoums,
sestinas, villanelles, ghazals, terza rima—these
are widely practiced by an astonishingly wide
variety of poets. Pick up a book or literary
journal and you won't have to look hard to find
a flowering of forms. And, as Rita Dove
suggests, “no poem is ever completely free of
the rules” (20).
IX. TRANSLATION
One can barely imagine poetry now
without the poems not originally written in
English. The poems thus enfolded into our
realm range from Sufi poets like Rumi to
Central European fixtures like Milosz or
Symborzka, to a host of Spanish language poets,
to Japanese practitioners of the haiku, and
more. This leaves out whoever is most recently
translating Dante and Rilke. In the past few
years, I have been fortunate enough to have
heard Milosz, Chinese poet BeiDao, and Joseph
Brodsky, before he died. And without
poet/translators like Robert Hass, W. S.
Merwin, Robert Bly, and many others, our
poetic world would not have been thus
enriched.
X. ET CETERA
Appalling project, lousy classification. I
could not find a categorical way to speak of
these poets whose work inspires me and moves
me to write: the luminous open lines of Merwin;
the wit and pathos of Richard Howard; Tim
Liu's burning lyricism; Mark Strand's glowing
poem in Dark Harbor; Ashbery's tweaky
grandeur; Mark Doty's lush figures; Robert
Hass's humane poems; Jacqueline Osherow's
engagement with the Psalmist. Those of you
33
who love and read poetry know exactly whom
I've left out. I acknowledge your disapproval. I,
too, disapprove.
XI. DISCLAIMER AS PERORATION,
ASSISTED BY INSPIRING QUOTATIONS
AND A FINAL POEM
I apologize for ignoring (nearly) the
“trends” portion of my assignment and for the
frankly partisan nature of my account. But what
does poetry do for us, anyway? What is its use?
Seamus Heaney, in The Redress of Poetry, quotes
Simone Weil from Gravity and Grace: “If we
know in what way society is unbalanced, we
must do what we can to add weight to the
lighter scale. . . . We must have formed a
conception of equilibrium and be ever ready to
change sides like justice, ‘that fugitive from the
camp of conquerors'” (3). Heaney goes on to
note:
Clearly this corresponds to deep structures of
thought and feeling derived from centuries of
Christian teaching and from Christ's
paradoxical identification with the wretched.
And insofar as poetry is an extension and
refinement of the mind's extreme recognitions,
and of language's most unexpected
apprehensions, it too manifests the workings
of Weil's law. (3)
Poetry gives us—and requires of us—moral
deftness and ethical movement. It abhors stasis.
Find some of these poets and read them. Find
what Heaney calls “the surprise of poetry as well
as its reliability . . . its given unforeseeable
thereness, the way it enters our field of vision
and animates our physical and intelligent
being . . .” (15).
Or, as Billy Collins says, in “Today,”
If ever there were a spring day so perfect,
so uplifted by a warm intermittent breeze
that it made you want to throw
open all the windows in the house Dove, Rita. “Introduction.” The Best American Poetry
2000. Ed. Rita Dove. New York: Scribner
and unlatch the door to the canary's cage, Poetry, 2000.
indeed, rip the little door from its jamb, Foucault, Michel. The Order of Things: An Archaeology
of the Human Sciences. New York: Vintage,
a day when the cool brick paths 1970.
and the garden bursting with peonies Graham, Jorie. Materialism. Hopewell, NJ: Ecco P,
1993.
seemed so etched in sunlight Heaney, Seamus. The Redress of Poetry. New York:
that you felt like taking Noonday P, 1995.
Lehman, David. “Foreword.” In The Best American
a hammer to the glass paperweight Poetry 2000. Ed. Rita Dove. New York: Scrib-
on the living room end table, ner Poetry, 2000.
Levine, Philip. What Work Is. New York: Alfred A.
releasing the inhabitants Knopf, 1992.
from their snow-covered cottage Levis, Larry. Elegy. Pittsburgh: U of Pittsburgh P,
1997.
so they could walk out, McGrath, Campbell. Spring Comes to Chicago. Hope-
holding hands and squinting well, NJ: Ecco P, 1996.
Merrill, James. A Scattering of Salts. New York:
into this larger dome of blue and white,
Alfred A. Knopf, 1996.
well, today is just that kind of day.
Williams, William Carlos. “It is difficult . . .” Qtd.
in advertisement for National Poetry Month.
LISA BICKMORE is an assistant professor of
Bomb, Spring 2000, 43.
English at Salt Lake Community College where she
currently serves as director of the Faculty Teaching
and Learning Center and teaches writing. Her book
of poems, Haste, was published in 1994 by National Christian Fiction and
Signature Press. Her work has appeared or is
forthcoming in Quarterly West and Mudfish. Among Publishing:
her honors is an Academy of American Poets Prize.
Recently, she was awarded an artist's residency at
Have Latter-day Saints Been
the Vermont Studio Center. Left Behind?
WORKS CITED
Collins, Billy. “Today.” http://www.poems.
Gideon O. Burton
com/todaycol.htm. Originally published in
Poetry 176.1 (April 2000).
Rising out of its early obscurity, limited venues for submitting their
imaginative writing by and about the Church manuscripts, they need only look back to the
of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints stands early 1970s when Deseret Book or Bookcraft
poised to grow and prosper. A healthy stable of published almost no fiction; when
established and younger writers and a thriving independent publishers like Covenant sold
LDS book trade are good portents of success. only scripture tapes (and others like Signature
And though authors continue to complain of did not even exist); when there was no Internet
34
for self-publishing and self-promotion—to see
just how far LDS publishing has come.
But where will LDS publishing go? This
is an issue for authors as they choose genres
and subject matter; for publishers, as they
market literary properties and develop product
lines; and for retailers and readers as well.
Though literary scholars might hope to see the
establishment of new independent presses
willing to publish more literary fiction and
nonfiction such as John Bennion's recent
Falling Toward Heaven or Edward Geary's now
out-of-print Goodbye to Poplar Haven, LDS
publishing will more likely take the path
already taken by national Christian publishing.
Just as Latter-day Saint presses and
markets have prospered in recent decades by
alternately whetting and satisfying growing
appetites for fiction, so have national Christian
publishers such as Zondervan, Bethany, and
Tyndale. Such publishers have their trade
associations, the Christian Bookseller's
Association and the Evangelical Christian
Booksellers Association, just as we have the
LDS Booksellers Association. Those publishers,
like Mormon publishers, do a steady business
in Bibles, reference works, and nonliterary
products such as talk tapes, children's videos,
self-help books, and lesson materials.
Indeed, their products, product categories,
and retail outlets are uncomfortably familiar in
many respects. The difference is one of
magnitude. Whereas there are around 300
LDS bookstores (mostly in the United States),
Christian bookstores number ten times that
and span the globe. We have our Deseret Book,
the dominant chain for our market with some
30 stores. The Christian market has Family
Christian Stores, with 350 stores. The annual
trade show of the LDS Booksellers brings a
couple hundred exhibitors and covers a floor
and a half of Salt Lake City's Expo Mart. The
comparable meeting of the Christian
35
Booksellers Association attracts 400 exhibiting
companies and representatives of 2,800 retail
outlets in a convention hall the size of six
football fields. Even by conservative estimates,
the Christian market is ten times the size of the
LDS market, with more than 50 million
evangelical Christians nationwide in
comparison to 5 million Latter-day Saints.
That order-of-magnitude difference has
allowed growth and specialization within the
national Christian market not yet possible in
LDS circles, but certainly likely. Their success
might be our future, and I suggest we evaluate
aspects of it that are worth imitating, and
aspects that are not.
The likelihood of following the national
Christian publishing trajectory is borne out in
part by common interests in genre fiction—
specifically romance, historical fiction, and
speculative fiction. Where an LDS market
publisher like Covenant might have a few
prominent romance writers like Anita
Stansfield or Rachel Ann Nunes with their First
Love and Ariana series, a Christian publisher
like Tyndale can create a separate imprint,
HeartQuest, for its cadre of inspirational
romance writers, boasting eight separate
romance series and nine romance anthologies—
from just one publisher.
Historical fiction has taken Christian
markets by storm in recent years—so much so
that in the annual Christian fiction awards, the
“Christy” Awards, separate recognition is given
for International Historical Fiction (including
biblical fiction) and North American Historical
Fiction. Mormon publishing has been
refashioned in the wake of two dramatically
successful series: Gerald Lund's Work and the
Glory and Dean Hughes's Children of the Promise.
These series have, in turn, paved the way for
Revolutionary War and time-of-Christ
historical series now beginning.
Christian historical fiction has
anticipated these developments with
astonishing breadth. Many Christian
publishers put out pioneer and western series.
From Bethany House publishers comes Laur-
aine Snelling's Red River of the North series
about immigrants on the prairie; Beverly
Lewis's Heritage of Lancaster County series about
the Amish. (Herald Publishers carries two
series about the Amish, including Carrie
Bender's Birch Hollow Schoolmarm.) Bethany
House also carries the Spirit of Appalachia series.
From Revell publishers comes Brenda Wilbee's
Sweetbriar series, about pioneer women in
Washington State. From WaterBrook comes
the Heart's True Desire prairie romance series
and a historical series for younger readers, the
Cahira O'Connor series by Angela Elwell Hunt.
There are western series almost too
numerous to mention, including the Starlight
Trilogy by Marian Wells which dramatizes 19th-
century Mormon Utah (in ways our audiences
would gasp at). Diversifying geographically,
Bethany House has put out the Annanbrae
series, historical romances set in post-World
War II England by Noreen Riols, and another
series about the settlement of Australia, Land of
the Far Horizon.
Fictional retellings of Bible stories are
also a staple of Christian publishing. Where
Mormon markets now carry Orson Scott
Card's version of the lives of Moses, Stone
Tables, and Abraham's wife, Sarah; and as
Gerald Lund begins his time of Christ series,
The Kingdom and the Crown, Christian
publishers have already put out a trilogy from
Bethany about Joseph of Egypt called Legacies of
the Ancient River; Francine Rivers's Lineage of
Grace series with fictionalized accounts of Ruth,
Rahab, and Tamar; Roberta Kells Dorr's
biblical trilogy about Abraham and Sarah, the
Queen of Sheba, and Solomon from Moorings
Publishing, and many others. Christian
historical fiction has also taken on the lives of
36
Reformation figures. Jack Cavanaugh's Book of
Books series dramatizes the lives of various
figures such as John Wycliffe who were
instrumental in the Reformation and Bible
translation.
Mormon speculative fiction has been
thriving, and the Winter 2000-2001 issue of
Irreantum highlights how many and varied are
LDS science fiction and fantasy authors. But
not even Orson Scott Card, publishing
nationally, can approach the runaway success
of the Left Behind series by Tim LaHaye and
Jerry B. Jenkins. It is the phenomenon of this
series and its first novel about which I would
like to speak in greater detail. Not only should
its subject matter, a dramatization of the earth's
last days, cause “Latter-day” Saints to pay
attention, but so should its storytelling
methods, its marketing success, and its
influence within and outside of mainstream
Christianity.
Here are some numbers to get your
attention. A critically acclaimed book of
literary Mormon fiction like Levi Peterson's
Backslider might sell five to ten thousand copies.
Popular Mormon fiction is considered best-
selling if it reaches sales of thirty to forty
thousand. A runaway success like Dean Hugh-
es's Children of the Promise has sold 300,000
total copies to date, while Gerald Lund's Work
and the Glory series that has dominated the
LDS market recently has achieved sales of 1.75
million copies to date.1
Tim LaHaye's and Jerry B. Jenkins's Left
Behind series, currently at its eighth of twelve
projected volumes, has so far sold 24 million
copies in the last six years. If one adds to this
the 6 million sales for the 16 volumes of the
parallel Left Behind: Kids series, the total
number of Left Behind books sold comes to 30
million copies (Christian “Voice”). The initial
press run of The Mark, the most recent volume,
was 2.4 million hardbound copies. Each of the
Left Behind books has appeared on the New
York Times best-seller list, demonstrating not
just the size of the Christian market but the
national attention the series has received.
In February 2001 a movie version of Left
Behind was released (though minimally in
densely LDS Utah). The Left Behind franchise
includes this movie, the Left Behind: Kids
spinoff series, audiotape versions of both series,
and a full-scale Internet site where people can
review and discuss the works and “witness”
about how the series has brought them to
Christ. Left Behind is not merely a publishing
success; it may well constitute Evangelical
Christianity's most significant missionary work
in contemporary America, as I will discuss.
We ought to pay attention to such
success. At the very least the Left Behind
phenomenon suggests how powerful the
medium of fiction can be in communicating a
specific Christian message. It also suggests the
potential for interdenominational religious
publishing, since the series carefully avoids
identifying with the Southern Baptists
Convention or any specific evangelical
denomination. At a time when Deseret Book
has just made its first tentative stretch into the
mainstream national market with its Shadow
Mountain imprint, it is good timing to
consider whether Mormon authors or
publishers could or should try to imitate Left
Behind.
Part of the series' success has been
capitalizing on end-of-the-world consciousness
that has come with moving into the third
millennium. This is apocalyptic or
eschatological literature, a literature of
revelation and of final things— death, judgment,
and the collapse of this world prior to Christ's
return. LaHaye and Jenkins have done their
Bible prophecy homework, and to their credit
they lay out a rational narrative for a sequence
by which the various biblical prophecies found
37
in Ezekiel, Matthew 24, and Revelation can
unfold credibly in the context of today's world.
What to most Mormons remains a set of not
clearly understood prophecies about Israel, the
mark of the beast, the Antichrist, and
Armageddon, etc., LaHaye and Jenkins make
into a believable sequence of events.
Thus, Left Behind is doubly apocalyptic
since it is itself a kind of revelation of end
times as recorded in the apocalyptic Book of
Revelation. However, the authors' explanations
do not come through traditional theological
means of expository exegesis, although
occasional chapters have pastors somewhat
artificially catechizing proselytes—and the
readers of the novel—in the details of end-of-
the-world prophecies. No, the literary vehicle
here is the political thriller genre. “More
intriguing than Clancy and Grisham,” reads a
back cover blurb.
Well, the Bible might be plodding work,
but Left Behind is definitely a page turner: Buck
Williams, an up-and-coming journalist at a
national news magazine, dodges an
assassination attempt and works his way into
the inner circle of a rising world leader whom
we come to learn will be the Antichrist. This
leader, a Romanian named Nicolae Carpathia,
preaches global peace and unity to a world in
turmoil, all the while consolidating his power
base for his future role as world leader. A New
York Times comment about Left Behind is
certainly true: It “Injects a Thrill into Theology”
(Neibuhr).
At the same time, biblical prophecy and
end-time events are only a framework for what
sustains the better part of the first novel's
story—a conversion narrative. The more
dramatic events catch one's attention, but their
purpose is clearly to provide a pressing context
for personal conversion and for subsequent
proselyting. The novel is more about the
psychology and the sociology of coming to
Christ than about the actual coming of Christ.
The catalytic event that launches both the book
and the series is what is known as The
Rapture—the sudden spiriting away of all true
Christians into a heaven (that is never depicted)
by Jesus (also absent from the drama,
apparently, until Book 12 of the series). The
Rapture produces both immediate and long-
term social chaos as the sudden disappearance
of pilots and drivers causes mayhem in the air
and on the ground, and as the remaining
people try to make sense of so many people
suddenly gone, leaving behind their clothes
where they sat or stood.
Narratively, the series requires readers to
view the world through the eyes of the unsaved,
the left behind. Being passed over by Jesus is
enough to frighten those in the story who have
even a minimal understanding of Christianity,
and people begin to rediscover the Bible and
evangelical Christianity's plan of salvation,
which includes rituals of professing Christ
publicly and the obligation to spread the word
to those who can yet be saved. As presented by
the authors, seven years of tribulation are
outlined in both the Bible and in the Left
Behind series, putting pressure on Christian
readers to be sure they are indeed true
Christians so that they will not be left behind
when the nonfictional Rapture occurs.
The book's action hero might be the
journalist Buck Williams, but most of the
narrative concerns airline pilot Rayford Steele,
his conversion to Christ, and his subsequent
efforts to bring his 21-year-old daughter, Chloe,
to Jesus. The book begins with Rayford
plotting an an affair with a co-worker, a flight
attendant. He is interrupted by the Rapture, a
dramatic scene in which frantic passengers in a
transatlantic flight discover that 150 passengers
are missing. When Rayford finally makes his
way back to his Chicago home, he discovers
that his wife and son are among those taken
38
away, and he begins simultaneously to repent
of his near-adultery and to search out the
spirituality that had comforted (and taken) his
wife.
Rayford's struggle is both the strength
and the weakness of the novel. Like many
Mormon conversion stories in fiction, the
credibility of his leap from skeptic to believer is
strained. For anyone who has had a leap of
faith, the change to embracing God can indeed
be sudden and transforming. However, the
rules of fiction are made in a fallen world
where character changes are earned after all
they and their authors can do, not bestowed
through a form of literary grace—and so at
times Rayford's transformation is more
contrived than credible.
On the other hand, Rayford's conversion
is occasionally rendered more realistic by his
mixed behavior toward his daughter. At first,
overcome with zeal, he preaches to and even
tries to shame his daughter into accepting
Christ. Later, conscious of how he had once
felt crowded by his departed wife's piety, he
backs off. “He felt that if he said or did
anything more, he would be responsible for her
deciding against Christ once and for all” (299).
Clearly, one can push too far.
As world circumstances worsen, Rayford
comes to imitate the missionary approach used
by the repentant and zealous pastor at his wife's
former church. “To be frank,” the pastor says,
“I no longer have time for the pleasantries and
small talk. . . . We live in perilous times. I have
a message and an answer for people genuinely
seeking. I tell everyone in advance that I have
quit apologizing for what I'm going to say”
(423). To the reader's relief, Rayford has the
restraint not to pressure his daughter further.
He does give his witness, though, to the
woman he'd thought of seducing earlier and to
the worldly journalist, Buck Williams, risking
great personal embarrassment in the process.
In a laudable use of fictional technique,
Chloe recognizes how much all this means to
her father as she observes him, from a distance,
confessing Christ to the flight attendant and
journalist. This awareness finally prompts her
to pray earnestly for herself and (in Mormon
terms) to gain her own testimony. This
conversion, and that of the journalist that
follows, comprise the real character
development and narrative climax of the book,
despite the conclusion's focus on the
bloodthirsty Antichrist Nicolae Carpathia
which is clearly setting up the sequel.
Like many LDS novels, this book appears
to be a warning or message to the world, but it
is in fact preaching to the choir. Only those
already invested in a Christian life will buy into
the ground rules respecting the end-of-the-
world scenario and especially the conversion
process. But the book should not be
shortchanged because it will be dismissed by
non-Christians or worldly literary critics. Those
of us who recognize the struggle to feel one's
life acceptable to God and the struggle to open
one's mouth boldly but respectfully to friends
and family will identify with the protagonists,
despite denominational differences. The book
is as much an attack on nominal Christianity
as it is a general critique of an unchristian
world. Throughout the book, humbled
“Christians” come to realize their lack of
commitment and see for the first time the
difference between having the name of Christ
and having the “mind of Christ” (197). Oddly,
the book could be called a kind of devotional
literature, a distant descendent of Ignatius
Loyola's 16th-century exercises in spiritual self-
examination.
Any piece of fiction that can lead to sober
self-reflection of one's state before God is
worth a Mormon's attention. However, it
comes at a price. The very kind of nominal
Christianity that the book explicitly critiques it
may implicitly enable. That is to say, it urges
39
the reader to come to Christ, not out of
recognition of one's fallen nature and
consequent need for Christ, but to escape the
Tribulation Period and assure oneself a place
in the Rapture. “This is God's final effort to get
the attention of every person who has ignored
or rejected him,” says a raptured pastor who
was prescient enough to make a motivational
videotape for those left behind (212).
Characters on the cusp of conversion are given
stern warnings. “I have this urge to tell you not
to wait too long because you never know what
might happen,” says the converted Chloe to
the dubious Buck Williams. The Left Behind
series is hellfire and brimstone repackaged,
scaring the unconverted or half-converted into
full Christian commitment, rather than
persuading them. The fictional medium
emphasizes sensationalistic and exterior
motives for conversion, rather than deeper,
interior motives for change.
In effect, one could say that this book
series about the Rapture is in effect a pseudo-
rapture —it has carried away 30 million
“faithful” readers, and the message is that we
must avoid being left behind (in the series, that
is). Such a statement may sound like a cynical
take on this publishing phenomenon, but
ministry through marketing has become a clear
and defended standard among Christian
booksellers. In 1997 the Christian Booksellers
Association launched an “Impact x 2”
campaign, “a challenge to double ministry
impact by doubling sales through Christian
retail stores by the year 2002” (“Industry”).
Apparently the idea of doubling their ministry
by doubling sales is stated entirely without
irony, as though sales of books constituted
“ministry” itself. Evidently, the Left Behind
series has enabled Christian retailers to meet
their ministry and growth goals: More than 80
new Christian bookstores are opening each
year, and established bookstores report that
Christian fiction, in competition with Bibles
and gift books, is the highest or second-highest
category of book they sell (Christian “Media”
8).
Mormon authors and publishers may
indeed feel left behind as they witness how
savvy Christian businessmen are working
media tie-ins that enrapture readers and
audiences—both mainstream Christian and
beyond. For example, Left Behind, the movie,
was marketed with a host of contemporary
Christian musical artists on its soundtrack,
including Michael W. Smith, Rebecca St.
James, and Avalon.
Those artists, like the sensational Left
Behind series, are making possible
breakthroughs to mainstream media markets.
A Christian Booksellers Association report
boasts how various teen pop acts like Rachael
Lampa and Stacie Orrico recently
went straight to the top of the charts and
broke into mainstream media outlets like
MTV and Disney. Lampa made an
appearance on the Tonight Show with Jay
Leno and has been featured in teen
magazines and other TV specials. . . .
Sixpence None the Richer's lead singer Leigh
Nash saw two songs find favor on the major
Hollywood film Bounce, starring Gwyneth
Paltrow and Ben Affleck, and Atlantic's
P.O.D. went all over the world, becoming an
MTV favorite, proclaiming their faith to
Rolling Stone magazine and shock-jock
Howard Stern. (Christian “Media” 8)
If there is a modern media Antichrist, it
is Howard Stern, a man who has somehow
developed a near cult following and a prime-
time cable show built upon exploiting and
pandering to all that is vulgar and repulsive in
American culture today. One has to wonder
about Christian publishing when it measures
its success by how well it has played into, rather
than critiqued, the worldliness of modern
media.
Also of note is the introduction of a
40
Christian credit card program in July 2000.
The card, issued by First Bank of Omaha, is “a
no-cost marketing tool designed to keep the
Christian store at the top of consumers' minds
by reminding consumers about Christian
product[s] and stores every time they use the
card and by providing monthly incentives to
visit the store” (Christian “Media” 2).
Proselyting meets plastic.
Perhaps we should resist the rapturous
attractiveness of Left Behind's 30 million sales
and the $3 billion-a-year industry of Christian
merchants, retailers, marketers, and promoters
that stand behind it. Don't get me wrong. I
believe in a glorious flowering of Mormon
letters, but having Miltons and Shakespeares of
our own may not mean having Tom Clancys of
our own, or Stephen Kings of our own, or Brit-
ney Spears of our own—especially when
literature becomes a marketing and media
phenomenon instead of a private and personal
exchange between an author and a reader—
something much closer to the model of
conversion we find in Joseph Smith reading
the epistle of James or ourselves reading
Moroni 10.
We would do well to reread Neal Chand-
ler's classic story, “The Only Divinely
Authorized Plan for Financial Success in This
Life or the Next,” which parodies Mormon
capitalistic hunger as Carmen Stavely
seamlessly blends the gospel with multi-level
marketing. In the end, as Hugh Nibley has so
often reminded us by recalling Brigham
Young's worries over the Saints' potential
prosperity, we may find capitalism
compromising, not complementing, our
religion. And it is not merely multi-level
marketing or large corporations that pose this
threat to our culture. It is the humble world of
LDS publishing, doomed by its own health to
grow less humble year by year, or at least more
blind to how publishing success may not equal
spiritual or religious success.
A case in point is the lesson of Betty
Eadie's brief and meteoric success with her
best-selling book, Embraced by the Light
(Placerville, CA: Gold Leaf Press [Aspen Books],
1992). Riding the wave of a shallow and
sensationalistic national interest in near-death
experiences, Aspen Books may have believed
that its capitalistic calling and election had
been made sure when it secured a multi-million
dollar contract from a national press for the
book's paperback rights. But the company's
follow-up titles by the same author and in the
same genre failed to sell; and under the lofty
weight of its pious but unrealistic expansion
plans, Aspen itself had a near-death experience.
The fizzling of this publishing phenomenon
saved Mormon publishing, at least temporarily,
from securing too strong a place in the realm of
sensationalistic spiritualism, but there are many
other appetites a hungry public wants fed, and
Mormon writers and publishers appear ready
and willing to satisfy those appetites without
looking too closely at where those hungers
come from or where they lead—even if they
cheapen or supplant the most profound aspects
of our spirituality and religion.
In the end, I think Left Behind presents an
interesting and highly readable model of a
conversion narrative for Mormon writers to
study. For Mormon publishers, though, the
series is more problematic. Its success might
appear to LDS publishers to be a dazzling
prophecy for their own future bottom line;
however, it should serve more as a warning to
them about compromising our faith by
capitalizing upon what is, in the end, too
important and too delicate to survive much
buying or selling.
I do not mean to suggest that the
subtleties of spiritual conversion or religious
experience cannot or should not be mediated
through literature. But I do mean to suggest
41
that, at a certain level of financial success for
publishers, even publishers manifestly devoted
to Christian ends will naturally ignore thorny
moral issues about commodifying spiritual
experience (as I believe Eadie and Taylor at
Aspen may have done) or corrupting the
correct motives for repentance (as I believe
Jenkins, LeHaye, and Tyndale have done in
Left Behind by exploiting the sensationalism
and stereotypes of popular genre fiction).
How could publishers pass over these
matters? Rather than fearing that the literary
experiences they vend may not in fact bring
about (or may adversely affect) religious faith,
or worrying that Christian fiction could be
supplanting Christian scripture, these
publishers interpret their economic success as
spiritual success. A satisfied customer might
indeed be a returning customer, but is a happy
customer necessarily an edified one?
Unfortunately, it is more likely than not that
economic success in Christian markets will fool
both publisher and public into believing that
what is popular must be good.
Can one seriously double the impact of
Christ's atonement by doubling sales of
Christian products? Does the adversary really
lose ground at each opening of another
discount Christian superstore—or Deseret Book?
Jesus taught that the kingdom of God is within,
a place where we must probe our motives and
rectify our relations to others. But to Christian
publishers the outward sign of clamoring
customers seems to relieve them and their
authors from similarly examining the morals of
their publishing mores. The temptation to
believe that one's financial success is also a
missionary success is simply too easy.
The Left Behind phenomenon is a success
that counts on maintaining no distinction
between the faithful and the faithful customer.
Do we want to be carried away by such success?
With an LDS-products market already
approaching $100 million in annual sales and
with popular fiction series thriving among
Latter-day Saints, perhaps it is already too late
to be left behind.
GIDEON O. BURTON, assistant professor of
English at Brigham Young University, teaches
Renaissance literature, rhetoric, and Mormon
literature and also serves as president elect of the
Association for Mormon Letters.
NOTES
1. Statistics for Hughes and Lund provided
by Cory Maxwell of Deseret Book.
2. “Fiction is general[ly] the top or second to
the highest-selling category of books in the typical
Christian retail store. Over the past several years,
Christian fiction has exploded in popularity,
making it the top-selling book category in many
Christian stores” (Christian “Media Kit, 8).
Your Grandma Makes Green Jell-O Salad, Too?
The Rhetorical Function of Mormon Humor
Anne Billings
Mention green Jell-O salad in the right
context to almost any Mormon, and you are
bound to get a chuckle. You can get the same
reaction if you talk about storing wheat in 100-
pound barrels, or falling asleep during a high
council speaker's remarks. Such cultural inside
jokes may seem trivial. However, this type of
shared cultural humor serves more significant
rhetorical functions than might at first be
apparent. Scholars of rhetoric since Aristotle
and Cicero have recognized that humor can be
an important rhetorical device (Herrick 109-11).
Today, most scholars agree that humor is a
significant form of rhetorical communication.
For instance, Stephen A. Smith asserts:
“Humor is usually purposeful and often
persuasive” and “can be a powerful form of
42
WORKS CITED
Chandler, Neal. “The Only Divinely Authorized
Plan for Financial Success in This Life or the
Next.” Benediction: A Book of Stories. Salt Lake
City: U of Utah P, 1989. 13-22.
Christian Booksellers Association. “Voice of the
Industry.” “Behind the Bestsellers: 2000. The
Year in Review,” http://www. cbaonline.
org/ voice/behind.htm.
—. “Industry Overview.”
http://www.cbaonline.org/ who/ overview.-
htm
—. “Media Kit.” http://www.cbaonline.org/pdfs/
info. pdf
LaHaye, Tim, and Jerry B. Jenkins, Left Behind.
Wheaton, IL: Tyndale House, 1995.
Niebuhr, Gus. “The Newest Christian Fiction
Injects a Thrill into Theology.” New York
Times. October 30, 1995.
social and cultural argument” (51). And
Mormon scholars such as Richard Cracroft and
William A. Wilson have studied various aspects
of humor in LDS culture. However, in my
research, I discovered little scholarship that
specifically examined humor as a rhetorical
aspect of Mormon culture.
Although Mormon humor serves many
different rhetorical functions, this paper will
focus on two—building community and
distributing power. Both of these functions are
listed as essential characteristics of rhetorical
communication in a definition of rhetoric
written by James Herrick. The idea that humor
builds community is especially supported by
the theories of Ernest Borman. Theorists such
as Freud and Bhaktin, as well as Mormon
scholars such as Richard Cracroft and Eloise
Bell, have examined the idea that humor
distributes or diffuses power.
To further support these assertions, I will
give specific examples of how both of these
functions operate using excerpts from
prominent Mormon humorists. The purpose of
explaining these rhetorical functions of humor
in LDS culture is twofold. First, it will establish
that a more in-depth rhetorical evaluation of
Mormon humor would be a worthwhile area
for future scholarship. Second, it will show
how humor can have both positive and
negative effects: it can include or exclude
people from a community, and it can create
balanced realism or damage faith. As
Christians who understand the power of
language, Mormons scholars of letters should
be particularly sensitive to these issues.
RHETORIC AND
COMMUNITY BUILDING
One function of our inside jokes is that
they help us to identify ourselves with our
group culture. Ernest Bormann described in
his essay, “Fantasy and Rhetorical Vision,” how
people within an organization (i.e., a town, a
family, a church, a country, a corporation)
develop a sense of community through “fantasy
themes”: stories that members of the group
accept, relate to, and act out in their lives.
Some of these stories in our culture, such
as the Joseph Smith story, are doctrinally
significant. Others, such as BYU dating stories,
are culturally significant but not doctrinally
significant. In fact, many of these stories are
considered not to be true, or, perhaps more
accurately, their truth is not considered.
Because much of the enjoyment of inside
jokes comes from the very fact that we identify
with them, inside jokes often do not seem
funny to outsiders, even when the joke is
explained. A book series that illustrates this
phenomenon are the “You Know You're a
43
However, as Bormann points out, it does not
matter if they are true. The important thing is
that people in the organization know the story.
When a story is so well known by a group that
it can be encapsulated in a single word or
phrase, it becomes an inside joke.
The idea that humor builds community is
not a new idea. For example, early in this
century, Henri Bergson theorized about humor
as a group experience:
You would hardly appreciate the comic if you
felt yourself isolated from others. . . . Our
laughter is always the laugher of a group.
However spontaneous it seems, laughter
always implies a kind of secret freemasonry,
or even complicity, with other laughers, real
or imaginary. (qtd. in Corrigan 746-47)
This means that it is the fact that we can
identify with the subject of the joke more than
the subject itself that creates the humor of
inside jokes. For instance, when you tell me
about the Jell-O salad your grandma makes, I
may laugh, not because Jell-O is inherently
humorous, but because I remember a similar
salad made by my own grandmother.
Or even if I have never seen a Jell-O salad,
I recognize the story as belonging to my culture
of Mormonism. I feel a connection with the
person who told the joke, and this sense of
connectedness is a feeling I like. The popularity
of jokes about Jell-O in LDS culture seems, in
fact, to have surpassed the actual popularity of
Jell-O, as shown by The Jell-O Grid, a chart in
a humorous LDS cookbook (Christensen) that
indicates which flavors of Jell-O should be
combined with which add-ins for particular
occasions. No one actually consults this grid,
but most Mormons would laugh at it.
Mormon If . . .” titles by Jim Brinkerhoff,
including You Know You're a Mormon If . . . and
You Know You're a Mormon Mother If . . . These
books contain page after page of inside jokes—
single lines accompanied by simple illustrations
that refer to entire shared cultural narratives,
such as, “You know you're a Mormon if you
have more sets of scriptures in your home than
TV sets” (Brinkerhoff You Know You're a
Mormon If. . . 41). The titles of the books are
particularly telling, saying, in essence—“You
know you belong to this community if this is
funny to you.”
Evidence of this function of humor
among LDS people is that, as William Wilson
points out in his article, “The Seriousness of
Mormon Humor,” the most popular humor is
that which “the average church member” can
identify with. If there is a central figure in
Mormon humor, he says, it is not a high-
ranking General Authority. Instead, it is “the
beleaguered bishop, his counterpart, the Relief
Society president, and occasionally a high
councilor or the stake president—in other words,
leaders at lower levels of authority than the
revered and fearsome General Authorities.”
They represent you and me, because we have
been or could become these people. In other
words, we identify.
A good example of Wilson's thesis is the
“Notebook” series of LDS humor written by
Carol Lynn Pearson with titles such as The
Faithful Mormon Father's Notebook, The Model
Mormon Mother's Notebook, The Ready Relief
Society Sister's Notebook, and The Busy Bishop's
Notebook. The very format of these books—print-
ed to look like actual notes scribbled in a
notebook—indicates that these jokes are about
real people in the Church whom we can relate
to.
For instance, in The Faithful Mormon
Father's Notebook, one page shows where the
father has scribbled: “Find new ways to store
more wheat: Jack up bed six inches. Drill holes
in bedposts and table legs. Replace all furniture
with wheat-log chairs. Empty waterbed.” The
entry on the next page reads: “Wheat in
waterbed makes a very rough night. Try filling it
44
with a year's supply of orange juice.” A few
pages later, a third note reads: “Crib mattress
sprouting. Find other place to store wheat.”
This series of notes is funny to Mormons
partially because many have had or have heard
stories of food storage mishaps. However, it is
also funny because most of us have known the
type of father the notebook is supposedly kept
by.
Humor builds community among LDS
people not only by helping members of the in-
group identify with one another, but also by
initiating newcomers into the community. The
jokes of an organization teach its members
about the values, goals, and expectations of the
group. The semantic idea of “scripts” argues
that words carry a great deal of cultural
information that we attach to them through the
experiences that we have. Richard Schank in
Tell Me a Story discusses how people form
mental scripts as they learn from their
experiences and the experiences of others (7-8).
People learn about the behavior expected of
them in a particular culture through scripts that
explain what to say or not say or how to act in
various situations.
Humor theorist Victor Raskin says that
jokes occur when the scripted information we
associate with different words is incongruous
(Raskin 99-147). An example of this type of
joke in Mormon culture would be “laid-back
Relief Society president.” The two terms don't
mesh. Because many consider this funny, it
provides information about our script for
“Relief Society president.” In this manner,
jokes can transmit much information about the
community's expectations of roles and behavior.
The titles of the “Notebook” humor books
mentioned previously suggest that Mormon
culture specifies definite scripts for certain
clearly defined roles and that these scripts are a
key of cultural identification.
Although virtually no published humor
has survived from the early days of the Mormon
Church, some folk songs indicates that
Mormons have used humor to create a sense of
community since the earliest days of the church.
While Mormons were the butt of jokes of their
persecutors, they also strengthened their self-
identity by joking at themselves. Richard
Cracroft points out, “A group has to feel quite
secure culturally before it tolerates the kind of
self-analysis which leads to successful satire or
parody” (qtd. in Nilsen 221). Christie Davies, a
scholar of ethnic jokes, also observes: “It is
often difficult to tell whether particular jokes
began outside as ethnic jokes and were adapted
for internal use or are the jokes of a people that
have become jokes about a people” (311).
The first known Mormon novel to use in-
group humor was Samuel W. Taylor's Heaven
Knows Why (New York: A. A. Wyn, 1948). This
novel received mixed acceptance, and this type
of book did not become widespread until the
1970s (Baker 664). The growth in size and
acceptance of the LDS Church may have
helped published humor to become more
widely enjoyed. As one non-Mormon critic
pointed out, “Being able to laugh at yourself is
a sign of maturity” (deNevers 49). This is as true
of an organization as it is of an individual.
Humor continues to be an important way
that Mormons create a sense of community.
Lauramaery Gold writes, in Mormons on the
Internet: “Latter-day Saints on the Internet
continue to carry on that tradition of Mormon
humor, with their own websites replete with
cartoons, jokes, and amusing stories” (qtd. in
Bartholomew 210). One I have seen recently is
an e-mail about the mythical Fourteenth Article
of Faith, which begins: “We believe in
meetings.”
RHETORIC AND POWER
DISTRIBUTION
In Mormonism, one powerful influence is
45
leaders in authority. But Mormons are also
influenced by the powerful cultural expectation
of perfection. We expect ourselves and our
leaders to be perfect. This ideal creates a great
amount of pressure on Mormons. Humor
functions effectively in the LDS community to
diffuse some of this pressure.
Psychologist Sigmund Freud and
rhetorical theorist Mikhail Bakhtin both
asserted that humor is one important means of
psychological release (qtd. in Palmer 80, Parkin
x). As Stephen A. Smith says, “Humor is an
inextricable part of the popular culture,
providing the common people with an
insulated means of argument to challenge the
dominant view of the social order” (51). And as
Susan Purdie points out in Comedy: The Mastery
of Discourse, joking that targets specific people
can have the effect of taking away their power
(127). More recently, Lawrence E. Mintz
observed that modern theories treat humor as
“a way of processing and appreciating
fundamental incongruities and conflicts, often
ones with the gravest implications, dressing
them in such a way that they seem less
threatening, more acceptable” (237).
In his article, “The Humor of Mormon
Seriousness,” Richard Cracroft explains how
this psychological release through humor
functions in the lives of Mormons. We are all
imperfect, he says, and as a Mormon sees
the gap between his solemn and heartfelt
profession of belief and the reality of his life,
the lay member must shatter or flex. . . . Our
Mormon jokes collect about those points on
which we feel the greatest strain—the Word of
Wisdom, the amount of money we are
required to give to the building of the
kingdom, the time spent by each of us and
especially our lay leaders, in directing the
work of the kingdom, and the austere and
self-sacrificing life of the Mormon
missionary. . . . [Humor helps us to] deal with
our leaders and doctrines without shattering
or breaking. (1517)
 Elouise Bell also talks about the power of
humor to heal because of its ability to let us
release our frustrations and help us put things
in perspective (49-51). Much of Mormon
humor is based on the incongruence between
the scripts we have in our head for how we
should act and how we actually act in real life.
Mormons tend to like jokes that seem to say it's
okay to be a good-intentioned but imperfect
person, such as the following: “You know
you're a Mormon if study time is when your
scriptures are opened and in your hand, your
head is bowed, and you are fast asleep”
(Brinkerhoff You Know You're a Mormon If . . .
125).
Humor requires us to look at ourselves in
a somewhat objective light. When we do this,
some of the power of cultural assumptions is
mitigated. We are able to examine some of our
ideas and test their validity when we see them
through the lens of humor. For instance, in
Wake Me for the Resurrection, Robert Kirby pokes
fun at a whole spectrum of Mormon issues,
from the less-serious phenomenon of how
people tend to sit in the same seats every
Sunday in church, to the more serious
phenomenon of Mormon kitsch (such as golf
balls embossed with temples), to the fairly
serious topic of the irrational paranoia many
Mormons have about attending the worship
services of another faith. His humor
redistributes power because it examines
powerful stereotypes and cultural assumptions
that can have great power over LDS people
when they remain undiscussed.
RHETORICAL PROBLEMS
WITH MORMON HUMOR
The sense of community or redistribution
of power accomplished by shared humor can be
valuable. However, sometimes LDS humor fails
to build community or appropriately distribute
power. In other words, humor, especially
46
humor that deals with sensitive or sacred issues,
can hurt, alienate, and offend. An example of
what at least some Mormons would consider to
be a failed attempt at Mormon humor is a book
of alternate lyrics for hymns written by Paul
Toscano. Although some people find his
alternate words to the hymn “Master, the
Tempest Is Raging” hilarious, I find them
troubling and offensive:
My! How the women are raging!
We can't keep them in their place!
They'll soon be demanding the priesthood,
Addressing us face to face. . .
Your clamoring yammering can't go on!
Please! Be still!
We give you children to raise for us;
And latitude to express praises for us.
And when you're unsatisfied sexually,
We say it's no worse than polygamy . . . (47).
Because of the sensitive subject matter in this
satire, many LDS people like me, women and
men alike, would not enjoy this humor.
Jokes can exclude as powerfully as they
include. And when a person is excluded by a
community's jokes, the jokes strip power away
from him or her. In the Handbook of American
Folklore, Jan Harold Brunvald describes how
Mormon in-group lingo and inside jokes can
exclude others: “Newcomers living among the
Mormons in my home state of Utah are often
confused and bemused by things they hear the
Latter-day Saints saying. Why do they speak of
going to an ‘LDS steak house' or to the ‘ward'
on the ‘Lard's day' for worship? What are
‘ZCMI' and ‘Deseret Industries,' where Utahns
may go shopping? Why are Jews called
‘Gentiles' here?” (201). Much of LDS humor
arises from these in-group terms and their
associated scripts. For a non-LDS person
moving to Utah, such confusion may merely be
merely a minor source of frustration or
amusement. However, to a new convert, this
lack of understanding of cultural jokes would
equal a very real lack of power.
Cracroft notes that “Mormon humor is
usually adult humor” which is usually aimed at
the “fully involved member of the church” (qtd.
in Nilsen 221). However, an increasing number
of church members do not fit this description.
In the Handbook of American Folklore, William A.
Wilson comments: “Most [Mormon folklore]
studies to date have assumed a cultural
homogeneity that in reality has never existed.
The fact is that rural and urban Mormons, male
and female Mormons, born-in-the-church and
converted Mormons quite often view the world
through different eyes and respond to it
differently in their lore” (159-60). Although this
book was published in 1983, Wilson's
observation is even truer today with the current
worldwide expansion of the LDS Church.
While greater diversity among the
Mormon population increases the chances that
a person will be excluded by in-group humor, it
also increases their potential of being
offended—and perhaps justifiably offended—
based on differing experiences that render
certain jokes not at all funny to them. People
who come from diverse backgrounds within the
community have different senses of what type
of power distribution through humor is
appropriate, inappropriate, and downright
apostate.
Cracroft explains some of the objections
that some Mormons have to humor: Some
Mormons feel that humor is “of the earth, . . .
and as such it is at odds with things spiritual.”
Furthermore, if humor requires emotional
distance from the subject, it may mean that
Mormon humor requires emotional distance
from the Church (15). While Cracroft is
arguing that humor is helpful and important to
Mormons, some of the points he raises about
the objections some Mormons have to certain
types of humor have a degree of validity. It is
47
possible to go too far.
William A. Wilson believes that the
“humor as safety valve” idea oversimplifies the
complexities of humor. While humor may serve
this purpose for some Mormons, for others it
can “serve dysfunctional or destructive ends”
(qtd. in Cracroft 13). Elouise Bell also points
out that humor in the LDS Church can be used
to hurt or heal. Humor hurts, she says, when it
is “malignant teasing” or “deliberately painful
mockery that hides its coward's face behind the
mask of the Joker” or when it is invasive (49,
51). In other words, humor can be used as a
weapon to deliberately distance oneself from
the community.
It is not always easy to find the line
between appropriate and inappropriate humor.
“The issue is an interesting one,” says Mintz
(speaking specifically of ethnic jokes), “and as is
usually the case, the extremists in both camps—
the ‘hey-it-is-just-humor,-lighten-up' group who
resent any restriction on freedom of speech, . . .
and the ‘any-expression-of-rid- icule-is-a-harmful-
insult-and-should-be-repressed' contingent—
need to consider the issue more calmly and
more carefully” (250).
CONCLUSION
This paper touches on only two of
humor's most significant rhetorical functions
among LDS people: building community and
distributing power. It shows that although our
humor can have wonderful positive effects in
binding people together and helping us
reconcile the ideal with the real, it can also
exclude, alienate, and corrode. Questions about
the appropriateness of various types of LDS
humor hinge on considerations of audience,
setting, motivation, and timing, which are all
rhetorical concerns. Further rhetorical analysis
of the speakers, audiences, settings, and intents
of different types of LDS humor will prove to
be a rich area for further study. By looking
closely at what Mormons laugh at and why, we
can come to a better understanding of who
Mormons are as a people and strive to use
humor for positive rhetorical ends.
ANNE BILLINGS delivered this paper as a first-year
M.A. candidate in the BYU English Department.
Long interested in the relationship between
language and culture, she majored in
communications as an undergraduate.
WORKS CONSULTED
Baker, Margaret P. “Humor.” Encyclopedia of
Mormonism. 4 vols. New York: Macmillan, -
1992. 2:664.
Bartholomew, Sherlene Hall. An Annotated
Bibliography of Literary Mormon Humor. M.A.
thesis, Brigham Young University, 1998.
Bell, Elouise. “Don't Laugh It Off: When Humor
Hurts, When Humor Heals.” Sunstone 16.3
(1992): 49-51.
Bergson, Henri. “Laughter.” Comedy: A Critical
Anthology. Ed. Robert W. Corrigan. Boston:
Houghton Mifflin, 1971. 745-50.
Borman, Ernest. “Fantasy and Rhetorical Vision:
The Rhetorical Criticism of Social Reality.”
Quarterly Journal of Speech 58.4 (1972): 396407.
Brinkerhoff, Jim. You Know You're A Mormon If . . .
Lawrenceville, GA: BF Publishing, 1996.
—. You Know You're A Mormon Mother If . . .
Lawrenceville, GA: BF Publishing, 1997.
Brunvald, Jan Harold. “Regional Folk Speech and
Sayings.” Handbook of American Folklore. Ed.
Richard M. Dorson. Bloomington: Indiana
UP, 1983. 201-07.
Christensen, Enid. No Man Knows my Pastries. Salt
Lake City: Signature Books, 1992.
Cracroft, Richard. “The Humor of Mormon
Seriousness.” Sunstone 10.1 (1985): 14-17.
Davies, Christie. Ethnic Humor from Around the
World. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1990.
DeNevers, Noel. “To See Ourselves as Others See
Us.” Sunstone 15.6 (1991): 47-49.
Herrick, James A. The History and Theory of Rhetoric:
An Introduction. Needham Heights, MA: Allyn
48
and Bacon, 1998.
Kirby, Robert. Wake Me for the Resurrection. Carson
City, NV: Buckaroo Books, 1996.
Mintz, Lawrence E. “American Humor: Unifying
and Divisive.” Humor 12.3 (1999): 237-52.
Nilsen, Don L. F., ed. Whimsy II: Western Humor
and Irony Membership Serial Yearbook. Selected
Papers from the WHIM Conference, 1983.
Tempe: Arizona State English Department,
1983.
Palmer, Jerry. Taking Humor Seriously. London:
Routledge, 1994.
Parkin, John. Humor Theorists of the Twentieth
Century. Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen, 1997.
Pearson, Carol Lynn. The Busy Bishop's Notebook.
Salt Lake City: Bookcraft, 1978.
—. The Faithful Mormon Father's Notebook. Salt Lake
City: Bookcraft, 1981.
—. The Model Mormon Mother's Notebook. Salt Lake
City: Bookcraft, 1979.
—. The Ready Relief Society Sister's Notebook. Salt Lake
City: Bookcraft, 1981.
Purdie, Susan. Comedy: The Mastery of Discourse.
Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1983.
Raskin, Victor. Semantic Mechanisms of Humor.
Dordrecht, Holland: D. Reidel, 1985.
Schank, William C. Tell Me a Story. New York:
Charles Scribner's Sons, 1998.
Smith, Stephen A. “Humor as Rhetoric and
Cultural Argument.” Journal of American
Culture 16.2 (1993): 51-63.
Toscano, Paul. Music and the Broken Word: Songs for
Alternate Voices. Salt Lake City: Signature
Books, 1991.
Wilson, William. “Folklore, A Mirror for What?”
Western Folklore 54.1 (1995): 13-21.
—. “Mormon Folklore.” Handbook of American
Folklore. Ed. Richard M. Dorson. Blooming-
ton: Indiana University Press, 1983. 155-61.
—. “The Seriousness of Mormon Humor.” Sunstone
10.1 (1985): 14-17.
—. “The Study of Mormon Folklore.” Utah
Historical Quarterly 44.4 (1976): 317-28.
 “Is There No Blessing for Me?”
The Relentless Jane Manning James
Margaret Blair Young
On Christmas day 1884, Elijah Abel, the
first black man to hold the Melchizedek
Priesthood in the LDS Church, died in Salt
Lake City, having recently returned from his
third mission. That same day—and it is difficult
to imagine that Abel's death was not related—
Jane Manning James called at the house of
President John Taylor. The purpose of this
rather brave visit of a poor black laundress to
the home of a Mormon prophet was none
other than to plead for temple blessings. For
whatever reason, Jane left President Taylor's
home without making her request. On
December 27, using a scribe, she dictated the
following to him:
Dear Brother: I called at your house last
Thursday to have conversation with you
concerning my future salvation. I did not
explain my feelings or wishes to you. I realize
my race and color and can't expect my
endowments as others who are white. My
race was handed down through the flood and
God promised Abraham that to his seed all
the nations of the earth should be blessed,
and as this is the fullness of all dispensations,
is there no blessing for me? (Qtd. in
Wolfinger 148).
She goes on to explain that Emma Smith
herself had invited her to be adopted into the
Smith family as a child but that she (Jane) had
been “so green” that she didn't comprehend
what such adoption implied.
Angus Cannon, Jane's stake president,
made a three-sentence answer for President
Taylor, granting permission for Jane to do
baptisms for the dead, then instructing her to
“be content with this privilege, awaiting further
instructions from the Lord to his servants” (qtd.
49
in Wolfinger 149).
This paper will be only a cursory look at
Jane's relentless pleas for temple blessings. It
will briefly compare her life with three other
Mormon women—all white—who we know were
her acquaintances: Patty Bartlett Sessions Smith
Parry, Eliza Partridge Smith Lyman, and Zina
Diantha Huntington Jacobs Smith Young. Eliza
had been present when the practice of plural
marriage was described to Jane in Nauvoo. As
Jane records it in her history:
Brother Joseph's four wives, Emily and Eliza
Partridge, Maria and Sarah Lawrence and myself,
were sitting discussing Mormonism and Sarah said
what would you think if a man had more wives than
one? I said that is all right! Maria said well we are all
four Brother Joseph's wives! I jumped up and
clapped my hands and said that's good, Sarah said
she is all right, just listen she believes it all now.
(Qtd. in Wolfinger 151-52)
The setting of this discussion was one of
relatively equal ground, for, although the four
white women were Joseph Smith's plural wives,
at this time they were employed as household
servants (Hill 353), as was Jane. Very possibly,
they were doing laundry during this talk. We
don't know of later interactions Jane had with
any of these fellow servants in the household of
the Smiths except Eliza Partridge, who would
marry Amasa Lyman after the martyrdom. We
do know that Jane and Eliza maintained a
friendship.
Patty Sessions delivered at least two of
Jane's children: Silas, born at Winter Quarters,
and Mary Ann, the first black child born in
Utah. Patty also treated Jane for a “swelling in
her side” in 1859 (Sessions 112).
We don't know much about Jane's
connection with Zina D. H. Young, but they
were certainly acquaintances. Zina and Eliza
Partridge were stepsisters as well as sister wives,
both sealed to Joseph Smith. And Zina and
Patty Sessions were famous friends and healers.
Surely Jane knew Zina from the Nauvoo days.
We do have a record of Zina herself submitting
another of Jane's petitions for temple blessings—
this time to Joseph F. Smith in January 13,
1894, when Zina was the General Relief Society
president. The request states simply: “Jane E.
James says Sister Emma Smith asked her if she
would like to be adopted into Joseph Smith's
family as a child, and not understanding her
meaning said no. Jane was born Wilton
Connecticut. Jane also asked me to ask if Isaac
James and her brother could also be adopted”
(qtd. in Wolfinger 150).
As we compare the lives of these four
women, we see a distinct rise in power and
wealth of the white ones, and a predictable
decline in power and wealth of Jane James—
mirroring what was happening to blacks
throughout the United States. In the early Utah
years, of course, they were suffering quite equal-
ly. In fact, at one point, Jane's economic
condition was even better than Eliza Partridge
Lyman's. On April 8, 1849, Eliza recorded:
[April 8] We baked the last of our flour
today, and have no prospect of getting more
till after harvest.
[April 13] Brother Lyman started on a
mission to California with O. P. Rockwell and
others. May the Lord bless and prosper them
and return them in safety. He left us—that is,
Paulina, Caroline, and I—without anything to
make bread, it not being in his power to get
any. . . .
[April 25] Jane James, a colored woman, let
me have two pounds of flour, it being about
half she had.
But Eliza would not remain poverty-
stricken, and Jane would not become
prosperous.
Jane's life and those of her contemporaries
50
followed some similar valleys. Jane was
abandoned by her husband, Isaac, shortly after
the Civil War; Eliza and Patty both experienced
a sort of abandonment through polygamy. Patty
was humiliated by both her first and her second
husbands when they prepared to contract other
marriages without advising her beforehand
(Rugh 316), and Eliza was left in Utah while
Amasa took several of his other wives to settle
San Bernadino, California. Eliza ultimately
joined her sister, Caroline, in separating from
their mutual husband upon his
excommunication (Carter 249).
Eliza and Jane both gave birth to sons at
Winter Quarters within a few weeks of each
other. Eliza's son, Don Carlos, died at five
months. Jane's, Silas, lived into his early
twenties, then died of consumption. Eliza's
daughter died in childbirth, and so did two of
Jane's daughters. By the time of Jane's death,
only two of her seven children outlived her.
Yet despite the similarities in many
aspects of their lives, their races determined
very different mortal destinies for these sisters
in the gospel. All three of the white women
died quite wealthy and with prominent names.
Jane, though lovingly (if a little patronizingly)
referred to by her white associates as “Aunt
Jane,” died poor.
Zina D. H. Young, as already noted, was
one of Brigham Young's wives and also Relief
Society general president. Her only daughter,
Zina Young (Williams Card), was raised in
wealth and comparative ease in Brigham
Young's household, supported herself by
teaching school after the death of her first
husband, married Charles O. Card of Cache
Valley as a plural wife, and spent most of her
adult years on the harsh Canadian frontier. Her
own daughter, Zina Card Brown, married Hugh
B. Brown, later an apostle and counselor in the
First Presidency. Although never affluent, these
women were not poverty-stricken either.
The twice-widowed Patty Sessions not
only gained wide repute as an immensely
knowledgeable midwife but was an expert
gardener and became prosperous by selling fruit
from her orchards. She herself stated that when
she ”came into the valley, all the money she had
was five cents, and now she had $16,000
invested in ZCMI” (Rugh 318).
Eliza Partridge lived very comfortably near
Richfield, Utah. Her journal periodically
mentions the various financial gifts her progeny
or relatives had sent her. Eliza's son, Platte
d'Alton Lyman, held high positions in the
Church, even presiding over the Church in
Oak City and also becoming president of the
Great Britain mission. The son and grandson
of her sister-wife, Maria, both became apostles
in the Mormon Church.
Jane ended her life in the same role she
had had in Nauvoo's Mansion House—as a
laundress. When Isaac left her, she sold their
property and moved from the more affluent
First Ward to the much poorer Eighth Ward,
where a number of black Saints lived.
Perhaps the most obvious difference in
the lives of these women is seen in their
children. Both Eliza and Zina married
ecclesiastical leaders and saw their descendants
(or relatives) called to prominent positions. But
none of Jane's children ultimately remained
active in the church. Apparently Sylvestor,
despite being excommunicated in 1884 on the
vague charge of ”Unchristianlike Behavior”
(Wolfinger 168), married a Mormon, Mary Ann
Perkins, and had at least one active child, who
married into another black Mormon family—
the Leggroans. As far as I can ascertain,
this ”believing line” died out when Sylvestor's
great-grandson, Monroe Fleming, passed away.
There is nothing unexpected in these
contrasts. Indeed, we would be surprised to see
Jane's life paralleling the white lives around her
in anything but natural events. The fact of her
race was a recognized barrier to any sort of
upward mobility—and certainly to any move up
51
temple stairs. As noted, Eliza Lyman refers to
Jane as ”a colored woman.” Patty Sessions does
not even give Jane's full name in her records,
but says, ”Put Black Jane to bed” (Sessions 54).
Wilford Woodruff recorded in his diary on
October 16, 1894: ”We had [a] meeting with
several individuals among the rest Black Jane”
(qtd. in Wolfinger 150) Jane herself, in a
plaintive postscript following one of her letters
to Joseph F. Smith) says, “I am colored” (qtd. in
Wolfinger 149).
Yet here we have her—this black woman
who claims to “realize [her] race and color” and
not ”expect [her] endowments as others who are
white” (qtd. in Wolfinger 148)—asking again
and again for exactly what she claims not to
expect—her endowments! And not only hers,
but those of her ancestors! She asks also for
adoption into what she surely regarded as a
celestial family—that of Joseph and Emma.
And she asks repeatedly, even after
receiving what would seem to be a definitive
“No.” The records we have indicate that she
made at least five petitions, the first dated
December 27, 1884, and the last on August 22,
1895, to three Church presidents—John Taylor,
Wilford Woodruff, and Lorenzo Snow
(Wolfinger 148-50). It is certainly likely that
there were unrecorded requests as well. Even
after the General Authorities granted as much
as they thought policy would allow—sealing Jane
to Joseph and Emma as a servant rather than a
child (Bush “Mormonism's” 83; Wolfinger 138),
Jane continued her requests for the full
blessings.
What made this woman so relentless?
What made her believe her pleas would ever be
heard? I suggest several answers:
1. She believed in Joseph Smith. She also
believed that he wanted her to be a part of his
eternal household—and not as a servant. Jane's
history claims that she saw “Brother Joseph in a
vision” before making her historic trek to
Nauvoo—travelling with her family of nine
(siblings, mother, and probably stepfather) 800
miles on foot, often leaving “bloody footprints”
(qtd. in Wolfinger 151). As Jane tells it, Joseph
Smith promised the family after their arrival at
the Mansion House that they would “be among
friends and would be protected.” The last
words she heard him say before the martyrdom
were, “Go and . . . remember your profession of
faith in the everlasting gospel. The Lord will
bless you” (qtd. in Wolfinger 152). If he was
indeed a prophet—and she believed he was—she
had to believe that there were blessings reserved
for her, not to be denied.
2. She was truly an initiate in Nauvoo,
having been invited to share sacred secrets.
According to her history, she had not been
excluded from the important secret of plural
marriage, and Lucy Mack Smith had let her
handle a bundle purportedly containing the
Urim and Thummin, then had told her, “You
must tell the Saints you were permitted to
handle” it (qtd. in Wolfinger, 152). Jane had
laundered Joseph Smith's temple robes and
“was given to know that they had to do with the
new name, which the world knows not of” (qtd.
in Wolfinger 151). Even gaining permission in
Salt Lake City to perform baptisms for the dead
was the beginning of temple initiation. Though
she was clearly aware of the restrictions placed
on her race, the fact that she had been trusted
with great secrets implied that God thought her
worthy of trust.
3. She had proved her loyalty as a Latter-
day Saint. She had lived as a servant not only in
Joseph Smith's household, but in Brigham
Young's and Reynolds Cahoon's. Only she of
her family had come west with the Mormon
pioneers, though her brother, Isaac Lewis
Manning, would join her during the last decade
of her life. Surely such loyalty had to count for
something!
4. She had some stature as she got older
because of the time she had spent in Joseph
52
Smith's household. When she was interviewed
for the Young Woman's Journal, the interviewer
asked if she remembered the Prophet at all. Her
response, in part, was: “Yes indeed, I guess I did
know the prophet Joseph. That lovely hand! He
used to put it out to me. Never passed me
without shaking hands with me wherever he
was. Oh, he was the finest man I ever saw on
earth” ([Interview] 552). Though her race
prevented her from ascending the temple stairs
beyond the baptismal font, her association with
“Brother Joseph” and with other prophets
earned her and her brother special places in the
tabernacle—seats which everyone understood
were theirs and for which Jane embroidered
seat covers (Wolfinger 136).
5. She understood that there was a
precedent for blacks holding the priesthood
(and hence being entitled to temple blessings).
Surely she knew about Elijah Abel's ordination;
it is unthinkable that she would not have been
acquainted with the Abel family, who lived in
Salt Lake City Thirteenth Ward, and hard to
imagine that her initial visit to John Taylor's
house on Elijah's death day was coincidental.
She also knew that a black man from Lowell,
Massachusetts, named Walker Lewis had been
ordained an elder, although she mistakenly
claims that Parley P. Pratt had performed the
ordination. It seems more likely that William
Smith, Joseph's brother, performed the
ordination (Bringhurst 133). In 1847 Brigham
Young had called Lewis “one of the best
elders . . . in Lowell [Massachusetts]” (qtd. in
Bush “Whence” 197). In a letter to Joseph F.
Smith on 7 February 1890, Jane wrote: “First as
Brother James has left me 21 years, and a
Colored Brother, Brother Lewis, wished me to
be sealed to him. He has been dead 35 or 36
years. Can I be sealed to him?” (qtd. in
Wolfinger 149). This particular knowledge of
Jane's could suggest some sort of loophole in
the policy, which she undoubtedly hoped
would let her into the upper rooms of the temple.
The Church authorities were in an granite from the same quarry used for the Salt
awkward position when Jane's petitions began— Lake Temple stone. President Gray was waiting
for the exclusive priesthood policy had not for me at the rock mill. I was to pick up the
been canonically set. Elijah Abel was the great finished sculpture from LeRoy at the foundry
exception: Ordained by Joseph Smith himself, and transport it to President Gray, who would
washed and anointed in the Kirtland Temple, then oversee its setting into the stone.
and advanced to the office of a Seventy, Elijah When I arrived at the foundry, LeRoy was
was a thorn in the sides of those Church waiting for me, looking disconcertingly nervous.
leaders who believed with much of America I asked how the relief had turned out, and he
that blacks were destined to be ”servants of said, ”Um, why don't you come and sit down?”
servants”—even eternally. He then explained to me that something very
When Seventy Zebedee Coltrin claimed unusual had happened: The bronze had
that Abel had been “dropped from the quorum” exploded during the firing process. Yes, our
once his lineage was discovered, Joseph F. sculpture had blown up, and we were set to
Smith went to the records and discovered that dedicate the monument the next day.
Abel's certificate as a Seventy had been twice LeRoy said he already had a plan: He had
renewed—including once after the migration the ceramic mold. He'd paint it bronze, and it
west (Bush “Mormonism's” 76). This same would look very much like the real thing. Only
Joseph F. Smith, who had learned to love the a few of us would know that it was only painted
dark-skinned people of the “Sandwich Islands” ceramic.
during his mission, spoke at Jane James's I drove up to the rock mill where
funeral. How I wish we had a copy of what he President Gray was waiting. He asked me how
said then! But during her life, when she made the sculpture had turned out. Fighting tears—
her requests for temple blessings to him, he not very successfully, I said, “Before I say
consistently—and predictably—denied them. anything else, you need to know that everything
The names of Patty Sessions and Zina D. will be fine.”
H. Young are well known, and Eliza Lyman's is He said, “Go on.”
familiar to many. But Jane's name is just I repeated, “Really—it's going to be fine.”
beginning to come out of the shadows. He repeated, “Go on.”
The Genesis Group dedicated a I said, “The sculpture exploded.”
monument to her in June 1999. The actual President Gray grinned, laughed, shook
events of setting that monument are somewhat his head, and said—in one of the best imitations
symbolic of Jane's life. of Bill Cosby I've ever seen—“Now hold on—
I found a sculptor—the wonderfully gifted wait a minute. Let me make sure I understand.
LeRoy Transfield, who initially tried to sculpt a It—it what?”
relief of Jane and her family crossing the “Exploded.”
wilderness barefoot. But whenever he'd start “Exploded?”
drawing, he'd get a headache. Finally, he drew I then explained that we would have a
something else: Jane offering the two pounds of “temporary” sculpture for now, and the real
flour to Eliza Partridge Lyman. Eliza's hands are one would be set after the sculpting process was
raised in surprise; Jane's demeanor is simple completed again.
and elegant. Darius Gray, the president of We had no other choice.
Genesis, had miraculously come upon some On the morning of the dedication, LeRoy
53
glued the ceramic relief to the granite with
thick epoxy, praying for the rain to stop, which
it miraculously did. We had a beautiful
ceremony about two hours after the ceramic
was glued to the stone. It was attended by
Elders David Haight, Alexander B. Morrison,
and John H. Groberg. Only a handful of us
knew that this monument was not the real
thing.
How like Jane's life! Sudden explosions
and unexpected tragedies—and yet the
ceremony and the faith and the beautiful music
of devotion go forward anyway. As Jane did, we
accepted a substitute, a lesser blessing—for now,
realizing that the real thing in all its
shimmering glory would be completed before
long.
Three months later, LeRoy completed the
“real thing.” This time, it didn't explode. I told
him it would be so wonderful if the ceramic
“temp” would come off in one piece so we
could donate it to the Museum of Church
History and Art. LeRoy assured me that was a
virtual impossibility. With the amount of glue
he had used, he would have to chip the “temp”
off. But the next morning, he called me to
announce in a half-amused, half-stunned voice,
that the ceramic had indeed come off in one
piece. The Genesis Group donated the ceramic
relief to the Museum of Church History and
Art in September 1999. The real one is next to
Jane's grave in the Salt Lake Cemetery.
I imagine Jane chuckling at the
appropriateness of these events. She had to
accept “temporary” answers to her pleas for
temple ordinances—though she clearly sensed
she was intended to have something eternally
better. At so many junctures, the fires of her life
must have felt much more explosive than
refining. Could she have imagined that more
than a century would pass before her petitions
would be answered as she desired? Could she
54
have imagined that just as the temporary
monument—now weathered and chipped—
would be removed from the temple granite and
the gleaming, virtually unchippable bronze one
set in its proper place, so she would be set in
her proper place of glory among those other
sisters she knew so well on earth, but who—
unlike her—were allowed to move easily from
their covered wagons to the highest and holiest
rooms of the temple?
“Is there no blessing for me?” Jane asked.
Would that we could give the right and timely
answer to her descendants and to all the world:
Oh yes, dear Sister (or Brother)—there are more
blessings for you than the sands of the seas, for
nothing will be denied you. “Arise, shine, for
thy light is come!” (Isa. 60:9)
MARGARET BLAIR YOUNG is the author of a
play about Jane James called I Am Jane. She is the
coauthor with Darius Gray of a trilogy of historical
novels about black pioneers called Standing On the
Promises.
WORKS CITED
Bringhurst, Newell. “The Changing Status of
Elijah Abel.” Neither White nor Black: Mormon
Scholars Confront the Race issue in a Universal
Church. Ed. Lester E. Bush Jr. and Armand
Mauss. Midvale, UT: Signature Books, 1984.
130-48.
Bush, Lester. “Mormonism's Negro Doctrine: An
Historical Overview.” Neither White nor Black:
Mormon Scholars Confront the Race Issue in a
Universal Church. Ed. Lester E. Bush Jr. and
Armand Mauss. Midvale, UT: Signature
Books, 1984. 31-52.
—. “Whence the Negro Doctrine? A Review of Ten
Years of Answers.” Neither White nor Black. Ed.
Lester Bush and Armand Mauss. Midvale,
UT: Signature Books, 1984. 193-200.
Carter, Kate, comp. and ed. “Eliza Maria Partridge
Lyman: Journal.” Treasures of Pioneer History, 6
vols. Salt Lake City: Daughters of Utah
 Pioneers, 1933. Vol. 2.
Hill, Donna. Joseph Smith: The First Mormon. Garden
City: Doubleday, 1977.
[Interview with Jane Manning James.] Young Wom-
an's Journal 16 (December 1905): 551-53; also
LDS Collectors' Library, CD-ROM. Salt Lake
City: Infobase, 1997.
Lyman, Eliza Maria Smith. Journal, 1846-63.
Photocopy of holograph. L. Tom Perry Special
Collections, Harold B. Lee Library, Brigham
Young University, Provo, Utah.
Rugh, Susan Sessions. “Patty Bartlett Sessions:
More Than a Midwife.” Sister Saints. Ed. Vicky
Burgess-Olson. Provo: BYU Press, 1978. 303-
22.
Sessions, Patty Bartlett. Mormon Midwife: The 1846-
1888 Diaries of Patty Bartlett Sessions. Ed.
Donna Toland Smart. Logan: USU Press,
1997.
Wolfinger, Henry J. “A Test of Faith: Jane Elizabeth
James and the Origins of the Utah Black
Community.” Social Accommodation in Utah.
Ed. Clark S. Knowlton. American West
Occasional Papers. Salt Lake City: n.p., 1975.
12672.

“Woman, Arise!” Political Work in the

Writings of Lu Dalton

Sheree Maxwell Bench

The world is progressing! O womanhood, waken

And join in the jubilant strain!
The fetters which bound thee now surely are breaking,
And never shall gall thee again. (“World” 182)

These lines of optimism were penned by
Lucinda Lee Dalton, a 19th-century woman, a
plural wife, an educator, a proponent of woman
suffrage, and an important foremother in early
Mormon writing. Dalton's poetry and essays
appeared regularly for twenty years in the pages
of Woman's Exponent, the 19th-century journal
published by Mormon women.
A careful evaluation of Lu Dalton's work
reveals an insightful woman who is intelligent
and articulate, witty and assertive. She is
sometimes didactic but never sentimental. She
writes both politically and passionately on a
personal level and to a broad audience. She
works to advance the cause of equity through
her writing as she explores the issues of women's
roles, political rights, and relationship with
God and men.
A central issue for Dalton was the
difference in her culture's treatment of girls
and boys, a disparity she both observed and
experienced personally. She relates her
reactions to this discrepancy in her
autobiography. Although she does not directly
cite discrimination as having an effect on her
writing, it is clear that her frustration with
limits on women's opportunities is a primary
motivating factor in her works. She explains:
So long ago as I can remember I longed to be
a boy, because boys were so highly privileged
and so free. Thousands of things for which I
heard girls gravely reproved, met only an

55
 indulgent smile when done by boys. . . .
Education was offered to them accompanied
with bribes, promises and persuasions, while
doled out to girls grudgingly as something
utterly wasted, and expected to be of no future
use. (“Autobiography” 7–8)
She wished to be a boy—not to be male, but to
have the opportunities they enjoyed and took
for granted—especially access to education.
As a bright child growing up in the 1850s,
Lucinda Lee had a burning desire to learn, but
education at the time was inconsistent and “ill-
regulated” (“Autobiography” 4), and girls
especially faced roadblocks in their schooling.
Fortunately, Lu's first teacher in Utah saw her
ability to excel and tutored her during lunch
hours. In her autobiography she writes, “He led
me through some of the enchanted vales of
poesy,” and “his criticisms on elevated and
maudlin sentiment in poetry are still my guide”
(5).
But other teachers were not so encouraging.
On one occasion she asked a “gentleman teach-
er” if she was proficient enough to “study
algebra with profit.” He replied that “it would
be wasted time for me to ever study it, because I
already had more learning than was necessary
for a good housekeeper, wife, and mother which
was a woman's only proper place on earth”
(“Autobiography” 8). This response only made
Lucinda more determined to get all the
education she could, a process she continued
after she became a teacher herself. To her
dismay, though, she was barely able to keep
ahead of her brightest students, children who
had better preparation as schools improved in
the territory.
The disparity of opportunity between the
sexes became only more glaring as Dalton reach-
ed adulthood, and she felt compelled to urge
people toward equity through both her poetry
and her essays. She became one of the more
56
prolific writers actively discussing the “woman
question” in the pages of Woman's Exponent, a
newspaper published by Mormon women from
1872 to 1914. The topic was central to the
journal, with over 21 percent of more than
fifteen hundred editorials printed addressing
“women and woman's sphere,” the highest
percentage of any subject (Madsen 127). The
Exponent became a vehicle by which Mormon
women reached the female portion of their
community, functioning for them in much the
same way as Godey's Lady's Book did for Eastern
women. Nicole Tonkavich explains that, as
editor of Godey's, Sarah Josepha Hale followed
the oral rhetorical tradition and regarded her
audience not as “private and individual silent
readers” but as a “community of like-minded
women” (165). This observation applies to the
Exponent as well. Members of its mostly female
audience looked to its pages for recognition
and reaffirmation of their shared experiences
as women, as mothers, and as members of a
persecuted religion. Often the columns became
a literal dialogue beyond the traditional
exchange of an editorial page as readers
submitted creative works in reply to published
articles.
Lu Dalton engaged in these Exponent
dialogues on more than one occasion. One of
her responses called “Answer to What Are We
Men to Do?” reveals her ability to use humor
and irony to convey her message. In this piece
she replies to a poem by R. W. Easterbrooks, a
male writer who wonders what will be left for
men to do when women assume occupations
that have traditionally been theirs. He says
some suggest that roles could be exchanged,
but he uses the worn argument that this would
be impossible since “God has fixed it so we
can't” because “babies must be borne and
nursed / by female mothers” (172). Consider
Dalton's response:

It seems, gentle sir, you are somewhat afraid,
Your strong-minded sisters may step from their
sphere
And some of your precious MEN'S RIGHTS may
invade?
(Excuse me a moment to wipe off this tear!)
You fear their activity given full sway
Would really monopolize industries all?
You flatter them, sir, in so happy a way,
I bow you my thanks in behalf of them all.
.......
Scant praise and less pay have resolved us at last
To try some employments man claims for his own;
We like them; they pay us; the time being past
To tremble at shadows, the barriers thrown
Around us by man we will scale or pull down,
Denying his right to prescribe every “sphere,”
To say, after fixing our limits all round,
“My sphere is unbounded, but yours is just here.”
(17)
Dalton's declaration that women have the right
to decide for themselves the parameter of their
sphere was an assertion that many Victorian
women were making. Her poem goes on to state
that despite laws which gave sole parental rights
to the father, mothers were happy to lovingly
care for their children and gladly claimed the
responsibility. But, she explains, many women
wanted increased opportunities in the public
world of employment as well. She ironically
suggests to Easterbrooks that he simply sit back
and relax while industrious women do their
work, an option implying that Easterbrooks —
and other men—are merely lazy. Her message is
that, in a world where there is much work to be
done, surely men can find some productive
industry to occupy their time just as women do—
something other, that is, than working to keep
women down.
Dalton's writings also use the strong
rhetoric familiar from anti-slavery writing to
point out inequities present in her society, but
57
she then goes further to offer resolutions to
these problems. In her essay “Government,
People and Privileges,” she proclaims: “Let
each individual find his proper station in life
by his innate tendencies and powers; not by
any accident of birth or station. Keep not
millions of Africans in bondage because they
are not white, nor millions of sisters in equal
subserviency because they are not brothers.”
She continues:
The nation has scarcely ceased panting from
the exertion of freeing its black children from
their shackles, when lo! its daughters hold up
their manacled hands and plead to have their
fetters, also, broken. The sons cry out in direst
amazement, “THESE are NOT fetters, but the
costly bracelets which we gave them, to make
them more beautiful in our eyes! They in
bondage! They are our idols, gems who rule
over us by the power of their beauty, their
grace and all their little clinging, caressing,
timid ways!” (167)
Clearly Dalton sees the Victorian
construction of womanhood as a form of
bondage and identifies man's complicity in it.
She reveals the hypocrisy of turning a woman
into a beautiful but weak person for one's own
pleasure, then asserting that, because she is
inept, she is incapable of accepting the
responsibilities of citizenship. She offers her
answer to this construct in the poem
“Woman's Sphere,” telling men:
No shadow, charming toy nor slave
Can ever be companion true;
To fit her for her duties grave,
More light and room must woman have—
To walk side by side with you. (106)
Dalton argues that woman needs more
education and more of life's experiences to be
equal with her brother man and to be a
responsible member of society.
 Dalton's frustration with the slow progress
toward equality may have come in part from her
religion. She was perhaps impatient for the
“better days” for women that were promised by
the prophet Joseph Smith. Unlike traditional
Christianity, Mormon theology taught that
women were the spiritual equals of men. It also
taught that women had the potential of
becoming as God and of achieving exaltation
coequal with their husbands. The Prophet
Joseph told Mormon women that they were
entitled to spiritual gifts such as the ability to
heal the sick and to speak with the gift of
tongues (Minutes of the Nauvoo Female Relief
Society, 28 April 1842, qtd. in Derr, Cannon,
and Beecher 43–47).
A defining moment came when the Proph-
et organized the Female Relief Society in 1842
and declared, “I now turn the key to you in the
name of God and this Society shall rejoice and
knowledge and intelligence shall flow down
from this time” (Nauvoo Minutes, 28 April
1842, qtd. in Derr, Cannon, and Beecher 1).
Mormon women saw this turning of the key to
them by their prophet as the beginning of a new
era of womanhood and women's rights, and
they connected this moment to the Seneca Falls
convention held only six years later to begin the
work for woman suffrage.
Dalton conveys the hopefulness she found
in these teachings:
Undoubtingly hear this anthem of cheer
The voice of a prophet is singing:
O, Sister rejoice! lift up thy glad voice,
The bells of thy freedom are ringing! (“Woman,
Arise!” 131).
But Joseph's teachings were complicated by the
prophet who had the most direct impact on
Dalton's life: Brigham Young.
Young's administration both expanded and
58
restricted women's roles. (For a thorough
discussion of this topic, see Derr.) His focus on
self-sufficiency while Mormons built their
community on the frontier meant that many
traditionally male occupations were opened to
women. They were given positions of
leadership and were increasingly part of the
public forum. But he also taught traditional
Christian ideologies which restricted them.
Young believed that the consequences for
Eve's transgression applied to all women, name-
ly, that their husbands should rule over them.
He described a “woman of faith & knowledge”
as one who would say, “It is a law that man
shall rule over me; his word is my law, and I
must obey him . . .” (Young JD 16:167). He
also echoed Paul's teachings that the husband
was to be the head of the woman, declaring,
“Let our wives be the weaker vessels, and the
men be men, and show the women by their
superior ability that God gives husbands
wisdom and ability to lead their wives into his
presence” (JD 9:308). While Young exhorted
husbands to exercise this leadership lovingly,
he still assigned them complete authority in
directing the affairs of the family, while wives
and children were simply to say “amen” (JD
4:55).
These teachings were difficult for Lucinda
to accept, but she worked to reconcile them
within her poetry. In these lines from
“Woman,” she refers to the consequences Eve
must suffer: women are “First to fall under the
censure of God, / Last to receive a full pardon.”
But she also clings to the idea: “That daughter
and son God will equally own / When made
pure and redeemed from the fall” (“Addendum”
138). She believed that at some point in time,
when all things were restored to their proper
order, women would realize their true potential
and receive their reward:
So, a day cometh, a glorious day, doubts in perfect bliss” (161). Dalton was
Early perfection restoring . . . willing to ask difficult questions as she worked
Then woman, who loves e'en through sorrow and through the inconsistencies she saw around her.
shame, Through it all, though, she remained hopeful.
The crown of a queen will be wearing. (“Woman”
Most importantly, she remained faithful to her
107)
religion.
It was again religion which complicated
Dalton understood her religion to be a part of
the straightforward issue of woman suffrage.
that restoration of order, but she wanted it to
For Utah women, the franchise became
occur in this life, not just in the hereafter.
intricately connected to their religious practice
Because of her religion's paradoxical
of polygamy, and Woman's Exponent became the
teachings of equality and hierarchy, Dalton
forum for debate. The women of the Great
struggled to gain an affirmation of what she
Basin had initially been given the vote in 1870,
believed in her heart to be true but did not
but the franchise was stripped away by the U.S.
always see evidence of in real life—that God
government in an effort to force Mormons to
loved his daughters as much as he loved his sons
stop practicing plural marriage. When the
and that women could have an unmediated
church finally withdrew public support for new
personal relationship with him. This struggle
plural marriages in 1890, after years of pressure
emerges in one of her most honest and
from the government, Utah women again had
poignant poems, “Questionings.” This very
to win voting rights as part of the territory's
personal poem shares an intimate moment
1895 bid for statehood.
between a mother (Lucinda?) and her newborn
With the support of suffrage leaders such
daughter. As the baby “nestles” near her heart,
as Susan B. Anthony, Mormon women publicly
the mother tells her that she longs to “shield”
worked for their cause, issuing a call to action
her from “woman's destiny” of vain longings
in the pages of the Woman's Exponent. One of
and “blind outreachings for the light above.”
Dalton's essays passionately asked readers,
She explains that, as women, they are “bidden
“Shall women themselves, under the veil of
to the last and lowest seats” and that while men
their traditional modesty, stand silently by in a
may follow Christ, they say women must follow
crisis like the present, and let this great wrong
them. She pleadingly asks her daughter who has
be done to them and their children, to their
“so lately seen His face”:
country and civilization?” She answered:
Mark this, sister women! To do so would
May we no longer touch His garment's hem
make us accessories before the fact to nothing
Without a brother's hand outstretched between?
less than a great crime. You who walked side
Will His life-giving voice but quicken them
by side with your pioneer husbands out of
And leave us sleeping till THEY break our dream?
civilization into desolation, you who bore
Is servitude our everlasting doom?
more than an even share of hardship and
E'en high as man's hopes may we not aspire?
danger in subdueing [sic] this stubborn,
Because we here sit in the lowest room
unfriendly clime, you who toiled, hoped,
Will Christ ne'er call us “Daughter, come up higher?”
prayed but wept not, can never be persuaded,
that you and your daughters are not equally
In the peaceful look on her baby's face she finds concerned in all that pertains to this hard-won
comfort that Christ “will end the cankering home, equal heirs to the grand estate. (“Shall
59
 Utah” 113)
Dalton believed that women's actions over the
years had completed “every requisite to honest,
useful citizenship” (“Shall Utah” 113), proving
they deserved the vote. After some debate the
men agreed, and Utah was granted statehood
with woman suffrage as part of its constitution.
The suffrage victory was only an outward
sign of what Lucinda hoped was an inward
change in attitudes toward women in 19th-
century America. She made her devotion to
bringing women and men together in a new and
equal relationship a central issue in her life as a
writer, as an officer of the territorial woman's
suffrage association, as a teacher, and as the
mother of six children. Her name was listed
among five women in Manti (where she spent
her last years) who were praised for making
“education and promotion of equal suffrage
part of their daily lives” (Daughters 300, 313).
Dalton said it was her prayer that “the time
may come speedily when women will know and
hold themselves at their true worth; . . . when by
the extent of their knowledge of life as it is and
as it should be . . . they shall compel men to
come up to their standard of morality and with
them seek something still better”
(“Autobiography” 11). This was the goal Lu
Dalton spent her life working to achieve.
SHEREE MAXWELL BENCH was in the second
year of her master's program in the English
—. “Woman's Sphere.” Woman's Exponent 2 (15 Dec.
1873): 106.
—. “The World Is Progressing.” Woman's Exponent 1
(1 May 1873): 182.
Daughters of the Utah Pioneers. Woman Suffrage in
the West. Oct. 1943. 300, 313. Qtd. in
Anderson.
Derr, Jill Mulvay. “Woman's Place in Brigham
Young's World.” Brigham Young University
Studies 18 (Spring 1978): 377–95.
Derr, Jill Mulvay, Janath Russell Cannon, and Maur-
60
Department at Brigham Young University when
she delivered this paper. Her favorite areas of
interest are 19th-century American women's
writings and Mormon Church history, so her
choice of Lu Dalton as a thesis topic allows her to
study both. She and her husband Michael have
been married for twenty-three years. They have four
children and three grandchildren.
WORKS CITED
Anderson, Lavina Fielding. “Lucinda L. Dalton.”
Sister Saints. Ed. Vicky Burgess-Olsen. Provo,
UT: Brigham Young UP, 1978. 141–71.
Dalton, L. L. “Shall Utah Become a State Without
Woman Suffrage?” Woman's Exponent 22 (1
Apr. 1894): 113.
D.[alton], L. L. “Government, People and Privileges,
[Pt. 1].” Woman's Exponent 2 (1 Apr. 1874):
167–68.
Dalton, Lucinda Lee. “Autobiography of Mrs. L. L.
Dalton.” Microfilm of holograph at Brigham
Young U. Original in The Bancroft Library,
University of California, Berkeley.
—. “Addendum. Most Respectfully to Queery [sic].”
Woman's Exponent 3 (15 Feb. 1875): 138.
—. “Answer to What Are We Men To Do, By R. W.
Easterbrooks, Exponent, April 15TH, 1876.”
Woman's Exponent 5 (1 July 1876): 17.
—. “Questionings.” Woman's Exponent 6 (1 Apr.
1878): 161.
—. “Woman.” Woman's Exponent 21 (15 Jan. 1893):
107.
—. “Woman Arise!” Woman's Exponent 21 (1 Mar.
1893): 131.
een Ursenbach Beecher. Women of Covenant:
The Story of Relief Society. Salt Lake City: Deser-
et Book, 1992.
Easterbrooks, R. W. “What Are We Men To Do?”
Woman's Exponent 4 (15 April 1876): 172.
Journal of Discourses, 26 vols. London and Liverpool:
LDS Book Depot, 1854-86.
Madsen, Carol Cornwall. “`Remember the
Women of Zion': A Study of the Editorial
Content of the Woman's Exponent, a Mormon
Woman's Journal.” Thesis, U of Utah, 1977.
Tonkavich, Nicole. “Rhetorical Power in the
Victorian Parlor.” Oratorical Culture in Nine-
teenth-Century America. Eds. Gregory Clark and
Whipple's The Giant Joshua: The Greatest but
Not the Great Mormon Novel
Eugene England
Let me say straight out that The Giant
Joshua is among the finest two or three novels
yet produced by or about Mormons–right there
with Virginia Sorensen's The Evening and the
Morning and Levi S. Peterson's The Backslider. It
compares favorably with other, much better
known, regional American novels such as
Giants in the Earth, Main Street, and even My
Antonia. It is not only, as the critic of Western
literature, Ray B. West has noted, “the most
complete record of a small pioneer community”
(Writing, 34), but it is also the richest, fullest,
most moving, the truest fiction about the Great
Basin pioneer experience that I have found.
Despite the shocked initial reaction to the
book in Mormon country, especially in St.
George, Laurel Thatcher Ulrich is right in
saying that “thirty years later the book seems
remarkably true to the faith, an excellent place
to begin in developing an understanding of
pioneer life” (254). West, in his substantial
review essay in the Saturday Review of Literature
in 1941, pointed out that Joshua caught a side
of the Mormon story missed by Vardis Fisher,
“the tenderness and sympathy which existed
among a people dogged by persecution and
hardship, forced to battle inclement nature and
struggle for each moment of happiness”
(Review 5). I honor Maurine Whipple for
providing our finest fictional access to our roots
61
Michael Halloran. Carbondale: Southern
Illinois UP, 1993. 158–83.
as Mormons and as Rocky Mountain, high
desert people, our most profound imaginative
knowledge of the spiritual ancestors of all
Mormons, the Dixie pioneers.
Yet we must still continue waiting for the
great Mormon novel. Whipple finally remains
too much a part of that “lost” generation of
Mormon writers of the 1930s and 1940s whom
Edward Geary has described so well for us. Like
them, Whipple is properly energized by her
own independence and by her disillusionment
with her people and their culture but not finally
reconciled to her characters and subject.
Whipple is nostalgic, able to praise in epic
terms the communal strengths of Mormonism,
able to see those strengths with unusual insight,
but finally, because of her lack of
understanding and loss of faith in the Church
of her own time, unable to keep faith with her
ancestors, and thus finally with her own
creations. She cannot keep the vision whole,
even though she knows it integrated her own
people within themselves and in their
community in a unique way—and so she cannot
bring her work to resolution and the novel loses
its quality in the last 100 pages: Her powerful
theme of human struggle is fragmented by
indecision about what motivated the struggle;
her fine central characters are victims of her
own fierce revenge and finally of her even more
destructive sentimentality. The rich, muscular
plot is betrayed by a turn to melodrama. It is
finally a disappointment of love and faith.
But that the book was written at all is a
miracle—an evidence of faith and love to which
attention must be paid, given the fragile nature
of the novelist's gift and human response to it.
Without her knowledge, a friend sent a nearly
forgotten manuscript of Whipple's to a
Colorado writers' conference in 1938; and out
of the blue, she received an invitation to attend.
There she remembers being given much
attention and extremely flattering praise by the
fine Harvard poet and critic John Peale Bishop.
Here the story takes on almost mythic
qualities: Bishop spending nearly all one night
sitting with her on the steps of a fraternity
house in Boulder, rejoicing over the unforced
humor in her work, its absence of breast-beat-
ing and melodrama of self, the honesty, vitality,
fidelity to her materials, to her landscape—all so
unusual in a first novel. Ford Maddox Ford,
also impressed, asked for first refusal rights on
the short novel and took it to Houghton
Mifflin, where a vice-president, Ferris Greenslet,
to whom Joshua is dedicated, became Whipple's
editor. All that attention could well have turn-
ed a young person's head, but Whipple settled
down to the actual task eventually agreed upon
with Greenslet: She risked moving beyond the
security of that highly praised first effort (called
“Beaver Dam Wash,” a story of the southern oil
boom that is still unpublished except in part)
and conceived a trilogy on the people of
southern Utah from settlement to the present.
She supported herself by teaching school and
giving tap-dancing lessons after school, which
she learned by correspondence one lesson
ahead of the students; and she kept up the
writing far into the lonely morning hours until
she got the first novel finished. She did this
over a two-year period, without assurances, and
won the Houghton Mifflin Literary Fellowship
62
prize from among thousands of applicants,
including Carson McCullers and Eudora Welty.
However, someone, apparently Elder Levi
Edgar Young, who was then president of the
New England States Mission, was asked to
review the book for the publisher. He
convinced Houghton Mifflin to reduce the
press-run because it was anti-Mormon and
would not sell in Utah. (According to Whipple,
Houghton Mifflin originally planned on a big
Utah sale—and even thought Joshua might be
made required reading for all Mormons
because it was so sympathetic!)
I qualify all of this because, having yet
found no independent verification, I have only
Whipple's word for this scenario, although
Clinton Larson told me he was present as a
young missionary in the mission office in the
fall of 1940 when Elder Young was reading the
page proofs and pronounced the book a damn-
ed lie.
The only real fact we have is that Whipple
developed, as a result of something that
happened to her, a crippling paranoia, a
persistent bitterness about her experience. She
did not complete her trilogy or write many
more Mormon stories. And some kind of
attention must be paid to that as well, by
anyone who cares about Mormon literature. At
least I can't help feeling a haunting, unfocused
guilt—a sense of responsibility which I try to
discharge by trying, as I am now, to pay honest,
appreciative attention to her achievement.
The reality remains that we do have Joshua,
still kept in print by Sam Weller's Western
Epics Press, and that many young Mormons to
whom we teach it in Mormon literature courses
and the parents to whom they in turn
recommend it, and the few who hear about it
on occasions like this can read a work which,
despite its flaws, remains probably the very
finest piece of fiction about Mormon history.
 The narrative tells the history of the
colonization of that area in southwest Utah
called “Dixie.” Brigham Young directed its
settlement beginning in 1861 to provide
various products for the Mormons in his self-
sufficiency program, especially the cotton which
the Civil War made unavailable. A major focus
in the settlement story—and a skillfully
developed central plot line—is the struggle with
a terribly alien land, especially the struggle to
control the Virgin River for irrigation despite
its sudden catastrophic floods. After twenty-five
years of losing progressively larger and more
costly dams—as well as their crops and even
lives—the settlers harnessed the Virgin with a
diversion dam and spillway system that I once
heard Whipple testify she believed was divinely
inspired.
This drama of the pioneering struggle with
nature to survive is made so central that some
think the land is the novel's protagonist. That
drama is handled extremely well, with unique
richness of historical detail. But in addition, the
horrific battles with the land–and with
polygamy—are baptized in a saving, though
poignant, humor, partly through the use of
ready-made folklore and folk poetry.
The real protagonist is, of course,
Clorinda MacIntyre, a marvelous creation of a
woman. Clory is from a wealthy Philadelphia
family, and her mother occasionally sends her
luxurious objects which are totally
inappropriate to her daughter's practical needs
but which serve as important symbols of her
rebellious yearnings and of her sense of the
legacy she wants to build for her children. That
hope sustains her through her great sacrifices.
One of these gifts, a paisley shawl, becomes the
shroud for her daughter, when all three of her
children are taken by black canker (scurvey).
Another, a rosewood desk at which she
imagines her children sitting in civilized
63
comfort, ends up in a museum.
Such a fate for Clory and her dreams was
determined when her father, while she was still
an infant, left her mother to join the Mormons
and then lost his life crossing the plains. The
man who had converted her father, Abijah
MacIntyre, raised Clory and then, when she was
only seventeen and falling in love with a young
Gentile soldier, took her, at Brigham Young's
direction, as his third wife and as part of the
colonizing mission to Dixie.
We first see Clory on the last leg of the
late winter journey to the assigned settlement
site of St. George, and we are quickly and
skillfully made to experience through her senses
the hostile landscape and the details of
Mormon pioneering: the building of a dugway
interrupted by a childbirth, and the healing
through anointing with oil of a crucially needed
ox. We also quickly begin to see her as a
complex, delightful, exasperating human being,
whom we come to care about deeply and whose
extraordinary burdens we feel with great pain.
Clory responds to the landscape, which is
“white and crimson, or black and yellow and
blue, spewed in fantastic violence . . . unreal . . .
[glittering] with such intensity that she closed
her eyes . . . A regular crazy quilt of a country;
savage, repellant, challenging, wildly beautiful”
(3). It is clear that she both fears it and is
kindred to it.
Clory is charming, vivid, intelligent, and
spunky in ways I imagine Maurine Whipple was
as a young woman—and still was in old age,
behind the bitterness. She constantly tries to
stretch the physical and spiritual walls that
crowd her; she builds her own dugout home
and furnishes it with those few things she has
saved to leave to her children; she plants the
highly scented Italian shrub bergamot in her
doorway to use for a unique perfume that
Whipple makes into a fine symbol of her. She
takes organ lessons at great cost and learns the
arduous process of making buckskin gloves with
which to pay the cost of imagination.
We perhaps see Whipple's starkest
identification with Clory when she is shown
listening to a friend's husband and a visiting
Gentile, who are “discussing the state of the
universe, wrangling over religion, debating
dogma . . . Clory listened and listened. Hunger
for knowledge can be as real as hunger for meat.
Hunger for knowledge and dreams of far places
and shining cities” (363). But the hunger is
never really met, the dreams never realized,
despite even some spunky preparations and
efforts by her to leave St. George.
And it finally appears that the great
antagonist is not really the land, but polygamy.
In a terrifying, powerfully symbolic scene
toward the novel's end, during the great
polygamy raid of the late 1880s, Clory hides
under a bed in friend's house while federal
officers who are prosecuting polygamists (The
Deps) taunt a woman in labor with obscenities:
“‘I can't stand it,” she cried with all of her being,
‘I can't stand it.'. . . No longer was she strong,
mistress of her life and her own soul.
Sometimes polygamy seemed more than a
condition, it was a Thing and she had thrown
herself against it and been bruised” (580-81).
Indeed it is polygamy, the creation of
blind and unfeeling men, including a male God,
in Clory's view—and I think Whipple's—that
destroys her life. Among Mormon novelists I
know only one who reports being influenced at
all by Whipple, and that one is Levi S. Peterson,
who did not read The Giant Joshua until his
mid-thirties, when he was already writing about
Mormon experience, including its dark side. He
says he was not influenced by it much. He was
reading other Mormon classics by Vardis Fisher
and Virginia Sorensen at the time, and they all
confirmed him in his work by showing him
64
there was “good stuff out there,” but he saw the
book as essentially a classical tragedy in its
accurate, detailed presentation of a case study
in polygamy. He agrees, as I do, with Jessie
Embry's point that Joshua confirms many
inaccurate stereotypes of polygamy but that,
though it does not give us a sociologically
accurate average case, it gives us a possible case,
probably based on Whipple's family traditions.
Clory's loneliness and emotional struggle,
from sharing Abijah with two other women,
and the added physical struggles when she
doesn't have him much at all under the
polygamy persecutions, leave her at forty, losing
her beauty and health, plagued by repeated
miscarriages despite medical advice she should
no longer bear children. Then Abijah marries a
young flirt, “a pert minx with bold, big-boned
bustle,” to take as his one allowed wife under
new Church policy, when he leaves to be
president of the Logan Temple.
When he leaves, Clory is again pregnant
from a period of renewed passion during which
she had tried to win back his love so that he
would take her with him. After a horrible
miscarriage in the street, she dies. But it is a
lingering death in which she has time to come
finally to what Whipple has her call a testimony,
a mystical sense of a Great Smile beckoning
among a thousand exploding light-balls and a
vision of the Joshua trees of the title, pointing
toward her Promised Land.
As Laurel Thatcher Ulrich noted in 1976
and as most of my students see right away, that
does not sound much like a Mormon testimony.
It seems, in fact, a version of the Emersonian
Romanticism very popular in the schools at that
time which was apparently a main source for
Whipple's own religious sensibility. That
ending, and the religious and artistic difficulties
that it entails, are the major fault of the novel.
The other flaws are, I think, quite minor.
There is perhaps a too-vivid dwelling on
suffering and on the sexual complexities of
polygamy. There are some historical mistakes,
like having “fast day” on the first Sunday
instead of Thursday as it was then, referring to
the Mormons practicing polygamy at the time
of the Haun's Mill Massacre in 1839, and the
implication that the Church approved Abijah's
desertion of his existing wives and marrying a
new young one before assuming his
responsibilities as temple president. There are
also occasional false notes of dialogue or
interior monologue, some undigested
expositions of Mormon doctrine or history or
folklore, seams in the fabric of reality, the
believable new world that it is the novelist's gift
and task to create for us. But Whipple does
create that world with brilliant vividness and
freshness, humor, and believability–certainly
not what Elder Young may have wanted, the
best example of polygamy, or what Embry
might prefer, an average example, but a
convincing example of the cost for some of
obedience to that principle, even when they
believed it divine.
Ray B. West once wrote that the American
novel—and especially the Western novel—has
not been characterized by excellence of style or
compactness of design but has been known for
“a native vigor, a robust and almost reckless
kind of energy” and criticized for a consequent
“roughness” (Writing 25). Joshua is strengthened
by not being pure in form, by being alloyed
with folklore and vernacular poetry, history and
doctrine, by audacious changes in point of view
as Whipple breaks from Clory as the central
consciousness to the mind of Erastus Snow or
Brigham Young or even to the whole world
itself personified—even moving a few times into
her own undisguised voice in the present.
But it is Whipple's own point of view that
poses the problems of the last part of the
65
novel—the major flaws I mentioned. Though I
think Whipple is, next to Virginia Sorensen,
the best of the Mormon regionalist writers, and
is able at times to transcend their perspective
and limitations, she finally remains, to quote
Sorensen's own description of those writers,
including herself, “incapable of severe
orthodoxies . . . striving to somehow balance
the importance of the individual (the writer's
respected and ancient concern) with the
importance of the great events that weld people
into vast groups and crowds into anonymous
armies” (182).
Clory, with whom Whipple deeply
identifies, is like the protagonists of Sorensen
and the other “lost generation” novelists, also
“in the middle,” caught between the instinct for
freedom and the demands of loyalty and
obedience. Geary, the most thorough critic of
these writers, notes: “With the ambivalence
which is almost the hallmark of Mormon
regional fiction, Clory resists the demands of
the community and yet finally dies in harness,
abandoned by those she would not abandon”
(Geary “Poetics” 15; see also Geary
“Mormondom's”).
But conflict is not the problem; great
fiction depends on conflict. The problem is that
Whipple created an epic, deeply moving frame
for that conflict, carried it powerfully toward a
climax and then—through some failure of
knowledge or faith, some lack of tough-
mindedness, perhaps merely a deep-seated
anger at males and authority—could not hold
true to her vision of the paradox of public duty
and private inclination, of integrity both to
group and to self, through which we must work
out our salvation in fear and trembling. As a
result, for many the novel seems to dissolve in
rancor, sentimental mysticism, and melodrama.
Mormon writers have tended to have
either the community vision of the zealot
insider, as we find in what might be called the
first or pioneer generation and the second,
“home literature,” writers, or else they have had
the individualistic, critical insights of the
sometimes sympathetic but nevertheless
detached outsider, the third or “lost”
generation Geary has examined. The first and
second groups were provincially inward-looking;
the latter group might be called provincials
precisely because of their self-conscious
rejection of provinciality, their outward-looking
unwillingness to give themselves wholly to
understanding their own people and place.
Whipple came closest to combining these two
valuable sets of insights. But finally, it seems to
me, she failed to fulfill her promise. She let
youthful inexperience and immaturity, focused
in her bitterness toward Abijah and polygamy,
destroy the ending of Joshua; then she let her
bitterness about the Church's reaction to her
book keep her from finishing the trilogy, where
she might have worked out the problems of
Joshua and given us the great Mormon novel.
Wallace Stegner has said of Western
writers—and it seems true of Mormon's lost
generation, including Whipple, “We cannot
find, apparently, a present and living society
that is truly ours and that contains the materials
of a deep commitment” (178). I believe the
great Mormon novel will be written by someone
at peace with the Mormon past and at home in
its present—yet someone who retains both the
critical objectivity and the artistic flexibility to
mold the raw materials of the Mormon
tradition closer to their own heart's desires and
thus reveal a unique esthetic and ethical
perception of human acts and motives. She, or
he, will have a balanced sense of both
individual and community integrity, will have
good vision in both the eye of faith and the eye
of knowledge, will see the faults without rancor
or self-righteous pride and the virtues without
66
sentimentality or self-consciousness. The writer
of the great Mormon novel will be someone
whose conscience remains sensitive and
courageous but whose wounds have healed.
Maurine Whipple was not quite that person;
the tragedy is that with some help, not so much
the material kind she thought she most needed,
but serious encouragement, loving criticism–
even some indication that others were learning
from her—she perhaps might have been that
someone.1
There are many things that Whipple knew
and knew how to say well. Perhaps most
surprising, given her tendency toward romantic
mysticism and her poor reception among her
own people, is her ability to capture the unique
spirit of Mormon devotion and what Lavina
Fielding Anderson has called “spiritual realism,”
the author's unselfconscious witness to the
direct presence of spiritual experience within the
realities of physical human life. A prime
example is Willie, dying painfully after the birth
of her first child, telling Clory the secret, kept
hidden through most of the novel, of her
strange withdrawal from life, especially from the
often superficial religious gossip of the women
around her:
Bit by bit during those long night reaches, the
story of Willie's past came out, that past so
dreadful that she had kept it hidden all her life.
And bathing her pain-wracked limbs Clory saw
deep, embedded scars along her elbows, her
knees, the bottoms of her feet. And in an
anguish of contrition Clory understood that
queer hobble, like a jointed mechanized doll.
“ . . . So happy,” muttered Willie, her eyes
staring vacantly at the ceiling, “Joe and me
and the two kids on the ocean. 'Ow good the
chicken bones tasted after the sailors 'ad
thrown them away! . . . They said it was too
late to start but the men was anxious. And we
women didn't know nothin' except we 'ad to
push them 'eavy carts a thousand miles.”
 . . . . “I remember one elder says we should
trust in common sense as well as the Lord. . . .”
Greasing axles with bacon and even soap.
Chewing a crumb of buffalo meat until it got
white and tasteless. Rationed to less than half
a pound of flour a day. Feet festered, wrapped
in rags. Remnants of human bodies eaten by
wolves. Five hundred head of cattle stiff amid
the snowbanks. Tents and wagontops blown
away and wagons buried up to the tops of the
wheels. Men pulling their handcarts up to the
moment they die. Wading a river and cutting
shins against the block of ice. Joe eating a dead
horse in the moonlight, mistaken for a wild
animal, shot. Ground too frozen to dig graves.
Sixteen die in one night, bodies piled up. Not
enough men with sufficient strength to pitch
tents. Sat on a rock until morning with dying
children on my lap. Feet frozen, bare upon the
snow, I crawled forward on hands and knees,
then on elbows and knees. . . .
. . . . “I'm sorry to 'ave such a 'ard time
dyin' . . . Don't let 'Sheba lay me h'out. I'll be
just another dead body to 'Sheba!”
And then when Clory had promised, and
the pale eyes had lost their look of desperation:
“A voice, not a whisper, but still and low said
to me: `If you will leave your 'ome, father and
mother, you shall have Eternal Life.' I 'ave
heard the same voice since, not in dreams but
in daylight, when in trouble and uncertain
which way to go; and I know God lives and
guides this people called Mormons. . . .”
Her eyes, already filled the mystery of the
last long trek, were dark with faith.
”Don't never knuckle under to life, Clory.
Don't never knuckle under, if you 'ave to
crawl—all—the—way!” (496-99)
There is also the marvelous creation of
Tutsegabbett, the local Indian chief who
becomes a Mormon. He joins the other
authorities as, standing in the sun, they wait for
Brigham Young's visit, “sensible in his
nakedness among the sweating broadcloth-
covered bodies of the white men. This
67
celebration seemed more like an ordeal or
endurance to him, but he had cast in his lot
with the Mormonies and he was trying his long-
suffering best to live up to them” (231).
At one point when Free's horse is shot
with a poisoned arrow during some Indian
trouble, Tutsegabbett sucks out the poison and
says to his beloved friend Jacob Hamblin, “We
cannot be good . . . we just be Paiutes. We want
you to be kind to us. It may be that some of our
children be good, but we want to follow our old
customs.” Later Whipple has him appear before
the high council with a complaint that makes
perfectly good sense to us in the year 2000 but
was an unsual insight for a young rural Utahn
in 1939: He felt that although the horse, the
rifle, and the saddle blanket he had been paid
for a certain spring were long since used up, the
spring was still as good as new, and he should
be paid more horse, more rifle, and more
saddle blanket.
But we see this interesting man first in a
scene that for me shows us the full range of
Whipple's skill with plot, character, and symbol,
as well as some of her flaws of sentimentality
and vauge humanism—but also shows her
courage to create an epiphany. Clory and her
friend Pal have decided to leave the community;
Pal's husband finds out, and he comes and tells
Clory he's made a bargain with his wife that if
he could show her one pretty thing in all the
desert she'd stay. He then takes the two young
wives on horseback at dawn up over Steamboat
Mountain, led by Tutsegabbett and Jacob
Hamblin. The Indian tells them on the way,
translated by Jacob Hamblin, the legend of
Neab and Nannoo, two lovers who, with Neab's
father, have tried to stop their people from
burying the sick and older Indians in caves to
die. The girl becomes extremely ill and the U-
ano-its tribe takes her to be put in the cave,
despite Neab's pleas:
 “What you are doing is evil,” he said; “Ah-bat
Moap, the great On-Top God, will take away
the rain and [you] will die. You have not
listened to [my father]. I go to prove his words
to you. I go to intercede for you. I go to coax
the anger from Ah-bat Moap.”
His people begged him to come out, but
when the women rolled the boulder back into
place, Neab was there to keep Nannoo
company. . . . The voice stopped. Clory was
still in her dream . . . . Tutsegabbett pulled up
his pony and waited for the others to catch up
with him. . . . [He] spread wide his arms and
Jacob matched the solemnity of his intonation.
“Ah-bat Moap, pleased with his servant, set
His footprint before the cave of Neab to show
his stubborn people the way.”
The Indian pony took another dainty step
or two. The others followed, the girls craning
their necks to peer around the figures of the
men. They lined up at the very lip of a huge
basin scooped out in the solid rock.
“See-coe!” cried Tutsegabbett.
Clory sucked in her breath tranfixed in
amazement and delight.
“David!” Pal gasped, and the two girls were
on their knees among the stones of the lip.
There before them, carpeting the
depression, were thousands of fairy bells with
lavender hearts, tossing their lovely heads.
Flowers wilting at a touch, so delicate as to be
almost other-earthly there among the black
rocks.
Sego lilies! Sown as thickly as a desert sky
with stars. Poised like heavenly butterflies
there on the grim lava surface as if they needed
no roots, would float upward at a breath . . .
“. . . The U-ano-its resolved never to fight
on a battlefield where sego lilies grew: thus
the sego lily became an emblem of peace. . .”
Ah-bat Moap and His mighty footstep
before the cave of Neab. Neab, who did not
run away. (173-74)
And, of course, Clory does not run away—and
also pays with her life for her devotion.
68
Bruce Jorgensen has compared Whipple
with the remarkable group of younger
American women writers whose work appeared
along with hers in l94l, with similar or even less
national attention: her competitors for the
Houghton Mifflin Prize, Eudora Welty and
Carson McCullers, and also Janet Lewis and
Caroline Gordon. Those four each went on to
a larger body of durable work and greater
reputation than Whipple, and Jorgensen
suggests that one of the main reasons for
Whipple's relative failure is that she did not
persist in developing her strength—intuitive
insight into the language, folk customs, and
moral strength of her own people—and did not
discipline her weaknesses, which included lack
of understanding of Mormon spirituality and
indulgence in a vague Romanticism as
substitute:
A relatively ill-equipped and undiscriminating
abstractionist mind undercuts the best work of
a splendidly endowed folk imagination, and
we can watch the struggle play itself out in
passage after passage in which homely imagery
gives way to ballooning cliches typical of the
slick popular idiom of the thirties and forties.
(8)
But when Whipple is able to remain true to her
root strength, especially when she dares to
attempt an epiphany grounded in genuine folk
experience that she believes is true, Whipple
achieves something none of those writers has.
Other novels are in many ways superior to The
Giant Joshua—for instance, in stylistic
consistency and uniformity of vision, in
unobtrusive steadiness of characterization, in
the structured power of denouement and
resolution, all of which are essentially formal
qualities, ones which fulfill our esthetic sense
and training. But despite all this, Whipple's
novel is moving and extremely valuable, it
seems to me, because it successfully conveys to
our minds and hearts a rare and challenging
moral and religious vision, not the most
orthodox Mormon one but a deeply felt and
wondrously imagined Mormon one. Her flawed
masterpiece stands as a blessing and challenge
to Mormon culture, perhaps especially to
Mormon writers, most of whom have yet to
learn what they might from her achievement
and to surpass it.
EUGENE ENGLAND retired from Brigham Young
University's English Department and is now at Utah
Valley State College where he coordinates Mormon
studies programs.
NOTE
1. See England (“Dawning”) for a suggested
Mormon literary history, including an analysis of
three separate generations of good writers and some
evidence that the third is beginning to achieve the
balance and quality I suggest might produce “the
great Mormon novel.” This generation already has
to its credit many other fine literary achievements.
WORKS CITED
Embry, Jesse. “Overworked Stereotypes or Accurate
Historical Images: The Images of Polygamy in
The Giant Joshua.” Sunstone, April 1990, 42-46.
England, Eugene. Brother Brigham. Salt Lake City:
Bookcraft, 1980.
—. “Great Books or True Religion?” Dialogue: A
Journal of Mormon Thought 9 (Winter 1974): 36-
49.
She, Clory, Had a Testimony, and a Great Smile
Harlow Söderborg Clark
I knew, of course—what child didn't?—that
Joshua had marched around the walls of
Jericho seven times then put horn to lips and
become the patron saint of trumpet players. So
69
England, Eugene. “`The Dawning of a Brighter
Day': Mormon Literature after 150 Years.”
After 150 Years: The Latter-day Saints in
Sesquicentennial Perspective. Eds. Thomas G.
Alexander and Jessie L. Embry. Provo, UT:
Charles Redd Center for Western Studies,
1983. 97-146. Includes select bibliography of
Mormon literature.
Geary, Edward A. “The Poetics of Provincialism:
Mormon Regional Fiction.” Dialogue 11
(Summer 1978).
—. “Mormondom's Lost Generation: The Novelists
of the 1940s,” BYU Studies 18 (Fall 1977): 89-
98.
Jorgensen, Bruce. “Retrospection: Giant Joshua.”
Sunstone 3.6 (Sept.-Oct. 1978): 6-8.
Sorensen, Virginia. “Is It True?—The Novelist and
His Materials.” Western Humanities Review 7
(1952).
Stegner, Wallace. The Sound of Mountain Water.
Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1969.
Ulrich, Laurel. “Fictional Sisters.” Mormon Sisters.
Ed. Claudia L. Bushman. Cambridge, MA:
Emmeline P, 1976.
West, Ray B. Jr. Rev. Saturday Review of Literature
23.1 (Jan. 4, 1941): 5.
—. Writing in the Rocky Mountains. Lincoln: U of
Nebraska P, 1947.
Whipple, Maurine. The Giant Joshua. Boston:
Houghton Mifflin, 1941; rpt. Salt Lake City:
Western Epics, 1976.
the thick green book intrigued me. What kind
of story did it tell about Joshua as a giant? Or
maybe many stories, it was so thick. Perhaps I
didn't read it because the type was small and
there were no pictures to break up the text, but
the image of Joshua the giant so captured me
that I will simply ask you to imagine my
disappointment several years later (as a teenager,
I think) to find that the title refers to a cactus.
When I finally read Maurine Whipple's
novel in my mid-thirties I knew it was about
polygamy and the founding of St. George in
southern Utah, described in pioneer song as
“Mesquite and soaproot, prickly pears and
briars, / St. George ere long will be a place
which everyone admires.” I had also read the
journal of my great-grandmother, Annie
Waldron Clark. Annie became a plural wife in
1886 as the Raid, the federal government's
brutal suppression of polygamy, was becoming
increasingly brutal. She went to live with her
husband's parents, only seeing him—she often
said later—at seedtime and harvest. Not even
Charley's brothers and sisters could know who
she was, whose seed she would harvest.
I learned only two years ago that when that
first child read the journal as an old man he
was so angry that people couldn't know who his
father was that he almost ripped those pages
out. I am glad my grandfather didn't. I am glad
the family printed the journal instead.
In 1890, Wilford Woodruff, Joseph
Smith's third successor as prophet, issued a
manifesto withdrawing public support for new
plural marriages, then conceding during
testimony to the Master in Chancery that it
applied to existing plural marriage. Many men
felt they had to choose between wives. Charley
kept both, unlike his brother-in-law Joseph M.
Tanner who told Charley's sister, Annie, that
he would no longer visit her and the children,
“though I did not for a moment suppose that
he intended to contribute no more to our
support” (xxiii), Annie said. (She wrote a book
about her life and ambiguous marriage, A
Mormon Mother, another book I have yet to
70
plumb the mystery of.)
The Giant Joshua ends similarly, in
abandonment and death. Whipple's biographer,
Veda Tebbs Hale, says The Giant Joshua “was not
to have ended” with Clory's tragedy. Whipple
planned for it to continue through two more
generations, to tell of Clory's son, his tragedy,
and his daughter's decision to come back to her
people from a flirtation with fame in the East.
“I think it would have conveyed the
message that even if a life is a tragedy looked on
in the short view,” Hale says, “there is a glorious
final lifting that redeems. I think we Mormons
have no idea how that message was appreciated
by a world reeling with the uncomprehendable
aftermath of the Second World War.” At 600+
pages, Whipple's editor “convinced her against
her will” to split the book. “But Joshua hit so
hard that the praise of the world and the
condemnation of the Church and her beloved
people crushed [Whipple] in the middle,” Hale
says, who is editing what Whipple did finish of
the story.
The ending is worth considering because it
has aroused considerable controversy—that is,
controversy able to be considered. The ending is
generally disliked, even among those who think
The Giant Joshua Mormondom's best novel. I
find it a good ending, and I am here to speak in
contro to the versers who dislike it.
The most common objection is to the
penultimate paragraph. I'm a bit hesitant to
quote it—out of context, standing by itself in a
critic's essay it sounds a good deal more purple
and mystical than it does in context—but since
the paper centers around this paragraph I will:
And now there is no more time. Already the
radiance is trembling on the horizon, the flush-
ed light leans down from the west, the Great
Smile beckons. And suddenly, with the shock
of a thousand exploding light-balls, she
recognizes the Great Smile at last. That which
 she has searched for all her life had been right
there in her heart all the time. She, Clorinda
MacIntyre, had a testimony!
General objections to this paragraph:
1. It seems too easy a resolution to a
lifelong quest. It seems like deathbed
repentance or a deus ex machina.
2. The vocabulary is not Mormon. As
Laurel Thatcher Ulrich said in her “Fictional
Sisters,” the phrase reminds one of the Great
Pumpkin (255)—an unfair comparison for a
phrase that predates Linus's pumpkin patch by
at least a couple of decades, one of those
phrases a critic (especially a young critic?) can
hardly pass up. Other critics have simply noted
that the idea seems more Emersonian or mystic
than LDS.
Such objections ignore three questions
this novel grapples with in the last 40 pages: the
question of power, the question of testimony
and belonging, and the question of vocabulary.
I'll consider each briefly.
Power is a motif in the novel—the Virgin
River's power and the pioneers' attempts to
dam it, the federal government's power and its
attempts to suppress polygamy, and the human
spirit's power to resist domination. To suggest
what domination means in this novel, especially
at the end, here is a story.
I started reading Joshua in January 1994 in
the lunch room at WordPerfect and set it aside
about six months later on page 594. Not that I
didn't like it. Other things happened. I got laid
off, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Five years of et
cetera before I finished the novel. Some time in
there I picked it up and realized why I had set
the novel aside. Page 594 begins Chapter XVI
section 2:
The Reign of Terror . . . Often, as soon as
a prisoner's term was up, he would be
rearrested at the penitentiary door. He was
helpless, since he was being punished for a
crime he had committed years before it was a
71
crime. As if a man were suddenly jailed for
having worn a mustache in his youth. (594)
Now that's domination. It's also strikingly
arbitrary behavior. Terror is about being
arbitrary, about punishing someone for
innocuous behavior, about punishing them
greatly for something trivial, about harming
innocent people for something no more serious
than having worn a mustache years before.
Whipple continues: “Thirteen hundred
prisoners upheld by the conviction that there
among the bedbugs and the beans they ate of
sacred bread” (594). Now that's the human
spirit resisting domination.
I wanted to read these last 40 pages with
enough psychic space and time to read them
without much interruption, because I knew
something horrible would happen. Of course, I
ended up reading them in short snatches riding
the bus home from work, et cetera. And still I
was surprised when I read the last couple of
paragraphs (having heard them quoted and read
them in other people's writings) at how right
they felt to me—as both a reader and writer of
fiction, at how they moved me.
The ending isn't about the Reign of Terror
(note the French revolution echoes)—that's just
the backdrop—but it both mirrors and
influences the novel's other power issue, the
flow of power between Abijah MacIntyre and
his family, especially his wives. Abijah is
president of the St. George Temple, sitting in
the temple as this section opens reading a letter
from Erastus Snow about a new plan to dam the
Virgin River. It doesn't excite him as it should.
He's just been asked to preside over the Logan
Temple in northern Utah. A way to leave Dixie.
More important, a chance to create, “Ech, a
MacIntyre dynasty at last” (596). But he can take
only one wife.
And that sets up the horrible thing I knew
was coming when I stopped reading for so many
years. Abijah is courting Julia Hansen; and her
father, hiding from the federal marshals is
maybe the only one who can stop the marriage;
but as he slips toward his house at night, they
see him, and shoot him down. Eugene England
calls that scene melodramatic;2 but terror is
arbitrary, and Whipple shows the marshals as
people who kill arbitrarily to maintain their
power.
England praises Whipple's vision but notes
that “for many the novel seems to dissolve in
rancor, sentimental mysticism, and melodrama”
at the end, and feels that “through some failure
of knowledge or faith, some lack of tough-
mindedness, perhaps merely a deep-seated
anger at males and authority [Whipple] could
not hold true to her vision” (part 2). The
conversation where Erastus Snow takes upon
himself Clory's burden (see below) suggests that,
if Whipple had a deep-seated anger, it was
toward one particular male authority, not a
general anger. Indeed, if there is a true villain in
the novel it is the marshals and the government
they represent, which pushes the family apart by
its prosecution of polygamy. The marshals and
the society they force upon the Saints
exacerbate the power struggle that has been
going on in Abijah's family for the whole novel.
When looking at power struggles, it's
worth asking who has the power, who can
choose between the strugglers, and who benefits
or suffers from that resolution. The obvious
answer is that Abijah has the power; but it's not
quite true because Abijah doesn't want a person.
He wants a dynasty. Thus the person who holds
the power is the person who can give Abijah
what he wants. That excludes Bathsheba, first
wife and past child-bearing, exerciser of much
power in the novel. Clory, too, always
miscarrying. “Shilpit,” Abijah calls her,
referring to her body's weakness (“Hugh”). He
must find a new wife to give him a dynasty.
72
Young Julia Hansen can give him a dynasty.
Young enough to be a granddaughter, she
doesn't realize that, if her power comes from
what she can give Abijah, it comes only from
that. Clory does, and so doesn't tell Abijah she
is pregnant. “No, if he didn't want to take me
for myself, I wouldn't let him take me just
because I'm pregnant again! Besides, who knows,
I'll probably lose this one, too” (612).
Clory's decision leads directly to the second
question, testimony and belonging. As an
undergraduate at BYU I often found statements
like the following in the Daily Universe's Letters
to the Editor column: `I don't know how
anyone with a testimony could possibly say what
you said about such-and-such. Better examine
your place with God and the Church, you old
so-and-so.' I figured, going off to graduate school
I would not see such letters at the secular
University of Washington, and I didn't. The
UW Daily contained letters like this, “So-and-so,
you blankety-blanking blank of a blank, I don't
know how any decent rational person could
have such an opinion. Blank you, you old
blankety -blanking so-and-so. I sincerely hope
you get the help you need.”
It is, apparently, natural for our species to
attack the speaker rather than respond
thoughtfully to the idea—indeed, to question the
speaker's very right to speak. In a culture
dedicated to rational inquiry, one's rationality
and sanity are as much license to speak as is
one's testimony in a religious culture. So it is
natural that if you lose the chance or ability to
speak you begin to doubt whether you have the
license to speak. (This is one reason rejection
can be so hard on artists. If no one likes your
work, how do you know it's good enough to
like?)
Abandoned by Abijah, Clory loses her
place in her culture. Not that the people of St.
George turn against or abandon her, but she
can't help noticing a change in status any more
than can women who become widows1 or
anyone who grows old. Further, Clory's
recognition of Abijah's unrighteousness in
abandoning his wives for a new wife doesn't
save her from wondering if he would have
taken her if she'd just had a testimony. Even
recognizing Abijah's insincerity when he bids
the people farewell in church doesn't stop Clory
from feeling unworthy. “‘and when I think of
my third in the Covenant, my young lass left
alane, and my twa young bairns—I am the one
to suffer-r!'” Clory decides in parentheses, “And
he really does look as if he meant it, with his
beard all trembly” (610-11).
Even this recognition doesn't rescue Clory
from the feeling that he really chose which wife
to take based on the wife's testimony.2 Marriage
creates complex emotional ties and demands
trust, partly because marriage starts with two
people uniting their bodies, innocent and
vulnerable. It is difficult to constantly question
one's spouse without also questioning oneself,
especially when the spouse is a religious leader.
Stated differently, testimony—especially in
LDS culture—is a communal matter. We stand
before our religious community and bear
testimony. The metaphor is worth noting, not
only because bear is the word we use for
delivering a child, not only because bear is what
prophets do with their burdens (songs), or what
the Lord asks his disciples to do with his and
each others' burdens, but also because the word
sounds like that wonderfully (or frighteningly)
intimate verb, bare.3
Therefore if your community does not
acknowledge your testimony, it's natural to
wonder whether you have one. Of course,
Abijah never talks about Clory's testimony, but
Clory is left to wonder why else he would reject
her. Maybe because he's a hypocrite—but
someone who believes Jesus's admonitions to
73
judge with charity may find it worse to damn
someone by calling him a hypocrite than to
question her own testimony.
Abijah's abandonment does not give Clory
the ability to abandon him. I salute Maurine
Whipple's understanding of how being rejected
by a religious leader would add to Clory's sense
that she doesn't have a testimony, and her guilt
over that lack. I also salute Whipple's ending
the novel by affirming Clory's testimony—that is,
affirming that she has a testimony, and
affirming that testimony. But the affirmation is
stated in terminology most Mormons wouldn't
recognize, and Whipple has been consistently
faulted for not understanding Mormon
spirituality.
There is a deep, deep irony in this. At the
end of the second to last chapter is a
homecoming party for David Wright and
Erastus Snow, just home from prison. Clory
walks up Mount Hope—an expression of her
sense, pregnant and abandoned, that she no
longer belongs in the community—seeking for
peace and watching the homecoming parade
from that place. Apostle Snow seeks her out up
there and she pours out her grief to him, “Why,
I haven't even got a testimony” (619).
Erastus replies:
“Prison has taught me many things, Clorin-
da Agatha. . . . But I'll tell you—I'm not sure
what a testimony is myself.”
He laughed a little. Heresy!
“The way I look at it, the thing we've got
that's immortal is an Idea. And maybe that's
why we've been persecuted. . . . Maybe, human
nature being what it is, the world will always
stamp upon that Idea. . . . But you can't kill it,
Clorinda Agatha—it's older than the world.”
His words seemed to come from out of the
past, as if they had lived forever, as old as time,
as old as the rocks.
“Thou shalt love thy neighbor . . . Everybody's
reaching for it, only some religions are going
 'cross-lots, some kitty-cornered. . . . None of us
ending as evidence that she did understand
have yet come within a million miles of it, but
Mormon spirituality, it becomes possible to ask
the big thing is that we try. And as long as we
why she chose to state that spirituality in terms
try and admit we're trying, there's hope. A most Mormons wouldn't use. Veda Hale told
mosque or a pagoda or a Tabernacle . . . and
me that she thinks Whipple wanted to relate
maybe we're a little closer to it in the
Mormon spirituality to the great
Tabernacle because we've gone out for it
spiritual/mystical tradition, that she wanted to
deliberately, colonized for it. I believe that to
be Zion's mission to mankind, Clorinda tell her non-Mormon readers that Mormon
Agatha—to create among these barren hills a spirituality stands right alongside any of the
great spiritual traditions.
little inviolate world, a little sanctuary where
the Brotherhood of Man and the Fatherhood She ought to be celebrated for that.
of God are not just words but living, breathing And so we have moved to my third point,
realities. . . .” (620) vocabulary. I opened the Writers' Digest one day
That doesn't sound very Mormon, years ago and found an article on the hazards of
certainly not like Erastus Snow or any other writing explicit sex scenes. They are problematic,
19th-century Mormon leader, and some have the writer said, because a scene that's not tied to
cited it as further evidence that Whipple just character development risks becoming
didn't understand Mormon spirituality. But pornographic. The only reason to give explicit
there are two passages of scripture that could physical details, the writer said, is to use those
help us interpret the scene differently. Doctrine details to show something about the characters'
and Covenants 1:24 tells us that God speaks to characters. However, most of us don't spend a
his servants “in their weakness, after the great deal of time discussing the physical details
manner of their language, that they might come of our sex lives with each other, so a writer who
to understanding.” Sure, it doesn't sound like assumes she or he is describing normal sex
Erastus. It sounds like Clory. He's speaking to might be describing something many readers
her “after the manner of [her] language.” would find kinky. Conversely, something the
He's also speaking to her “in her weakness,” author finds perverted may seem perfectly
a phrase that restates Alma's baptismal normal to readers.
covenant at the Waters of Mormon to “bear Of course (leaving Writer's Digest behind)
one another's burdens that they may be light” there is an ancient connection between sex and
(Mosiah 18:8). In saying, “I'm not sure what a spirituality, probably ancient when Solomon
testimony is myself,” Erastus is taking upon drew on it to sing his Song of Songs, so let me
himself Clory's burden, her sense that she also draw on the connection and suggest that
doesn't have a testimony. most people probably talk more readily about
The deep irony is that, while Maurine sex than their spiritual lives. So what does
Whipple portrays her faith community as someone aiming to imagine another person's
bearing each other's burdens, that community spiritual life draw on?
burdened her with the label of one who didn't More important, how does someone
quite fit, indeed uses the very scene that describe the physical details of a spiritual
celebrated their empathy as evidence she didn't experience, let alone the emotional content?
understand their spirituality. Reynolds Price demonstrated in A Palpable God
If, instead, we choose to interpret the and again in Three Gospels how physical the
74
Bible's spirituality is, how grounded in the
human body. Christianity moved away from
this physicality, Price says. He recommends
reading Bible stories as one would read a novel,
asking, “What does this story ask me to believe?”
(1978, 31).
The level of physical detail, Price says,
indicates that the writers of many biblical
narratives, especially the Gospels, wanted their
readers to believe they were writing accurately
about real events in the life of a real man who
was the Son of God in the same way he was the
son of Mary. For various reasons Christian
spirituality became divorced from the body—yes,
I'm making much too large of a generalization—
and developed a rather abstract tradition.
Mormonism reasserted a high degree of
physical detail, with Joseph Smith proclaiming
God's embodiment in the King Follett
Discourse and “The Father has a body of flesh
and bones as tangible as man's; the Son also”
(D&C 130:22). But Mormon descriptions of
spirituality tend to be highly abstract. To use a
platitude I've heard over and over in the last 25
or 30 years, “Trying to explain the Holy Spirit
to someone who's never felt it is like trying to
explain the taste of salt to someone who's never
tasted it.”
That may sound like a solid, salt of the
earth metaphor, but it's really saying, “If you
don't know what a spiritual experience is I can't
tell you.” It's a totally abstract statement—much
more abstract than comparing one's spirituality
to the warmth and tenderness and affection
and openness and joy and enigma and
sensuality and generosity of—a Smile.
The Mormon answer to such abstraction is
to invite the Holy Spirit to communicate one's
message to the readers or audience. This can
create difficulties for an artist—who probably
can't assume readers will be aware of the Holy
Spirit in the same way the artist is. The readers
75
may have very different expectations about and
relationships to the Holy Spirit. Said differently,
a fiction writer may feel uncomfortable about
trying to create a spiritual experience for
someone, then asking them to pay for the
experience. Smacks of simony, doesn't it?
Perhaps the search for a common language
accounts for why much Mormon fiction uses
stock expressions to describe spiritual
experiences. In Jack Weyland's “The First Day
of Forever,” a character feels “the sweet
influence of the Holy Ghost bear[ing] witness to
Cathy's words” (21). In contrast, in David
Farland's Brotherhood of the Wolf, Gaborn, the
Earth King, tells his chosen, “If you ever hear
my voice in your mind or in your heart, take
heed” (27), and throughout the novel his
chosen hear his voice telling them, “Flee” (404),
or “Strike now” (468).
To a writer any statement that says, “I can't
describe a spiritual experience in words” sounds
like either sheer evasion or a challenge. So take
it as a challenge. How do you describe a
spiritual experience? A neighbor once described
a vision he had by saying it was as if a window
opened up right in front of him, in the same
way I suppose that a pop-up window opens up
in a computer program. And indeed, in Julie
Nichols's fine unpublished story about a vision,
“Cat Woman,” the vision first appears on a
computer screen; and in Orson Scott Card's Lost
Boys, Stevie interacts with the lost boys' spirits
through a computer game.
But most Mormon depictions of
spirituality are not visual. Instead, they rely on
the sense of touch. Two metaphors figure
prominently when Mormons discuss spirituality.
The first is the veil. In Mormon thought, the
dead live on the same planet as the living. We
don't see them because a veil separates this
world from the next, but we can sometimes feel
their presence just as we can feel the presence of
other people in a room even if we can't see
them. This sensing the presence of the dead
often happens in the temple, where people
perform ordinances like baptism as proxies for
the dead. “The veil is very thin in the temple” is
a phrase commonly used to express the sense of
the dead's presence.
The second metaphor is the burning in
the bosom. I'll spare you all the jokes about
heartburn. The important thing here is that
“burning in the bosom” is used to describe a
feeling of peace, joy, warmth, affection, reassu-
rance—everything conveyed in . . . a smile.
I'm suggesting that Maurine Whipple's
images of the Great Smile and the Grand Idea
are attempts to translate Mormon spirituality
into terms non-Mormons might recognize. John
Bennion has written about the tension
Mormon readers feel when Mormon writers try
to convey Mormon experiences in non-
Mormon terms (for non-Mormon audiences or
not) in his essay, “Negotiating Scylla and
Charybdis.” As Bennion's title suggests,
translation is a risky business—especially when
the translation is in the same language as the
original. If you recast my ideas how do I know
they really still mean the same thing?
Conversely, if I recast your ideas how do I know
I'm doing you justice? (Parenthetically, this
problem is a great concern for literary critics,
and there are endless debates about what
responsibility the critic has toward the text.)
Many LDS feel that Whipple did not re-
present their spirituality faithfully. But I
wonder how that might change if we changed
our assumptions, decided that the image of the
Great Smile is an attempt to relate our
spirituality to a larger audience—a way of saying,
“We are people just like you,” to those who
might consider Mormons a strange group of
hicks. And the beginning of Whipple's last
chapter almost makes this statement explicitly.
76
At the beginning of Chapter XVII the story
flashes forward about 70 years to “another Clory
MacIntyre” (625) looking at the objects we've
seen in the book—canes, books, ledgers,
clothing— then resumes the story of Clory's
death in childbirth. Whipple is contrasting the
artifacts you might see in a museum with the
human beings we've been living with for 600
pages, reminding us that the people we've been
sharing our hours with are indeed people, not
historical artifacts. She's probably also giving us
a glimpse of how the novel might have ended if
she hadn't allowed her editor to convince her to
split the novel into two, ending Volume 1 with
Clory's death. Or Whipple may be trying to
reassure us that there's more to the story—that it
doesn't end with Clory's abandonment and
death but will continue into the present.
The idea that Whipple didn't see Clory's
death as the story's end suggests a different way
of reading the novel's final words.3 England and
others object that Clory's final words, “Will you
see that my fingernails look nice? Sometimes the
women neglect fingernails” (633) are a sign of
vanity, not testimony (England pt. 3). Perhaps
that is both Clory's and Whipple's way of
asserting, to the very end, Clory's humanity. At
the end she is about to become an object, a
dead body, but she reasserts her humanity by
asking that her nails be cleaned.4 Or maybe,
having recognized her own testimony, her pure
heart, Clory wants to meet God with clean
hands.
And that should be the end. When I went
off to graduate school, I took that green book
about Joshua the Giant with me, though I never
read it. On April 12, 1991, at Seattle Deseret
Industries I found a copy of the Western Epics
1976 reprint, which I did read (and which,
maddeningly, to a scholar and book lover, omits
Whipple's acknowledgements and any mention
of the original publication).
 Shortly after I bought that copy my parents
told me Maurine Whipple would be speaking at
Watercress Farm in Springville, Utah, on June
21, 1991, and asked me to send the book. I did
and they asked her to sign it. Later they showed
me the inscription: “To Marden and Bessie:
With all the best wishes — and blesing. [sic]”
Whipple was in her nineties then, and my
father speculated that, perhaps because it took
her such effort to write the inscription, she
forgot to sign it. So the inscription, like the
story, is unfinished. I treasure both.
HARLOW CLARK, a freelance scholar, read this
paper at the AML conjoint meeting of the Rocky
Mountain Modern Language Association
convention, October 1999, in Santa Fe, New
Mexico. He thanks Eugene England for his fine
scholarship, example, and generosity to younger
scholars. It is a pleasure to honor him by disagreeing.
NOTES
1. Indeed, at the end of Chapter 6, Section 7,
Clory receives two marriage proposals, one tender
and a bit comic, the other grotesque, a parody and
mirror of Abijah. An old lecher tells her in the
Temple (note the capital T, Clory's recognition of
the Temple as sacred):
“The Lord has revealed to me . . .”
Clory fled in horror, ran all the way home,
and even in the stifling dusk, banged the door
tight against all the nameless horrors of
widowhood.
2. See Clory's agonies about testimony (614-
15).
3. Perhaps we can also give a different reading
to the troubling scene in which Clory, dying, laughs
hysterically when she hears of Julia's miscarriage.
She is not laughing at Julia's misfortune. Rather, the
text allows us, if we want to read it that way, to see
Clory laughing at a deeply tragic irony, rather than
at a person, since Clory is bearing Abijah's dynasty,
while Julia is likely to bear his scorn as Clory has
after each miscarriage. But even if Clory is laughing
at someone (probably Abijah), it's possible to see the
77
laughter as relief rather than vengeance. I would
compare it to the remarkable passage in Florence
Child Brown's I Cannot Tell a Life where she
describes her relief in hearing that her ex-husband,
who had beaten her for years and nearly killed her
with a 2x4, is dead. Brown makes no excuses for her
emotion, nor does she recapitulate her reasons for
resenting and fearing her husband. She simply
reports it as straightforwardly as she reported his
attempt to kill her. Similarly, Whipple shows us only
Clory's laughter. She doesn't tell us how she wants
us to feel; thus, we may respond according to our
personal readings of this scene.
3. “Her powerful theme of human struggle is
fragmented by indecision about what motivated the
struggle, her fine central characters are a victim of
her own fierce revenge and . . . her even more
destructive sentimentality, and the rich, muscular
plot is betrayed by a turn to melodrama. It is finally
a disappointment of love and faith” (England, pt. 1).
England's comment that this scene helps turn
Abijah “into a grotesque oldfool” (pt. 3) suggests
that he finds it bathetic.
I should note that England, after giving a
scathing critique of Whipple's spirituality and
sentimentality, renders a rather more positive
interpretation in part 4 but does not reinterpret her
spirituality. I assume, however, that interpretation is
always a choice. Works of art do not interpret
themselves; and the more they try to, the more
didactic and preachy we find them. Readers
interpret works of art, and it is always fair to ask
what benefit a reader or community of readers gets
from a particular interpretation.
Perhaps one benefit readers get from
interpreting The Giant Joshua as a work that doesn't
quite understand Mormon spirituality is that we can
shield ourselves from a painful vision of our past. As
the story about my grandfather suggests, many of
Whipple's original readers would have been born in,
grown up in, or lived in polygamy, and known a
great deal of pain from the persecutions.
We have assumed from Whipple's descriptions
of Clory's spiritual experiences that she didn't
understand Mormon spirituality. Maybe we have
also assumed it from Whipple's being part of our
Lost Generation. Literary theories are apt to filter
down from the academy into the general readership,
and the dominant trope in our half century's literary
theory—that art and the artist are beyond culture, to
use the title of Lionel Trilling's 1965 book—has
damaged relations between artist and culture. Two
recent threads on AML-List suggest a strong sense
that literary writers, particularly those who publish
in New York, are leaving their culture. Marilyn
Brown comments: “But like most really successful
Mormon writers, [Brady Udall's] writing is just a
shade off of Mormon . . . and he doesn't really
strike me as Mormon now. The closest story . . . was
‘Beautiful Places' about the boy in church who
helped the two vagrants.”
Todd Petersen, in a discussion about whether
Irreantum should comment on the attitudes toward
the religion of authors it writes about or publishes,
observed: “What about the Phyllis Barbers of the
world or the Sterling McMurrins or the David
Velozes or the Tim Lius or the Brady Udalls? What
do we do to people when we assume a general level
of activity in the church, when we make those
assumptions about their work (Why would a good
LDS boy write something like Natural Born Killers?)
The reason: They're not necessarily ‘good Mormons'
and it's wrong to even suggest that they are. For
example, Veloz has called himself ‘the dazed former
Mormon lying on the floor after getting bawled out
by Oliver Stone.'” (Capitalization and punctuation
standardized.)
It's worth noting that while Barber, McMurrin,
Veloz, and Liu may have commented about their
relationship to the Church, I don't know of any
statement from Udall, and no one in the Udall
thread mentioned one. I'm asking what we might
gain if we assume that artists are not placing
themselves beyond or against their culture, if we
instead interpret their works as members of the
culture—particularly if we assume that Whipple did
understand Mormon spirituality, and wanted to
convey that understanding to a non-LDS audience.
4. Clory is also echoing the instructions of
Willie, Abijah's second wife, to her as Willie is
dying after failing to expel an afterbirth: “I'm sorry
to have such a 'ard time dyin' . . . . Don't let 'Sheba
78
lay me h'out. I'll be just another dead body to
'Sheba!” (498). Bathsheba is Abijah's first wife.
WORKS CITED
Bennion, John. “Beyond Scylla and Charybdis: A
New Look at Insider and Outsider Stereotypes
of Mormonism.” AML Annual, 1997. Salt Lake:
Association for Mormon Letters, 1997. 59-66.
Brown, Florence Child. I Cannot Tell a Life.
Springville, UT: Salt Press, 1999.
Brown, Marilyn. “Re: [AML] Brady Udall Query”
AML-List, 1 Feb. 2001.
Card, Orson Scott. Lost Boys. New York:
HarperCollins, 1992.
England, Eugene. “Whipple's The Giant Joshua: A
Literary History of Mormonism's Best
Historical Fiction.” AML-List. CRITICAL
MATTERS. ENGLAND, “Whipple's The
Giant Joshua” Pt. 1, 18 March 1997; Pt. 2, 19
March 1997; Pt. 3, 20 March 1997; Pt. 4, 21
March 1997.
Farland, David. Brotherhood of the Wolf. The Runelords
series, Vol. 2. New York: Tor, 1999.
Hale, Veda Tebbs. “Re: WHIPPLE, The Giant Joshua,”
AML-List, 21-Nov-1996.
Hugh, Brent. “Shilpit (was BUSHMAN, “Finding a
Voice”)” AML-List 23 Oct. 1999.
Nichols, Julie. “Cat Woman.” In Pigs When They
Straddle the Air. Ph.D. diss. University of Utah,
1994.
Petersen, Todd Robert. “RE: Question for
Irreantum's Editors.” AML-List 02 April 2001.
Price, Reynolds. A Palpable God. New York:
Atheneum, 1978.
—. Three Gospels. New York: Scribner, 1996.
“Shilpit" (was BUSHMAN, “Finding a Voice). AML-
List, Sat-23-Oct-1999.
Smith, Joseph, Jr. “The King Follett Discourse.”
Teachings of the Prophet Joseph Smith. Ed. Joseph
Fielding Smith. Salt Lake: Deseret Book, 1977,
342-62. See also Stan Larson, “The King Follett
Discourse: A Newly Amalgamated Text.” BYU
Studies 18.2 (Winter 1978): 193-208. For the
original sources see Andrew E. Ehat and Lyn-
don W. Cook, eds. The Words of Joseph Smith:
 The Contemporary Accounts of the Nauvoo
Discourses of the Prophet Joseph. Provo: BYU
Religious Studies Center, 1980. 340-62. Remedying Race and Religious
Tanner, Annie Clark. A Mormon Mother. Salt Lake Prejudice
City: University of Utah Library/Tanner Trust
Fund, 1960. Rpt. 1976. Through Spiritual
Ulrich, Laurel Thatcher. “Fictional Sisters.” Mormon
Sisters. Ed. Claudia L. Bushman. Cambridge,
Autobiography:
MA: Emmeline P, 1976. 241-62. Wynetta Willis Martin's Black
Weyland, Jack. “The First Day of Forever.” The First
Day of Forever and Other Stories for LDS Youth. Mormon Tells Her Story
Bountiful, UT: Horizon, 1980. 11-22.
Whipple, Maurine. The Giant Joshua. Boston:
Houghton Mifflin, 1941; rpt. Salt Lake City:
Laura Bush
Western Epics, 1976.
Race will always be at the center of the encourage nonmembers to examine the
American experience. —Michael Omi and misinformation and misperceptions they may
Howard Winant, 5 have about Mormons.
Many U.S. citizens during the 1960s and
[H]e inviteth them all to come unto him 1970s viewed the Mormon Church as a white
and partake of his goodness; and he denieth western religion with overt racist practices that
none that come unto him, black and white, denied black Mormons full privileges of
bond and free, male and female; and he
membership. At the time, people of African
remembereth the heathen; and all are alike
unto God, both Jew and Gentile. (2 Nephi
(considered Hamitic) descent could be
26:33) baptized into the Church, but Church
authorities did not allow blacks to participate
In her 1972 spiritual autobiography, Black in most temple ceremonies, thus preventing
them from obtaining the religious ordinances
Mormon Tells Her Story, Wynetta Willis Martin
most prized by Latter-day Saints. In addition,
explains and defends her conversion to the
black Mormon men were banned from
Mormon Church during the late 1960s, a
holding the priesthood.2 This restriction
period when it came under severe attacks from
meant these men could not hold significant
civil rights activists in the United States for
positions of Church leadership—or power—
discriminating against its black members.1
until the ban was officially lifted on June 9,
Rather than condemning Mormons for treating
1978, permitting blacks access to all religious
blacks differently, Martin tells the story of her
ordinances in the LDS Church (D&C Official
1966 conversion and her problematic
Declaration 2).3
experiences within a mostly white Church since
To protest Mormons' treatment of their
her baptism. Martin expects her narrative to
black members, civil rights activists in the mid-
help her newfound white sisters and brothers in
1960s began staging demonstrations against
the faith see themselves in her stories—their
the LDS Church and instigating boycotts
attitudes and behaviors—and come to a greater
against Brigham Young University's athletic
understanding about race and race relations. In
program.4 Reminiscent of the late 19th century
addition, Martin expects her autobiography to
79
when the Church repeatedly defended its “God-
given” right to practice polygamy, the Church
in the 20th century was forced to defend its
“God-given” right to deny LDS members of
African descent full access to priesthood
authority and temple ceremonies. To deflect
criticism from outsiders, Church authorities
publicly supported the civil rights of all people,
regardless of their race.5 However, Mormon
leaders also argued that restricting black
members from receiving priesthood ordination
or temple ordinances did not deprive these
particular Latter-day Saints of their civil rights.
From the perspective of Church authorities,
modern-day prophets had instituted Latter-day
Saint practices according to God's will.6
Furthermore, blacks were free to choose
membership (or not) in the LDS Church. If
blacks converted, then they also accepted
Church policies, doctrines, and practices.
Mormon leaders argued, therefore, that as long
as the Church did not violate blacks' citizenship
rights, then non-Mormons could not dictate
Church policies, doctrines, and practices from
the outside.
Considering the discriminatory history of
blacks in the Mormon Church, many have
wondered why—then and now, even more than
twenty years after the ban was lifted in 1978—
any black person would choose to join such a
church. Through the genre of spiritual
autobiography, Wynetta Willis Martin attempts
to explain and justify such a choice.7 With
multiple audiences in mind— blacks, whites,
insiders, outsiders, and her own nonmember
parents —Martin chronicles her religious quest,
attempting to answer critics' and supporters'
questions about the circumstances that
motivated her 1966 conversion.
Martin's relatively short autobiography
offers readers a brief background about her
childhood experiences growing up in California
with religious parents who taught her to fear
God. She then relates a dramatic spiritual
80
experience that parallels Joseph Smith's First
Vision. Martin constructs this experience as
compelling her to search for a more
meaningful relationship with God. This quest
led her to the Mormon Church where, despite
her skin color, she felt love and acceptance.
After explaining her conversion, Martin then
discusses her problematic experiences as a
black woman in a mostly white church, a
narrow focus on the recent past. Her life and
personal narrative are still very much in
process. In addition, the LDS Church had not
rescinded its discriminatory policy. Thus, she
had to accommodate her life and her life story
to a contradictory situation that had not yet
changed for her.
After Martin was baptized in San Diego,
California, she toured California “giving talks
on why she had joined the church.” According
to a news article included in appendix material,
a spiritual leader told Martin that she had a
“special mission” to “teach love” (76). Martin's
autobiography appears motivated, at least in
part, by this leader's advice. His words and her
own encounters with many Mormons'
ignorance about black experience and with
many outsiders' ignorance about Mormons,
inspired and authorized Martin to write about
her life. Determined to better inform outsiders
about Mormons and to educate Mormons
about black experience, Martin believes the
story of her spiritual journey has the power to
help end ignorance, to promote understanding
among people from very different backgrounds,
and thereby, to remedy both race and religious
prejudice.
From the outset, Martin confronts the
race issue head on with a bold assertion about
her identity in the autobiography's first
sentence. She writes, “My name is Wynetta
Martin. I am a Negro and a member of the
Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints,
more commonly called the Mormon Church”
(11). In contrast to the conventional Mormon
woman's spiritual autobiography, Martin's
introduction mentions nothing about her
genealogy or place of birth. Instead of
connecting herself with ancestors or describing
how she grew up in a particular community,
Martin deals with the color of her skin.
Although her black identity, combined with her
rarity as a Mormon, are the main impetus for
writing, Martin nonetheless insists on her
individuality, separate from the category of
“black” or “Mormon.”
She wants intensely for readers to
approach her autobiography as a sincere
narrative about her own particular conversion.
“My story is not about Negroes,” asserts Martin,
“nor is it about Mormons or their church
doctrine. It is about my life and how I became
convinced to join the Mormon Church” (11).
Martin's initial claim here is undercut by the
content of the autobiography itself. To varying
degrees, she does, in fact, write about “Negroes,”
“Mormons,” and “their church doctrine.”
Nevertheless, Martin begins her story by
resisting racial and religious categories, and
hence, by resisting racial and religious
stereotypes. This preemptive rhetorical strike is
Martin's attempt to prevent readers from
assuming that they already know something
about who she is simply because they know
something about her race and chosen religion.
Besides working to prohibit readers from
reducing the complexity of her personal
identity, Martin wants to prove to outsiders that
she is happy, that her new religious community
is not full of bigoted people, and that she is
fulfilling her own mission to spread love and
end any form of prejudice through her speaking
and publishing.8 With these writing goals in
mind, Martin begins the second paragraph of
her autobiography by addressing critics who
may believe that she was deluded or coerced
into converting. Here Martin communicates
the power of her religious convictions through
81
strong verbs, purposeful adjectives, and explicit
appeals to readers' sympathy. Approaching her
argument from a position of defense, Martin
writes:
Perhaps the fact that I quite eagerly, even
greedily embraced, and still do, the promises
of my church, a church that has been recently
the target of many, who have accused us of
bigotry, segregation, and racism, and even in
the most liberal of minds, my church has
been cursed and despised, because it will not
allow the people of my race the privileges, as
yet, of the Priesthood, given to all other races.
[sic] Perhaps this practice has instilled a great
hatred and contempt for me in the eyes of my
own people, and even in the eyes perhaps of
many white people, both members and non-
members, who learn of my conversion. (11)
Here Martin identifies her potentially critical
reading audiences—blacks, whites, outsiders,
and insiders—but she maintains, with fervor,
that despite the curses and hatred she must
endure for her religion or her race, she is at
peace with her decisions. “I am now, happily,
and willingly, a member of the Church,” writes
Martin. “Many cannot understand why a
Negro would want to join the Mormon
Church. This too I will attempt to explain, at
least from my personal experience” (11). Like
polygamous wives who defended polygamy,
even when it caused them suffering, Martin,
too, defends a religion that has applied
discriminatory policies against her.
Martin's strategy for addressing
discrimination inside or outside of the Church,
however, is to educate readers about racial and
religious prejudice through the medium of
spiritual autobiography. Based on her personal
experience, Martin is convinced that Mormon
prejudice is not severe and that any negative
judgments Mormons have formed about black
people grow out of ignorance, fear, or naiveté,
rather than hatred. She feels similarly
convinced about the negative attitudes of
blacks, such as her parents, toward Mormons.
In fact, Martin's autobiographical argument is
based on the assumption that educating people
out of their ignorance will eliminate
misconceptions and prejudice of any kind.
Knowing that many in her audience may
be critical of her message, Martin works to
disarm readers' suspicions about her writing
intentions by declaring that she does not
presume to know other people's experience or
feelings and that she does not write about her
own conversion to convert others. Of her critics,
Martin writes, “I cannot know what is in all
hearts, and I cannot know the thoughts of all I
meet; I do not judge them, nor do I ever try to
convert or convince anyone of my race, even my
parents, that this is the ‘true' Church” (11).
Thus, from the start, Martin attempts to
control her audience's response to the narrative
she writes about her life. Insisting that her aim
is not to convert readers, especially other black
readers, but to help outsiders understand her
reasons for converting, Martin asserts, “It is
right for me, but I cannot hope they will
understand, and if they would not find peace in
conversion to Mormonism, as I have done, I
would not wish it for them” (11-12).
Because Latter-day Saints have always been
a missionary-minded people, it is unlikely that
Martin does not possess some latent desire to
persuade readers, especially readers such as her
parents, to seek membership in the Mormon
Church. However, Martin maintains that her
primary purpose in writing about her life is to
fulfill what she views as her destiny to improve
relations between blacks and whites inside and
outside of the LDS Church.
As an adult convert to the Church,
Martin's 1972 text pioneers a new form of
Mormon women's autobiography that reflects
the lives of Mormon women writing from a
variety of ethnic and racial backgrounds. In the
early 1980s, for example, Mary Sturlaugson
(Eyer), another black Mormon woman, wrote
82
about her own conversion in A Soul So
Rebellious (1981) and added the story of her
LDS mission in He Restoreth My Soul (1982).
Sturlaugson's autobiographies—published by
Deseret Book, owned and operated by the
LDS Church—became well known among
Mormon readers.
Similarly, Me and Mine: The Life Story of
Helen Sekaquaptewa as told to Louise Udall,
first published in 1969 and now in its tenth
printing by the University of Arizona Press,
contains a chapter entitled “My Church,” in
which Sekaquaptewa, a Hopi woman, briefly
discusses her conversion to Mormonism.
“What they [LDS missionaries] taught sound-
ed good to me,” writes Sekaquaptewa, “like a
familiar philosophy, like the teachings we were
used to, like the Hopi way. I was really
converted the first week and believed
everything, although I was not baptized right
soon” (241).
Unlike most Mormon women's
autobiographies from the 19th and early 20th
centuries, Martin, Sturlaugson Eyer, and Seka-
quaptewa are not white Mormon immigrants.
Nor were they born into the Church or
baptized as children, spending their lives in
Utah or Idaho and writing about growing up
in a Mormon community. Instead, all three
autobiographers are grown women who made
a conscious choice during adulthood to be
baptized and then to write about their
conversions.
One way in particular that Martin's story
revises the tradition of Mormon women's
autobiography is by focusing less on a
communal religious experience (like
pioneering in a rural Utah community) and
more on her individual quest for God and a
personal identity. Martin rarely uses the plural
pronoun “we,” but instead writes as “I,”
claiming her individual identity and
experience. In this way, Martin's life story
looks more like the life writings produced by
early Mormon male autobiographers such as
Joseph Smith or Parley P. Pratt, both of whom
wrote about seeking God and finding him
through their own individual efforts. In fact,
Martin's method of investigating numerous
religious faiths like a “church tourist” (29) and
her narrative's dramatic depiction of a scene in
which she claims to experience the presence of
evil and then the presence of God (39) closely
parallel Joseph Smith's First Vision.
FIRST VISION PARALLELS
Martin arranges her narrative to show that
her decision to become a Latter-day Saint
occurred after long years of searching for a
religion that explained God to her in a way that
matched her experience with Him on one
eventful night: “What I lacked,” claims Martin,
even then as a child, was a God—a God I liked
and felt at home with—not a wrathful, spew-
spitting God, but a gentle father, who wept
with me in my anguish-filled moments and
smiled on me with love and hope as He
proved to me that God is Love, and that the
giving of His Son was the real proof of His
benevolence. (19)
When Martin unexpectedly found the
God she was searching for in the Mormon
Church, she insists that she made a free and
eager choice to join that church. Her defense of
the Church and the life story she tells about her
religious quest place her well within the
tradition of Mormon women's autobiography.
Furthermore, key portions of Martin's text
clearly parallel the now-canonized and highly
influential autobiographical fragment, the First
Vision, written by Joseph Smith, Mormonism's
founding prophet. In fact, Martin identifies
strongly enough with Smith's narration of his
spiritual journey, written a century earlier, that
a Mormon readership would likely recognize
Martin's reinscription of key moments from the
First Vision using parallel details from her own
83
experience. Is it coincidence that Martin says
discovering Smith's narrative was a key factor
influencing her decision to join the Mormon
Church: “[T]he thing that really converted me
was reading the Joseph Smith Story . . . . It
brought back to my memory my own very
personal experience with the evil powers and
praying within for deliverance and feeling the
Lord's spirit of peace come over me” (55). The
experience of reading Smith's narrative was
likely an additionally compelling reason for
Martin to write about her own spiritual
awakening.
Like Smith, who felt “induced” to narrate
his life experience “to disabuse the public
mind, and put all inquirers after truth in
possession of the facts, as they have transpired,
in relation both to myself and the Church”
(Pearl of Great Price, J.S. History 1:1), Martin,
too, writes her autobiography to provide an
accurate self- portrait that will explain her
controversial decision to join the Mormon
Church. As a storyteller, Martin builds tension
into her narrative by describing the
dissatisfaction and longing she had felt since
youth: “I have always been a hungry person;
yet no matter how I gorged myself socially,
intellectually, spiritually, or even literally on
food at the table, nothing ever satisfied me”
(15). Martin's early loneliness and longing (22),
combined with what she describes as a
constant “vague dissatisfaction and anger” (23),
led her on a quest similar to Smith's.
Joseph Smith lived during a period of
American revivalism when numerous religious
sects were vying for converts. Smith writes, “I
attended their several meetings as often as
occasion would permit.” But after studying
numerous religious denominations, says Smith,
“it was impossible for a person young as I was,
and so unacquainted with men and things, to
come to any certain conclusion who was right
and who was wrong” (JSH 1:8). Studying
multiple religions brought Smith more
confusion than clarity, yet he writes that he had
enough faith to keep seeking answers to his
religious questions.
Echoing this tradition of Mormon
spiritual autobiography, Martin, too, depicts
herself as a hopeful seeker who investigates
innumerable religious faiths. Like Smith, she
provides evidence that she investigated many
religions before discovering Mormonism. To
persuade her audience that her conversion to
the LDS Church was not a quick or casual
decision, Martin works to prove that her
baptism was based on lengthy personal research.
“By the time I was twenty-four years old,” she
declares, “I had been in and out of so many
churches . . . I felt like a tourist in Italy” (29).
This fruitless searching only increased her
loneliness, longing, skepticism and fright:
I was sure at this age that all churches were
relatively void of meaning for me, and I nearly
lost all faith in finding my truth, so long
locked up inside me! The old pattern of fear
and running initially set in my childhood was
gravely reinforced as each church became a
symbol to me of rejection of me by those who
belonged and believed. (29)
Wavering between hopeful belief and utter
skepticism, Martin explains that, by this point
in her life, she is filled with “pseudo-intellectual
comments on the personality of God if He did
exist” (37). Despite a longing to fill her
unknown hunger, she did not actually believe
in God, especially the one her parents had
taught her to fear. Describing herself as a full-
blown skeptic, Martin writes, “The price of
genuflecting to a malevolent and unkind
monstrosity revolted me.” Now, looking back,
Martin observes:
How silly and sad and ridiculous I must have
been. My adamant and fervent denials of God
only showed more vividly the need I had for a
God who was kind; and the kindess [sic] I
sought I knew inately [sic] did exist in God,
and I had known it all my life, despite my
caustic and juvenile dribblings [drivelings] and
84
uncandid remarks about Him. (37)
After some years of reflection, Martin
connects her previous skepticism with low self-
esteem: “I entered my apartment that night the
image of a full-fledged, independent, and I
thought very ‘with it' single girl. This was my
self-portrait. Sadly, I was exactly the opposite
of all these. I sighed that night as I prepared
for bed, feeling the acute shallow and empty
behavior patterns of my life thus far” (37).
With each description of her past anxieties
and empty denials about God's reality, Martin
works to recreate her sense of longing for
authentic experience in the minds of readers.
By this point in the narrative, they anticipate
answers from the autobiography that will
resolve her religious and personal dilemmas.
Having built up narrative tension, Martin
draws her audience further into the life story
by promising to share one of her most private—
now made public—spiritual encounters: “In
these next few pages, I am about to reveal with
a natural and hesitating wariness, an
experience so deeply personal in my life that I
tremble when thinking of it; and my heart is
stirred by the questions, paradoxically, as to
how this vivid and very real experience of mine
will be accepted” (35). Martin depicts this
particular spiritual experience as an important
juncture in her story and a turning point in
her life, not only because she discovers that
God does, indeed, exist, but because hearing
God speak to her validates her own existence
and worth. “At the outset of my revelation of
this moment in my life,” writes Martin, “I
must say I do not fear ridicule nor disbelief
from others . . . it truly was—a sacred, stunning
and very wonderful revealing experience,
which marked the beginning of a very definite
turning point in my life” (36).
Like Smith, who insists that his story is
true, even though many criticized, persecuted,
and disbelieved him (JSH 1:25), Martin, too,
wants badly to convince readers of the truth
and value of her spiritual experience. As she
writes, Martin suspects that some readers of this
spiritual event will believe she was hallucinating
or merely hearing what she wanted to hear. She
acknowledges that she has already admitted to a
life of fantasizing as a child. Thus, Martin tries
to persuade readers that she can distinguish
fantasy from fact, or fiction from nonfiction.
To reenforce the story's credibility, Martin
claims “perfect and total recall” of the event. “I
do not hesitate to tell what happened to me
because I fear others will scoff or smirk at my
naiveté,” writes Martin. “[W]hat I do fear is that
my ability to recount this very beautiful and
very real episode in my life, will be called a
‘hallucination,' or a very ‘real dream.' It was
none of these,” she insists. “It was really an
occurrence that I would vow to my death I saw
and heard while wide awake, and while fully in
tune with all of my senses—even so in tune that
I was given the gift of perfect and total recall of
the incident” (36).
Martin emphasizes further that the
extraordinary event she is about to divulge took
place on an ordinary evening. Nothing in
particular—except a life of longing—
foreshadowed her “moment of light” when she
heard God's voice speak to her. She presents
the event as taking her by surprise.
When Smith begins the story of his own
dramatic dialogue with God and Jesus Christ,
his story, too, opens on a normal “beautiful,
clear day, early in the spring of eighteen
hundred and twenty” (JSH 1:14). Never before,
says Smith, had he actually prayed to God; as
he began, he describes being “seized upon by
some power which entirely overcame me, and
had such an astonishing influence over me as to
bind my tongue so that I could not speak.
Thick darkness gathered around me, and it
seemed to me for a time as if I were doomed to
sudden destruction” (JSH 1:15). Then Smith
called on God to “deliver” him “out of the
power of this enemy which had seized upon me”
85
(JSH 1:15).
A similar foreboding darkness occurs in
Martin's story. On that ordinary night, she says,
she felt a “horrid massive presence of a silent
suffocating stillness, that now had [be]seiged
my room. Even the outside street noises were
inaudible” (38). Her response—to pray for
protection from the evil power that had
engulfed her—is like Smith's:
I began to sob a prayer just as a child would,
begging something somewhere for a kind
God yearning to pray to a Father-In-Heaven,
not a monster from Hell, to help me: “Dear
God,” I pleaded in tearful and convulsed
spasms of sobs, “please, please, help me now
in my most desperate hour of need.” (39)
The fright-provoking encounter that Martin
describes is intended to intensify her account.
For a Mormon readership, the similarity to
Smith's narrative also reenforces the truth
value of Martin's story.
Smith describes feeling desperate during
his terrifying encounter. But “at the very
moment,” he writes, “when I was ready to sink
into despair and abandon myself to
destruction . . . just at this moment of great
alarm, I saw a pillar of light exactly over my
head, above the brightness of the sun, which
descended gradually until it fell upon me”
(JSH 1:16). As soon as the light descended,
Smith's account continues, he saw “two
Personages, whose brightness and glory defy all
description, standing above me in the air”
(JSH 1:17). Immediately afterward, “One of
them spake unto me, calling me by name and
said, pointing to the other—This is My Beloved
Son. Hear Him!” (JSH 1:17).
Paralleling Smith's description, Martin
writes that she, too, prayed desperately for help
and then felt “a most gracious and quiet peace,”
followed by “a voice [that] spoke in the
darkness, quietly, serenely, but with the most
monumental majesty. . . . A very brief message
was given me, as I felt a calming brush that
might have been a hand on my damp and warm
brow. The voice said, ‘BE STILL, AND KNOW
THAT I AM GOD'” (39).
Both Smith and Martin conclude the
stories of their remarkable spiritual encounters
by testifying of their truth. Each autobiographer
works to reenforce the veracity of her or his
experience by claiming that their personal
knowledge of this spiritual event overrides any
possible skepticism from others: Smith insists,
“I had seen a vision; I knew it, and I knew that
God knew it, and I could not deny it, neither
dared I do it; at least I knew that by so doing I
would offend God, and come under
condemnation” (1:25). Martin, too, maintains,
“I shed tears because I know that it happened
to me, and that will always be enough for me. If
no one else can believe it really happened, that
special moment of my life, I know that it did—
and I am so very glad” (39). Martin's repetition
and emphasis is parallel to Smith's, and her
language (“I know”) reveals her desire as an
autobiographer to persuade readers that she is
telling the truth.
The stakes seem high that Martin's readers
will trust her and believe her autobiographical
story. Thus, the most central religious
experience of Martin's narrative, in which she
writes about discovering God through an
individual, very personal revelation—a familiar
trope among Mormons to describe a spiritual
awakening—echoes Smith's text. Based on
Martin's personal revelation from God, she
seeks out the religion that best reflects her
spiritual experience. Then she writes her life
story to argue the value of her decision by
narrating positive experiences she has had in
the Mormon Church.
A DEFENSE AGAINST
CHARGES OF RACISM
Like other women autobiographers,
Martin writes her life story so that it can be of
86
use. Within the tradition of Mormon women's
autobiography, such a purpose usually means
that a Mormon woman autobiographer
constructs her life story to inculcate Mormon
values in her descendants, to promote faith,
and to explain or defend various Church
doctrines, such as 19th-century Mormon
polygamy. Martin's autobiography differs from
this tradition by defending the Church against
charges of racism, rather than sexism, and
because, instead of writing for her posterity,
Martin writes for her disapproving parents and
for other nonmember readers who are, she
believes, misinformed about Mormons.
The tension over Martin's parents'
ultimate rejection or acceptance of their
daughter's new- found Mormonism is central
to Martin's storytelling.9 Because her parents
are black and nonmembers, the words that
Martin records them speaking in her
autobiography voice the suspicions and fears
of outsiders, one of the audiences whom this
life story addresses. As a writer, Martin's
rhetorical challenge is to represent her parents'
(the opposition's) views accurately and fairly
and then to allay their concerns.
Martin's mother especially articulates the
suspicions of black outsiders. After speaking
with a Mormon missionary on Temple Square,
for instance, Martin's mother observes, “I was
very impressed with the sincerity of the young
man I talked with; however, his answers as to
where our [blacks'] place is seemed not to
come from the deepest conviction in himself
that it was right or even that he understood”
(66-67). Here Martin records her mother as
having astutely identified the discomfort that
many white Mormons felt about the
priesthood exclusion policy before 1978.
Martin reports her mother's words as evidence
of that uneasiness.10
Finally, however, her mother's acceptance
of her daughter's decision, with certain
reservations, provides a tentative closure to the
 main portion of Martin's life story. Her
autobiography builds, in fact, to a final
emotional climax when she narrates her
parents' visit to Temple Square in Salt Lake
City. By depicting their visit as having a positive
outcome, Martin resolves the emotional and
narrative tension she increases throughout the
text. She writes that her mother tells her, “I
Martin tells readers that “this moment
together in my kitchen, with we two alone, has
been one of the most lovely memories, and
strangely enough, one of the most mind-easing
moments of my life too” (67). She offers the
interchange with her mother as evidence to
outsiders that she has been warned about the
possibilities of being exploited or coerced into
membership and that she accepts any
consequences for her decision. Martin
concludes the episode with her parents as a
resolution of any lingering tensions that she had
woven into her story: “I had their blessings and
their prayers for what I had done. Perhaps if I
dare believe it, I had won possibly their
admiration too” (67-68).
Because Martin is conscious of the
assumptions or stereotypes that nonmember
readers may hold about her new religion, she
depicts examples of relationships with Mormons
who have shown her what she believes to be
genuine expressions of love and acceptance.
Martin maintains, “So many members have
welcomed me with open arms, and I don't find
the general prejudice that so many think there is
in the Mormon Church” (70). On an
“Appreciation Page,” she names and thanks “the
endless list of good members who have helped
me and given me acceptance in the Church” (6).
Furthermore, as the first black faculty member
at Brigham Young University, Martin forcefully
defends this private university against what the
outside world believed, at the time, to be
egregious acts of racism. “No race is barred
from B.Y.U.,” declares Martin, “and I'm here as
a material witness” (70).
87
promise you, darling, I will never call your
church weird again, but I will not humor you
by saying that I believe it is true. If they are
taking advantage of your race, making you a
mockery, it is my prayer you will know it and
become wiser in decisions that should be given
extensive thought” (67).
To convince readers that she has not been
deceived by Mormons and that she recognizes
racism when she sees it, Martin prefaces the
story of her first positive encounter with what
will become a dear Mormon friend by relating
contrasting stories of racial hatred that have
been directed against her, thus proving that she
knows what real racism feels like. This incident
occurred before her own conversion. She work-
ed at a hospital and therefore
knew some white people violently objected to
sharing the facilities of a room in a hospital
ward with a colored person. In the weeks I
had spent as an employee of this same
hospital, I had had to handle many such
situations in the most tactful manner I could
manage without showing that an insult to my
people was indirectly an insult to me, too. (49)
To avoid being subjected to “irate” or
“superior-type white people,” when Martin
herself undergoes minor leg surgery at this
same hospital, she requested a roommate who
had been asked beforehand “if she objected to
my color” and whether she was a nonsmoker
(Martin suffered from asthma) (49). Martin
regained consciousness to find an empty bed
next to her, leading her to assume, incorrectly,
that the nurses couldn't “find even one person
who would be willing to share a room with a
‘NEGRO!'” (50). Correcting her
misapprehension, Barbara Weston, a Mormon
and a “really darling gal” with an “infectious”
laugh, soon arrived. “We were friends on sight,”
writes Martin (51).
Recreating the scene with Weston when
the two women discuss Weston's Mormon
religion, Martin reveals the ignorance and
religious prejudices that she held previous to her
education about Latter-day Saint beliefs. She
confesses, “[O]ne of the first things [Barbara]
told me next morning as she brushed her hair
was that she was a devoted Mormon. I thought
she meant something to do with her dietary
habits, like a vegetarian or something, so I
shrugged and said, ‘Me, I eat anything!'”(51).
Clarifying Martin's misperceptions, Weston
explains, “A Mormon is a religion, you cuckoo!
I'm a member of the Mormon Church—you
know, Salt Lake City—the Church of Jesus
Christ of Latter-day Saints, alias also the L.D.S.
Church!” (52). Here, using her new friend
Barbara's explanation, Martin informs readers
about the various names of the Mormon
Church, working to clear up the confusion that
sometimes results because of them. She then
moves the interchange between herself and
Barbara to one of the most common prejudices
held against Mormons—religious fanaticism:
I looked at [Barbara] apprehensively, “Hey,
you're no firespouting fanatic or something are
you?” She laughed her merry laugh again and
said in her pleasant musical voice, “Do I act
like I would be a fanatic? I'm what is regarded
as an active and average member of my church
and I really love it! It's my life as well as my
husband's and children's, too. It gives us the
ground rules to follow in leading a meaningful,
happy life, with activity, spirituality, and a heck
of a lot to live for now and for all eternity!!!”
(52)
Recreating this dialogue between herself
and her Mormon friend—who replaces the
negative, stereotypical label “fanatics” with the
more positive terms “active,” “average,”
“meaningful,” and “happy”—enables Martin to
acknowledge the prejudice against Mormons
that she, too, held before converting to the
Church herself. Soon Martin thinks Weston
might be “the answer to my long and sincere
and searching supplications through prayer for a
channel to express my faith” (52). Martin writes
88
that her hospital roommate had “a special sort
of charisma” and “cheeriness” that, observes
Martin, convinces her “there was a reason to
like living” (53). Looking back, Martin portrays
Barbara Weston as a person who “radiated”
what Martin believed to be “complete
happiness and accordance with life and God”
(53).
In like manner, Martin's autobiography
works to prove that Martin herself had come to
embrace and radiate this same happiness as a
result of her own conversion to the Mormon
Church. The two-by-two-inch photo of Martin's
image smiling out from her book's black and
white front cover, for example, is situated just
above a larger, hand -drawn image of the Salt
Lake Tabernacle organ and choir. Martin's
photograph above the choir image intends to
reenforce the reader's sense of her happiness as
well as her black identity and membership in
this famed choir. Accompanying a collage of
excerpted newspaper articles profiling Martin's
life at the end of her book are seven additional
photos of Martin, all of them smiling. The
smiling images collectively communicate that
Martin made a free, happy choice to become a
Mormon.
MORMON PREJUDICE LEAKS OUT
In addition to writing for her parents and
other outsiders, Martin writes about her
experiences as a black member of the Church
to educate her newfound Mormon community,
the majority of whom Martin characterizes as
mostly ignorant about black cultures or history
and as hyper-conscious of Martin's skin color.
The varied purposes and widely differing
audiences that Martin anticipates reading her
book complicate how she narrates the story of
her conversion to the Mormon Church. By the
time she begins writing the story, Martin has
been touring nationally with the Mormon
Tabernacle Choir for two years. “It seemed
almost too good to be true,” writes Martin.
“The Choir has meant more to me than anyone
can ever imagine because as I stated before,
music has been a way for me to express all the
feelings I cannot sometimes verbalize” (62).
In spite of the autobiography's insistent
message about Martin's newfound “happiness,”
soon after her baptism, she began working for
the Genealogical Society (now Family History
Library), where, she admits, “despite most
people's kindness, my race did present
problems.” Because no other blacks sang in the
Tabernacle Choir or worked with her at the
Genealogical Society, Martin writes that
“naturally” she knew her “race might be a
handicap” (59). Feeling Mormons' “over-
kindness” and “uneasiness” toward her (59),
Martin illustrates those experiences with
dialogues between herself and various Mormons.
Scenes in which Martin depicts herself as
interacting with Mormons often reiterate what
theorists Michael Omi and Howard Winant
describe as rules of “racial etiquette” that have
developed over time in the United States. The
rules become “a set of interpretive codes and
racial meanings which operate in the
interactions of daily life.” Such rules, argue Omi
and Winant, have come to direct the nature of
interactions in a racialized society:
Everybody learns some combination, some
version, of the rules of racial classification, and
of their own racial identity, often without
obvious teaching or conscious inculcation.
Thus we are inserted in a comprehensively
racialized social structure. Race becomes
“common sense”—a way of comprehending,
explaining and acting in the world. (62)
Martin's autobiography painfully illustrates the
racial rules and tensions at play in her lived
experience as she depicts them in the pages of
her own text. Although most characters in
Martin's life story would like to think they
interact without race “prejudice,” that is,
without consciousness of skin color and
appearance, her Mormon characters' attempts to
89
treat people of all races and backgrounds alike
frequently fail. Nowhere is Mormon
equivocation on the issue of equality more
evident than in supplementary material
following Martin's story written by Martin's
publisher, John Hawkes. Hawkes's essay
perpetuates ideas commonly held by many
Mormons as doctrine. He argues, for example:
Everyone has different intellectual, physical
and spiritual capacties [sic]. We are all
endowed with so many different attributes
and abilities. We are all born unequal to each
other. Everyone is our superior is [sic] some
small way. There have been many wise men
who have questioned the reality of God
simply because they felt a just God would not
make men so unequal, and yet everywhere
they look they see great inequality among men
right from birth.
There is no way to make God just and fair
in looking at this life alone. To understand
the justice of God and the total inequality of
men, we must look beyond this life into a
preexistent state. (Martin 84)
In a racialized culture, perceived
differences based on physical appearances such
as these expressed by Hawkes constantly shape
the behaviors and attitudes that Martin
characterizes in her text. Furthermore, LDS
theology at the time—which urged Mormons to
proselyte all people, regardless of race, but
which also contained contradictory policies
that discriminated against black members—
created unresolved tensions and racist concepts
of white superiority within Mormon people, no
matter how many Mormons, including Martin
herself, denied it.
When civil rights activists were
contending over how best to confront race
prejudice in the United States in the 1960s
and 1970s, whether through direct
confrontation or through nonviolent resistance,
the rhetorical and narrative strategies Martin
chooses look more like those of Dr. Martin
Luther King than those of Malcolm X. Unlike
black militants who felt no qualms about
identifying policies or acts of racism, Martin
adopts the moderated rhetoric of passive
resistors, judicially constructing scenes with
Mormon characters in which she stoically
endures their racialized comments or behavior.
She then records these experiences, hoping that
her book will ameliorate conditions for herself
and others in the future.
Martin writes, for example, that she “can
remember one [Mormon] fireside in 1969
during which someone asked me if I would
change my skin to white if I had the chance”
(71). Martin constructed a poised answer to the
offensive implication that white skin was
preferable to black. “With a smile on my face,”
writes Martin, “I said that Mr. Clean, Ajax, and
Comet serve the purpose for many things. I
don't care how much I rubbed with those
chemicals, nothing would take my built-in tan
away.” Then, using capital letters in her
autobiography, Martin completes her pointed,
but cool-headed response: “NO, I would not
change my color from black to white because it
wasn't meant to be. Each race should be proud
of their color” (71). Throughout her
autobiography, Martin characterizes herself as
one who must often find the strength to
exercise Christ-like patience and understanding
as Mormons communicate their attitude that
black skin is inferior and that they generally lack
meaningful understanding of or knowledge
about black experience.
According to the Oxford English Dictionary,
“prejudice” is defined as “a previous judgment;
esp. a judgment formed before due examination
or consideration; a premature or hasty
judgment.” The term is also used to mean a
“preconceived opinion; bias or leaning
favourable or unfavourable; [a] prepossession;
when used absolutely, usually with unfavourable
connotation.” In the context of Martin's
argument, the term “prejudice” could be
90
defined as forming an unfavorable judgment of
some person or some group of people often
based on their perceived race or religion.
Assuming that Martin would agree with
this definition and granting her insistent claim
that Mormons are not racists (i.e., not hateful
racists), then there are still many scenes in
which Mormons exhibit or express racial
prejudice. Martin herself, however, resists using
the term “prejudice” to label Mormons'
attitudes or behavior. Even if she were willing
to use the word, though, Martin could hardly
afford to do so since the aim of her argument
is to defend Mormons against charges of racism.
In a thesis-like statement located toward the
conclusion of her text, Martin declares:
The Gospel is not prejudiced and I have
met very few people in the Church which
show any prejudice. There will always be some.
No matter what church one attends or what
race, creed or nationality we deal with, we will
find good and bad people. We must not pin
point one race or one religious group as being
prejudiced, or we are paradoxically
“prejudiced” in so doing. I hope that I can
remove any prejudice that may exist anywhere
I go for my race or my church. (71)
Martin's injunction against “pin point[ing]” any
“group” for “being prejudiced” coincides with
her desire not to generalize or stereotype;
however, her resolve not to identify instances
of prejudice when she encounters them among
Mormons leads to contradictions between the
story she wants to tell about her new religious
community and the story she actually tells. In
other words, Martin's written defense of
Mormons against charges of racial prejudice
becomes tenuous at best.
Because Martin refuses to use the term
“prejudice,” she forces herself to identify and
thus to “remove” prejudice indirectly by
narrating anecdotes, mostly without
commentary, in which many Mormon
characters give away their prejudices toward
blacks. For example, Martin reports a dialogue
between her and a Mormon woman at the
Genealogical Society. This scene demonstrates
the naiveté and narrow cultural or racial
experience Martin often encounters within her
new Mormon community:
One day a lady came up to me and asked in
the most sincere innocence, “Are you from the
West Indies, Dear?” I said, “No, why?” “Well,”
she said, “Your skin and hair are of the West
Indian type.” I knew of course she wanted to
know what nationality I was, for it was beyond
her comprehension that a Mormon would be a
Negro or vice versa. I told her in a quiet
manner that I was a Negro. She said rather
flustered, “Oh I'm so glad to see you working
here, but are you a Mormon?” When I replied
yes, she was close to collapse. Not a vicious
woman, but a naive one, she made it a point to
go out of her way every morning and come to
where I worked and say, “Oh hello there, good
morning.” (59)
Because a key purpose of Martin's
autobiography is to convince outsiders,
especially her parents, that Mormons are not
racists, she gains several potential benefits from
telling this anecdote. First, the scene
acknowledges the awkwardness of her situation
as one of the few, if only, black Mormons most
other Mormons encountered in the 1960s and
early 1970s. She also portrays Mormon
prejudice as “innocent” or harmless—not
intentionally mean-spirited. In fact, rather than
ignoring or snubbing her, Martin writes that
Mormons such as this woman display “overkind”
attention toward her. How, then, implies
Martin's text, can either she or her readers fault
these well-meaning white people for their
“overkindness?” While Martin reveals enough
for an audience to know that she is
uncomfortable with the woman's behavior, she
presents the story with little interpretation,
allowing the woman's words and actions to
speak for themselves.
Jessie L. Embry's 1994 study of other black
91
Mormons' experiences presents many similar
incidents. Based on 201 returned survey forms
and 224 oral history interviews conducted by
Embry, a white Mormon woman, and Alan
Cherry, a black Mormon man, Embry
concluded that while some black Mormons
suffered from instances of racial hatred or
bigotry in the LDS Church, “a more serious
problem than deliberate malice was ignorance,
insensitivity, and a general lack of experience
with cultural and racial diversity” (147).11
Embry also points out that, historically,
“Mormons have not been hostile as much as
ambivalent—and sometimes intimidated—by
racial differences” (78). A second scene that
illustrates Mormons' ambivalence and
intimidation over racial differences occurs
when Martin recalls a question posed to her on
the first night that she joined the Mormon
Tabernacle Choir. Describing a tour of the Salt
Lake Tabernacle, Martin writes:
I remember one person approached me and
said, “Sister Martin, we are very happy to have
you with us. What shall I call you— Black,
Negro, or colored?” I then said with a smile
on my face and love in my heart, that they
could call me anything as long as they spelled
my name right! That was the end of that
session. (62)
Although this speaker's hyper race-conscious
question implies an ostensibly admirable desire
to call Martin by the racial term that she would
prefer (“Black,” “Negro,” or “colored”), such a
question posed to a stranger demonstrates his
or her insensitivity to or casual disregard for
the complex issues surrounding racial
terminology and identification. Even though
Martin knows that her skin color makes her a
rarity and, thus, a curiosity among Mormons,
this speaker's question, obviously posed from a
white perspective, reveals the person's lack of
meaningful understanding about people and
cultures outside of his or her insulated
experience.12
 In the 1960s, white Mormons like these
two individuals behaved very much like white
members of the dominant U.S. culture. Most
were not well educated about the historical or
cultural experiences of racial minorities living in
the United States; furthermore, they felt little
need or reason to rectify that ignorance.
Mormon sociologist Armand Mauss reports,
“Careful review of the history of Mormon
racism will reveal that it has followed closely the
comparable history for America as a whole, sad
as that may be” (176).13
Martin reports several other negative
encounters with white Mormons, all the while
avoiding calling Mormons prejudiced. She even
goes so far as to counter one BYU nursing
student's actual admission to being prejudiced
during a question-and-answer period at a lecture
Martin gave. In her autobiography, Martin
quotes the nursing student's statement as
though she remembers it verbatim: “Mrs.
Martin, I was born in the South and I am
prejudiced, but I don't dislike you” (69). After
quoting this statement, Martin tells her readers,
“She was so sincere and meant well. I told her
that many things were instilled into her mind as
a child while growing up in the deep South,
where Blacks cannot defend themselves and
where they are barred from restaurants etc. I
said to her that I didn't think she was
prejudiced, and she felt good about my saying
this. But as we all know by now, we all have
some ‘hang-ups' once in a while” (69).
As a U.S. citizen and a newly baptized
Mormon, Martin grapples in her autobiography
with a subculture steeped in racial stereotypes
and prejudice. Martin's response to her white
characters' racial prejudice is to minimize their
words or actions by calling them something
other than “racism” or “prejudice”—in this case
“hang- ups” and in other cases, “rudeness” (43)
or “funny ideas.” Martin wants to avoid any
language or accusations that might make her
92
appear prejudiced herself or that, perhaps,
might incur white readers' disfavor. At times,
the autobiography may even exasperate some
who view Martin as a writer who is ready to
assuage all her white readers' consciences about
their prejudice and make them “feel good,” as
she writes about doing for the nursing student.
As a person raised in the United States, a
deeply racialized country,14 Martin's writing
suggests in places that she herself has
internalized cultural messages about what it
means to be black and a woman. She insists,
for example, on “eagerly,” “gladly,” “happily,”
and “willingly” (11) converting to a church that
had not yet rescinded its discriminatory policy.
She also generously excuses discriminatory
remarks or behavior among church members
when she encounters them.
Martin's writing thus gives evidence for
denial about the racialized culture of the
Mormon Church.15 Although she wants to
combat and eliminate prejudice, Martin writes
from a conflicted position as she struggles to
account for the potential criticism from
opposing readers and to accomplish the varied
purposes that she set out to achieve through
writing. Such personal and narrative challenges
sometimes lead Martin to perpetuate ideas in
her autobiographical writing that threaten to
stunt her own or others' growth.
When Martin discusses the day that she
asked her daughter what she would like to be
when she grows up, for example, Martin is at
first disappointed, but then writes approvingly
about her daughter's decision to pursue a
career in the service industry. “I have to be a
waitress or something like that, mommy!” says
her daughter. When Martin claims that she
wanted to “deride” her daughter's choice and
her “dogmatic approach to what her future
must surely be,” Martin, instead, “holds back,”
deciding firmly in her autobiography that “no
job is too menial . . . since if a person wants to
do it and enjoys it as well, it is indeed an
enviable state, for how many people of any race
or religion can claim a real love of their daily
work?” (31). Alluding to race in this context
obliquely reveals Martin's personal
understanding that since the time of slavery,
blacks in the United States have been seen or
have seen themselves pursuing service-oriented
jobs. Rather than “condon[ing]” or “condemn-
[ing]” what Martin viewed as her child's
“innocent dream,” however, she “let silence be
the binding link of further communication
between us.” In short, this would not be a
moment in the autobiography when Martin
interrogates the subordinated position of blacks,
especially black women, in the United States—-
those citizens relegated to subservient work that
other upwardly mobile white American males,
for example, would never “dream” of pursuing
as a livelihood. By remaining silent, Martin
asserts that she is allowing her child individual
freedom: “I was able to accept her goals as her
right to achieve them, and not instigate my own
fallen dreams on the life and mind of a child,
with her own life to live, and her own right for
individuality and finding herself” (31).
Whatever freedom of choice Martin believes she
promotes by relating this incident with her
daughter, her reluctance to critique her
daughter's desire for a career as a waitress
suggests potential evidence for Martin's own
conditioned resignation to second-class
citizenship as a black woman.
In a more empowering passage of her
autobiography, Martin confronts just such
stereotypes about black women when she admits
to the difficulty of both extending and receiving
acceptance in a mostly white community.
Martin writes:
I try to turn away from snubs, and from
derision, from forced toleration that is
suffocation and an insult to me on the part of
some narrow-minded people both inside and
outside the Mormon Church. Some people
93
really believe that all Negroes are “hotel maids”
or “Southern mammies” who have gone to
their glory, but remain alive in the hearts and
labels and breakfast tables on a syrup bottle! A
real mammy with a kerchief wrapped around
her head, and acres of impossibly white teeth,
gleaming like a banner against a black sky of
skin is the only image of the Negro race some
people comprehend! (12)
Such tensions between Martin's desire to
both condemn and accept inequality permeate
the autobiography, illustrating the difficulty she
faces as an autobiographer working to maintain
favor with her multiple and conflicting
audiences, all the while trying to accommodate
herself to membership in a church and a
society that discriminate against her. Whether
to garner favor with her white Mormon
audience or to avoid committing “prejudice” by
her own definition, the real story of race
discrimination in the Mormon Church leaks
out, especially in the ancillary material that
accompanies Martin's text.
FRAMING MARTIN'S STORY
Martin's life story does not stand alone as
a published work. Although not an official
Mormon publication, the book printed by
Hawkes Publishing, a small, independently
owned press, is fashioned to achieve a sense of
association and credibility with the mainstream
LDS Church.16 The book's cover images and
doctrinal essay by Hawkes, entitled “Why Can't
the Negro Hold the Priesthood,” frame
Martin's actual narrative. Analyzing these
framing images and text provides a historical
context for reading Martin's account.
The use of “Negro” obviously dates the
text. According to one excerpted news article,
the original title of Martin's autobiography was
to be I Am a Negro Mormon (78). In addition,
the photos, newspaper articles, foreword, and
Hawkes's essay provide the best indicator of the
controversy, divisions, and angst inside and
outside of the Mormon Church over
black/white issues at the time. Both front and
back covers of Martin's autobiography are clearly
fashioned to market an explanation and defense
of Mormons' unpopular teaching about Church
members of African descent. Even the title,
partially written in capital letters “BLACK
MORMON Tells Her Story,” emphasizes
Martin's racial and religious identity, an
unexpected combination sure to sell her book.
In both words and images, the cover of this
autobiography means to capture readers'
attention by promising answers, once and for all,
to the persistent questions that 1960s and 1970s
America directed at Mormons. In small letters
at the bottom of the front cover appears the key
question that critics of the Church asked most
often: “Why can't the Negro hold the
priesthood?” And an additional nagging
question acts as a title on the back cover: “Can a
Negro Find Happiness in the Mormon Church?”
Martin's final words intend to answer that
question directly. “[I]t is difficult for me to
imagine how I could possibly be more filled
with happiness and how my life could be more
saturated with blessings than it is at the present.
I am so very glad that I AM A BLACK
MORMON” (73).
Interestingly, the content and structure of
Martin's autobiography is reminiscent of the
slave narrative tradition. First, Martin's text is a
spiritual quest in which she focuses on a life-
changing conversion experience using a
tripartite structure common in slave narratives—
before conversion, conversion, and after
conversion. In “Singing Swords: The Literary
Legacy of Slavery,” Melvin Dixon argues:
“Conversion as rebirth or transformation was a
central event in the slave's recorded life” (302).
Furthermore, slaves used a “conversion-like
model of personal experience and testimony to
construct their own ‘witness' to the horrors of
slavery and the regenerative joy of freedom”
94
(303). Slaves often narrated their quest toward
freedom as it was made possible by God and
Christianity. Martin's narrative, too, is a story
about her religious quest for happiness and a
kind of freedom in relation to God that she
had not known before her conversion to
Mormonism.
Despite Martin's sense of liberating
happiness, however, a problematic aspect of
her autobiography is its second parallel with
slave nar- ratives—introductory material written
by white writers preceding the actual story.
Before the text of Martin's narrative appears a
statement by Mayor Bart Wolthuis typed on
official “City of Ogden, Utah” letterhead,
excerpted on the book's back cover, and
included as the first page of the book next to
Martin's own dedication page. Wolthuis's four-
paragraph “Forward” [sic] simulates the
preliminary text written by white abolitionists.
Such material was usually situated before the
actual narrative to confirm, for white readers,
the truth and credibility of a former slave's
personal story about slavery as well as his or her
own good character. The Narrative of the Life of
Frederick Douglass, an American Slave is preceded,
for example, by both William Lloyd Garrison's
Preface and a letter written by Wendell Phillips,
Esq., two white male abolitionists with
community status. Likewise, Mayor Wolthuis, a
white male with community standing in Utah,
confirms that “Wynetta Clark Martin is a
member of the Church of Jesus Christ of
Latter-day Saints and sings in the Tabernacle
Choir” (3). Wolthuis establishes Martin's
musical talent and affirms that God has been
guiding her life.
Like Garrison and Phillips writing for
Douglass, Wolthuis appeals to white readers
for sympathy as they read Martin's life story;
however, his appeal borders on patronizing
sympathy that relegates blacks to a
subordinated moral or economic position from
which they wish to lift themselves up to the level
of whites. Wolthuis writes, “The reader will feel
a genuine empathy for the plight of all
individuals who strive to rise above the
circumstances in all walks of life” (3).
Furthermore, when Wolthuis describes the
targeted audiences for Martin's autobiography,
he implies his own white identity and privileged
class: “For the caucasian [sic], this book gives a
lucid account of the struggles the blacks face in
being accepted as a full partner in today's
complex and sometimes disturbing world. We
begin to understand the many problems and
frustrations the minority people face each day as
they strive to walk the same path of life as we”
(3). Besides clearly distinguishing between we
and they (and directing his message to whites),
Wolthuis points out that Martin's life story is
also intended for black readers. By reading her
story, he claims that black readers will come to
know “that within His church there is a place
for all of the children of God” (3). Sadly,
Wolthuis fails to recognize the irony of his glib
statement, overlooking the fact that blacks were
relegated to a subordinated “place” in the
Mormon Church at the time.
Another problematic item following
Martin's life story is a thirteen-page essay by
Martin's publisher, John D. Hawkes, entitled,
“Why Can't the Negro Hold the Priesthood?”
Although Hawkes makes clear at the beginning
of his discussion that his writing is not
“authoritative,” the explanations he offers for
restricting blacks' full participation in the LDS
Church are, nevertheless, common racist
rationales based on Cain/ Ham lineage and
blacks' assumed inferior performance in a
preearth life that circulated widely among
Mormons.17 Hawkes's essay (7994) and Wol-
thuis's letter (4) frame Martin's narrative about
her conversion. Thus, taken as a whole, the
book problematically confronts Mormon race
prejudice, illustrates it, and also attempts to
95
justify it. Just as many early Mormon women in
polygamy wrote to defend a religion that
simultaneously inspired and burdened them,
Martin, too, appears similarly devoted to a
religion that both inspires and oppresses her.
The primary ideal that Martin intends to
promote through her autobiography is the
importance of educating oneself about
different races, peoples, cultures, and religions.
She does not accept the excuse that white
Mormons would likely offer that “they just
didn't know ” or “just didn't realize. . . .” that
they were prejudiced. Her autobiography prods
them to become better educated about black
history and black concerns, especially if they
genuinely wish to welcome her into their
Mormon community and share the gospel of
Jesus Christ with its message of salvation,
acceptance, and love for all people. Hired as a
“Research Consultant on Black Culture” and
as the first black faculty member at BYU,
Martin writes, “I took advantage of this chance
to do something for humanity.” During her
first teaching assignment with BYU student
nurses, Martin told them that “to become a
good nurse one must know different cultures.”
She claims to have “lectured to them for about
forty -five minutes,” insisting that “for them to
understand the beginning of White superiority
and Black-assumed inferiority, they must go
back to the discovery of America” (68 -69).
Obviously Martin's own rhetoric and story-tell-
ing reflect a complicated rendering of her
search for truth, an identity, and a way to
educate people against accepting prejudice
toward any people for either their race or
religion.
NOTORIETY, AUTHORITY,
AND FAITHFUL TRANSGRESSION
During the late 1960s and early 1970s as
one of only a few black Mormons in the
United States, Martin recognizes that she is a
new kind of Mormon pioneer. By writing, she
stakes her claim to several significant “firsts,”
establishing her historical importance within
the Church. She writes, for example, about
being the first black member of the Mormon
Tabernacle Choir, a well-known U.S. singing
group that was, by then, one of the best public
advertisements for the LDS Church. Martin's
choir membership also brought her national
attention. In one of the excerpted newspaper
articles published at the end of Martin's text, a
writer from the Kansas City Call, a black
newspaper, asserts that, as the first black
Mormon Tabernacle Choir member, “Mrs.
Clark . . . challenges the commonly held belief
that the Mormon church is racist” (77).
Besides this most notable “first,” Martin also
establishes her claim as the first black faculty
member at BYU in 1970 (68), the first black
person to attend the Brigham Young University
In addition to her public exposure and
numerous “firsts” in the LDS Church, Martin
mentions that she has been asked to address a
variety of Mormon congregations about her
experience (70): “I have had many speaking and
singing engagements since 1967 in Utah,” writes
Martin. “In less than six years I have spoken in
more than one hundred Sacrament meetings
and very close to a hundred firesides, in
addition to many seminary classes” (70). Such a
speaking and singing circuit authorizes Martin
to write about her experiences as a convert to
Mormonism.
Martin's attention to her own modest fame
also reenforces her credibility as a writer. It
seems equally reenforcing for her as an
individual who came from obscurity and always
yearned for attention, whether as a child
“jokester” or as a singer on a public stage.
Beyond bolstering her own self-esteem, however,
Martin's newfound public presence among
Mormons affords her a kind of unofficial
authority among Mormon readers to address
Mormon doctrine regarding blacks. After
96
Ball (70), and the first black member of her
San Diego, California, ward. Martin mentions
these “firsts” casually in her text, but their
accumulated weight lend her significant
authority to speak on issues concerning blacks
in the Mormon Church. The collage of
excerpted newspaper clippings, all with
Martin's smiling photo and eye-catching
headlines, illustrate the media attention that
her life story and conversion attracted in the
early 1970s: “Choir Member Not Bitter on
Mormon Restriction,” proclaims one headline.
The other headlines are similar: “Black
Member of Mormon Tabernacle Choir Visits
Here,” “Wynetta Martin Joins BYU Faculty,”
“First Negro in Choir Accepts Post at BYU,”
and “Negro Singer Joins LDS Church, Pens
Book” (76-78).
working to establish such credibility and
authority, toward the middle of her
autobiography Martin articulates a version of
Mormon doctrine concerning exaltation that
differs markedly from LDS male leaders'
authoritative teachings. Martin asserts:
These two things, baptism and the Holy
Ghost are the only requirements contrary to
popular belief, for entering the Celestial
Kingdom and being with God for eternity if
one is worthy. Therefore, the Priesthood
covenants of the Temple which we [black
members] are not allowed at this point are not
really so crucial as popular belief dictates. (56;
italics removed)
Martin's deliberate choice to assert in
writing that life with God after mortality can
be achieved exclusively by worthiness and
baptism, rather than by worthiness and temple
covenants, constitutes a faithful, but
transgressive moment in her text.18 Her
interpretation of doctrine in this passage would
not have gone unnoticed by her Mormon
audience. In addition, Martin attributes Latter-
day Saints' “overemphasis” on the importance of
temple covenants to mere “popular belief,”
rather than to the doctrine of LDS General
Authorities, who have always stressed the vital
nature of temple covenants. In this and one
additional passage of her autobiography, Martin
attempts to replace “authoritative” Church
doctrine with her own interpretation of the
gospel. Although a moot point since the 1978
change in policy, Martin's bold assertion means
to force her contemporary Mormon audience of
readers to study the gospel and learn for
themselves what their own Book of Mormon
might really mean when the prophet Nephi
teaches that “all are alike unto God” (2 Ne.
26:33).
By offering a transgressive interpretation of
doctrine in writing, Martin's text becomes one
of several Mormon autobiographies published
by black members working for change, either
consciously or unconsciously, in the Mormon
Church. According to Mormon author and
literary critic Eugene England, autobiographers
such as Helvecio Martins (a Brazilian and first
black General Authority), Alan Cherry, and
Mary Sturlaugson Eyer raised “the
consciousness and conscience of church
members and leaders.” England claims, “They
each wrote autobiographies that told honestly of
the prejudice they encountered in the Church
and then endured because of the spiritual
witness they had of the Gospel's truth.” England
also argues that black Mormons'
autobiographies influenced other Church
members' thinking and perceptions about race
and the gospel. “Their lives made graphically
real . . . the truth of patient Church service as a
means to make a profound change in the ‘truth'
of the Gospel as it was perceived by others”
(“Revisiting” 1).
In retrospect, Martin's own narrative
describing her conversion, along with the
97
images and framing material that constitute
this Mormon woman's autobiographical act
during the 1970s, provide evidence for just
how far the contemporary LDS Church has
moved away from its former position on black
priesthood denial and temple restrictions.
Concluding her story, Martin writes, “My
conversion to the Mormon Church has taught
me, strangely enough, a greater tolerance for
racial disputes than I ever thought possible”
(72). To the end of her narrative, Martin
maintains her “understanding” that “all people
basically mean well, but fear and ignorance
prompts [sic] many verbal remarks that I am
sure are not intended to be painful” (72).
Ultimately, this Mormon woman's
autobiography argues for examining one's own
prejudices, rather than pointing a finger at
others: “I do not cry anymore over insults,”
explains Martin. “I cry only over insults I give.
If a person has been purposely unkind, I hope
for them only serenity in finding God and
learning to live life filled to the brim with
kindness” (72).
LAURA L. BUSH earned her Ph.D. in English
from Arizona State University in May 2000. This
paper is drawn from the third chapter of her
dissertation, Faithful Transgressions in the American
West: Five Twentieth-Century Mormon Women's
Autobiographical Acts. In the other four chapters,
Laura analyzes rhetoric and narrative art in the
autobiographies of Mary Ann Hafen (Recollections of
a Handcart Pioneer of 1860: A Woman's Life on the
Mormon Frontier, 1938), Annie Clark Tanner (A
Mormon Mother, 1941), Terry Tempest Williams
(Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place,
1991), and Phyllis Barber (How I Got Cultured: A
Nevada Memoir, 1992).
NOTES
1. For articles analyzing the history of blacks
and the Mormon Church, see Bush and Mauss,
especially Lester Bush's groundbreaking article,
“Mormonism's Negro Doctrine: An Historical
Overview,” first published in 1973, that locates the
origins of the LDS Church's ban on priesthood
ordination for black males with Brigham Young,
rather than with Joseph Smith. Bush also explains
why Mormons—themselves under attack in Missouri,
a slave-holding state—held both anti-abolitionist and
anti-slavery positions. Bush and others have pointed
out that no leader of the Church has ever offered
any definitive reason(s) for the restrictions against
blacks. See also Bringhurst's historical study, and
Jessie L. Embry's useful chapter, “Impact of the LDS
`Negro Policy.'” Embry's work grew out of an oral
history project she completed with Alan Cherry, a
black Mormon.
2. All LDS women are barred from priesthood
ordination. Most Latter-day Saints consider this
restriction to be a distinction between women's and
men's roles given by God through modern-day
prophets.
3. Because the LDS Church does not record
race in its membership records, approximating the
number of black members is difficult, except in areas
where people are mostly of African descent. One of
the best- known early converts, Elijah Abel, was
baptized in 1832 and ordained an elder in 1836.
Abel's remarkable ordination to the priesthood
provides evidence for tracing priesthood denial back
to Brigham Young rather than to Joseph Smith. Jane
Manning James, another well-known black early
convert, married Isaac James, also a black Mormon.
Embry points out that “Elijah Abel, Jane Manning
James, and Samuel Chambers [a freedman] are
among the best documented black church members
between 1840 and 1900. Stories of other blacks who
converted after the pioneer period are more difficult
to reconstruct” (43). By the 1960s and 1970s, black
Americans had not joined the LDS Church in any
significant numbers. Because of black priesthood
denial—the reasons for which, affirms Embry, have
never been clear (70)—missionaries were discouraged
from proselytizing in black communities until after
1978 (57). Embry and Cherry sent a survey to 500
people identified as black Mormons; 201 were
returned (83). Alexander B. Morrison, an LDS
98
General Authority and scientist with the World
Health Organization, discusses Church growth in
Africa from 1978 to 1988. By 1989, he reports,
there were 13,000 Mormons in Nigeria alone (87).
4. Examples of protests against the Church
include a July 1965 resolution passed by Salt Lake
and Ogden Chapters of the NAACP condemning
the Mormon “doctrine of non-white inferiority”
(Mauss 15). Activists also picketed through
downtown Salt Lake City in 1965 and called for
Third World countries to deny visas to LDS
missionaries (Mauss 155). When such tactics failed
to move LDS leaders, who were adamant that only
a revelation from God would change the policy,
activists in 1968 began to protest against Brigham
Young University, “a vulnerable secondary target”
(Mauss 158). Stanford and the University of
Washington, for example, cut off athletic relations,
“even though investigations by both the Western
Athletic Conference and a University of Arizona
delegation had exonerated the Mormon school of
any discriminatory practice” (Mauss 158).
5. In a December 15, 1969, letter to stake and
mission presidents, the First Presidency pointed out
that Latter-day Saints “know something of the
sufferings of those who are discriminated against in
a denial of their civil rights and Constitutional
privileges,” then continued: “We believe the Negro,
as well as those of other races, should have his full
Constitutional privileges as a member of society,
and we hope that members of the Church
everywhere will do their part as citizens to see that
these rights are held inviolate. Each citizen must
have equal opportunities and protection under the
law with reference to civil rights” (qtd. in Mauss
222). Ernest L. Wilkinson, president of BYU,
published a full-page advertisement in major
Washington, D.C., newspapers on April 1, 1970, in
another effort to persuade the public that
Mormons supported civil rights (Mauss 159).
6. Mauss argued that, regardless of Mormons'
perceived racism and despite Mauss's own
discomfort with the priesthood ban for black men,
the distinctive LDS “principle of continuous
revelation must be maintained” (24). Otherwise,
Mormon doctrine could be influenced by public
opinion. If such influence were possible, then the
claim to divine revelation given by the “President,
Prophet, Seer, and Revelator” for the LDS Church
when moved upon by the Holy Ghost—a central
tenet of Mormonism—would be undermined.
7. For other autobiographies explaining or
defending the author's conversion to Mormonism,
see Cherry, Sturlaugson Eyer, and Martins.
8. I have been unable to locate any reviews of
Wynetta Willis Martin's book in any nationally
distributed periodicals; however, Martin and her
publisher must have intended her story to receive at
least modest national attention since her
membership in the Mormon Tabernacle Choir had
been reported by the press.
9. She dedicates the autobiography “To my
beloved parents: Grace and Sentell Willis Sr.
Daughters: Pauletta Rochell Martin and Ruth Ann
Martin, Brothers and Sisters: Freddie, Diane, Carolyn
and Anthony.”
10. Mauss claims that Dialogue: A Journal of
Mormon Thought, an unofficial publication begun by
Mormon intellectuals in the 1960s, actually grew out
of many Mormons' great discomfort about and
debates over the policy toward blacks in the
Mormon Church: “It is more than coincidence,”
writes Mauss,” that the decade of the 1960s gave rise
almost simultaneously to the Mormon confrontation
with civil rights and to Dialogue” (1). In an essay to
commemorate the 20th anniversary of lifting the
priesthood ban and to express concern over
Mormons' lingering denial about their racialized
culture, a founding editor of Dialogue, Eugene
England, reflects: “We were especially uneasy about
the unofficial but nevertheless widely accepted
reasons for the ban—that blacks were descendants of
Cain through Ham, naturally fit for servitude and
inferiority, or were given black bodies and denied
priesthood and temple blessings because of some
failing in their pre-existent life. Some of that
uneasiness remains today, twenty years later, when
we consider that most Mormons are still in denial
about that ban, unwilling to talk in Church settings
about it, and that a remarkable number of Mormons
still believe that blacks, as well as other colored
people, come color-coded into the world, their
99
lineage and even their class a direct indication of
failures in a previous life” (“Playing” 1).
11. A “statistically random sampling” of black
LDS Church members was impossible to obtain.
See Embry's Chapter 4, “The Oral History Project
and Survey,” for the survey and interview
methodologies (79-94).
12. Ironically, Mormons themselves, with
their history of religious persecution and forced
migration, understand, at some level, what living
outside the normative dominant American culture
means. The explanatory and defensive nature of
Latter-day Saints' autobiographical writing about
their Mormon experience gives evidence for their
often marginalized status. Since their own
beginnings, Latter-day Saints have often written,
seemingly in vain, to combat religious stereotypes,
and to escape being called by the originally
derogatory name “Mormons.”
13. Mauss found that Mormons represented
attitudes common among many U.S. citizens in the
mid-20th century. “Treating blacks ‘differently' had
become so thoroughly normative in the nation that
even the churches generally did not question it
until the 1950s, at the earliest. Prior to that time,
the public schools, the military, and nearly all
major institutions of the nation were racially
segregated. Accordingly, rumblings about racism
among the Mormons were rare and continued so
until the 1960s” (154). As a result, “Mormons were
no more likely to give anti-Negro responses than
were the Presbyterians, Episcopalians, Lutherans
(whether American or Missouri Synod) or Baptists
(whether American or Southern), and
furthermore . . . the Mormon responses were very
nearly the same as the Protestant averages” (22).
The real difference among Mormons themselves,
writes Mauss, seems to be “between the educated
and uneducated, the manual [worker] and the
professional, the old and the young, or the rural
and the urban (as in any denomination).” He
points out that manifesting prejudices according to
these characteristics accords with other studies that
have found socio-economic status to be one
probable determinant of attitudes toward
minorities (23).
 14. Omi and Winant argue that a permanent
“racial ideology” has shaped the history, social
systems, relations, and minds of U.S. citizens . “The
continuing persistence of racial ideology suggests
that . . . racial myths and stereotypes cannot be
exposed as such in the popular imagination. They
are, we think, too essential, too integral, to the
maintenance of the US social order. Of course,
particular meanings, stereotypes and myths can
change, but the presence of a system of racial
meanings and stereotypes, of racial ideology, seems
to be a permanent feature of US culture” (63).
15. England examines how Mormon writers
have dealt with race, arguing that they have had to
bear “a double burden of hidden black presence and
denial, of fundamental contradiction between
professed ideals and actual practices: We [Mormons]
have all the American contradictions [Toni]
Morrison reviews and also our own unique theology,
which has been more explicitly idealistic and non-
racialized than traditional Christian thought, and
our own cultural overlay, which has been in some
ways more racialized than the rest of American
culture: We claimed, as early as the Book of
Mormon in 1830, that ‘all are alike unto God . . .
black and white' (2 Nephi 26:33), and Joseph Smith
renounced slavery when that was a minority position,
but we were the only church formally to declare a
policy that made a distinction by race and to develop
a powerfully influential, though unofficial, racialized
theology” (“Playing” 4; italics omitted).
16. On December 20, 1999, I had a brief
telephone conversation with John D. Hawkes, the
now aging publisher of Martin's text. He
remembered little about its publication but said that
his designer would have come up with the concept
of the Mormon Tabernacle Choir with a photograph
of Martin inserted above it. Although Martin would
have been consulted on the cover, by contract the
final decision on cover design rested with Hawkes.
17. Hawkes's explanation for black priesthood
restriction is based on a speculative theory common
among Mormons that blacks did not perform as well
in the preexistence as other spirit children of God.
According to Hawkes, “There was a war in Heaven
and one-third of the hosts of heaven were cast out
100
with Satan—never to receive the opportunity of
obtaining physical bodies. All those born into this
life accepted the plan of our Savior. And it is the
author's [Hawkes's] belief that we all accepted the
conditions under which we would be born, black or
brown, white or yellow. It is highly possible that we
may have known all of the limitations and
advantages we might have. We may have known
whether we would be blind or crippled, whether we
would be born in the jungles of Africa or into rich
families in America. Whatever our limitations
might have been we accepted them and rejoiced at
the opportunity to come to earth and obtain bodies”
(85).
18. According to Mauss, other black Mormon
writers at the time, Carey C. Bowles (1968), Alan
Gerald Cherry (1970), and Daily Oliver (1963), also
“tended to reject the theological rationales
traditionally offered for the status of Negroes in the
Church, but (except for Oliver) were nevertheless
generally appreciative for their membership” (187).
WORKS CITED
Bringhurst, Newell. Saints, Slaves, and Blacks: The
Changing Place of Black People within
Mormonism. Westport, CT: Greenwood P,
1981.
Bush, Lester J., and Armand Mauss, eds. Neither
White nor Black: Mormon Scholars Confront the
Race Issue in a Universal Church. Midvale, UT:
Signature, 1984.
Cherry, Alan. It's You and Me, Lord! Provo, UT:
Trilogy Arts Publication, 1970.
Dixon, Melvin. “Singing Swords: The Literary
Legacy of Slavery.” The Slave's Narrative. Ed.
Charles T. Davis and Henry Louis Gates Jr.
Oxford: Oxford UP, 1985. 298-317.
Embry, Jessie L. Black Saints in a White Church:
Contemporary African American Mormons. Salt
Lake City: Signature Books, 1994.
England, Eugene. “Playing in the Dark: Mormons
Writing about Blacks and Blackness.”
Unpublished essay, 1998.
—. “Revisiting ‘Why the Church Is As True As the
Gospel.'” Unpublished essay, 1999.
Eyer, Mary Sturlaugson. He Restoreth My Soul. Salt
Lake City: Deseret Book, 1982. See also
Sturlaugson.
Eyring, Henry B. “That We May Be One.” Ensign 28
(May 1998): 66-68.
Hawkes, John. “Why Can't the Negro Hold the
Priesthood.” In Wynetta Willis Martin. Black
Mormon Tells Her Story. Salt Lake City: Hawkes,
1972. 79-94.
Martin, Wynetta Willis. Black Mormon Tells Her Story.
Salt Lake City: Hawkes, 1972.
Martins, Helvecio, with Mark Grover. The
Autobiography of Elder Helvecio Martins. Salt
Lake City: Aspen Books, 1994.
Mauss, Armand L. “Mormonism and the Negro:
Faith, Folklore, and Civil Rights.” 1967.
Reprinted in Bush and Mauss.
Morrison, Alexander B. The Dawning of a Brighter
Day: The Church in Black Africa. Salt Lake City:
Deseret Book, 1990.
Omi, Michael, and Howard Winant. Racial
Formation in the United States: From the 1960s to
the 1990s. 2nd ed. New York: Routledge,
1994.
Sekaquaptewa, Helen. Me and Mine: The Life Story of
Helen Sekaquaptewa as told to Louise Udall.
1969. Tucson: U of Arizona P, 1993.
Shea, Daniel B. Spiritual Autobiography in Early
America. Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1988.
Smith, Joseph, Jr., et al., History of the Church of Jesus
Christ of Latter-day Saints, edited by B. H.
Roberts (Salt Lake City: Deseret News Press, 6
vols. published 1902- 12, Vol. 7 published
1932).
Sturlaugson, Mary. A Soul So Rebellious. Salt Lake
City: Deseret Book, 1981.

The Mantle of the Poet:

Reappraising Clinton F. Larson

Kevin Klein

I have to confess that, long before I

became interested in Clinton F. Larson's poetry,
I was interested in his money, offered to
students in the form of creative writing contests
at BYU. It has been only in this past school year,
as I have tried to take my own poetry writing
seriously, that I have begun to acknowledge my
cultural heritage and study influential Mormon
writers.
I first learned about Larson's place in Mormon
poetry from Eugene England's introduction to

101
Tending the Garden, in which England dubs him
the “spiritual father” of contemporary Mormon
poetry (xxiv.). I wondered why I hadn't heard
about Larson's work in discussions with friends
about the poets they studied in their Mormon
literature classes. I decided to research
England's claim to see if Larson's work
influences Mormon poetry today.
I found that Mormon scholars
contemporary with Larson also appreciated his
work. In 1966 Marden J. Clark prefaced a
collection of Larson's verse dramas with high
praise: “Dr. Larson's plays and poems now seem
to me the most significant body of literature yet
to come from our specifically Mormon
materials and the Mormon environment” (ix).
Similarly, in 1969 Karl Keller observed, “There
is no tradition before [Larson] that shows any
kind of a beginning” and predicted that “at
some far-distant point in time the history of
Mormon poetry may well have to be said to
have begun with Clinton F. Larson” (112).
Later, in his preface to the 1988 Selected Poems
of Clinton F. Larson, David L. Evans calls him
“one of the most significant Mormon writers or
Intermountain writers.”
The first problem I faced was the disparity
between the apparent importance of Larson's
contribution to Mormon poetry, and the
scarcity of critical scholarship on his work thus
far. Evans laments this difference in his 1999
entry on Larson in the Dictionary of Literary
Biography. He declares, “Larson was a prolific
writer. It is unfortunate that he has not been
studied and publicized by prolific critics.” This
statement contains several troubling
implications: first, that Larson's poetry is worth
criticism because he wrote a lot of it; second,
that the lack of scholarship on Larson's work
has more to do with the capability of critics
than the quality of material; and third, that the
role of Larson's critics, once they are capable, is
102
to “study” and “publicize,” rather than evaluate,
his work.
Such protective commentary doesn't
succeed in publicizing Larson to begin with: It
asserts his artistic greatness but avoids placing
his work in the context of contemporary
American poetry. Perhaps Evans shelters the
eccentric bulk of Larson's poetry from a world
that did not see fit to acknowledge it as it came;
if so, Evans's displeasure with the critical
scarcity seems unfair. It is perhaps in this
generous spirit towards Larson that Evans
includes shaky empirical evidence of Larson's
influence—for instance, that one of Larson's
best poems, “Homestead in Idaho,” “has been
widely used in British school anthologies” and
that “well over three million copies of [Larson's]
books are in use” (Selected xi). The truth is that
Larson's work has generated little criticism
compared to his voluminous efforts. My
secondary sources consist of a few book reviews,
several anthology and book introductions, and
four articles, one presented at AML in 1994
and another adapted from a 1972 BYU master's
thesis.
As I studied Larson's work, I understood
why much of it had a hard time finding an
audience. Thomas Schwartz, author of the
adapted master's thesis, uses a phrase from
Larson's poem “The Twin Planets” to identify
him as the “creator of titanic opposites” (39).
Indeed, Larson's poetic career reflects a
determination to unify incongruities in
professed vs. expressed faith and in choices of
subject matter and style as well.
First and most obviously, much of Larson's
literary work deals with Mormon themes: Many
of his verse dramas portray Book of Mormon or
early LDS histories, and he also wrote the text
for Illustrated Stories from the Book of Mormon.
While many of his poems are religious in tone
or topic, few of them present Mormon material
or discuss secular subjects from a patently
Mormon perspective. England's explanation is
that Larson's poetry is indeed Mormon; it just
contains intimations rather than
representations of LDS life. It is “deeply grounded
in Mormon theology and experience” (Tending
xxiv; emphasis mine).
Keller observes, “There is no mention of
anything explicitly Mormon in [The Lord of
Experience]—as if Larson is avoiding the specific
pursuit of the history, the personalities, the
social and theological issues, and the language
of the Church” (113). However, like England,
Keller enlarges the definition of what
constitutes Mormon poetic elements to include
anything spiritual: “The Kingdom of God to
Larson is not in the institution or authority or
ordinances, but, as he says, ‘in the still center'”
(112-13).
In this spirit of broad interpretation,
England calls one of Larson's most celebratable
poems, “To a Dying Girl,” a “perfect jewel of a
modern Mormon lyric” because it expresses
“the tragic claims of mortality in the face of
sincere faith in immortality” (“Editor's” 287):
How quickly must she go?
She calls dark swans from mirrors everywhere:
From halls and porticos, from pools of air.
How quickly must she know?
They wander through the fathoms of her eye,
Waning southerly until their cry
Is gone where she must go.
How quickly does the cloudfire streak the sky,
Tremble on the peaks, then cool and die?
She moves like evening into night,
Forgetful as the swans forget their flight
Or spring the fragile snow,
So quickly she must go. (England Harvest 30)
The poem is indeed beautiful. However, in
comparison to Wordsworth's sonnet “On the
Beach at Calais,” for example, it is only more
103
modern, not more Mormon:
Dear child, dear girl, who walkest with me here,
If thou appear untouched by solemn thought
Thy nature is not therefore less divine;
Thou liest in Abram's bosom all the year
And worship'st at the temple's inner shrine,
God being with thee when we know it not.
Wordsworth's portrayal of children as
fundamentally innocent and close to God is
more specifically LDS than Larson's hints of
immortality. Calling Larson's poem Mormon
solely because it suggests a triumphant life after
death neglects the commonness of that
particular belief among many other religions.
While Keller and England interpret
Larson's suppression of clear Mormon themes
as avoiding sentimentality, others view it as
representing the conflict between Larson's
poetry and personality. Robert Pack Browning,
who reviewed The Lord of Experience for Western
American Literature, objects to Larson's muted
Mormonism. Almost in response to England's
Mormon reading of “To a Dying Girl,”
Browning believes that among the book's many
poems dealing with death, only a few even
imply the unique Mormon theology regarding it.
“One comes to feel,” Browning adds, “that a
heartier assertion of the peculiarly Mormon
features of these poems might be what Larson
needs to free himself from the intensely literary
self-consciousness that stifles so many of them”
(143). After examining several of Larson's
poems about death and violence, Schwartz
similarly concludes that “Larson's human voice
is incapable of treating death in the way in
which Mormon theology demands . . . when
Larson writes as a Mormon poet, his own voice
is camouflaged” (48). For example, in “Seven-
Tenths of a Second,” Larson develops
wonderfully vivid details of a car crash:

In the compression the bumper flows into the grill,
And its bits of steel slip into the tree with sounds
Of puncturing; the hood rises and waves into the
shield
In front of you as the drive of wheels lifts and
hovers,
After several more descriptive sequences, he
ends with the addressed driver's graphic but
insignificant death:
The car reclines into the ground,
Conforming noisily as hinges rip, doors pry,
And rail the air, and seats rise, puff and bound
Forward to press and pin you where you die.
(Selected 75)
“Seven Tenths of a Second” represents
Larson's clear and natural voice, especially in
comparison with most of his overtly religious
verse. A poem whose title heralds a particularly
momentous religious event, “The Morning of
the First Resurrection,” nevertheless refuses to
establish any mood or setting in its dense
opening lines:
The suns of topaz pearl tourmaline strontium
Agate crystal quartz, of light cerise gemming
Sunrise grain indigo and carmine stars
East north east lining in . . . (Selected 128)
Such lines support Browning's observation of
Larson: “the committed Mormon is often given
short shrift in the hands of the diffident
litterateur” (143).
Larson's prevailing verbosity lies at the
center of other poetic incongruities. Calling it
his “baroque style” or the “modern classical
idiom,” he argues that his cultivated use of
rhyme, sound, and meter—created all too often
with obscure word choices and syntactic
gymnastics—comprises an inherently spiritual
104
literary form. Larson describes this “baroque”
form as “the style that relates the realities of
earth to the realities of heaven. . . . [I]t seems
allied with spiritual truth” (Geary 76). Such an
alliance between heaven and poetic form
conveniently transcends time and thus frees
Larson from contemporary literary trends. To
Schwartz, who studied under him at BYU,
Larson once confided, “The poet has to guard
himself against being caught up in these prosaic
times” (Schwartz 41).
This mindset contradicts Larson's own
concept of the Mormon's spiritual duty to take
the present at face value: “It has never been the
spirit of prophets and poets to deny the
existence of the world that we know, with its
beauty and ugliness, its good and evil. They
have never been so cynical as to imply that man
cannot get along in it and cannot be saved in it”
(qtd. in Schwartz 41). So while Larson can write
poems about modern themes like Pac-Man,
quantum physics, and Fred Astaire, he has
difficulty treating contemporary spirituality
without triviality. His religious poems with
modern-day settings, from the provocative
“Going to an R-Rated Movie” and the satirical
“The Professional Christian,” to tender
vignettes like “Sleeping in Church,” present
predisposed characters either saved or damned
before they have a chance to act in the poems.
By contrast, one of his strongest religious
poems, “Advent,” depicts the shock of the
falsely pious who expected “a gentle God, a
Lamb” at Christ's second coming. But while the
poem creates genuine conflict and surprise, its
setting is an allegorical medieval feast rather
than a scene from real life. Larson himself
revealed to Schwartz that “his reluctance to
write a Mormon contemporary play arises from
his love of grandeur, of the heroic, and of
eloquence” (41). These stylistic preferences
manifest themselves in Larson's poetry as well.
 Given his quirks, it would seem
convenient to extend Orson Whitney's
prophecy of LDS writers a hundred years past
Milton and hail Larson as the Mormon Blake.
But he had none of the introverted self-
possession with which Blake remythologized
Christianity for himself and largely ignored the
possibility of appealing to a large audience.
Larson felt anxious to be recognized not only as
the Mormon poet laureate but as a substantial
secular poet as well. The latter was never a
possibility: Except for a few appearances in
national magazines—and the British
schoolbooks—his work was all published in
Utah, mostly by BYU. Larson may have
convincingly achieved the distinction of
Mormon laureate—and even greater national
recognition as regional voice—if he had stopped
worrying about universality and written what
Browning calls “the poems of Clinton F. Larson,
twentieth century Mormon of Provo, Utah”
(144).
Larson's insecurities of identity, both his
own and his audience, underscore the 1990
collection Sunwind. The book was published by
Geneva Steel and distributed to all employees
before it went to bookstores in an effort to
contribute to local culture (Evans 1999).
Naturally, its audience would be those perhaps
interested in poetry but not well trained in
reading it. Indeed, Evans's introduction begins
with an apology for poetry reading in general:
“Say, why not turn off the tube for a while—or
stay home from the game this evening—and
instead read a poem or two?” (xiii). The book
contains many accessible poems from previous
collections, but among its two hundred pages
are tremendously difficult pieces with simple
titles. The speaker in “The Last Supper,” for
example, declares:
Your fine servility
105
Foreshortens you or restricts your discipleship
Amid the quasars of my power when you lip
The knowledge of the integer and slip
Into a sleep of faith. (180)
“Christ the Magician” begins, “Beryl exquisite
the lamp of level light / Or laser the impresario
the castle moves / As if the cloud were still
Betelgeuse” (161). If Larson sought the
appreciation of a local audience with this book,
he would have done well to appeal to their
interests and experience level. Even if he
refused to change his style to do so, he could
have been more selective, perhaps removing
from the two hundred pages such poems as
“INRI = mc2, or Limits.” Many of the poems in
the collection would overwhelm an audience
used to straightforward sermons, simplifications
of the Old Testament, and a God who speaks
to people in their own language.
These conflicts of subject matter, style, and
audience have prevented Larson's work from
significantly influencing current LDS poets.
However, the example of an orthodox yet
unsentimental Mormon poet writing
professionally paved the way for their efforts.
According to England, Larson
[departed] both from the didactic and inward-
looking provinciality of the first 100 years of
Mormon literature and the elitist, patronizing
provinciality of his contemporaries in the “lost
generation.” . . . Grounded in Mormon
theology, history, and contemporary life and
thought, able to both criticize and affirm,
Larson was devoutly part of rather than
standing apart from his Mormon people.
(Tending xi)
While Larson never quite unified his poetic
vision, his doggedness in dealing with its
incongruities allowed him to bridge the gap in
Mormon writing between home literature and
the lost generation's unsympathetic regional
portrayals. He never changed his poetic
techniques, even as they differed radically from
mainstream trends. And perhaps for similar
reasons, neither did he sincerely entertain
moral difficulties in his poetry. If his educated
poetic sensibility prevented him from selling
out to those for affirmation, his muted but
unquestioning Mormon perspective kept him
away from the temptations of religious self-exile.
Because he couldn't loosen his particular
grip on the world, Larson's work remains a
comprehensive but fragmented representation
of life filtered through varying degrees of a
Mormon gaze. Yet he prepared the way for
others to be able to entertain seriously the
spiritual quest as embodied in the Book of
Mormon account of Enos, whose wrestle with
God gives a glimpse of the personal conflict
between anguish for sin and passion to
encounter the divine. While his work may not
criticize and affirm simultaneously, in the
dialectic that produces true faith, Larson's
influence in creating the literary environment
for Mormon writers to do so merits him the
distinction of their “spiritual father.”
KEVIN KLEIN is completing a creative thesis of
poetry for his English M.A. degree at Brigham
Young University. After graduation, he plans to
continue writing.
WORKS CITED
Landscapes of Seduction: Terry Tempest Williams's
Desert Quartet and the Biblical Song of Songs
Boyd Petersen
In the early part of the second century CE,
106
Browning, Robert Pack. Review of The Lord of
Experience. Western American Literature 4 (1969):
142-45.
Clark, Marden. Introduction. The Mantle of the
Prophet and Other Plays by Clinton F. Larson.
Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 1966.
England, Eugene. Editor's Commentary. Harvest:
Contemporary Mormon Poems. Salt Lake City:
Signature Books, 1989. 285-88.
—. Introduction. Tending the Garden: Essays on
Mormon Literature. Eds. Lavina Fielding
Anderson and Eugene England. Salt Lake City:
Signature Books, 1996.
Evans, David L. “Clinton F. Larson.” Dictionary of
Literary Biography: Twentieth-Century American
Western Writers, Third Series. Ed. Richard H.
Cracroft. Publication pending Spring 2000.
—. Introduction. Sunwind. By Clinton F. Larson.
—. Introduction. Selected Poems of Clinton F. Larson.
Provo, UT: BYU Press, 1988.
Geary, Edward. “A Conversation with Clinton F.
Larson.” (Interview). Dialogue: A Journal of
Mormon Thought 4 (Autumn 1969): 74-80.
Keller, Karl. “A Pilgrimage of Awe.” Dialogue: A
Journal of Mormon Thought 3 (1968): 111-18.
Larson, Clinton F. Selected Poems of Clinton F. Larson.
Provo, UT: BYU Press, 1988.
—. Sunwind. Provo, UT: Geneva Steel Corporation,
1990.
Schwartz, Thomas D. “Sacrament of Terror:
Violence in the Poetry of Clinton F. Larsen
[sic].” Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 9
(Autumn 1974): 39-48.
Rabbi Akiba defended the inclusion of the
Song of Songs in the Bible, saying:
Heaven forbid that any man in Israel ever
disputed that the Song of Songs renders the
hands unclean (i.e., is holy), for the whole
world is not worth the day on which the Song
of Songs was given to Israel, for all the
Writings1 (ketubîm) are holy, and the Song of
Songs (shir hashirim) is the Holy of Holies
(kodesh hakodashim). (qtd. in Landy Paradoxes
13)
Today, Akiba's comments on the Song of Songs
are more frequently cited by critics than any
others. They are a radical and powerful defense
of the Song of Songs. However, despite their
fervent nature, they also implicitly recognize
that the Song's status within the Hebrew Bible
had been challenged. Indeed, there are three
substantial reasons why that status would have
been questioned. The Song of Songs is wildly
erotic love poetry, has no overtly religious
narrative or theme, and never mentions the
name of God.2
Akiba himself was uneasy about the Song
and sought to limit its use to the realm of
religion: “He who trills his voice in chanting
the Song of Songs in the banquet house and
treats it as a sort of song has no part in the
world to come” (qtd. in Pardes 120). Most likely
what threatened Akiba was not so much where
the Song of Songs might be read, as how it
would be read. Akiba most probably used
allegory to read the Song of Songs. Ironically,
while religions usually prefer to read biblical
texts at the literal level, the most frequently
sanctioned method of reading the Song of
Songs has been at the allegorical level (Bergant
26). So while Akiba defended the inclusion of
the Song of Songs in the Bible, the Song's
content at the literal level most likely troubled
him.
Some 1700 years after Akiba, the Mormon
Prophet Joseph Smith set about working on an
inspired translation of the Bible. Smith had
107
little training in biblical languages and worked
from the English text of the Bible; therefore, his
“translation” was not what we conventionally
think of as a translation. He cut, pasted, and
edited—elucidating many vague passages,
cutting some verses, adding others, and revising
many disturbing sections. When Smith got to
the Song of Songs, he corrected nothing, but
simply wrote at the bottom of the page “The
Songs of Solomon are not inspired writings”
(Matthews 87). Smith did not, to my knowledge,
elaborate on his misgivings about the text.3
Perhaps what troubled Smith were the
same three points that gave early Jewish
authorities concerns about the text. There is,
however, one other book in the Bible—the book
of Esther—that is even less overtly religious than
the Song of Songs and, like the Song, does not
mention the name of God. And while the
rabbis did debate the status of Esther, Smith
left that book intact. Furthermore, that the
Song of Songs is erotic love poetry probably
would not have concerned Smith since he was
not a prude, and, in fact, his teachings imply
that sexual love is a divine gift. Whatever his
motive was, Smith's short notation has
rendered the Song of Songs an impotent text
within Mormonism.
In 1995, 168 years after Smith's
translation of the Bible, the Mormon naturalist
and essayist Terry Tempest Williams published
a text which resembles the biblical Song of
Songs in many ways. Both prominently feature
female characters, and give them a strong voice.
Both texts mix genres—part poetry, part
narrative; the one dialogue, the other interior
dialogue. Like the Song of Songs, Williams's
Desert Quartet submerges its reader in a highly
erotic landscape. And both use that landscape—
a garden in the Song and a desert in Desert
Quartet—to create eros in the text.
Yet while the Song of Songs uses
metaphor to transform the body of the beloved
into a garden of delights, Desert Quartet uses
personification to transform the desert
landscape into a passionate lover. In the Song
of Songs, the body becomes the landscape
where seduction takes place; in Desert Quartet,
the landscape becomes the body which seduces.
Both works also invite allegorical readings;
however, the one represents premodern allegory
and the other (post)modern allegory.
Finally, both texts mirror the landscape
they describe. The reader must wander through
the texts in the same way the texts wander
through the settings' natural terrain. Neither
has a “coherent” linear plot nor argues a
monolithic point. Perhaps this aspect of the
Song of Songs is the primary source of
discomfort for both Rabbi Akiba and Joseph
Smith, since this meandering discourse is, as
some feminist critics would argue, indicative of
women's ways of seeing and speaking, ways that
often make men uncomfortable.
SONG OF SONGS
While the alliterative first line of the Song
of Songs, shir ha-shirim asher li-shelomoh,
attributes the book to Solomon, few scholars
accept this provenance and rather see this
attribution as a later addition. Most date the
Song fairly late, probably to post-Exilic times
around the third century BCE. Recently, several
scholars have proposed that the author of the
biblical Song of Songs was a woman (LaCocque;
Bloch and Bloch; Falk).4 While I find similar
claims about the hypothetical book of J
problematic, the arguments for a female author
of the Song of Songs, I believe, are sounder.5
For one thing, women are often associated
with songs in the Bible (e.g., Miriam's song by
the sea in Exod. 15; and Deborah's song of
victory in Judges 5). Furthermore, it is the wom-
an, not the man, who is the principal character
108
of the text. She speaks the majority of the lines
in the Song, and it is her voice that opens and
closes the Song. She is neither reserved nor shy,
and she is responsible for initiating action.
The text is also unusually sympathetic,
when compared to the rest of the Hebrew Bible,
to the female character's concerns. As Marcia
Falk puts it, “[U]nlike most of the Bible, the
Song of Songs gives us women speaking out of
their own experiences and their own
imaginations, in words that do not seem
filtered through the lens of patriarchal male
consciousness” (117). André LaCocque goes
even further, stating that the Song of Songs is
“a woman's song from beginning to end, and it
puts the heroine at center stage” (43). If it is a
woman who wrote the Song, it also explains
some of the similarities it shares with Williams's
Desert Quartet. Yet there are differences between
the two works that must be noted as well.
In the Song of Songs, simile and metaphor
are the main poetic devices used to create eros.
The lovers compare each other's bodies to the
flora and fauna around them—to henna blooms
and rose of Sharon, to doves and fawns, to
spices and perfumes, but also to less likely
objects such as crimson thread, marble pillars,
and tablets of ivory. The comparisons are often
abstract in meaning but sensual in sound.
Consonance and punning dominate the poem.6
For example, in Chapter 4, many strange
comparisons come together: the lover's teeth
are compared to a flock of goats (4:2), the
lover's lips to a crimson thread (4:3), and the
lover's breasts to fawns grazing in a field of lilies
(4:5). The comparisons seem strange and
somewhat fantastic; however, consonance
unites these images. The white teeth (shinnayik),
come together with the crimson (shani) of the
thread, and the white lilies (shoshannim) to
create a united image of beauty.7 While there is
often tension among the Song's metaphorical
images, the sounds of the poem create unity.
Robert Alter notes further punning in this
same chapter among the words for “frank-
incense” (levonah), “Lebanon” (levonon), and
“ravish” (libavtini), and argues that this punning
“triangulates the body-as-landscape, the external
landscape, and the passion the beloved inspires”
(201). Thus at the sensory level of the poem,
the poet unites lovers, landscape, and eros.
To heighten the comparisons, the poet
constantly turns her similes into metaphors. By
so doing, what starts out as a simple
comparison between the lover and the
landscape turns into a comparison that makes
lover and landscape inseparable. The woman
describes her lover as like a “mare in Pharaoh's
chariots” (1:9), but goes on to say he “is a spray
of henna blooms” (1:14). The man describes his
lover as “like a lily among thorns” (2:2), but
goes on to say she is “a garden locked” (4:12).
When one lover states “our vineyard is in
blossom” (2:15), we are not certain whether the
reference is to the actual garden or to the lovers'
bodies.8 We are no longer able to separate the
two sides of the metaphor. Garden and lovers
have become one; the lovers' bodies commingle
with each other and with the lush landscape.
Moreover, we can no longer distinguish which
of the two lovers is speaking. Like their bodies
and the landscape, the voices of the lovers
merge.
As Harold Fisch paraphrases the sublime
gesture of our poet: “I take what seemed to be a
‘mere' simile and I turn it around into
metaphor. . . . I will turn that trope around and
you will see how difficult it will be to keep the
two sides of the comparison separate from one
another” (Fisch 91). The playfulness of
language—of consonance, simile, and
metaphor—mirrors the erotic playfulness of the
two lovers. In the process, the landscape
becomes not simply an erotic setting for
109
lovemaking, but an active participant in eros.
As Francis Landy states, “Exploring the body is
equivalent to exploring the world” (“Song,”
306).
Novelist and literary theorist William Gass
argues that “a character . . . is any linguistic
location in a book toward which a great part of
the rest of the text stands as a modifier” (qtd. in
LeClair and McCaffery 28). By Gass's radical
definition, “anything . . . which serves as a fixed
point, like a stone in a stream,” may function as
a character (50), for characters are the “primary
substances to which everything else is attached”
(49). As he puts it, “we may depart from them,
but soon we return, as music returns to its
theme” (49). In the Song of Songs, the
landscape is surely a “linguistic location” which
modifies the rest of the text. It is as much a
character as the two lovers, and the landscape is
just as involved in their lovemaking.
Both Phyllis Trible and Francis Landy see
the Song of Songs as an answer to the Adam
and Eve narrative in Genesis. While the former
is a story of unity shattered through
disobedience, the latter is a story of reunion
and reintegration through eros. But it is not
simply the redemption of the sexes that we see
in the Song of Songs. It is the redemption of
the humans with the land. Mirroring the union
of the two lovers, the lovers and the landscape
become one.
DESERT QUARTET
Like the Song of Songs, Terry Tempest
Williams's Desert Quartet creates a landscape of
eros; however, in Desert Quartet, the landscape
is the only lover. While Williams previously
explored the relationship between the body and
the landscape in Refuge and the erotic nature of
landscape in An Unspoken Hunger, in Desert
Quartet she pushes that exploration to its
ultimate conclusion. She addresses the question:
“How might we make love to the land?”
(London 2). In the tradition of T. S. Eliot's
Four Quartets, each section of the Desert
Quartet corresponds to one of the four “basic
elements”: earth, water, fire, and air. Williams
personifies each of these elements to create a
passionate lover of the red-rock desert
landscape. The rocks have flesh (3) and a pulse
(8). The desert sighs (11) and cares for the
human wanderer (12). The rushing water
caresses with “a fast finger” (23). The “blue
tongue” (41) flames of her camp fire are
“charismatic” (38); the firewood “pops like
vertebrae” (38). The rocks have lips (52) which
breathe (53) and wail (54) and speak (57).
Through personification, Williams has created
of the landscape a suitable companion for the
female character who wanders through this text.
Just as the author of the biblical book of
Genesis creates Adam (adam) from the earth
(adama), Williams has created a lover out of the
earth. But despite the human qualities this
lover is granted, it does not take on human
form—her adam is adama.9 In the course of the
text, the two become one flesh. Williams uses
explicitly erotic language to portray the union
between the female character and each of the
four elements of the landscape. And this union
is described in explicitly religious terms as an
act of faith (7), a baptism (28), or a sacrament
(46).
The first act of love-making is with the
desert rock. As the character squeezes her body
between the walls of a narrow slot canyon, she
becomes wedged:
[My] hips can barely fit through. I turn
sideways, my chest and back in a vise of
geologic time. I stop. The silence that lives in
these sacred hallways presses against me. I
relax. I surrender. I close my eyes. The arousal
of my breath rises in me like music, like love,
as the possessive muscles between my legs
texts is that they both invite allegorical readings,
110
tighten and release. I come to the rock in a
moment of stillness, giving and receiving,
where there is no partition between my body
and the body of Earth. (9-10)
The second is with water: “My legs open.
The rushing water turns my body and touches
me with a fast finger that does not tire. I receive
without apology” (23). The third is with fire:
“My legs open to the heat, the tingling return of
heat, inside, outside, shadows dance on the
sandstone, my ghostly lover. I allow myself to be
ravished” (41). The fourth is with air. The
woman places her mouth over an opening in
the rock, and tries to capture the wind passing
through the hole. “My belly rises and falls. I
move away and listen. I return with my mouth
over the opening. Inhale. Exhale. I move away.
I listen. I return. I am dizzy. I am drunk with
pleasure” (57-58).
Providing a wonderful illustration of
William Gass's liberal definition of character,
Desert Quartet transforms the landscape into a
character suitable for an erotic relationship
with the woman. Gass sums up his theory as if
he had read this very text:
I have known many [characters] who have
passed through their stories without noses, or
heads to hold them; others have lacked bodies
altogether, exercised no natural functions,
possessed some thoughts, a few emotions, but
no psychologies, and apparently make love
without the necessary organs. (45)
Like the Song of Songs, Desert Quartet creates
eros through its landscape. While in the Song
of Songs, for the lovers to explore each others'
bodies becomes the equivalent of exploring the
landscape, in Desert Quartet to explore the
landscape becomes the equivalent of exploring
a lover's body.
ALLEGORY
An additional similarity between the two
but that similarity becomes a difference when
we look at the nature of these allegories. Today,
when commenting on the Song of Songs, most
critics ignore or dismiss allegory. Yet we have, as
Harold Fisch argues, no record of the book
being read any other way anciently, and a long
history of allegorical interpretation (97).10 I
believe, as Fisch states, that there is an
“allegorical imperative” when reading the Song
of Songs. Asserting that allegorical readings
result from an inscribed ambiguity within the
text, Fisch states that certain phrases and
imagery within the Song which have “resonance”
to other books within the biblical corpus create
a “pressure of the text . . . vibrations that it sets
up in the minds of its readers” (98). These
“vibrations” then compel us to move from
reading the Song as a simple love poem, to
reading it as a commentary on the relations
between Israel and the land, on the one hand,
and Israel and God, on the other. Such phrases
within the Song as “I sought the one I love . . .
but I found him not” (3:1; 3:2; 5:6), or “let me
be a seal upon your heart, like a seal upon your
hand” (8:6) create “vibrations” that resonate
with similar language in other books of the
Bible.
Furthermore, I believe there is abundant
imagery in the text that links it with the temple.
As John Lundquist has noted, the temple is
often associated with the waters of life which
flow from within the structure. In the Song of
Songs, the lover is compared to a “garden
spring, a well of fresh water” (4:15). temples are
also associated with the tree of life and gardens
in general. In the Song, the garden is the
central location of lovemaking, and trees
abound. The pomegranate, which is mentioned
three times in this text, had a cultic significance
in the Hebrew temple where a pomegranate
and a golden bell were attached to the hem of
the priests' robes. The architectural images in
111
the poem—twin towers (8:10), marble pillars on
pedestals of gold (5:15); all “the work of a
master's hand” (7:2)—recall the grand temple of
Solomon, whose name is mentioned many
times in the text. As André LaCocque states,
“the only other place that contains such
description as we have here of jewels, gold, and
silver is the portrayal of the ornaments for the
tabernacle or the buildings of the temple”
(78).11
LaCocque goes on to note that the
reference in 4:6 to the mount of myrrh (har
hammor) alludes to Mount Moriah (har hamoriah)
and the hill of frankincense (gibeat hallebona)
alludes to Mount Zion—both names of the
temple site (106).12 The lovers' bed also alludes
to the temple. In 1:16b-17, the place of
lovemaking is described as pastoral: “cedars are
the beams of our house, cypresses the rafters.”
Yet the location is still a house (bayit) which is
the common biblical term for the temple, and,
likewise, it is made of razim and berotim, “cedar
and cypress,” the two woods which were
imported from Lebanon to construct the
temple. Because these materials were so closely
associated with the temple and were imported
exclusively from Lebanon, Lebanon becomes a
common metaphor for the temple throughout
the Bible (LaCocque 81).13 Thus, one 18th-
century rabbi glossed “the scent of Lebanon”
(Songs 4:11) as “the scent of the sacrifices
offered in the temple,” because Lebanon
“alludes to the temple that whitens the sins of
Israel” (qtd. in LaCocque 111). In verse 14 of
the same chapter, the Song furthers this
allusion by listing the spices associated with the
beloved: “nard and saffron, fragrant reed and
cinnamon, with all aromatic woods, myrrh and
aloes—all the choice perfumes.” Exodus 30:23
tells us that the liturgical anointing oil was
composed of most of these perfumes and spices
(LaCocque 111).
 The text's frequent references to shoshan-
nim or lilies (in 2:2, 16; 4:5; 5:13; 6:2-3; and 7:3)
also points to the temple. While the word is not
used with such frequency in other parts of the
Hebrew Bible, it is used in the description in 1
Kings 7:19 of the “lily design” of the temple's
column capitals and its “sea of bronze” whose
brim is described by 1 Kings 7:26 as “like the
petals of a lily” (LaCocque 124-25; 128). The
“columns of smoke” spoken of in 3:6 are
reminiscent of the column of smoke that
guided the Israelite march through the desert;
but in stating that the smoke is of myrrh and
frankincense, the text places us back in the
temple where the smoke of the incense rises
from the altar (Lev. 16:13). Furthermore, if we
take the word shalhevetyah of 8:6 to mean “fire
or flame of God,” instead of a “great fire,” we
may find a further reference to the temple,
since the flame of God is found in the temple,
“constantly alight only on the altar at its centre;
it communicates between heaven and earth
(Landy Paradoxes, 127).
Finally, I believe that the language used to
describe the locked garden and closed bedroom
of the poem is some of the most significant. “A
garden locked is my own, my bride . . . let my
beloved come to his garden and enjoy its
luscious fruits!” (4:12, 16); “Hark, my beloved
knocks! Let me in, my own, my darling, my
faultless dove!” (5:2). Both of these descriptions
recall the Holy of Holies into which the high
priest would enter once a year on the Day of
Atonement. I do not believe this similarity in
imagery is accidental. In saying that the Song of
Songs is the Holy of Holies, I believe, Rabbi
Akiba was being more deliberate than has fre-
quently been supposed. While the temple was
the site of ritual at-one-ment, the Song of Songs
is an allegorical illustration of at-one-ment.14
Even though I believe the Song of Songs
must be read allegorically, the images of the
112
Song cannot be tied down—as some early
commentators tried to do—to one particular
referent.15 This is not a medieval allegory like
the Romance of the Rose with one-to-one
allegorical correspondences.16 There characters
like “Good Welcome” and “Piety” aid the hero
while “Shame” and “Fear” keep him from his
quest to gather his “Rose.” Here the images are
much more fluid, or, as Harold Fisch puts it,
“metaphor and matter-in-hand have a way of
moving into each other's territory” (98). As
Ariel and Chana Bloch observed, in the Song
of Songs “a lily is a lily is a woman's body is a
man's lips is a field of desire” (32). And while
the metaphor of a marriage is used frequently
among Hebrew prophets to portray the
relationship between God and Israel, the Song
of Songs is the only example of a reciprocal
relationship between the two. The Hebrew
prophets use the metaphor of an unfaithful
spouse to depict Israel's straying from God,
while the Song of Songs uses the metaphor of
marital bliss to portray the union of Israel and
God. As Ilana Pardes states, since the Song of
Songs portrays the relationship of God and
Israel as one of “mutual courting, mutual
attraction, and mutual admiration, there is
more room for hope that redemption is within
reach” (127).
Williams's Desert Quartet also invites an
allegorical reading. After all, we know that it is
physically impossible to have sexual intercourse
with the earth, or at least for the earth to be an
active participant in that sexual act. We must
read this text at the metaphorical level.
However, the Quartet does not allow us to go
far with such a reading. While it does not
require much imagination to see the lovers of
the Song of Songs as representing God and
Israel, it is impossible to see the lovers of Desert
Quartet as representing anything other than the
human and the landscape. There is no
transcendent quality to the allegory. The
Quartet may be read as an allegory of mutual
nurturing between the earth and humans, but it
cannot be taken any further.
Walter Benjamin maintains that allegory
was ruined in the 1600s in that it lost the
transcendent quality that set it apart from
history: “Allegories are, in the realm of
thoughts, what ruins are in the realm of things”
(178). No longer able to serve any function
beyond mere convention, allegory from the
17th century on “is not convention of
expression, but expression of convention” (175).
Nevertheless, it is a convention that became
highly ornamental:
That which lies here in ruins, the highly
significant fragment, the remnant, is, in fact,
the finest material in baroque creation. For it
is common practice in the literature of the
baroque to pile up fragments ceaselessly,
without any strict idea of a goal, and, in the
unremitting expectation of a miracle, to take
the repetition of stereotypes for a process of
intensification. (Benjamin 178)
Without purpose, allegory became a
hollow shell with no deeper meaning, no
transcendence. Postmodern allegory takes this
even farther. Summarizing the writings of
Charles Jencks, Steven Connor states that
“postmodernist allegory does not allow us to be
sure of what the main story is, nor what the
underlying myth may be that it alludes to” (97).
This certainly describes Williams's text. We
wander through the text's desert landscape
searching for allegorical meaning but finding
only false trails. Desert Quartet illustrates
allegory's ruined state, but it also shows us how
lovely these ruins can be.
WOMEN'S WAYS OF WRITING
Terry Tempest Williams has stated that, in
writing Desert Quartet, she “wanted the book to
be like a landscape one must enter on its own
113
terms. [She] wanted the structure to mirror the
desert” (qtd. in Bartkevicius and Hussmann 4).
Certainly she achieved this goal. We have no
“coherent” narrative in the prose poem, no
linear plot development, no telos toward which
the plot is moving. Instead, the text wanders
like the desert trails; it meanders like the desert
river. Similarly, the Song of Songs gives us no
linear narrative. The narrative—what there is of
one—follows the young Shumalite woman
through the town in search of her lover. In the
course of the prose poem we enter into gardens,
vineyards, and bedroom chambers, but we do
not get a coherent narrative pattern.
Furthermore, neither text makes a singular
argument. Both depict the ecstacy of erotic
union, but neither argues a specific point. Both
texts mirror the meandering landscape in
structure and in logic.
Williams has stated that in writing Desert
Quartet, she attempted to “explore the use of
language in its pure sense, to use the word ‘erot-
ic' to intensify, to expand our view of Eros, to
literally be in relationship on the page” (qtd. in
Bartkevicius and Hussmann 3). Williams
acknowledges the influence of the French
feminist theorist Hélène Cixous on her writing
and says she was attempting to use Cixous's
admonition to “write out of her body”—to
“bypass the intellect and feel the words before
[she] under[stood] them” (4). In so doing, she
hoped to create a “more organic form where it
is circular, not linear, where it is tactile, not
simply on the surface” (4).
Williams, like Cixous, argues that women's
language in general is more organic and circular
than men's language. “A woman's language is
about meanderings, like a river” (Williams, qtd.
in Pearlman 123). Likewise, Cixous contends
that, since women don't deny their unconscious
physiological drives as men do, they support the
“logic” of their texts with their bodies (Cixous
1457). Thus, a woman's text “is never simple or
linear or `objectivized,' universalized” (Cixous
and Clément 92), but is “traversed by lilting
flows” (93). Women's use of language and
metaphor is different from that of men and
originates from a nearness to their desires.
If the Song of Songs, like Desert Quartet,
was written by a woman, this may explain why
both Rabbi Akiba and Joseph Smith found that
text disturbing.17 It does not make its point in a
masculine way. Both the Song of Songs and
Desert Quartet are prose poems with confusing,
labyrinthine structures. Such a text, Cixous
claims, “always falls on the deaf, masculine ear,
which can only hear language that speaks in the
masculine” (Cixous and Clément 92).
Responding to the texts, a male reader may be
tempted to ask, “What's the point?” while a
female reader may be perfectly content with
their meandering “meanings.” In her
(wo)manifesto, “The Laughing Medusa,”
Hélène Cixous calls for woman to “put herself
into the text—as into the world and into history”
(1454). Ultimately, both the author of the Song
of Songs and Terry Tempest Williams have not
only written themselves into their texts, but
into the landscape, and thus into the world and
into history.
BOYD PETERSEN is currently pursuing a Ph.D. in
comparative literature at the University of Utah. He
lives in Provo with his wife, Zina, and children,
Mary and Christian. This paper was originally
presented at the conjoint session of the Association
for Mormon Letters and the Rocky Mountain
Modern Language Association on 11 October 1999.
NOTES
1. The Writings, or ketubîm, is the section of
the Hebrew Bible which contains miscellaneous
Wisdom literature, poetry and history. It did not
become canonized until several centuries after the
Torah and the Prophets.
114
2. As David Blumenthal has noted, there are
two words in the Song of Songs that might be read
as names of God: shalhevetyah (Song 8:6) and bi-
tseva'ot (Song 2:7 and 3:5). The Talmud
comprehends tseva'ot as a name of God, most likely
because in all but five cases when it is used in the
Bible it is linked with either the Tetragrammaton or
with some form of Elohim. However, most
translations of the Song of Songs interpret bi-tseva'ot
as “gazelles.” Shalhevetyah may be read two ways: as
two words it would mean “fire of Yah [God]”;
however, it is usually rendered as one word meaning
“great fire” (81-82). Blumenthal's and Michael
Broyde's essays both give very insightful background
about problems of canonization of the Song of
Songs.
3. Despite his misgivings about the book, one
passage from the KJV translation of the Song of
Songs was quoted by Smith in two of his revelations.
Doctrine and Covenants 105:31 and 109:73 both
quote Song of Songs 6:10, “Who is she that looketh
forth as the morning, fair as the moon, clear as the
sun, and terrible as an army with banners.”
Furthermore, in his public addresses, Smith twice
quoted from the Songs of Songs—once Song of
Songs 2:15 and once again 6:10. (See Ehat and
Cook 130, 166.) Clearly, Smith was familiar with
the text and felt free to quote from it despite his
misgivings. It seems that Smith was not so much
disturbed by the text as he was unable to
comprehend it.
4. Taking a more nuanced potion, Marcia Falk
argues that the text is a composite of both male and
female voices coming from a prior oral tradition
(134-35).
5. See Harold Bloom's introduction to David
Rosenberg's translation of The Book of J.
6. Since vowel points were not added to the
Hebrew text until the Middle Ages by the Masorites,
we cannot make any arguments for assonance
within the text.
7. Similarly, in verse four of that same chapter,
there is a punning between the words for tower
(migdal), shield (magen), and warriors (giborim).
8. All quotations from the Song of Songs
come from the Jewish Publication Society
translation of the Hebrew Bible unless otherwise
noted.
9. Desert Quartet was originally published in
four separate installments in the New England Review,
volume 16, 1994. In that version, Williams used a
first person point of view for the first sequence, a
third-person feminine point of view for the second,
a third-person masculine for the third; and a third-
person plural for the fourth. Williams has stated
that her publisher asked her to make the change to
use the first-person point of view throughout, which
“took me closer to the truth,” (qtd. in Bartkevicius
and Hussmann 6). She also risked readers making
the assumption that the female character is she. “I
realized that in our culture we have no protection
when we choose to enlist a first person narrator
because readers naturally assume it is you. . . . But I
believe there is something larger at work, the ‘I'
becomes the universal ‘I'” (6).
10. Critics who would dismiss an allegorical
reading of the Song, often ignore the fact that any
interpretation is a form of allegory. And many
critics argue for interpretations that are much more
improbable than the one historically passed down
for this text.
11. While LeCocque is quick to note that this
text alludes to other parts of the Bible and to the
temple, he dismisses allegorical readings of the text.
12. Frankincense, notes LaCocque, is
mentioned exclusively for liturgical uses in the Bible
(106, note 11).
13. See 1 Kings 5:8, 10; 6:15, 34; 2 Kings
19:23; Isaiah 37:24; Jeremiah 22:6-7; and Ezekiel
17:3, 22-23.
14. While some commentators have argued
that this text is liturgical, deriving from pagan
Bergant, Dianne. “‘My Beloved Is Mine and I Am
His' (Song 2:16): The Song of Songs and
Honor and Shame.” Semeia 68 (1994): 23-40.
Bloch, Ariel, and Chana Bloch. The Song of Songs: A
New Translation. Berkeley: U of California P,
1995.
Bloom, Harold, and David Rosenberg. The Book of J.
New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1990.
Blumenthal, David R. “Where God Is Not: The
Book of Esther and Song of Songs.” Judaism
115
fertility cults, I reject this argument and see instead
a text which alludes to the temple without being a
part of its rites.
15. The Targum, for example, saw the Song as
a historical account of God's relations with Israel
from the Exodus until the coming of the Messiah
(Bloch and Bloch 31).
16. For an overview of Medieval allegories on
the Song, see E. Ann Matter's The Voice of My
Beloved: The Song of Songs in Western Medieval
Christianity.
17. As Cixous stated, a woman's voice “sings
from a time before law, before the Symbolic took
one's breath away and reappropriated it into
language under its authority of separation” (Cixous
and Clément 93). As such, she cautions, men don't
like women's texts, but warns: “Let the priests
tremble, we're going to show them our sexts!”
(Cixous 1460). Or, as Williams states, “The
language that women speak when nobody's there to
correct them oftentimes can make people
uncomfortable because it threatens to undermine
the status quo. It's what we know in our hearts that
we don't dare speak . . .” (123).
WORKS CITED
Alter, Robert. The Art of Biblical Poetry. New York:
Basic Books, 1985.
Bartkevicius, Jocelyn, and Mary Hussmann. “A
Conversation with Terry Tempest Williams.”
Iowa Review 27 (1997): 1-23.
Benjamin, Walter. The Origin of German Tragic
Drama. 1963. Trans. John Osborne. London:
Verso, 1998.
44 (1995): 80-92.
Broyde, Michael J. “Defilement of the Hands,
Canonization of the Bible, and the Special
Status of Esther, Ecclesiastes, and Song of
Songs.” Judaism 44 (1995): 65-79.
Cixous, Hélène. “The Laugh of the Medusa.” Trans.
Keith Cohen and Paula Cohen. Signs 1 (1976):
875-93. Rpt. in The Critical Tradition: Classic
Texts and Contemporary Trends. Ed. David H.
Richter. 2d ed. Boston: Bedford, 1998. 1454-
 66.
Cixous, Hélène, and Catherine Clément. The Newly
Born Woman. Trans. Betsy Wing. Minneapolis:
U of Minnesota P, 1986.
Connor, Steven. Postmodernist Culture. 2d ed.
Oxford: Blackwell, 1997.
Ehat, Andrew F., and Lyndon W. Cook. The Words
of Joseph Smith. Orem, UT: Grandin P, 1991.
Falk, Marcia. The Song of Songs: A New Translation
and Interpretation. San Francisco: Harper,
1990.
Fisch, Harold. Poetry with a Purpose: Biblical Poetics
and Interpretation. Bloomington: Indiana UP,
1988.
Gass, William H. Fiction and the Figures of Life. New
York: Knopf, 1970.
LaCocque, André. Romance She Wrote: A Hermeneut-
ical Essay on Song of Songs. Harrisburg, PA:
Trinity, 1998.
Landy, Francis. Paradoxes of Paradise: Identity and
Difference in the Song of Songs. Sheffield:
Almond, 1983.
—. “The Song of Songs.” The Literary Guide to the
Bible. Eds. Robert Alter and Frank Kermode.
Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1987. 305-19.
LeClair, Tom, and Larry McCaffery, eds. “A Debate:
Willam Gass and John Gardner.” Anything
Can Happen: Interviews with Contemporary
American Novelists. Urbana: U of Illinois P,
Austen's Granddaughter:
Louise Plummer Re(de)fines Romance
John Bennion
As my two daughters became teenagers
and their relationships with boys became more
complicated, they struggled to read the
confusing cultural signs of romance. They had
to make decisions: Would they foster several
relaxed relationships or focus on one boy? How
116
1983.
London, Scott. “The Politics of Place: An Interview
with Terry Tempest Williams.” Insight &
Outlook. 1995. http:// www.west.
net/%7Einsight/ ttw. htm (8 Sept. 1997).
Lundquist, John M. “What is a Temple? A Prelimin-
ary Typology.” The Quest for the Kingdom of God:
Studies in Honor of George E. Mendenhall. Wino-
na Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 1983. 205-19.
Matter, E. Ann. The Voice of My Beloved: The Song of
Songs in Western Medieval Christianity.
Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 1990.
Matthews, Robert J. “A Plainer Translation”: Joseph
Smith's Translation of the Bible. Provo, UT:
Brigham Young UP, 1975.
Pardes, Ilana. Countertraditions in the Bible: A Feminist
Approach. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1992.
Pearlman, Mickey. Listen to Their Voices: Twenty
Interviews with Women Who Write. New York:
Norton, 1993.
Tanakh: The Holy Scriptures. Philadelphia: Jewish
Publication Society, 1988.
Trible, Phyllis. God and the Rhetoric of Sexuality.
Philadelphia: Fortress, 1978.
Williams, Terry Tempest. An Unspoken Hunger:
Stories from the Field. New York: Vintage, 1994.
—. Desert Quartet. New York: Pantheon, 1995.
—. Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place.
New York: Vintage, 1991.
physical would their relationships be? How
emotionally consuming? As we struggled
through those years together (my wife says that
parents experience puberty again with their
children), I have been grateful for the novels of
Louise Plummer. Her voice is like that of a
friendly aunt who knows plenty of stories about
love. She is neither as dogmatic as parents nor
as mercurial as peers. Reading her modern-day
novels of manners helped my daughters walk
through the forest of adolescence.
Plummer's intelligent, ironic voice reminds
me of Jane Austen. Both write about young
women whose happiness is at first threatened
by faulty judgment and then secured by solid
decisions. Both authors examine the differences
between love, which is enduring, and
infatuation, which is transient. In addition to
modeling the growth of female characters who
gradually discover a reliable manner of loving,
both writers contrast the qualities of young men
who are worthy or unworthy of love. Both
authors also compare the ways stories of love
are told, whether in the manner of romances
(where excitement depends on insecurity and
self-deceit) or of novels (where fidelity to
realistic human behavior is the standard).
Recently, after years of reading Plummer's
novels, my younger daughter discovered Jane
Austen. When I asked her what she likes about
Austen she said, “Because she's very witty.
Sarcastic. What she says is clear. And because
you know there's going to be a happy ending.”
At sixteen she's learning to read Austen's irony.
I believe she was prepared for that leap by
reading contemporary authors like Plummer,
whose cultural signs are more accessible than
Austen's. Young people need contemporary
authors who are careful to build bridges of
understanding back to the language, techniques,
and deepest cultural values of the classics.
What specifically are those values? Austen
allows for Persuasion based on rational social
judgment rather than on bias. She favors
choices about love and marriage which involve
objective social standards rather than either
overweening Pride or distorting Prejudice. Her
ideal basis of judgment is a balance of Sense
117
and Sensibility. Her work is in reaction to the
excesses found in the Gothic romance; but
instead of merely being anti-romantic, she
endeavors to find a way to incorporate
sentiment into her formula for successful love
and marriage.
An example of the rational ideal is found
in Pride and Prejudice, where Elizabeth Bennet
tries to change her sister's sympathetic
impression of an engagement. “You shall not,
for the sake of one individual, change the
meaning of principle and integrity, nor
endeavour to persuade yourself or me, that
selfishness is prudence, and insensibility of
danger, security for happiness” (94). In that
book and in Austen's other novels, this strictly
rational ideal is softened by a kinder heart, in
this case, that of Jane Bennet, who sees good in
everyone.
In like manner, Louise Plummer shows
young women the difference between romantic
obsessions, infatuations, and a more self-
actualized kind of love. She unmasks the
manipulation and deceit found in modern
romance novels, movies, and TV shows. She,
like Austen, believes that unbridled romantic
emotion sets up young men and women for
trouble. Her books, like Austen's, are novels of
manners, because readers judge good behavior
through seeing the mistakes of the characters,
who generally come to a stable vision by the
end of the story. This description might imply
that I think that the main virtue in Plummer's
work is the didactic content, but like Austen,
her narratives are never pushy, using irony and
a balanced narrative to give readers a broader
range of options than they had before sitting
down with the book.
Because love has to do with verbal as well
as physical commerce, both authors explore the
ways we talk and write about love. Some brief
examples will show how Austen and Plummer
criticize the excessive language and exaggerated
manners of romance novels. In Northanger
Abbey Austen makes clear that hyperbole or
deceit in matters of love can produce terrible
social damage. A naive but pure-hearted
heroine, Catherine Moreland, goes to Bath as
traveling companion to a Mrs. Allen. In Bath
she meets Isabella and John Thorpe, who are
expert dissemblers, making play with
manipulating the truth. She falls in love with
Henry Tilney, who is much more forthright.
Through the progress of the novel, Austen's
ironic voice gives readers the insight to judge
between the two approaches to love and life.
Austen embeds in her novel references to
Gothic romances which are (to use Henry
James's metaphor) like a free-floating balloon,
untethered from reality. The following
conversation occurs early in the book between
the heroine and her friend, Isabella:
“Have you gone on with Udolpho?” [Ann
Radcliffe's Mysteries of Udolpho, 1794]
“Yes, I have been reading it ever since I
woke; and I am got to the black veil.”
“Are you, indeed? How delightful! Oh! I
would not tell you what is behind the black
veil for the world! are not you wild to know?”
“Oh! yes, quite; what can it be?—But do not
tell me—I would not be told upon any account.
I know it must be a skeleton, I am sure it is
Laurentina's skeleton. Oh! I am delighted with
the book! I should like to spend my whole life
in reading it. I assure you if it had not been to
meet you, I would not have come away from it
for all the world.”
“Dear creature! how much I am obliged to
you; and when you have finished Udolpho, we
will read the Italian together; and I have made
out a list of ten or twelve more of the same
kind for you. . . . Castle of Wolfenback,
Clermont, Mysterious Warnings,
Necromancer of the Black Forest, Midnight
Bell, Orphan of the Rhine, and Horrid
Mysteries. Those will last us some time.”
118
“Yes, pretty well; but are they all horrid, are
you sure they are all horrid?” (60-61)
Soon readers see that, in Isabella's case,
life imitates fiction. She speaks after the
manner of what she reads—full of passion,
improbability, and exaggeration. Through the
course of the novel, Catherine discovers that
Isabella is unreliable and that her liberties with
truth harm herself and others.
In Plummer's The Romantic Obsessions and
Humiliations of Annie Sehlmeier, the protagonist
and her new friend Maggie use the same kind
of language to discuss a contemporary romance:
“Have you read this?” She pulled a tattered
paperback book from one of the lower shelves:
The Thorn Birds by Colleen McCullough.
I shook my head.
“Oh, you must read it. It's so wonderful.
It's also a television movie with Richard
Chamberlain—the heroine's name is Meggie
and it's all about forbidden love.” Her eyes
widened. Forbidden love was better than
ordinary love. “I've got it on video and have
seen it a million times. The book's better
though.” She forced it into my hands. (34-35)
Readers of both Plummer and Austen
begin to question whether forbidden love, with
its unstable emotional truth, is better than
ordinary love. They are given the mental tools
with which to criticize novels and movies about
love.
Plummer mocks the conventions and
language of romance novels by having her
protagonist Kate write one. The story begins
when Richard, whom Kate has long admired,
comes home from college for Christmas
vacation. Kate and her best friend Ashley
become rivals for his love. Kate thinks of love
as something that grows out of an enduring
friendship; for Ashley, who has steeped herself
in romance novels, love is immediate—sexual
attraction and little else. It becomes clear that
Kate is writing the novel to work out her ideas
about love. In the prologue she self-consciously
imitates a romance:
This is one of those romance novels. You
know, that disgusting kind with kisses that last
three paragraphs and make you want to put
your finger down your throat to induce
projectile vomiting. It is one of those books
where the hero has a masculine-sounding
name that ends in an unvoiced velar plosive,
like CHUCK (although that is not my hero's
name), and he has sinewy muscles and makes
guttural groanings whenever his beloved is
near. In romance novels, the heroine has a
feminine-sounding name made up of liquid
consonants, like FLEUR, and has full,
sensuous lips—yearning lips. I think the word
“yearning” will appear at least a thousand
times in this book. The heroine also has long
silky legs and is a virgin. (1)
Kate knows about romances because Ash-
ley has always shared them with her. Like Isabel-
la, Ashley not only reads but lives romances,
believing that love involves manipulation and
deceit more than it does honesty.
The manners and language of the foils in
both Austen's novel and Plummer's are
remarkably similar; Isabella and Ashley could
be sisters. Isabella says to Catherine,
“Oh! they [men] give themselves such airs.
They are the most conceited creatures in the
world and think themselves of so much
importance!—By the bye, though I have
thought of it a hundred times, I have always
forgot to ask you what is your favourite
complexion in a man. Do you like them best
dark or fair? (63)
Move her forward two centuries and she could
be Ashley:
“None of that counts,” Ashley said, finally
turning away from the mirror to look at me.
“What counts?”
Her tongue flickered between her teeth.
“Thighs,” she said slowly. “Boys' thighs.”
That was it? Thighs? Thighs? What about
warmth and kindness and humor? What about
119
intelligence and stability? (47)
Unlike these two characters, the authors
admire language which is “plain, unaffected,
gentleman-like English” (Emma 432). In Emma
Austen has Knightley say, “If you were as much
guided by nature in your estimate of men and
women, and as little under the power of fancy
and whim in your dealings with them, as you
are where these children are concerned, we
might always think alike” (121). In like manner,
Plummer has her protagonist admire frank
language and realistic portrayal of human
relations:
Reality is not appropriate to the [romance]
genre. I just read a couple or Harlequins, and
I've got to edit out some of the reality in this
novel as it is. I'll have to cut Midgely and the
cancer (he died three weeks ago). I won't say
anything about Richard receiving an early
acceptance into the University of Minnesota's
American Studies Program with a full
fellowship, while I have applied to Columbia
and do not expect to be turned down. Even if
Richard and I marry down the line and have
2.5 children—a real possibility—I need to find
out first who Kate Bjorkman is. (181)
The ironic reference to the act of writing
helps Plummer teach readers about the
differences between romances and novels. Her
novel is presented as a workshop on how to
write about love. Plummer even includes
“Revision Notes,” italicized sections in which
she meditates on the difficulty of saying the
truth, especially when her tools are the
language and conventions of the romance
novel.
The similarities I've outlined between
Northanger Abbey and The Romantic Obsessions
and Humiliations of Annie Sehlmeier hold true for
the rest of the books by both authors. A close
comparison of Emma and The Romantic
Obsessions and Humiliations of Annie Sehlmeier
can show that both authors follow a fairly
consistent pattern of moving from false
judgment to true judgment as the protagonists
come of emotional age.
In Austen's novel Emma sets herself up as
a judge in matters of love. As a matchmaker,
she will manage the exciting economics of the
heart. Through the bulk of the novel, Emma is
ignorant of her true love for John Knightley,
based on a long friendship. For part of the
book she believes she loves Frank Churchill, a
gentleman who has been adopted by a family of
high social status. Plummer's protagonist is
newly immigrated from Holland. She has
feelings for two boys, Jack Wakefield, who is a
reliable friend and who loves her, and Tom
Woolley, who plays at emotion, feigning
passion for every girl he knows. Both authors
have their characters flirt with what appears to
be love, but which is really surface infatuation.
Austen's protagonist meditates on her own lack
of reaction when she is separated from the
supposed object of her affection, Frank
Churchill:
Emma continued to entertain no doubt of
her being in love. Her ideas only varied as to
the how much. At first, she thought it was a
good deal; and afterwards, but little. She had
Emma believes she is in love, but she is
wise enough to doubt how deep and enduring is
her affection. Plummer's Annie Sehlmeier is
more self-deluding about her own motives. Her
younger sister Henny has hired her to drive her
to the home of a handsome boy, where they spy
on him and repeatedly toilet paper his car.
Annie muses:
If I did it, if I went with her [Henny], I
would be like her. I would be like a person
who kissed her high school president in back
of the piano at assembly.
No, I wasn't anything like that. I really loved
Woolley. It made me sick, I loved him so much.
Real love. It was different with Henny. She had
the hots. That was different from love. I was in
120
great pleasure in hearing Frank Churchill
talked of . . . ; she was very often thinking of
him, and quite impatient for a letter, that she
might know how he was, how were his spirits,
how was his aunt, and what was the chance of
his coming to Randalls again this spring. But,
on the other hand, she could not admit
herself to be unhappy, nor, after the first
morning, to be less disposed for employment
than usual; she was still busy and cheerful,
and pleasing as he was, she could yet imagine
him to have faults; and farther, though
thinking of him so much, and, as she sat
drawing or working, forming a thousand
amusing schemes for the progress and close of
their attachment, fancying interesting
dialogues and inventing elegant letters; the
conclusion of every imaginary declaration on
his side was that she refused him. Their
affection was always to subside into friendship.
Every thing tender and charming was to mark
their parting; but still they were to part. When
she became sensible of this, it struck her that
she could not be very much in love; for in
spite of her previous and fixed determination
never to quit her father, never to marry, a
strong attachment certainly must produce
more of a struggle than she could foresee in
her own feelings. (268)
love. (111)
While the cultures on which the two
novels are based are quite different, both
authors use these scenes to enable a reader to
question the depth of the attraction. In a later
scene Annie continues her self-delusion:
I looked up. Woolley was removing his shirt.
I let out an involuntary gasp. I had seen the
black hair on his chest and, oh awesome, I
had seen his navel. My insides shuffled about.
I felt dizzy. He was so beautiful.
Henny fanned herself with an empty
envelope. “He's so beautiful,” she swooned.
“Don't be an idiot,” I snapped. “Haven't
you ever seen a boy's chest before?”
“Wake up, Annie, that is not a boy's chest.”
 “This is so stupid,” I said, starting up the car.
I didn't turn the lights on. “I don't know why I
do this.”
“For the money, sister dear. For the money.”
She placed the five dollars on the dashboard.
I will go to Hell, I thought. I felt weak all
over. (118)
Although Annie continues to think that her
attraction to Woolley is deeper than Henny's,
she does feel guilty for enabling Henny's
delusion. She mocks Henny's infatuation, at the
same time keeping her own passion secret.
While the focus on flesh is very different from
anything in Austen's works, the use of irony is
similar.
The young women in both novels have
friends with cooler heads—the men who love
them enough to be honest. This contrast
enables Plummer and Austen not only to model
stable male characters, but also to explore how a
change in vision is required to admire realistic
qualities more than romantic heroism. The
primary characteristic of the ideal male in both
novels is their frank honesty. Austen writes:
Mr Knightley, in fact, was one of the few
people who could see faults in Emma Wood-
house, and the only one who ever told her of
them: and though this was not particularly
agreeable to Emma herself, she knew it would
be so much less so to her father, that she would
not have him really suspect such a
circumstance as her not being thought perfect
by every body.
“Emma knows I never flatter her,” said Mr
Knightley. . . . (42)
In similar manner, Plummer gives Annie's
friend Jack, the quality of saying what he thinks
without contrivance:
After the dance Jack and I stood under the
yellow light of the porch and held each other,
our faces touching.
“I feel like I'm hugging a bear.” Jack laughed.
His mouth was close to my ear, his face was
warm and smelled of spice.
121
“You smell wonderful,” I couldn't help
saying.
“You are wonderful. I like you better
than . . .”
“Life itself,” I finished for him.
“No that's no good.” He laughed. “Sounds
like Woolley, the golden throat of
insincerity.”
I drew my head back so I could see his
face. “You think that?” I asked. “But he's
your friend.”
“But he wouldn't be if he talked to me the
way he talks to girls. I'd want to throw up.
Like the way he's always telling you that you
look like Meryl Streep. It's so insulting.”
“But Meryl Streep is lovely,” I argued. “It's
flattering to be compared with her.”
“Yes, but you're you. You're not one of
those made-up movie star fantasies. You're
real. You're better. I think you're prettier, for
that matter.” (124)
Through these scenes, both authors show
how indulging in fantasy causes problems in
relationships. One is that each protagonist
misinterprets the actions and motivations of
others. Emma believes that Frank Churchill is
pining for her:
He was silent. She believed he was looking
at her; probably reflecting on what she had
said, and trying to understand the manner.
She heard him sigh. It was natural for him to
feel that he had cause to sigh. He could not
believe her to be encouraging him. A few
awkward moments passed, and he sat down
again. . . . He stopt again, rose again, and
seemed quite embarrassed.—He was more in
love with her than Emma had supposed; and
who can say how it might have ended, if his
father had not made his appearance? (265)
He is actually in love with Jane Fairfax, a
woman Emma dislikes. She mistakes his
actions because she has constructed a false
story to explain his behavior. Elsewhere
Austen suggests that Emma is an “imaginist,”
leaping quickly to exotic interpretations of
simple matters.
Although Plummer's Annie knows that
Woolley is just flirting with her, she believes
that her own emotions are deeper than his. She
allows herself to be affected by his advances
because she has misinterpreted her own
emotions, writing a false script for herself
similar to the one Emma crafted. Plummer
writes:
He sat down next to me, his coat thrown over
the back of the chair. He wore a new sweater,
of dark green, with two red reindeer facing
each other on the front. His face was tanned
from skiiing over the holidays. He looked
absolutely stunning, and I felt my Christmas-
day resolve fading. The pure physical beauty of
him made me weak and dizzy.
“How are you doing?” He leaned into me
and smiled.
I didn't move away. I smiled back without
answering.
He opened a book and pretended to read
the same way I pretended to read. His body
seemed to give off electrical charges. My insides
trembled like Oma's chocolate pudding. I tried
following the text with my pencil, marking
lightly each sentence as I read it. For a half
hour, I worked in that tremulous state.
Then Woolley reached over and wrote
lightly in my notebook, “I love Annie
Sehlmeier.” He watched my face while I read it.
I swallowed. I did not believe it, but I liked
seeing it written in his hand. My face burned.
(130)
Through indulging in fantasy about love, both
women find that they make embarrassing and
potentially damaging mistakes of judgment.
In the segment of the novel which begins
before the following exchange, Emma and
Harriet have discussed the latter's attachment to
a man above her station. The women have
discovered that they misunderstood each other.
When Harriet talked about feeling warmth
toward a man who had rescued her, she meant—
122
not Frank Churchill, who came to her aid
when she was threatened by gypsies—but
Emma's own good friend, George Knightley,
who had danced with Harriet when no one
else would. Emma's reaction is stark:
“Good God!” cried Emma, “this has been a
most unfortunate—most deplorable
mistake!—What is to be done?” . . .
“I do not wonder, Miss Woodhouse,”
[Harriet] resumed, “that you should feel a
great difference between the two, as to me or
as to anybody. You must think one five
hundred million times more above me than
the other. But I hope, Miss Woodhouse, that
supposing—that if—strange as it may appear—.
But you know they were your own words,
that more wonderful things had happened,
matches of greater disparity had taken place
than between Mr Frank Churchill and me;
and, therefore, it seems as if such a thing
even as this, may have occurred before—and
if I should be so fortunate, beyond
expression, as to—if Mr Knightley should
really—if he does not mind the disparity, I
hope, dear Miss Woodhouse you will not set
yourself against it, and try to put difficulties
in the way. But you are too good for that, I
am sure.” . . .
“Have you any idea of Mr. Knightley's
returning your affection?” (397)
Emma's question shows that she sees the
damage her romantic speculations have done
to Harriet, who loves a man so far above her
that he will certainly reject her.
In like manner, Annie's excesses harm
herself and the friend who really loves her,
Jack Wakefield. In the middle of the night she
sneaks to Woolley's house and toilet-papers
his car. She doesn't know that all her friends
are hiding on the roof, watching her dance:
“Is that you, Apollo?” [her nickname for
Woolley] I whispered rashly and grinned at
the car. “Come to your maiden queen,” I
said to the car, extended my arm to it.
 “Come closer.”
I held both arms above my head, swaying
them as gracefully as I could in my down jacket,
tr[ying] to make them look like Ms. Needham's
modern dance class. I swayed, bent my body
forward, and planted a kiss smack on the hood
of the car. Even in the moonlight, I could see
the pink imprint clearly. “My love,” I said and
pressed my lips again on the cool metal. . . .
“My love,” I said again and planted one kiss,
two, three more kisses on the hood of
Woolley's car. More lipstick and more kisses—I
wanted to cover Woolley's face, those lips,
those dimples, those eyes with kisses. I
continued kissing and calling the car “Woolley
dear” and “Woolley darling.” I let my lips
linger on the white painted surface.
That's when I heard a clear voice in the
night: “Stop it. Please stop it!”
That was when a blinding light beamed
directly into my eyes from the roof of the
garage. (139-40)
Her friend Jack has been watching her silly
dance, and it nearly costs her his friendship.
Like Emma, Annie is a good person who has
been misled by her own emotions.
Toward the ends of their novels, both
authors allow their heroines to have epiphanies
during which they meditate on their folly.
Emma sees the damage she has done to Harriet:
Her own conduct, as well as her own heart,
was before her in the same few minutes. She
saw it all with a clearness which had never
blessed her before. How improperly had she
been acting by Harriet! How inconsiderate,
how indelicate, how irrational, how unfeeling
had been her conduct! What blindness, what
madness, had led her on! It struck her with
dreadful force, and she was ready to give it
every bad name in the world. (398)
In parallel fashion, Annie's imagination
plays over and over her foolish performance
with Woolley's car:
I closed my eyes and saw the heads of my
friends staring down at me from Woolley's
123
garage. Maggie's face, crying. Jack's face. Jack.
Had I put that pain there? Was I capable of
that? I didn't mean to. It was just my secret.
It was just silly fun. I saw Woolley's face. He
hardly seemed worth the humiliation now.
My face was wet again. Really very wet. I
rubbed it. I couldn't stop this silent crying. I
must be getting sick I thought. I must be ill.
(142)
Instead of allowing their characters to be
destroyed by these minor crimes of romance,
each author allows her protagonist to recover.
After self-delusion turns into self-realization,
the characters evaluate what happened. In the
following passage, Knightley talks about Frank
Churchill, but Emma applies the advice to her
own manipulative matchmaking:
“Very bad—though it might have been
worse.—Playing a most dangerous game. Too
much indebted to the event for his
acquittal. . . . —Always deceived in fact by
his own wishes, and regardless of little
besides his own convenience.—Fancying you
to have fathomed his secret. Natural
enough!—his own mind full of intrigue, that
he should suspect it in others.—Mystery;
Finesse—how they pervert the understanding!
My Emma, does not every thing serve to
prove more and more the beauty of truth
and sincerity in all our dealings with each
other?”
Emma agreed to it, . . . with a blush of
sensibility on Harriet's account. . . (430)
She realizes that luck and Mr. Knightly's good
sense saved her from doing serious damage to
her unformed friend, Harriet.
At the end of Plummer's book Annie and
her sister talk about love:
“Do you love Jack?” It was an earnest
question. She leaned against the porch post
and waited for my answer.
“I honestly don't know,” I said. “I haven't
the vaguest notion of what love is. Do you
love Roger?” I asked. They had been dating
steadily since the Christmas Dance.
 “I like to kiss him.” She laughed. “A lot.”
She bit her lip. “I don't think that's necessarily
love, though.”
“Well,” I said. “The imitation is pretty
heady stuff, if you ask me.” I sighed. I felt as
old as Oma. “And it doesn't feel that bad
either.” (170-71)
Plummer, like Austen, allows her
protagonist to be burned a little, just enough
that she respects passion, but not so much that
she is repulsed by love. The characters of both
authors learn to balance emotion and reason
and to distinguish between the cultural signs of
deep and shallow love.
Plummer's two other novels, My Name is
Sus5an Smith. The 5 Is Silent and A Dance for
Three, also follow the career of young women
who learn how to judge character through
making mistakes. The protagonists of these two
novels at first chose to love foolishly, relying on
the loose fidelity to truth commonly found in
romance novels.
In the former novel a budding artist, Susan
Smith, believes that her family is parochial and
doesn't comprehend her artistic vision. Without
real evidence, she believes that her Uncle Willy,
whom she hasn't seen since he abandoned her
mother's sister, understands her vision. She has
admired him in imagination so much that her
vision of him is distorted. “Willy grew in my
mind, godlike, with magical powers to make me
fly through the air, soar like a bird right over the
peaks of the Rocky Mountains. I never stopped
loving Willy” (10).
After graduating from high school she lives
with her aunt in Boston. The story, like all of
Plummer's and Austen's novels, shows her
facing life decisions: Which values of the artistic
community will she adopt, which traditional
values of her family in Utah? Like Austen's
heroines she has an epiphany. After discovering
that Willy lives in Boston, she seeks him out,
124
and they begin dating, even though he is
much older. He is as charming as ever, and
now she is eighteen, apparently ready to feel
grown-up passion for him. When he violates
her trust, using a key she has loaned him to
rob her and her aunt of their possessions, she
feels wretched and thinks:
Willy, how you burn behind my eyes. How you
smart. Your kisses have turned to cold sores and
boils. Your smile scrapes my insides. I am only
eighteen. You should have known better. I am only
eighteen. I was a humiliated eighteen. I was no
match for you. I am so young. Only eighteen.
(188).
Her vision of character, before her epiphany
and after, is reflected by her artistic vision. In
Boston she met a young male artist; she
corresponds with him in Italy. After receiving
some sketches, including some of Uncle Willy,
her friend writes:
But . . . I feel less sure of your sketches of
your Uncle Willy. Does he really look like
that? Is he that square-jawed, and do his eyes
gleam in quite the way your highlights
suggest? Is his hair that thick, that curly? Do
his muscles shine like the photographs in
those muscle-mania magazines? I feel
reluctant to ask these questions, because I
saw your portraits, Susan, saw your clear
vision of other people, and have faith in that
vision, but I have to say, quite honestly, that
the sketches of your uncle Willy seem
distorted to me and therefore false. You
make him look like He-Man. (189-90)
His letter sinks into her heart. She
realizes that she allowed a soft romantic idea
of Uncle Willy to distort what she trusts
most—her sense of what is true artistically. In
the end she adopts a more realistic view of the
world, one connected to both the traditional
values of her parents and the aesthetic
principles of art.
A Dance for Three involves material
Austen wouldn't include in a novel: Hannah
finds herself pregnant, and when she tells Milo,
the father of her unborn child, he hits her and
then lies about having sex with her so that his
senior year of high school won't be ruined.
Despite these cultural differences, the book is
similar to Austen's work because Plummer
focuses on the ways illusion causes personal
damage. Early in Hannah's relationship with
him, Milo hid his violent and selfish nature
behind a cultivated appearance and manners,
the kind of surface sheen that from long before
Austen's day could be misread as good character.
The section is in Hannah's voice:
Milo looks preppy in a fresh blue oxford-cloth
shirt with the sleeves rolled up. “Hey Ziebarth.”
He smiles.
“Come in,” I say, and introduce him to
Mama.
I can see by her face that she is impressed by
Milo's good looks, his height, his neat
appearance, his polite manner. (31)
Hannah is impressed also and fooled by his
feigned kindness and his interest in her moth-
er's bonsai trees. He plays her father's guitar for
her and her mother, and Hannah thinks,
It is the first time Mama and I have seen or
heard this guitar since Daddy died. Milo plays
notes, not just chords. When he lowers his
head, I see Daddy—the same dark hair, the
same pose—Daddy sitting on the edge of the
sofa playing the guitar. Daddy. I feel my chin
tremble and bite hard on my bottom lip. (33)
Like Austen's heroines, she is unable to see
him clearly at first. Eventually they have sex, but
Hannah persists in her belief that he will be like
her father—stable in his love for her, responsible
in caring for her. However, when she tells Milo
she is pregnant, he hits her and later that day
turns to another girl, saying the same words to
her that he said to Hannah, months before,
when he was persuading her to yield to him.
With most of the other books I've
discussed in this article, the protagonist has an
125
epiphany concerning her mistake of
judgment—a life-changing revelation of truth.
However, Hannah is not strong enough
emotionally to stand a revolutionary
transformation of her world. She is so fragile
emotionally that she has a psychotic break,
during which she smashes many of her
mother's pots of bonsai and dances as if she
were a tree. “I see and hear everything as I
sway my branches and kick up my roots,”
describes Hannah. “Perhaps I even see the
policemen grab me from behind. . . . There is
blood on my shirt. I want to wipe it off, but I
can't move either arm. I'm handcuffed.” (70)
Rather than blame Milo, she blames
herself, repressing key facts about his behavior.
During therapy she is forced again and again
to visit in memory two crucial scenes: when
Milo first had sex with her and when he hit
her. Like Austen, Plummer uses fictional
experience to enable readers to read character
as they would read a text—the word-by-word
revelation of interpreted truth. Plummer
italicizes the remembered scene, showing how
the meaning changes as Hannah remembers
more about Milo and judges him more
accurately. The book begins:
Milo wasn't the first boy to kiss me but he was
the first one to bite me. I said “Ouch,” and he
said, “Let me lick it better.” It was when his
mouth was on my shoulder and his hands tugged
my camisole down that I knew I would go all the
way with him. I would lose my virginity with Milo
in the back of his Toyota 4Runner parked above
the cemetery with the lights of Salt Lake City
below. Not that we were looking. I kissed him
fiercely. Too fiercely. He said, “Slow down; it's
better slow.” (1)
Much later, in a conversation with her
therapist, Caitlin, Hannah remembers the
scene fully, finally recognizing what Milo did
to her and seeing him for what he is. Because
trusting her illusion about Milo is part of her
illness, remembering is part of her healing. The
reader, watching the slow expansion of
remembered detail, discovers the truth with
Hannah. The last description of her seduction,
given verbally to Caitlin, goes beyond that on
the first page:
I pulled him down on me. “Now,” I said. “Now.”
It was when Milo was in me that the announcer
on the television said, “The Mailman delivers,” and
Milo arched his torso back and yelled. “The
Mailman delivers. The Mailman delivers!” (150)
Caitlin asks careful questions to help Hannah
see clearly what she had forgotten: that while
they were having sex, Milo was watching a
basketball game on a portable TV. Caitlin asks,
“—when he ‘yelled' he was happy because?”
“Because Karl Malone scored!” Could she
be more dense?
“And?”
I look away then and think of Milo's urgent
rocking, his chest arched away, his attention
focused on the television, his one hand turning
up the sound so that the roar of the crowd
filled the car and above that his yelling, “The
Mailman delivers.” When I look back at Cait-
lin Saunders her face is as sad as I feel. “I think
Milo was happy because he and Karl Malone
scored at the same time,” I say.
She nods again. “I think so too,” she says.
We sit and look at each other. For the first
time, I see that her eyes brim with tears. (151)
Later in group therapy, Hannah is pushed
even further to see how radically foolish her
judgment of Milo was. Forced to publicly admit
that he hit her more than once, she crumbles:
“Oh,” I say, my mouth twisted in a little oval.
“Oh, oh, oh.” . . . He hit me once— here. Milo
hit me here. I fell against the Dumpster and
knocked my head. He said I was a whore. . . . I
went to his house—oh, oh, oh. He was with
Mimi—oh—I hid in the back of the 4Runner.
They made out. Oh, oh, oh. I remember being
a tree and swaying my branches. I remember
being a wild thing and painting my face with
blood. I made more blood with Daddy's old
126
razor blade. I'm bad. Oh, oh, oh.” (157)
At this point she has no illusions left—no
hidden memory. She is unable to maintain
the romantic fantasy that the person she loved
is not magical or heroic, but a shallow, lustful,
selfish nothing. Naive readers who ignored
the implied cruelty in the first description of
Milo's bite, perhaps thinking his aggressive
show of affection interesting or romantic,
must now judge his acts differently. Hannah's
repression of memory is pathological, but it is
similar to the treatment of truth found in
many romantic fantasies, whether written,
imagined, or acted out.
Hannah's recognition of her mistake in
judgment is not the hopeful epiphany of
Austen's novels or of Plummer's earlier ones.
But while there are no more illusions,
Plummer does give hope that Hannah might
love a better person in the future. That hope
is given through Milo's brother, Roman, who
although he is blind in one eye, sees more
clearly than anyone in his family Hannah's
worth as a human being. After Hannah
accuses Milo, he and his parents focus on
their main worry, that the smooth career of
Milo's life might be upset. Roman, however
worries about her, what her life will be like.
He also goes to the hospital to visit the baby.
Much later, after Hannah has given the baby
up for adoption and returned to high school,
she and Roman talk. This section is written
from his point of view:
Her face is in the window [of the car] now,
her hands grasping the door. “You came to
the hospital, didn't you?” Her eyes,
unflinching, look directly into mine. She
won't accept anything but the truth. . . .
I nod.
“Did you like him?” She has to press her
lips together after she asks this question.
“I liked him a lot.” My voice is gravelly
and I turn and see that my knuckles are
 white from clutching the steering wheel too
tightly. “He smiled at me,” I say.
Little shudders of air escape her lips and she
tries to smile. “He was beautiful, wasn't he?”
“Yes,” I say. He was very beautiful.”
Her smile wobbles. “Thanks, Roman,” she
whispers.
I nod.
She backs away from the window, but our
eyes stay focused on each other for a few more
seconds.
Then we look away. (217-18)
Roman's act is a quiet one, simply giving her
empathy. He shows with his white knuckles, the
tone of his voice, and his willingness to look her
in the eye that he knows she has passed through
a difficult experience. Nothing more than that
happens between them, no hint that they will
ever grow closer.
Through this and a few other scenes given
from Roman's perspective, the reader learns to
value him—the klutzy, skinny, one-eyed younger
brother of a boy with the body (and the
character) of a Greek god. If Hannah had loved
Roman first, the reader is able to see, he would
have treated her with kindness and respect. If he
had fathered her child, he would have stayed
with her. His empathy and Hannah's emotional
recovery constitute the hope of the novel.
Sophisticated, funny, and hip, Plummer's
novels are a bridge back to the values and
techniques in Austen's work. While the social
The “Mormon Magical Realism” of Phyllis Barber:
Parting the Veil with Folkloric Literature
Eric A. Eliason
Readers interested in the confluence of
literature with Mormon and Western history
127
codes, especially those pertaining to sexual
passion, have changed dramatically in the two
centuries between these writers, what is
similar is their certainty that honest
expression is better in matters of love than
exaggeration and deceit. Behind their ironies
of people who make mistakes are two certain
and steady voices, telling young women that
they can trust themselves, trust their heads.
JOHN BENNION teaches creative writing, the
British novel, and Mormon literature at Brigham
Young University. He is the author of Breeding
Leah and Other Stories (Signature Books, 1991) and
Falling Toward Heaven (Signature Books, 2000). He
delivered this paper at the AML conjoint meeting
of the Rocky Mountain Language Association,
October 1999, in Santa Fe, New Mexico.
WORKS CITED
Austen, Jane. Emma. 1816. London, Penguin
Books, 1985.
—. Northanger Abbey. 1818. London, Penguin
Books, 1972.
Plummer, Louise. A Dance for Three. New York:
Delacorte Press, 2000.
—. My Name Is Sus5an Smith. The 5 Is Silent. New
York: Delacorte Press, 1991.
—. The Romantic Obsessions and Humiliations of
Annie Sehlmeier. New York: Dell Publishing,
1989.
—. The Unlikely Romance of Kate Bjorkman. New
York: Delacorte Press, 1995.
will recognize Phyllis Barber's name. She wrote
And the Desert shall Blossom about the
construction of Hoover Dam and she won the the story of the brutal coming of age of a young
Associated Writing Programs' creative black girl in Florida. Hurston is a bright star in
nonfiction award for How I Got Cultured: A the constellation of authors who have
Nevada Memoir about her experiences growing contributed to the African American canon.
up. With a growing collection of glowing Hurston was also a student of Franz Boas—
reviews from the likes of Atlantic Monthly, perhaps the most important American
Library Journal, The New York Times Review of anthropologist ever. She became an influential
Books, and Kirkus, she is perhaps the most and innovative folklorist who roamed the
critically acclaimed Mormon writer most South collecting the stories of her people. The
Mormons have never heard about. This should results of her fieldwork efforts are still in print
change. In her most recent collection of short and widely read (Hurston, Mules).
stories, Barber develops a literary interest in Folklorists also take glee in pointing out
folklore to produce what may be her best that only one of Shakespeare's many plays, The
fiction yet. Her turning to traditional oral Tempest, was his original plot idea. The rest
narrative was a wise decision considering the were drawn from history or, more commonly,
historical relationship between folklore and adapted from stories that had been circulating
emergent literary traditions. orally throughout Europe for centuries. My
Oral narrative traditions have figured colleague Gideon Burton tells me that many
prominently in significant American literature quotable quotes we associate with Shakespeare
from the beginning. Washington Irving wrote were actually his renditions of orally circulating
the first American fiction to receive critical sayings and proverbs common in Elizabethan
respect in Europe. He drank deeply from the times.
swirling currents of German-American folktales As Mormon literature comes into its own,
to produce such still-read classics as “The its luminaries have also found fruit along the
Legend of Sleepy Hollow” and “Rip van paths of Mormon folklore. Maurine Whipple's
Winkle.” Literary scholars have long recognized The Giant Joshua drips with references to
Mark Twain's keen ear for American dialect pioneer legends, Three Nephite appearances,
and written literary development of the and frontier folk remedies (Wilson). Levi S.
American tall tale oral narrative genre. Recently, Peterson has made a career probing the
Shelley Fisher Fishkin has demonstrated that backwaters of the Mormon heartland and the
the dialogue in Huckleberry Finn mirrors the LDS psyche with frequent reference to oral and
form, structure, and performative techniques of customary traditions. Three Nephite legends
African American speech styles in general, and are just one well- known Mormon oral narrative
perhaps one witty black boy acquaintance of type. But the legion of writers who have
Twain's in particular. fashioned Nephite stories and similar angelic
This process of dipping into the streams of occurrences into short fiction includes Wallace
traditional verbal art appears whenever an Stegner, Margaret Blair Young, Maurine
ethnic, national, or religious group begins to Whipple, Levi S. Peterson, Neal Chandler,
develop or reinforce a literature of identity. Brent Pribil, Franklin Fisher, Brian Evenson,
Among the most-assigned novels in freshman Rodello Hunter, and Phyllis Barber.1
English courses during the 1990s was Zora To understand the importance of
Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God, folklore's relationship to literature, it is
128
necessary to keep in mind a central issue. Most
story telling in the history of human experience
has been, and still is, communicated orally. It is
impossible to conceive of the existence of
written language, and hence written literature,
without acknowledging that speech and oral
tradition spawned writing and continue to
coexist with writing as the undergirding
structure that holds it up. All written literature
owes oral folklore. But in emergent literatures
such as Mormon literature, this debt tends to
be immediate, openly acknowledged, and self-
consciously regarded as beneficial by authors.
With Parting the Veil, Phyllis Barber jumps
wholeheartedly into the fray of folklore-inspired
Mormon literature. Her stories are small slices
of life juicily rendered in vivid prose more than
they are fully developed complex narratives.
This technique appropriately mirrors the
generic conventions of the anecdotes on which
her stories are based as well as the realities of
today's short-attention-span society. In a move
unusual for a writer using this common
technique, she includes an epilogue describing
her research at the Fife Folklore archive at Utah
State University and she describes each
“original” story from which she drew her
literary ideas. This procedure allows us to see,
more transparently than is often the case, how
authors craft their material using the raw stuff
of legend.
There is something very Mormon about
this relationship. If writing is a creative process,
it is not accomplished ex nihilo. It is always done
by molding matter unorganized or by reshaping
material once organized for a different purpose.
It is a plus for Parting the Veil that Barber lets us
see this. Many of her stories bear only a tenuous
similarity to the archival transcription she
consults. However, in each case an essential
core rooted in the oral traditions of Mormon
people remains intact.
129
Composing fiction in this manner, close
to the tradition, is not only a good means to
make good literature, but it is also an effective
way for authors to remain resonant with their
community. Perhaps not surprisingly, it is the
stories in which Barber strays farthest from the
spirit of the folklore that she runs the greatest
risk of alienating her audience. Her treatment
of some ideas might well have been designed to
move us to higher planes of cultural
introspection but may have the actual result of
baffling and offending some readers. The
certainly provocative and entertaining, but
perhaps inappropriate, extended treatment of
one woman's struggle with her temple garments
in “Ida's Sabbath” is one example (Barber,
Parting, 37-52).
The best story in this collection is the first
and shortest one. It chronicles how a clever wife
reins in the embarrassingly boyish enthusiasm
and passion for precision violence that erupts
in her husband when he finds a whip on an
abandoned wagon while crossing the plains to
Zion.
After long enduring his cracking at little
animals and his showing off to co-travelers she
prays: “Dear God. The whip. It is not good. All
of thy little creatures are unsafe. I promise I'll
never complain about flies again if thou will aid
me in a solution. Karl is forgetting about thee.
His mind must be single to thy glory. Amen”
(3).
The protagonist's mind is enlightened with
a solution that makes the whip disappear and
keeps her husband's ego and position as head of
the house intact. (What she actually does is
chop up the whip and boil it down in a tasty
stew for her husband.) “The Whip,” through
humorous means, raises evocative questions
about gender relationships within LDS
marriages.
The book's title, Parting the Veil, hints at
perhaps the biggest contribution of the
collection overall. In her preface Barber claims,
“When I was a child, it was as common to
think of an angel appearing by my bed as it was
to drink orange juice for breakfast” (ix). While
this statement may be hyperbole, she captures
an essential facet of Mormon epistemology
often overlooked in the past. The foundations
of the Restoration were laid by people who
concretely witnessed heavenly beings acting
among human beings. There is no workable
way to “spiritualize” or “metaphorize” these
events that makes any sense in literary or
historical writing. To the people they happened
to, these events were indeed as real as breakfast.
The legacy of the explosion of otherworldly
contact that opened the Last Dispensation is
that Mormon folklore is rife with the reality of
angels and demons.
Unfortunately, in the most dynamic
period in Mormon literary history, the 1930-60
“Lost Generation” era, writers such as Maurine
Whipple, Vardis Fisher, and Virginia Sorensen
wrote of the bold spiritual truths permeating
Mormon doctrine and folklore as if they were
only nostalgic survivals or psychological
anomalies from a more fired-up but innocent
and gullible age (Geary). If Phyllis Barber feels
ideological kinship with the lost generation, on
this matter she hides it well. Most of the stories
that are not fantastic at face value at least leave
the reader wondering at the reality of strange
visions and touched by their haunting presence.
Barber often takes her reader from the
mundane world to the world of visions and
spirits so quickly and seamlessly that a reader
can be caught off guard. That these two worlds
are one in the classic Mormon mind is, of
course, her very point. She makes this point
well with passages such as the following excerpt
from “Spirit Babies” where a woman
accustomed to visionary experiences has just
130
witnessed her small child plummet head first
out of a shopping cart onto a linoleum
supermarket floor:
Delta Ray rolled onto her hips and cupped
Tara Sue's face in her hands. She closed her
eyes and ears to all the sounds around her,
and in her mind, watched her own body rise
up out of the pasta aisle to the safe place
where nobody could ever be hurt. She watched
Tara Sue rise with her as she pushed aside the
walls of clouds. “You'll bless my baby won't
you?” she asked the first angel she saw, who
happened to be carrying a trumpet. “You'll
bless and protect my littlest angel girl and
make her hair keep curling and her eyes keep
shining like stars, won't you please?” (10)
Indeed, writing about the wondrous reality
of visions, dreams, and very out-of-the-ordinary
happenings is a defining and generative goal in
this collection. Barber is not the first in
Mormon literature to engage in this
revolutionary practice. She along with Margaret
Blair Young, Orson Scott Card, and Levi
Peterson are on the forefront of what could be
called “Mormon magical realism.” This trend
counters the “realism” of the past by refusing to
cram the uncircumscribable variety of human
experience into a naturalistic box and
arrogantly calling such literature “realism”
because it matched the agnostic spirit-empty
worldview of trendy literary elites. Instead,
Mormon magical realism allows for the reality
of sacred experience and the possibility of
bumping into beings of light.
Mormon magical realism was presaged, if
not inspired, by the Latin American magical
realism of the 1960s and 1970s that has come
to characterize the best of Latin American
literature today. The father of this literary
movement, Nobel Prize winner Gabriel García
Márquez, was once asked how he got his bold,
innovative, and now hallmark idea to write
about the fantastic in matter-of-fact tones. He
answered:
The tone I eventually used in One Hundred
Years of Solitude was based on the way my
grandmother used to tell stories. She told
things that sounded supernatural and fantastic,
but she told them with complete
naturalness. . . . What was most important was
the expression she had on her face. She did
not change her expression at all when telling
stories. In previous attempts to write, I tried to
tell the story without believing it. I discovered
that what I had to do was believe in them
myself and write them with the same
expression with which my grandmother told
them: a brick face. (456)2
Again as with Washington Irving, Mark Twain,
and Zora Neale Hurston, we have in Barber's
Mormon magical realism an example of a
pivotal event in literary history owing its
existence to a return to folkways—a return to
tradition that ironically makes it revolutionary
in the eyes of elites detached from regular
people. Barber doesn't quite seek or achieve the
“brick face” tone of Márquez. She instead
prefers to let the wonderful seem wonderful
rather than ordinary. She is also content to let
it seem maybe a little troubling at the same time.
In her evasion of full-on straightfacedness
she has her finger on the pulse of her people.
Many if not most committed Latter-day Saints
are very comfortable with the “without a
shadow of a doubt” testimony rhetoric we have
borrowed from legalese when it is applied to
the First Vision and the coming forth of the
Book of Mormon. However, we are often quite
wary of faith-promoting rumors such as: secret
mission calls to China, accounts of the Three
Nephites saving sister missionaries from serial
rapists, accounts of Steve Martin's conversion,
the attempt of one particular artist to make one
particular painting look more like Christ using
the advice of certain particular eyewitnesses, the
purported visions of little boys caught in garage
131
doors who report that “little birdies” are urging
us all to go to the temple, and Aunt Pearl's
claim that John the Revelator rescued her that
time on the beach in California. In fact, an
Internet site devoted to faithful Mormonism
dedicates a whole page to unceremoniously
debunking such sensationalistic esoterica (LDS).
In allowing only for the possibility of
gullibility rather than insisting on its
ubiquitousness, Barber is far kinder than many
modern Mormon debunkers who seem bent on
branding as a slack-jawed hallucinator any
Latter-day Saint who dares to believe in any
reported manifestation of spiritual gifts not
already correlated in the standard works.
Where Barber may occasionally lose the pulse
of her people is in confusing parting the veil
with embracing the wacky. “Devil Horse”
features Joseph Smith baptizing the horse in
question and “The Boy and the Hand” is about
a floating hand showing up at a family dinner.
Despite occasional strange eddies, Barber is a
delightful breath of fresh air. She is on the right
track in showing that in the Latter-day Saint
worldview “Mormon magical realism” is
perhaps better simply called, “Mormon realism.”
Barber explores the supernatural not only
for its own sake but also to raise curious ethical
questions. In perhaps the most complex and
haunting story in the collection, “Dust to Dust”
(53-64), Barber forcefully poses the following
dilemma. Most Christians would agree that it is
difficult but clear what to do when one is
poverty stricken and a poor stranger comes
asking for food and money. But what do you do
when an obviously well-off stranger, hinting
that he is an angelic emissary, comes knocking,
asking for food and money? In this story,
narrated with an ethereal stream of
consciousness style, a lonely pioneer woman
who yearns for more cultured things than are
available on the frontier—a recurring motif in
this collection—is visited by a handsome
stranger in an ornate carriage who asks for all of
what little money she has.
“Dust to Dust” is set in pioneer times with
curiously contemporary sensibility. Barber's
stories tack back and forth between the
concerns of the past and the concerns of the
present. The chapters span from the first
decade of the Restoration to yesterday. In thus
setting the past in the context of the present,
her work is not unlike that of a historian.
It is a common misconception that
folklore is the opposite of history. History is the
truth about the past while folklore is the
untruth about the past. Or so goes the fallacy.
The reality is much more complicated. History
tends to fetishize primary documents, and the
agendas and assumptions of historians make
history writing anything but a straightforward
unmediated representation of prior events.
Folklore is not simply “stories about the past
that conflict with documents.” As ethno-
historians have shown, oral traditions often
preserve accurate information about past events
for which documents have been lost or never
existed (Vansina). Also, since folklore is a
mirror for the values, concerns, fears, hopes,
prejudices, and aspirations of any group of
people at any given time, studying folklore
should be an essential part of the work of any
social historian, as Robert Darnton has so well
illustrated. While the Mormon studies
community has become more sophisticated in
our understanding of history, we are still naïve
in our understanding of folklore. Phyllis
Barber's book may help us see wider vistas.
By drawing on the creative energy of her
people's folklore, Barber's Parting the Veil
refreshingly revitalizes serious Mormon
literature. While not every Mormon will feel
comfortable with the issues raised and the
language used in every story, the book is a step
132
in the right direction for Signature Books.
Some of this press's editorial choices in fiction—
as Eugene England has pointed out—have in
recent years seemed bent on alienating even the
most open-minded of Latter-day Saint readers.
But Parting the Veil is of good report. We should
seek after such things.
ERIC A. ELIASON is an assistant professor of
English at Brigham Young University where he
teaches folklore and Mormon literature. An edited
collection, Mormons and Mormonism: An Introduction
to an American World Religion has appeared (2001)
from the University of Illinois Press and Jester for the
Kingdom: J. Golden Kimball in Mormon Folklore will
follow.
NOTES
1. Margaret Blair Young feels that her Three
Nephite short story was one of her best creations.
Unfortunately, it was lost in a house fire.
2. Not only do magical realist authors
recognize the value of a straightforward tone in
describing supernatural events, but scholars in the
folklore of religion have been arguing for the same
thing. See Walker and Hufford.
WORKS CITED
Barber, Phyllis. And the Desert Shall Blossom: A Novel.
Salt Lake City: Signature Books, 1993.
—. How I Got Cultured: A Nevada Memoir. Athens: U
of Georgia P, 1992.
—. Parting the Veil: Stories from a Mormon Imagination.
Salt Lake City: Signature Books, 1999.
Chandler, Neal. “The Last Nephite.” Benediction: A
Book of Stories. Salt Lake City: U of Utah P,
1989. 166-94.
Darnton, Robert. The Great Cat Massacre: And Other
Episodes in French Cultural History. New York:
Random House, 1985.
England, Eugene. “Danger on the Right! Danger on
the Left!: Recent Mormon Fiction.” Paper
presented at the Literature and Belief
Colloquium, Brigham Young University,
Provo, Utah, 26 March 1999.
Evenson, Brian. “Sanctified, In the Flesh,” Dialogue:
A Journal of Mormon Thought 29.3 (Fall 1996):
177-85.
Fisher, Franklin. Bones. Salt Lake City: U of Utah P,
1990.
Fishkin, Shelley Fisher. Was Huck Black?: Mark
Twain and African-American Voices. New York:
Oxford UP, 1994.
Hufford, David J. “Reason, Rhetoric, and Religion:
Academic Logic versus Folk Belief.” New York
Folklore 11 (1985): 177-94.
Hunter, Rodello. “I Walk in the Steps” and “The
Three Nephites.” In her A House of Many
Rooms: A Family Memoir. New York: Alfred A.
Knopf, 1965. 128-30, 168-70.
Hurston, Zora Neale. Their Eyes Were Watching God.
New York: Harper Collins, 1999.
—. Mules and Men. New York: Harper Collins, 1990.
Geary, Edward A. “Mormondom's Lost Generation:
The Novelists of the 1940s.” BYU Studies 18
(Fall 1977): 89-98.
LDS Hoaxes and Mormon Urban Legends.
www.ldsworld. com/gems/ul
Marquéz, Gabriel Garciá. One Hundred Years of
Traditional Misperceptions of Zion:
From John Milton to the Crystal City in Hatrack River
Marilyn Brown
Traditionally, the words that describe Zion
are what I call “up” words, or hierarchical
language—words that put something almost out
of reach, or “up.” Webster's defines Zion as
“Heaven, the heavenly city” (1699). The
American Heritage Dictionary agrees: “An
idealized, harmonious community; utopia”
(2077).
Many scriptures describe Zion as an “up”
place—high, mighty, and perfect: “my holy hill
133
Solitude. New York: Harper and Row, 1998.
First English translation, New York: Harper
and Row, 1970. Originally published as Cien
Años de Soledad. Buenos Aires: Editorial
Sudamericanos, 1967.
Peterson, Levi S. “The Third Nephite.” Night Soil.
Salt Lake City: Signature Books, 1990. 19-39.
Pribil, Brent. “The Nephite (A Chronometric
Challenge).” Unpublished manuscript in my
possession. Cited by permission.
Stegner, Wallace. “The Perpetual Patriarchs.”
Mormon Country. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P,
1981. 158-65.
Vansina, Jan. Oral Tradition as History. Madison: U
of Wisconsin P, 1985.
Walker, Barbara, ed. Out of the Ordinary: Folklore and
the Supernatural. Logan: Utah State UP, 1995.
Wilson, William A. “Folklore in the Giant Joshua.”
Proceedings of the Symposia of the Association for
Mormon Letters, 1978-79. Ed. Steven P.
Sondrup. Provo, UT: AML, 1979. 57-63.
Whipple, Maurine. “They Did Go Forth.” Bright
Angels and Familiars. Ed. Eugene England. Salt
Lake City: Signature Books, 1992. 11-19.
of Zion” (Ps. 2:6); “The joy of the whole earth
is mount Zion” (Ps. 48:2), “out of Zion, the
perfection of beauty” (Ps. 50:2), “Let us go up
to Zion unto the Lord” (Jer. 31:6), “The Lord of
Hosts shall reign in Mount Zion” (2 Ne. 24:23),
“Zion must increase in beauty and holiness”
(D&C 82:14), “redemption of Zion must needs
come by power” (D&C 103:15), “He shall
stand upon Mount Zion, and upon the holy
city” (D&C 133:56), and “. . . that they may be
prepared to receive the glory that I have for
them, even the glory of Zion” (D&C 136:31).
You've heard all of the “up” words—glory,
power, beauty, holiness, the mountain, the holy
city, and the Crystal City in Orson Scott Card's
Hatrack River. These words characterize our
vision of the place where God dwells, the place
we want to be. And these words are fine. I love
them too. Up-words get us “looking up.” But at
the same time I want to explore a problem with
such high-flown language.
From the beginning not only the Jews, as
evidenced in our biblical text, but the
Mesopotamians, the Moslems—all people who
have lived upon the earth—search for the elusive
quality of joy. Everybody likes “up.” It's a
characteristic of everyone. Every society has
searched for its own definition of Zion, which is
usually rest of some kind in the elusive “up”
place, whether they call it Zion, heaven, or
whatever.
When Adam found himself deep in
thistles and thorns, he wanted rest, and he
pleaded at the altar with his hands uplifted.
The Mesopotamians built the ziggurats circled
by wall after wall. The central symbol was the
holy of holies high on the pyramid in the center
where a person was safe from harm. Their goal
was to be in a state of peaceful rest. The desire
to build the Tower of Babel was the natural
desire to reach up: “Let us build us a city and a
tower, whose top may reach unto heaven” (Gen.
11:4). Noah's people looked up to the sky to
receive God's promise to which he answered, “I
do set my bow in the cloud” (Gen. 9:13).
It was natural that, to escape the slime pits
of Sodom and Gomorrah, they “fled to the
mountain,” for which refuge “blessed be the
most high God” (Gen. 14:10, 20). “I have lift
up mine hand unto the Lord, the most high
God, the possessor of heaven and earth,”
exulted Abraham to the King of Sodom (Gen.
134
14:22). “Look now toward the heaven,” the
Lord instructed him (Gen. 15:5).
All civilizations almost naturally looked up.
I don't know of any who looked down. Why
did they all look up? We all have more in
common than we think. The main reason is
biological. Everybody begins as a child who
naturally looks up to his or her parents. Where
else would we look for guidance and help?
However, I believe that, when we're older, this
direction of the child's gaze may merit another
point of view.
John Milton is one of those authors who
has added to the tradition of high-flown, well-
meaning language about the power and glory of
heaven. Yet I wonder if this kind of language is
the best there is to help us find the true
meaning of Zion? Instead of always looking up,
do we ever grow up and look each other
straight in the eye?
In Milton, heaven and God, like Zion, are
characterized by “brightness” and “power.” If
you read closely, Satan is an honorable son who
genuinely aspired to be like his father. When
presented with the “up” words, he took them to
heart. He looked to his father's status and
“trusted to have equalled the most high” (bk. I,
l. 40). He believed he could become like his Fa-
ther-God, and he spent his life yearning for that
achievement. In many cases, Milton's language,
like scriptural language, feeds Satan's mispercep-
tions about the power of hierarchies in Zion.
He paints a picture of heaven for Satan in
which “All the ends of heaven appeared /
Under their hierarchs in orders bright” (bk. V,
ll. 586-87). When God calls upon his Son to
save humankind, he does not concentrate on
talking about the service Christ will give or his
filial obedience. Most of his speech is sprinkled
with hierarchical phrases, such as “effectual
might,” and of being “above the rest” (bk. III, ll.
70, 184). God tells his son Satan that he will be
“mightiest in thy father's might” (bk. V, l. 710).
Christ too uses such words and phrases as “in
triumph high” (bk. III, l. 254) and “my
exaltation” (bk. VI, l. 727), and even “I among
them chief” (bk. VI, l. 745).
Though Milton is guilty of continuing
these misperceptions through his use of
traditional hierarchical language, he does
understand that looking upward must be
tempered with “connection,” a phenomenon
which includes making an exchange straight
across, from eye to eye. We may have a little
compassion for Satan when we understand how
he became obsessed with “up” language;
however, he missed one critical step in his
thinking which Adam did not. Adam was
humble enough to take his eyes off the “up”
and to look someone in the eyes and listen.
When the angel Raphael offers knowledge,
Adam is willing to hear.
Raphael admits that Adam and his
offspring have naturally imagined the great
brightness of God. But he says to Adam:
“Consider first, that great / Or bright infers no
excellence” (bk. VIII, ll 89-90). And then he
continues, explaining that “greater and brighter”
means service. The greater and brighter sun, for
example, serves the earth.
. . . the earth
Though in comparison of heaven, so small,
Nor glistering, may of solid good contain
More plenty than the sun that barren shines,
Whose virtue on itself works no effect . . .
(bk. VIII, ll. 91-95)
The great and bright sun serves the “fruit-
full earth,” which receives “his beams” (bk. VIII,
ll. 95-96). The power of the sun is efficacious
only insofar as there is an exchange in which the
earth accepts the sun's rays and benefits from
them. The rays are “unactive else.” They cannot
135
work virtue on themselves, but find their vigor
only by working in the earth (bk. VIII, ll. 96-
97).
Where is the hierarchy here? There is
none. And later Milton makes a point that it is
not important “whether the sun predominant
in heaven / Rise on the earth, or earth rise on
the sun” (bk. VIII, ll. 160-61). This is the key to
understanding that there is no hierarchy in
God's love. It makes no difference whether the
male image of the sun rises on the earth or
whether the female image of the earth rises on
the sun. Oh yes, they are different. He didn't
say they were not different. But there is no
hierarchy in the relationship between male and
female, Father and Son, or between any beings.
In Paradise Lost, Milton has Eve
misunderstand this principle as she eats the
fruit. Milton has her saying that she ate it “to
add what wants / In female sex . . . and render
me more equal” (bk. IX, ll. 821-23). I think that
was the beginning of the end of Eden and must
be conscientiously overcome to establish Zion.
In Zion's rest, everyone must understand how
it's supposed to be. We can't have Eve thinking
that she is still “wanting” or “lacking” because
she is female. We can't have another man
thinking he is just a “slave.” How much
learning must take place for humankind to
overcome the images of power that “up”
language has subtly left in our lives? How many
rebellions and crimes are committed by people
because they learned to see themselves as
powerless or lower and know not how to
unlock their own joy? Seeing all of the “up”
principles at work—the power, the money—too
many people fail to understand that the true
way to achieve their individual Zion is to grow
up, to talk straight across, to take their turn,
and expect that they will receive the same
moment of attention as well. A human being
must know himself or herself worthy of this
exchange.
I realize that for us to feel this worthiness,
we must be obedient. There are many
requirements in achieving Zion—which, by the
way are more easily studied by a group (family,
church, congregation), which shares good
communication with each other. But that is not
the subject of my paper. The subject of my
paper is that, in order to achieve Zion, first we
have to recognize what it is and that often our
traditional language about it has not been
helpful at all.
My plea is for fewer “up” words and more
exchange words. Talk, listen, listen, talk with
equality until the words of the language we
speak to each other need not be spoken words
but the Adamic language of the heart, shared in
a simple communication of joy in one another's
presence. This is the at one ment in which we are
at one with each other as the Savior understood.
Instead of our differences, we will
concentrate on the similarities of our human
lives! Level. It's to be a level world, everyone.
And it's going to take some earth-shaking
activity to get it that way. And just in case you're
not acquainted with the kind of “level” I mean,
or the kind of “shaking up” I mean, the Lord
reminds us:
Wherefore, be not deceived, but continue
in steadfastness, looking forth for the heavens
to be shaken, and the earth to tremble and to
reel to and fro as a drunken man, and for the
valleys to be exalted, and for the mountains to
be made low, and for the rough places to
become smooth—and all this when the angel
shall sound his trumpet. (D&C 49:23)
The shaking will be done with words,
concepts, and beliefs—through language—about
the ways in which we perceive each other. If the
sea of glass mentioned in the scriptures is the
television and the Internet—and I believe it is—
then that which is most visible upon the glass
screen is the image of another human being
136
and the human activities and feelings that are
shared. It is our perceptions of one another that
will be shaken. If you expected hurricanes or
caterpillars or explosions to level the earth, you
may rest assured that the prophecy refers to our
connections with each other—how we are to
achieve Zion. The traditional “up” words that
place one individual above another will be
leveled. The mountains will be made plain, and
those who feel that they are in the valleys must
be exalted.
I hope as we continue writing new pieces
of literature we will become more aware of
where Zion really is and that we will use our
“up” language judiciously. Let's make it harder
for anyone to be deceived.
I love the Church. I am so honored to be a
part of it and so grateful for its efforts to
organize people to help each other and to teach
that the visiting teacher, the organist, and the
Primary worker are every bit as important as the
bishop or the Relief Society president. It
doesn't always work, but that's the goal.
I think Card's Hatrack River, like Milton's
work, is similarly at fault for giving us more
excitement about amazing powers and “up”
goals, than it is the moments of “Zion.” When
Alvin and Arthur Stuart finally return to the
home of their older brother Measure, Alvin
finds what I would call Zion.
And Alvin got to know his best-loved brother
all over again. All the old things that Alvin
once loved were still in Measure as a man, but
there were new things, too. The tender way
Measure had with his children, even after a
spanking or a stiff talking to. The way Measure
looked after his land and buildings, seeing all
that needed doing, and then doing it, so there
was never a door that squeaked for a second
day, never an animal that was off its feed for a
whole day without Measure trying to account
for what was wrong.
Above all, though, Alvin saw how Measure
 was with Delphi. She wasn't a noticeably pretty
girl, though not particular ugly either; she was
strong and stout and laughed loud as a donkey.
But Alvin saw how Measure had a way of
looking at her like the most beautiful sight he
could ever see. (788)
The text never indicates that Alvin knows
he is in the Crystal City in that moment. A few
paragraphs later he is ready to “go out and find
people I can teach to be Makers,” so that he can
“build up the Crystal City” (790). I wanted to
say, “Alvin, do you realize you're in it right
now?” At the close of the book, I do give credit
to Card that Alvin's last hope is for “a woman
he could love and live with till he died” (792).
The language of the true state of Zion may
be much different from the traditional one. If
we ignore the “up” phrases and concentrate on
the more realistic descriptions, such as “This is
Zion—the pure in heart” (D&C 97:21), I believe
that we will have come much closer to
understanding the truth.
MARILYN BROWN (MA, BYU; MFA U of U) and
AML president (2000) is the author of six published
novels, four poetry books, and two original musical
plays. In AML's first year, she won its second prize
for poetry, placing next to Marden Clark and, in
1982, its first novel award (for The Earthkeepers). She
and her husband, Bill Brown, founded the non-
profit Villa Institute for the Performing Arts (VIP
Arts) in conjunction with the Villa Playhouse
Theatre and the Little Brown Theatre in Springville,
Utah.
WORKS CITED
American Heritage Dictionary. Boston: Houghton
Mifflin, 1992.
Card, Orson Scott. Hatrack River. New York: Tom
Doherty, 1988.
Milton, John. Paradise Lost. Ed. Stephen Orgel and
Jonathan Goldberg. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1933.
Webster's New World Dictionary. Cleveland, OH:
World, 1951.

Not Another Orson Scott Card Paper:

Elizabeth H. Boyer and Leonard Tourney

Ivan A. Wolfe

The first time I ever read anything by
Orson Scott Card was a year after I served an
LDS mission, so I was twenty-two at the time. I
read Ender's Game because I was a tutor at the
Reading Lab at Ricks College, and one of my
students was perusing it, and it was my job to
help him improve his reading skills. I figured I
had better read it to understand what was going
on, making it possible to help my student. I
rather enjoyed the book and soon I found
myself reading the entire Ender series and a
137
dozen other Orson Scott Card books.
I had heard about him and seen his books
before then, but I had never gotten around to
reading his literary corpus before. I was aware
that he was LDS, but that didn't (at the time)
give me any reason to read his books, especially
since I didn't know any LDS people my age who
read him, and all the people in high school who
read him were not the type of people I was
interested in being associated with. Once I
finally got around to reading him, I was amazed
and now wish I had discovered Card sooner.
He is now one of my favorite authors, and
while I still haven't read everything he has
written, I'm getting close.
The title of my paper is “Not Another
Orson Scott Card Paper” and by now it seems
like some paean of praise to the man. Well, my
story goes on a little further. When I got to
BYU and became involved with the science fic-
tion/fantasy crowd (through the Leading Edge
magazine and the annual science fiction
symposium) I began to read critical approaches
to LDS-tinged science fiction/fantasy.
Unfortunately, nearly everything I found was
Orson Scott Card related. While my search was
by no means exhaustive, I was rather
disappointed. Occasionally I might read an
essay on Mormons in non-LDS science
fiction/fantasy or about Dave Wolverton, but
everything was overwhelmingly Orson Scott
Card. I searched in vain for anything written on
two authors I had been introduced to while
growing up: Elizabeth H. Boyer and Leonard
Tourney (both of whom were educated at
Brigham Young University). This essay is an
attempt to help remedy that disappointment I
felt three years ago and, I hope, bring to the
attention of others two authors whom I have
enjoyed reading and who, I feel, deserve at least
some attention.
Elizabeth H. Boyer is a writer of
Scandinavian-flavored fantasy. According to her
biographical note on the jacket, she is
Scandinavian by descent and was inspired to
study Scandinavian folklore by reading Tolkein
(Boyer Keeper 347). The depth of detail
inherent in her world is comparable to that of
Tolkein, even if her writing style and
characterization aren't.
In Boyer's realm, humans (known as Scip-
lings by elves) coexist with Alfar (known as elves
by humans) on an island called Skarpsey,
138
though the elves live on a different plane of
reality than the humans. The general time
frame seems to be around that of a pre-
Christian Scandinavian culture, although
characters tend to lapse into quoting or
alluding to the Bible.1 The difference between
Alfar and Sciplings are that the Alfar live longer,
have an inherent magical nature, and can
change into a personal animal form known as a
“fylga.” Part of this power is due to a magical
gem that all Alfar carry in their bodies at birth.
The gem can be removed and transplanted into
a human, giving him a long life and the
memories and power of the Alfar owner. This
procedure does not kill the Alfar, but his
personality partially resides in the gem; thus, if
the Alfar had a strong personality, the
personalities of the Alfar and Scipling may
merge or split, causing serious mental problems.
Sciplings and Alfar are sexually compatible and
have sometimes married (or not) and produced
offspring.
The Alfar are split into Ljosalfar (light
elves) and Dokkalfar (dark elves). The light
elves practice “fire magic” and seek to do good,
while the dark elves practice “ice magic” and
strive to conquer the world, create chaos and
generally be mean and nasty—apparently
because they live underground and it's in their
genes. Besides all this, the Alfar realm houses
dwarves, giants, fire jotuns, dragons, and other
mythical creatures.
Despite this wonderful detail, Boyer's
earliest stories tend to follow a rather
predictable pattern. The story titles are formed
by filling in the blanks between “the (blank)
and the (blank).” The “hero,” a Scipling youth
who has been separated from his parents is
forced into the Alfar realm, where he hooks up
with a group of very disagreeable misfits who
are in trouble. Some magical item—a sword, a
satchel, a dragon's heart, or a locked box—must
be recovered because it is essential in defeating
the enemy, even though no one knows what it
is supposed to do. Most of the story concerns
getting hold of the item; then it is usually lost
in a battle or some other confrontation, but
finally recovered in just enough time to kill the
bad guy. Order is restored, the disagreeable
characters become somewhat likeable, and the
hero generally returns to the Scipling realm.
Boyer's four-volume Wizards War series
deviates from this pattern somewhat, and her
latest three novels focus on female protagonists
more, but this overview basically summarizes
what to expect in her novels.
Boyer's writing style is somewhat sparse on
detail and long on conversation, apparently her
preference for developing characters since she
seems to cares more about what they say than
what they do. As Umberto Eco says in his
“Postscript to The Name of the Rose” there are
several ways to use dialogue to describe what is
going on:
“How are you?”
“Not bad. And you?”
“How are you?” John said.
“Not bad. And you?” Peter said.
“How,” John said, “are you?”
And Peter replied at once: “Not bad. And
you?”
“How are you?” John inquired anxiously.
“Not bad. And you?” Pete cackled.
John said: “How are you?”
“Not bad,” Peter replied, in a dull voice.
Then with an enigmatic smile, he added: “And
you?”
In all cases but the first cases the author
intrudes on the story, imposing his own point
of view. He intervenes with a personal
comment, to suggest how the words of the two
speakers should be interpreted emotionally.
(30-31)
Boyer prefers not to intrude on the
dialogue, only occasionally describing how it is
139
said. She lets the characters words speak for
themselves. Her characters are always somewhat
disagreeable, even the hero, and generally spend
most of the time arguing, playing nasty pranks
on each other, being uncommonly stubborn,
and generally being thoroughly unherolike.
Though the Scipling hero is generally likeable,
he is never truly remarkable or even easy for the
reader to identify with. Though this style of
characterization may seem to undermine the
point of a fantasy adventure, the characters are
sympathetic, keeping the reader interested
enough to read through to the end where
nearly all of the good guys become likeable and
agreeable.
An illustration of these points is a brief
tour of Boyer's The Elves and the Otterskin. This
is not Boyer's best book, but it is the best
introduction to her work. The story starts off
with Ivarr, the second son of a poor fisherman.
Ivarr is sold as an indentured servant to the
witch Birna. Birna is preparing him for some
unnamed future task, which is rather unclear to
him. One day while he is out gathering herbs
for some healing spells, Ivarr sees a vision of the
necromancer Lorimer plotting with the most
gruesome comic sidekick I have ever
encountered. Lorimer has removed the head
from a troll's corpse and reanimated it so that
he can exploit the knowledge of the dead. This
head, Grus, has a very sarcastic wit and often
pokes fun at those around him. A typical joke is
his offer to switch bodies with Ivarr, “putting an
old head on young shoulders, or young on old”
(166). Lorimer may fit the archetypal role of the
villain's comic sidekick found in many
children's movies (such as the Bat in Anastasia
or the Parrot in Disney's Aladdin), but I would
be surprised to see one as gruesome as he is in
any cartoon.
After Ivarr sees this vision, Birna is killed
and Ivarr is sent to the Alfar realm where he
joins a group of outcast elves who accidentally
killed the prince of the dwarves while he was in
his fylga form as an otter. As part of the wergild
they have a few months to find enough gold to
cover the pelt of the otter with gold. The pelt,
however, has been enchanted so that it gets
bigger with each piece of gold put on it. The
elves feel that their only hope is to slay a dragon
and steal its treasure, hoping that the spell has
some sort of ultimate limit. To do that they
need to get the sword Glimr from a barrow
mound in the middle of an enchanted maze.
This is what Birna was preparing Ivarr for, but
she died too soon to teach him everything.
The elves hired a fire wizard named Gizur
to help them out, only to discover that he is not
a Guild wizard. As Gizur finally admits: “I went
to a smaller school of less renown which was
significantly cheaper to attend and didn't
require such a lengthy apprenticeship or such
an exhaustive final examination” (128). The
elves are a disagreeable group of bottom-level
spies who can't get along, are unable to use
their magic power to any degree, and spend
most of their time arguing over trivial matters.
During the course of the journey, they
learn to use their magical powers through mere
serendipity and discover that they all have the
potential to be extremely powerful. One
summons a comet from outer space but
manages to miss his target by half an island,
thus saving his own life. After many hazards
and narrow escapes, they reach the barrow and
recover the sword, only to find that it is broken.
Gizur dies battling Lorimer, who shows up to
kill them all and take the sword for himself. In
a shocking blow to convention, Gizur stays
dead.
The elves manage to pick up another
wizard named Regin. Regin, however, is an ice
wizard who had, coincidentally, freed Lorimer
from imprisonment in a bog several years ago,
140
allowing Lorimer to once again wreak havoc on
the world. Regin was serving Lorimer but has
decided he is tired of being abused by the man
he freed and spends the rest of the book
purging himself of his ice powers and using fire
magic. After finding a suitable dragon, the elves
use their newly discovered magic to reforge the
sword; and then Ivarr kills the dragon, losing
the sword as it gets stuck in the body of the
dying dragon who plunges to the bottom of a
dangerous river. Since Glimr was the only
sword with a remote chance of killing Lorimer,
this is not a good turn of events. The elves take
the treasure, only to have it stolen from them
by Lorimer. In the end, a senile old dwarf
(whose fylga form is a fish) recovers the sword
for Ivarr, Ivarr kills Lorimer, and the dwarf
king's son is alive after all. (The elves killed a
normal otter, but Lorimer kidnapped the son
to make it look as if the dead otter was the fylga
of Prince Ottar). Ivarr returns home, taking the
head of Grus the troll with him so that he can
take Birna's place as the local witch/healer. The
elves, of course, wanted him to stay, and one of
them with a prophetic gift tells Ivarr before he
leaves: “I've seen your future and it's hopelessly
prosperous and happy and you're going to be an
important chieftain someday if you go back, so
you'd better stay here with us where things are
far more chancy” (349).
This is my brief introduction to the works
of Elizabeth H. Boyer. She has four stand-alone
novels set in her Scandinavian world, a four-vol-
ume series called the WIZARDS WAR also set
there, and three other novels with other fantasy
settings (still heavily Scandinavian), plus a short
story in M. Shayne Bell's excellent anthology
Washed by a Wave of Wind.
Leonard Tourney is a mystery, not a
fantasy, writer. His published novels—at least
six—all take place in Elizabethan England and
feature Constable Matthew Stock and his
helpful wife Joan. As far as mysteries go,
Tourney's work is rather conventional, though
well written. In the course of solving the
murder, Stock often mixes it up with the higher
and lower classes of his day, even with Queen
Elizabeth's court. Sometimes the reader knows
the murderer's identity; in this case, the novel
becomes a contest between Matthew Stock and
the villain. In other stories, the reader is
unaware of the criminal's identity until the very
end. In this case, the climactic scene is often a
Hercule Poirot-like convocation of all those
involved, before whom he pieces the entire
crime together and makes the final accusation.
The villain is apprehended, and peace and
order are restored.
I consider that Tourney incorporates
fantasy elements in his work in two ways. The
first is in his ability to make Elizabethan
England real to the reader. Tourney knows this
time and place well, bringing the scene to life
for the reader. A prized skill among fantasy and
science fiction authors is just such an ability to
make alien locales real to the reader. For
example, Rudyard Kipling is considered to be a
major influence on many modern fantasy and
science fiction writers because he makes an
alien locale (India) real and vibrant to readers
who have no first-hand experience with it.
Tourney does the same with Elizabethan
England.
The second has to do with what a
Mormon might call “the gifts of the spirit.” In a
novel marketed to a Mormon audience, such an
element might not seem very fantastical, but
Tourney writes to a national audience. Thus,
his incorporation of these “gifts,” usually
manifest through Joan Stock, constitutes
something out of the ordinary for a typical
murder mystery novel. In one novel, Joan
ponders whether fortune tellers are legitimate
or not: “[Joan] herself had gifts, glimmerings, as
141
she called them, visions that came unbidden,
visions that warmed, consoled, informed, as her
need was, that she did not construe as
incompatible with true religion or common
sense and that had more than once saved her
life” (Bartholomew 64). Tourney resists the urge
to use this gift as any sort of deus ex machina,
and Joan's gift plays only a small part in any
story, never actually solving the crime.
Tourney's first book, The Player's Boy Is
Dead, is an excellent introduction to his work,
but I here focus on The Bartholomew Fair
Murders, since it has many more fantasy
elements and is somewhat less formulaic than
the others. In the first scene of the novel, a very
old Queen Elizabeth, troubled by a sermon that
makes her aware of her own mortality, decides
that she must go see the Bartholomew Fair and
sample some of its pork once more before she
dies. She is adamant, despite the resistance of
her counselors.
The next scene shows young Gabriel
Stubbs walking toward London. Tourney's
scene is simultaneously poetic and tongue in
cheek:
Fate might have chosen another
circumstance for such an appalling deed—say,
an obscure, owl-haunted night, or driving,
blinding rain, or some dismal road remote
from human habitation. But it is only in the
imagination of poets that time, place, and
weather necessarily conspire to make a fit
setting for violence. The act in question was
accomplished in the full light of day, upon a
broad open road, and before at least a dozen
witnesses as though the thing done were an act
of corporal mercy worthy of commendation.
That the witnesses did not at the time
understand what they saw, or how the act itself
might threaten harm to a much greater one
than he who presently would be dead, does
not mitigate the audacity of the killing. Nor
does the fact that the deed was provoked by an
 impetuous act of the victim. There were
supernatural forces at work. Whether satanic
or divine, let every man judge for himself. (8)
Stubbs, a troubled youth who hears voices
in his head, is a recent convert to Puritanism
who has just been reading a pamphlet about
Satan's many disguises and deceptions through
the ages. An old carter en route to
Bartholomew Fair gives him a lift and, while
the boy naps, tries to molest him. Gabriel wakes
and instinctively strikes out with his walking
staff, killing the old man with a blow to the
head. Gabriel's mind snaps; and following the
voices in his head, he takes out his knife and
carves claw marks into the man's forehead.
Constable Stock finds the carter's body on
the road but is unable to find any clues. At the
fair, he talks to an old friend, Ned Babcock,
who has trained a bear and charges admission
to people wishing to watch it fight various
animals. The bear has already killed his son-in-
law, who was tormenting it, so he has to keep it
under tight supervision. Unfortunately, badly
eaten body parts are found in the district's
junkpile, and Ned's financiers threaten to drop
his funding. But the eaten body parts generate
much publicity and every show immediately
sells out, letting Ned pay back his investors.
Babcock hires Stubbs to help clean the bear's
cage.
Stubbs learns that Queen Elizabeth is
coming to the fair and decides to kill her,
convinced she is an enemy of the Puritans. He
strikes up a romance with a local girl who is to
be in the Queen's retinue of “virgins” so that he
can get access to Elizabeth. Meanwhile, Joan
Stock visits a fortuneteller who warns her in
startlingly accurate terms of future danger.
Then a local wine merchant is murdered,
and suspicion falls on Stubbs, who goes into
hiding. Babcock is found torn apart near his
bear cage, then Stubbs himself is found
142
drowned in a malmsey barrel, an apparent
accident. Constable Stock determines that
Stubbs could not have killed Babcock and
gathers all the suspects to explicate the clues. It
turns out that the local police sergeant, who
was blackmailing Babcock, killed both Babcock
and Stubbs, hoping Stubbs would be blamed
for the murder. The constable had also paid the
fortuneteller to warn Joan Stock away from the
case.
All seems well, but Tourney adds a final
flare of suspense by revealing that Stubb's
girlfriend has become mentally unhinged as a
result of being physically and sexually abused as
a young girl in a male-dominated society that
did not punish her exploiters. She decides to
stab the Queen, and the Stocks barely manage
to avert disaster. The fortune teller, in a further
twist, had already given Joan her amazingly
accurate predictions of disaster before the
police officer offered her money; figuring that
she had already done the job for free, she had
no qualms about taking money for it. The novel
ends with Queen Elizabeth being so impressed
by Joan Stock that she invites them to court so
she can enjoy her company.
These are the two LDS authors I read well
before I ever became a reader of Orson Scott
Card. However, an unanswered question is why
they are comparatively unknown to Mormon
audiences. Even a search of such nonacademic
sources as newspaper reports and Internet sites
revealed very little about them. Nearly every
newspaper/magazine/webpage article I come
across that discusses Mormon genre writers in
the science fiction, fantasy and mystery,
regularly includes Orson Scott Card, Anne
Perry, Dave Wolverton/Farland, and
occasionally M. Shayne Bell. Why don't Boyer
and Tourney get more attention? Here are some
possible reasons, only one of which seems
convincing—to me, anyway.
 The first is sales. Neither is a bestseller or
household name compared to the likes of
Orson Scott Card. Perhaps no one has heard of
them, or they don't sell well enough to attract
the attention of literary critics. However, they
sell well enough to keep book contracts and stay
in print. While they aren't New York Times or
Amazon.com bestsellers, they do have
respectable sales figures, and I would personally
be ecstatic if mine were anything like theirs.
A related argument may be that their
writing quality isn't sufficiently high to attract
critical attention, but this answer begs the
question of what standard they are being rated
against. I could make a case that they are better
writers than some LDS authors who get lots of
attention in Mormon literary studies.
A third reason may be the apparent lack of
“Mormonness” in their works. Though
Tourney does include the “glimmerings” of
Joan Stock and both authors communicate
clear-cut concepts of good and evil, neither is
an exclusively Mormon idea. To paraphrase F.
A. Blackburn's comment on Beowulf, we could
claim that a notion of good and evil were
Mormon only by proving everyone else does
not believe in clear distinctions between good
and evil (2). However, many other LDS authors
often get analyzed for works that are not
explicitly or implicitly Mormon (such as Neil
Labute for “Your Friends and Neighbors”).
While the lack of unique Mormonness does
make it less likely they would be noticed, it does
not rule them out.
The reason I came up with that convinced
me was that of agenda. What I mean by “agen-
da” some may call the “theme” or “didactic
lesson,” but I prefer the term “agenda.” When
reading those LDS authors who tend to get
scholarly attention (Orson Scott Card, Dave
Wolverton/Farland, M. Shayne Bell) I find
what I call an “agenda” in many of their works.
143
What I mean by this is the lesson they are
trying to teach with their stories. Eugene
England can write an essay called “Pastwatch:
The Redemption of Orson Scott Card” and
present it at Life, The Universe and Everything
(LTUE), and spend the entire essay talking
about what Orson Scott Card is trying to teach
us, whether it's shaking us up about our
attitudes towards blacks in the Alvin Maker
series, or respect for other cultures in Pastwatch,
or the abuse of power in Treasure Box. David
Farland's Runelords series forces the reader to
make some serious moral decisions about the
use and abuse of power. A quick glance at the
short stories by Dave Wolverton and Elizabeth
Boyer in Washed by a Wave of Wind reveals a
very strong environmental agenda in
Wolverton's story (though it isn't the main
point), while Boyer is just trying to tell a story.
When M. Shayne Bell gave a presentation at
LTUE in 1999 entitled “10 Things Your
Writing Teacher Didn't Tell You” he said that
he likes to write about environmental issues
because it is an issue important to him.
I am not passing any judgment on these
authors, as I enjoy their work, but the impulse
to be didactic seems very strong and that
impulse, which results in various “agendas,”
seems to be what attracts the Mormon critics.
Tourney and Boyer are merely trying to tell
stories and entertain; and while they may teach
something as the story is told, it almost seems
accidental. The reason I found so much on
Card and so little on Boyer and Tourney is
because they aren't out to change the world,
shake up their readers, and open our minds.
The books they write are well written and are
entertaining, but that seems to leave the critics
with very little to do besides review the books
and decide if they enjoyed reading them or not.
Any attempt to find a didactic theme in their
works will most likely be forced or come up
cold.
IVAN A. WOLFE is a graduate student at BYU,
studying English. He chaired BYU's science
fiction/fantasy symposium, “Life, the Universe, and
Everything,” in 2001 and has been on its committee
since 1997.
NOTE
1. I get the idea that this characteristic is more
unconscious on the part of Boyer than any
anachronistic knowledge of the Bible by her pre-
Christian Scandinavians and elves.
WORKS CITED
Blackburn, F.A. “The Christian Coloring in
Beowulf.” An Anthology of Beowulf Criticism. Ed.
Lewis E. Nicholson. Notre Dame, IN: U of
Notre Dame P, 1963. 1-22.
Bell, M. Shayne, ed. Washed by a Wave of Wind. Salt
Lake City: Signature Books, 1993.
Boyer, Elizabeth H. The Elves and the Otterskin. New
[T]hrough the gate, guarded and led by more
soldiers with Springfields, came George Q.
Cannon, Orson Pratt, . . . Daniel Wells,
Cannon's brother, and two other leaders of
the Latter-day Saints. Their hands were bound
behind them.
None of the Mormons hesitated in mount-
ing the thirteen steps to the multiple gallows.
Each leader took his place at a noose. . . .
“These men have been convicted of treason
and insurrection against the United States of
America . . . “ [General Pope] raised his right
hand high into the air— “[L]et the punishment
be carried out.” The hand dropped. (How 306-
7)
Science fiction is a literature devoted to
the exploration of the Other: other worlds,
other peoples, other realities, other histories —
conveying that sense of Otherness and alien-
ness to one's own group. It is not just a case of
letting the stranger stay to tell his stories but
seeking out that stranger's own campsite,
144
York: Ballantine Books, 1982.
—. Keeper of Cats. New York: Ballantine Books, 1995.
Eco, Umberto. “Postscript.” The Name of the Rose.
Trans. William Weaver. New York: Harcourt
Brace Jovanovich, 1984.
Tourney, Leonard. The Bartholomew Fair Murders.
New York: Ballantine Books, 1988.
—. The Player's Boy Is Dead. New York: Ballantine
Books, 1988.
Projecting the Other: The
“Mormon Question”
in Harry Turtledove's How
Few Remain
Lee Allred
spending the night in song and story. John
Clute's authoritative Encyclopedia of Science
Fiction notes that SF “manifests an eager
determination to meet and establish significant
contact with aliens”; yet “the greatest difficulty
SF writers face with respect to alien[ness] is that
of depicting something authentically strange”
(18). Clute then states this paradox: For a
literature so intent in depicting that Otherness,
“familiar definitions of SF imply that there is
nothing more alien to its concerns than
religion” (1000).
One might therefore assume an eager
determination by science fiction writers to
explore the alienness of our own particular
community, our Otherness, for if ever a group
was noted from its inception—and throughout
its entire existence—for being “authentically
strange” in the context of the American
experience, it would be the Mormons. Such,
curiously, is not the case, either in science
fiction or in American letters in general.
It cannot be said that Mormonism is
obscure today; currently the number of
Mormons in America is roughly the same as
the number of Jews (or indeed, the number of
SF readers): about five million. Some even
project that if current growth trends hold
steady, “one American in eight [will be
Mormon by] 2020” (Bloom 90)—not that I'm
suggesting that in 2020, one in eight characters
in films or movies will be Mormon. The issue
is not one of percentages, but of perception.
Our Otherness is just too Other, too strange,
too new.
History, a field that ever increasingly
celebrates diversity, often finds our
Otherness . . . well, too diverse. Arnold and
Weiner's The American West: Living the Frontier
Dream makes no reference to the Mormon
participation in that dream, save for two brief
mentions, both of which cast Mormons outside
the main American culture, lumping us in with
other “alien” groups: Hispanics and Indians
(52, 163f). This neglect

COMPARISON OF TURTLEDOVE'S AND HISTORY'S “UTAH WAR”

_____________________________________________________________________________________________ _______________
Turtledove's "U.S. Presidential Edmund-Tucker Law, 1887.
Declaration, 1881"
Collum Bill, proposed 1870, in David
L. Bigler, Forgotten Kingdom, 282
_____________________________________________________________________________________________

The former civilian government of
Utah Territory is dissolved.
Territory declared "hostile soil
under occupation" and is put under
military occupation. General Pope
appointed military governor.
Give the U.S. marshal and clerks of
the district courts the authority to
select grand juries.
Disincorporate the Mormon
church "in so far as it may have, or
pretend to have, any legal existence"
and ordered the U.S. attorney
general to "wind up" its affairs.
Suspension of habeas corpus.
Civilian judicial system abolished;
justice system to henceforth be
military tribunal.
Impose a sentence of five years in
prison and up to $5000 in fines for
cohabitation with more than one
wife.
Dissolved the Perpetual Emigrating
Fund Company and ordered that
its assets in excess of debts and
lawful claims, like those of its
parent, be escheated, or returned,
to the United States for the benefit
of the territory's common schools.
Every male citizen [sic] of Utah
Territory shall be required within
60 days to take a loyalty oath to U.S.
government. Said oath to include a
denial that male citizen [sic] is or
shall henceforth be wed to more
than one woman at a time.
Allow the U.S. marshal to
requisition military force to aid him
in the performance of his duties.
Prohibited secret marriages and
required all weddings to be
certified in probate courts by a
license "subject to inspection as
other public records."
Perjury to loyalty oath denial of
cohabitation shall be punished with
the utmost severity by military
tribunal.
Empower the territorial governor to
appoint and remove probate
justices of the peace, election judges,
notaries public, and sheriffs.
Gave to the U.S. marshal and
deputies the power possessed by
sheriffs, constables, and other local
peace officers to enforce all federal
145
and territorial laws.
Polygamy within the boundaries of
Utah territory is from this time
forward abolished and prohibited.
Abolish Utah's "numbered ballot"
election law and guarantee that
elections would be conducted by
secret ballot.
Abolished the right of women in
Utah to vote.
LDS church declared "not a
religion liable to protection under
the First Amendment, but a
political organization subject to
sanctions for its acts [of rebellion].
Repeal the territorial law giving
probate courts original jurisdiction,
both civil and criminal, and limit
the authority of these tribunals to
cases involving a maximum of $500.
Required prospective voters, grand
and petit jurors, and public office
holders to swear an oath they
would support the U.S.
constitution and obey the
Edmunds Act.
Construction of the so-called
Mormon Temple is suspended
until further notice. Abolished the office of territorial
Canceled all Utah land laws, such school superintendent and gave the
as those giving large land grants to Utah Supreme Court the power to
Brigham Young and other Mormon appoint a commissioner of schools.
leaders.
Dissolved territorial laws providing
for the election of probate, or coun-
ty judges and authorized the U.S.
president to appoint such local
magistrates.
Public worship at the Mormon
Tabernacle and other so-called
Mormon churches is suspended.
Required the U.S. president "to
send a portion of the Army of the
United States" to Utah to enforce
the law, if necessary, and
authorized him to call as many as
40,000 additional troops if needed
to carry out this purpose.
Liquidated existing election
districts and ordered the Utah
Commission to redistrict the
territory and apportion
representation according to
population.
All public meetings of more than
ten persons are prohibited.
Repeal all acts and parts of acts of
the United States or of the
Legislature of Utah not consistent
herewith, including the act of
creating the territory itself.
Called it incest for first cousins or
closer relatives to marry, cohabit, or
have sexual intercourse and re-
quired punishment of not less than
three years in prison for this
offense.
Any resistance to military authority
will be crushed without mercy.
[Acts of rebellion] will result in
hostages being taken. If guilty
parties are not promptly
surrendered, hostages will be
hanged by the neck until dead.
occurred, not only despite our fascinatingly the first permanent Anglo settlements in
unique approach to settling the frontier, but perhaps as many as five Western states were
our very substantial contributions to frontier Mormon.1
America outside the shopworn story of our All of these considerations make Harry
1847 migration. One such contribution is that Turtledove's alternate history novel, How Few
146
Remain (and subsequent spin-off series, The
Great War), a welcome surprise. Turtledove
matter-of-factly works Mormonism into his
larger “retelling” of an 1880s in which the
South had won its War of Succession.
Turtledove's Mormons are neither stereotypical
villains nor squeaky-clean Tom Clancy do-
gooders.2 Rather, they are simply the Other.
How Few Remain postulates a second War
Between the States in 1881. The war quickly
spreads, with fighting occurring not only along
the Union-Confederacy border, but also along
the Union's Mexican and Canadian borders as
well, after the South's French and British allies
come to its aid.3
In the middle of this, the Mormons, ill-
used by the Union government, revolt. They
block all rail and telegraph lines through Utah
territory, cutting the Union in two. The
Union—shades of Captain Moroni!—pulls
troops from its external war to crush a greater
internal menace. Generals Pope and Custer,
along with their new Gatling guns, are
dispatched to Utah to forcibly put down the
Mormons' passive revolt. John Taylor is hunted
down. Prominent Mormons are hanged. Pope
declares martial law and hands down harsh new
edicts to the surviving Mormons.
Now, it has been said that biology is
destiny. In matters military, it is no less true
that geography is destiny. Whether Turtledove
originally planned on including Mormons in
his How Few Remain, Turtledove is too good a
historian not to realize that he had no choice.
Utah is the crossroads of the West. That the
first transcontinental railroad, telegraph, and
telephone lines were completed in Utah is no
accident. In a scenario where northern routes
are threatened by British Canada and southern
routes by the Confederacy (indeed, internal
evidence in the novel suggest that neither
northern nor southern routes have yet been
built in 1881), the logistical lines of
147
communication running through Utah are the
Union's sole east-west lifeline—an easily severed
jugular.4 And including Utah Territory in his
novel means including Mormons, for, unlike
Arnold and Weiner, Turtledove does not
presume to pretend Mormons don't exist.
The mere fact Mormons exist in Turtle-
dove's fiction is exceptional. The use Turtledove
puts to them is remarkable, even though at first
glance it may not seem so. The device Turtle-
dove uses to project Mormon Otherness in
1881 is the same device oft used by Gentiles
and Mormons alike. Like Twain in Roughing It,5
Larry Barkdull in Praise to the Man, Marilyn
Brown in Statehood, and even the Church itself
in the film The Mountain of the Lord, Turtledove
chooses the device of the eastern traveler.
Turtledove, however, uses not an
inquiring journalist, but the disgraced,
disgruntled former U.S. president Abraham
Lincoln. Lincoln has become a hiss and a
byword in the North for losing the War of
Secession. In 1881, he is now a political
lecturer and agitator for a homespun socialism,
one that Turtledove creates with quotations
from Lincoln's actual historic speeches and
writings (Borrit).
Through Lincoln's eyes, and later through
those of Union generals Pope and Custer,
Turtledove projects that Mormon Otherness
that 19th-century America found so alien, so
frightening, so repellant. Indeed, the main
primary sources for Turtledove's research on
the “Mormon Question” were Harper's Weekly
articles from the 1880s,6 the same source so
richly mined by Terryl L. Givens's germinal
work Viper on the Hearth or Bunker and Bitton's
earlier The Mormon Graphic Image.
As Gentiles in 1881 did, Turtledove
principally cites polygamy as the source of Mor-
mon Otherness. Turtledove's fictional non-
Mormon “Gentiles”—a term the Jewish
Turtledove repeatedly finds amusing—can't
leave polygamy alone, as his Lincoln detachedly
observes (How 54).7
Yet Turtledove also finds, quite rightly,
that other issues inflame the conflict between
Gentile and Mormon. J. H. Beadle, writing in
Scribner's Monthly in 1877, described
Mormonism as an anomaly in the American
experience: “Americans have but one native
religion and that one is the sole apparent
exception to the rule of universal toleration”
(qtd. in Givens 20). Givens notes just what an
exception Mormonism is: “In no other case in
American history has a governor signed an
order for the expulsion or extermination of a
segment of his state's own citizenry, a state
militia forced the evacuation of a city of
thousands, the United States sent an occupying
army against its own citizens, or dissolved a
church as a legal corporation and
disenfranchised thousands of its members” (41).
Just as Givens ultimately cites theological
differences as the ultimate root of Gentile-
Mormon conflict,6 Turtledove's General Pope,
in fact, cites the Mormon's “wicked, perverse,
and licentious doctrine” as the main
justification for putting down the rebellion, not
logistical extremities (How 116). Givens further
argues that the singular religious intolerance
towards Mormonism is such an uncomfortable
anomaly to Americans that there was a very
strenuous attempt to couch the “Mormon
question” in secular terms.
Denied geographical isolation, Mormons
in the 1880s substituted mental and cultural
isolation, sought to the extent Mormonism
became not only a religion, but also a distinct
culture (Givens 169 n6; cf. Mauss). Turtledove's
Lincoln immediately notices this Otherness; his
first observation is that “coming into Utah
Territory [is] almost like entering a foreign
country” (How 54).7
But foreign in what way? Gentiles
instinctively felt Mormons to be the Other but
148
seemed completely baffled at how to express
this—or how to combat an aggressively assimilat-
ive menace that looked just like them. Half,
possibly more, of the Mormons of the day were
first or second generation Britons, including
two prominent Mormons in How Few Remains:
Mormon prophet John Taylor and Apostle
George Q. Cannon, both of whom still spoke
with British accents—a missed detail Turtledove
might have used to great effect with the Union
at war with Britain.
Faced with a 19th-century Pod People
looking just like themselves, critics trotted out
the stereotypical racial attacks of the day,
desperately trying to force the Mormon menace
into a familiar pattern. Mormonism was linked
to the Roman Catholic menace, the Irish,
Indian, Negro, the polygamous desert-dwelling
Moslem menaces, and in particular, the “Yellow
Peril” of immigrant Chinese. (Legislation was
proposed to adapt the anti-Chinese
immigration laws against Mormons.) In fact,
Mormons actually rated below the Chinese as
desirables. Lecturer De Witt Talmage famously
stated that “the Chinese may stay, but the
Mormons must go” (Bunker and Bitton 91).
Gentile critics even argued that Mormons
were a separate race altogether. A passage from
an official “statistical” report by the Surgeon
General's office shortly after the arrival of John-
ston's Army reads: “The yellow sunken
cadaverous visage, the greenish-coloured eyes,
the thick protuberant lips, the low forehead,
the light yellowish hair, and the lank angular
person constitute an appearance so
characteristic of the new race . . . as to
distinguish [Mormons] at a glance.” (qtd. in
Givens 137; emphasis mine).
This passage incidentally echoes a Santa Fe
Trail pioneer account: “These unwelcome
visitors [Mormons] had a certain glitter of the
eye, and a compression of the lips, which
distinguished them” (Arnold and Wiener 164).
Turtledove's characters, too, are able to
distinguish between Mormons and Gentiles at a
glance (How 167), although his Lincoln is less—
or should I say more?—discerning (170).
Mormon appearance was further stereotyped.
The men invariably wore beards; both sexes
were frequently said to wear only black. These
diabolical Mormons had mesmeric powers, and,
of course, were cryptic, mysterious, secretly
treacherous.
Turtledove manages to catch all of this
“viper on the hearth” paranoia perfectly in both
the reactions of his Gentile characters and the
actions of his Mormons. In one scene of How
Few Remain, Lincoln is kidnapped and taken
blindfolded before John Taylor (211ff). Taylor
stares at him from predictably deep eye sockets
shadowed in darkness. Taylor's lips are
“bloodless”—no doubt, prominent, protuberant,
and compressed as well. Orson Pratt's most
striking feature is his unkempt white beard
(fashioned, perhaps after John Brown). Custer
and Pope consider putting down “fanatical”
Mormons in the same category as putting down
“fanatical” Indian tribes (307).
Above all, Turtledove's Mormons are
never permitted to be anything other than “the
Other.” Clute observed that “bids to tell a story
from an alien viewpoint are rarely convincing”
(18); likewise, nowhere in How are we
permitted to get inside a Mormon head. There
are no Mormon viewpoint characters in How or
the subsequent series The Great War. In fact, in
The Great War: American Front, the first book of
the series, the Mormon subplot pops up out of
nowhere, deep into the book (265).
Turtledove's trademark is distinctive characters,
including plantation slaves, Marxist agitators,
anarchists, slave owners, Prussian generals, New
England fishermen, French Canadian farmers,
etc. But it is as if, notwithstanding scores of
authentic diverse viewpoint characters,
Mormons are just too alien to be anything but
149
forever the Other.8
Yet Turtledove's portrayal of Mormons,
while perhaps unflattering, is not antagonistic.
The “Mormon question” as Turtledove presents
it and his Gentiles' reactions to it are
historically authentic—authentic, that is, to
Gentile sources—the obvious result of
meticulous research. How Few Remain was
published just a few months after Givens's Viper
on the Hearth. In reading the one, I was struck
how, point by point, it echoed the other.
Running through Turtledove's books,
however, is a Bloomian respect for Mormon
society. His Lincoln, like Harold Bloom, is
appreciative of Mormon scope. In what an
authorial description calls “professional respect,”
Lincoln says, “Well, well. They [don't] do things
by half, do they?” (How 135). Earlier Lincoln
says, “The Mormon are the godly, pious folk we
profess ourselves to be” (99). In the two books
of The Great War published thus far (the series
is projected as three), only one scene allows
Mormons a speaking role. It establishes that,
despite everything that happened in How Few
Remain, despite the fact that the Mormons are
only pages away from their possible Final
Solution in The Great War, they are still
staunchly patriotic, decent people wedded to a
belief in the U.S. Constitution.9
Turtledove's attitude is perhaps best
described by a passage in his another of his
books, Worldwar: Tilting the Balance:
As far as [Jens] was concerned, what the
Mormons believed was good only for a belly
laugh. Even so, he'd never felt safer in his
travels than he did in Utah. Whether the
doctrines were true or not, they turned out
solid people. Is that what the answer is? he
wondered: as long as you seriously believe in
something, almost no matter what, you have a
pretty good chance in ending up okay? He
didn't care for the idea. He'd dedicated his
career to pulling objective truth out of the
physical world. Theological mumbo-jumbo
 wasn't supposed to stack up against that kind
of dedication. But it did. Maybe the Mormons
didn't know a thing about nuclear physics, but
they seemed pretty much content with the
lives they were living, which was a hell of lot
more than he could say himself. (557)
Like anyone else attempting to portray
someone else's culture, Turtledove
understandably makes a few missteps.
Undoubtedly because he used a Harper's
account, Turtledove describes a very quirky
Mormon religious service in the Tabernacle,
one implying that Mormon congregations don't
sing. There is also the commonplace
implication that Mormonism ceases at the Utah
borders. (Deliciously, when Pope banishes
Lincoln from Utah to keep him from stirring
up any additional trouble among the Mormons,
he sends Lincoln to Pocatello, Idaho [How 308]).
Either Turtledove's copy editor or his reliance
on 19th-century sources misstates the Church's
full name. Most puzzling, however, Lincoln
comes to Utah to lecture on economics,
advocating cooperative ventures that shun
banks and Gilded Age capitalism. Yet during all
his time in Utah territory, he never once
notices a bishop's storehouse, Zion's
Cooperative Mercantile Institution, the United
Order, or a hundred other evidences that the
Mormons were actually practicing what Lincoln
was preaching. Nor do any of his Gentile
shopkeeper or miner friends mention that the
Mormon closed economic system may be
freezing them out (Arrington; Arrington et al.;
Brown et al., 100-01).
What is important, though, is not how
much Turtledove gets wrong, but how much he
gets right in his details—details like the adobe
construction of period Mormon dwellings (How
240), or that scholar Orson Pratt would indeed
immediately understand a classical allusion
made to him by General Pope (How 173-74).
But How Few Remain is not only
historically authentic. It is fictively authentic as
150
well. It works as a novel. It works as alternate
history. The main proofs of its working as
alternate history are the delicious ironies that
unfold. Lincoln, like the Rev. Caswell of Three
Days in Nauvoo fame, as wonderfully recounted
in Hugh Nibley's The Myth Makers, is driven all
around the city of the Mormons by his Gentile
friends, gleaning most of his “information” on
Mormons from these sources, rather than
being—as Nibley puts it—“willing to make the
supreme sacrificium intellectus and listen to the
Mormon side of the story” (i). It must be said,
however, that unlike Caswell, Lincoln does
make some later attempts to meet Mormons;
on the whole, Turtledove's fictive Lincoln is far
more sympathetic and openminded than the
factual Caswell.
Lincoln, seemingly ignorant of Nauvoo or
the Battle of Crooked River or the 1857 Utah
War arrogantly tells John Taylor, “the living
martyr” who had been wounded four times at
Carthage: “We left religious war behind in
Europe. We should be well advised not to let it
emigrate from that place to our shores” (How
212).
The Great War series, too, has its ironies, if
a war of extermination can be said to be ironic.
It was during World War I that Mormonism
truly began its quasi-assimilation into
mainstream American society. In Turtledove's
Great War, however, Mormonism moves
toward probable extinction as the Union armies
wage a bitter house-to-house fight from Price to
Odgen against Mormon men, women, and
children ages eight and above.10 Turtledove
ironically depicts that struggle in two of the
least Mormon Utah communities, Gentile-
heavy Price and Odgen.
A Confederate character muses on the
struggle, cheered by the fact that virtually no
Mormons exist in his precious South, oblivious
to the fact that, in real history, “[t]he Southern
States Mission was the most successful in the
church during this period . . . [even though]
[p]erhaps no where on the earth was the church
more despised and persecuted than in the
American South at the turn of the century”
(Alexander 223).
The greatest irony of all, however, lies in
the harsh “solution” of martial law seen as the
answer to the Mormon question in How Few
Remain (170f). Pope's fictitious edicts are, in
many respects, less severe than the actual
provisions of the historic Edmunds-Tucker Act,
and undeniably far less harsh than the
draconian Cullom Bill nearly adopted in real
history that, rather than impose a
Constitutionally allowed limited declaration of
martial law, would, by its own admission, have
torn up the Constitution and cast aside posse
comitatus by requiring a military force of forty
thousand11 to administer civil laws. Yet hidden
among Pope's edicts is a seemingly mild
injunction that is the harshest of all, fictive or
historical: the banning of assemblies of ten or
more persons. While the other restrictions seek
to destroy the organization of the Church, this
limitation would destroy its very soul—forever
barring a communal people from communing
with another. Pope chose the number to ever
remind the Mormons that not even their
beloved Council of the Twelve could ever meet
again. Whether Turtledove realizes it or not,
this edict might be the one key issue against
which the Mormons rise up in their final,
doomed revolt in The Great War.
Clute asserts that efforts to tell the Other's
story from the Other's viewpoint are rarely
convincing. Turtledove both proves and
disproves this assertion. True, he allows the
Mormon Other to speak only briefly; still, in
telling the Mormon Other's story not only
directly but by indirection and projection as
well, Turtledove is quite convincing.
Turledove's alternate Gentiles, like historical
Gentiles of the day, see Mormon Otherness to
151
be the “Mormon question.” His alternate Saints,
like ourselves, see that Otherness to be the
“Mormon answer.”
LEE ALLRED presented an earlier version of this
paper at “Symposium on Science Fiction Literature
and Alternate History” in conjunction with
Conestoga '99 science fiction convention, 26 June
1999, Tulsa, Oklahoma, where Mr. Turtledove was
the convention guest of honor. He attended the
session at which this paper was delivered. This
version incorporates changes and other information
as a result of conversation and correspondence with
Mr. Turtledove afterwards and was presented in this
form at the annual meeting of the Association for
Mormon Letters, 28 February 1998, Westminster
College, Salt Lake City.
NOTES
1. They are Utah, Idaho, Wyoming, Nevada,
Colorado. Mormons were also significant early
settlers of several other states, including California,
Iowa, New Mexico, and Oregon (Deseret).
2. For a non-exhaustive look at Mormon
stereotypes in recent national popular literature, see
Austin.
3. Turtledove has Napoleon III maintaining
his Mexican French Empire.
4. For more detailed information on rail and
stagecoach routes of the time, see Beck and Haase.
5. Samuel Clemens, ironically, is the first to
mention the Mormons in How Few Remember.
6. The first version of this paper noted how
closely Turtledove duplicated the feel of the 1880s
material cited in Givens and in Bunker and Bitton.
Afterwards, Turtledove e-mailed me that his source
material was, in fact, contemporary Harper's articles.
7. Stephen J. Stein, in his introduction to
Thomas Alexander's Mormonism in Transition, echoes
that thesis: “Ironically, [American] religious
pluralism . . . has often had the practical effect of
creating pressures to conform to an ‘American way'
of doing religion. Dissenting sects are coaxed and
coerced to give up their most distinctive beliefs and
practices and to imitate patterns of other religious
groups” (iii).
8. This was actually the effect I consciously
tried for in my own alternate-history Mormons in
“For the Strength of the Hills,” where the Mormons
were almost exclusively an off-camera menace.
9. It is quite instructive to compare the
attitudes (and actions) of Turtledove's subjugated
Mormons in The Great War with his subjugated
Southerners in his Nebula Award-nominated short
story “Must and Shall” and how differently the two
groups handle what can be conjectured as roughly
the same desperate situation.
10. Turtledove perhaps equates the Mormon
concept of age of accountability with adult standing:
“Men, women, children down to about the age of
eight—every Mormon in Price— fought, and fought
to the death” (Walk 324).
11. A force of forty thousand troops was
actually larger than the standing army of the time.
WORKS CITED
Alexander, Thomas G. Mormonism in Transition: A
History of the Latter-day Saints, 1890-1930.
Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1995.
Allred, Lee. “For the Strength of the Hills.” L. Ron
Hubbard Presents Writers of the Future, Vol. 13.
Los Angeles: Bridge Publications, 1997. 414-
485.
Arnold, James R., and Roberta Wiener. The
American West: Living the Frontier Dream.
London: Blandford P, 1996.
Arrington, Leonard J. Great Basin Kingdom: An
Economic History of the Latter-day Saints 1830-
1900. 1958; reprint ed. Salt Lake City:
University of Utah Press, 1993.
Arrington, Leonard J., Feramorz Y. Fox, and Dean
May. Building the City of God: Community and
Cooperation Among the Mormons. 2d ed.
Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1992.
Austin, Mike. “Mormon Stereotypes in Popular
Fiction: 1979-1998.” 9 Feb 2000 http://www.
intrepid.net/~austin/sunmike.htm.
—. “Mormons in Popular Literature Bibliography:
1979-2000.” 9 Feb 2000 http://www. intrepid.
net /~ austin/ biblio. htm.
Barkdull, Larry. Praise to the Man. Salt Lake City:
Deseret Book, 1997.
Beck, Warren, and Ynez D. Haase. Historical Atlas of
the American West. Norman: U of Oklahoma P,
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1989.
Bigler, David L. Forgotten Kingdom: The Mormon
Theocracy in the American West, 1847-1896.
Spokane, WA: Arthur H. Clark, 1998.
Bloom, Harold. The American Religion. New York:
Simon & Schuster, 1992.
Boritt, Gabor S. Lincoln and the Economics of the
American Dream. Chicago: U of Illinois P,
1994.
Brown, Marilyn. Statehood: A Novel Celebrating Utah's
Centennial. Murray, UT: Aspen Books, 1995.
Brown, S. Kent, et al., eds. Historical Atlas of
Mormonism. New York: Simon and Schuster,
1994.
Bunker, Gary L., and Davis Bitton. The Mormon
Graphic Image, 1834-1914: Cartoons, Caricatures,
and Illustrations. Salt Lake City: U of Utah P,
1983.
Deseret News 1999-2000 Church Almanac. Salt Lake
City: Deseret News, 1998.
Clute, John, and Peter Nicholls. The Encyclopedia of
Science Fiction. 2d ed. New York: St. Martin's
Griffen, 1995.
Givens, Terryl L. The Viper on the Hearth: Mormons,
Myths, and the Construction of Heresy. Oxford:
Oxford UP, 1997.
Mauss, Armand L. The Angel and the Beehive: The
Mormon Struggle with Assimilation. Chicago: U
of Illinois P, 1994.
The Mountain of the Lord. Videocassette. Salt Lake
City: The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day
Saints, 1995.
Nibley, Hugh. The Myth Makers. Salt Lake City:
Bookcraft, 1961.
Turtledove, Harry. E-mail to Lee Allred. 5 July 1999.
—. E-mail to Lee Allred. 6 July 1999.
—. The Great War: American Front. New York: Del
Rey, 1998.
—. The Great War: Walk in Hell. New York: Del Rey,
1999.
—. How Few Remain. New York: Del Rey, 1997.
—. “Must and Shall.” Nebula Awards 32. Ed. Jack
Dann. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1998.
—. Worldwar: Tilting the Balance. New York: Del Rey,
1995.
Twain, Mark. Roughing It. New York: New American
Library, 1994.
The Utah Centennial History Suite: Premier Edition.
CD-ROM. Salt Lake City: Timeless Software,
Anne Perry's Tathea: A Preliminary Consideration
Richard H. Cracroft
The publication of Anne Perry's Tathea in
September 1999 under Deseret Book's Shadow
Mountain imprint marks a significant literary
milestone in Mormon letters. Although
Tathea's appearance was heralded by the Salt
Lake Tribune and the Deseret News, LDS-
centered journal editors, either standing all
amazed at this imaginative theological
thunderbolt or overwhelmed by the bulk of the
522-page tome (the same number of pages as in
the English edition of the Book of Mormon)
remain curiously silent about this important
Mormon cultural event. The fact is that Anne
Perry, the internationally famous writer of
nearly three dozen well-received mystery novels
set in Victorian England, with seven million
books in print, and the most famous and
widely published Mormon author (including
Gerald N. Lund, Orson Scott Card, and Dean
Hughes—excepting only Mormon himself) has
stepped outside her accustomed genre to write
a fantasy-based spiritual autobiography which
renders in Tathea's epic journey to the light the
essential Mormonism to which Perry converted
in 1967 and to which she continues a fervent
disciple.
Some of Perry's readers, accustomed to
the familiar eccentricities of astute London
detectives William Monk and Thomas and
Charlotte Pitt, seem dismayed at their favorite
author's generic switch, even though she
continues to produce her two-per-year quota of
Monk and Pitt mysteries. Readers of the
153
1998.
48,761 copies which Amazon.com reports
having been sold as of yesterday (18 February
2000) register responses ranging from
“disappointment,” “tedious,” “rather dull,” and
“she's lost a lot of credit with me,” to “one of
the most beautiful books I have ever read,” and
“on par with the great fantasies, adventures,
spiritual journeys done by Tolkien and Lewis,”
and “a remarkable, clever, and poignant book
that defies the norms of modern fantasy and
demands to be read” (“Customer”).
Although Tathea contains a mystery or
two, readers must grant Perry her donnée, and
follow her epic hero, Tathea, on her spiritual
journey, in which Perry explains her own
deeply felt Latter-day Saint convictions
“concerning who we are, why we are here on
this planet, and where we are hoping to go
when this life is over, and God finally says,
`Welcome home'” (“Anne's”). Tathea becomes
representative woman, whom we vicariously
follow on her salvation journey, a journey
which also traces the spiritual history of God's
dealings with his mortal children—on whatever
world they may be found.
In Tathea, which Perry originally
dedicated to a number of friends, including
“Russell M. Nelson[,] for setting the star to
follow” (“Jacket” 4),1 one senses her profound
purpose in writing the book: “Everything else
I've done,” she said in a recent interview with
Dennis Lythgoe,
has been moving toward this [book]. The
inspiration came from who I am. I believe
 very strongly that one of the most powerful
ways to reach people who do not wish to open
the scriptures and who are not actively
searching for something is to tell them stories.
You can move people by stories, whether they
wish to be moved or not.
Bearing her witness of the restored gospel, says
Perry, makes Tathea “the most important book
I've written to date[;] indeed it may well be the
most important that I shall ever write”
(“Anne's”).
The genre carrying Tathea's spiritual
quest—which could be called Tathea's Travels or
The Magnificent Journey—might be called epic
fantasy—although it bears little resemblance to
classic fantasy; or it could be considered
religious allegory—although its figures are only
occasionally Bunyanesque (except for the
minor character of Sophia, who is, she tells us,
wisdom); or perhaps the Christian apologetics—
although Perry is more didactically overt than J.
R. R. Tolkien, and is nearer, yet different from,
C. S. Lewis; or a Bildungsroman or a rite de
passage through humankind's several estates in prologue begins as Tathea, wife of the Isarch of
the tradition of Nephi Anderson's Added Upon, Shinabar, “the oldest civilization in the world,”
the Book of Abraham (especially chap. 3), or
Orson Scott Card's free adaptation in his
Homecoming series of the Lehite wanderings.
But inevitably we turn to what were likely the
greatest influences on Perry's imagination,
namely Lehi's visionary journeys in 1 Nephi
and humankind's pilgrimage to holiness as
represented in the House of the Lord. After all
is said and donnéed, however, Tathea thumbs
its literary nose at generic categorization and
takes a form distinct and unique in Mormon
letters, if not in world literature.
The setting of Tathea, according to Perry,
although not readily deduced from the book, is
“on another world, not unlike our own, about
two thousand years ago” (“Anne's”). The
strange and exotic pretechnological cultures
which Tathea visits in vision or in person
vaguely suggest ancient Rome, Egypt, barbaric
154
northern Europe, and renaissance Venice, but,
again, are distinctive. The racially varied
peoples and societies which Perry depicts share
Earth's all-too-familiar capacities for good and
evil, love and hate, avarice and generosity,
sorrow and joy, hope and despair, folly and
nobility.
The characters in Tathea are not subtly
nuanced or psychologically dynamic. They are
epic characters, good or evil, who become
better or worse, according to their embrace of
truth. In an attempt to humanize Tathea, Perry
dangles moral and ethical temptations before
her; but the reader does not for a moment
believe this otherworldly saint will fall, even to
learn the value of repentance.
STRUCTURE
The book is divided into four parts: (1)
“Prologue: Preparing for the Journey,” (2) “Part
I: The Vision of the War in Heaven,” (3) “Part
II: The Book and the Mission,” and (4) “Part
III, The Coda: The Words of the Book.” The
awakens in the night to find her young son and
royal husband murdered in a palace coup.
Spirited into the desert by a loyal servant, the
spiritually shattered Tathea takes ship and sails,
Ulysses-like, through the dreadful Maelstrom to
exile in the Lost Lands, where she seeks out the
sage “who was said to know the meaning and
purpose of all things” (13). To her queries,
“Why do I exist? Who am I?” (26), the old man,
directing her quest “to know the mind of God”
(26), sends her to the seashore to prepare her
soul to receive further light and knowledge.
In “The Pre-Existence: The Vision of the
War in Heaven,” Tathea's guide, Ishrafeli, an
angel and a Christ-figure but not the Christ,
comes for her at dawn in a skiff. He asks only,
“Are you sure?” “I am sure,” she answers (28),
and the pair embark upon five distinctive but
thematically related journeys. In the city of
Parfyrion, she encounters Cassiodorus, a
triumphant general who is conspiring to rob
the city of its agency; learning that his course is
“the age- old pattern of all tyranny” (48), she
unmasks him as “a shadow of the Great Enemy” destination, Sardonaris, a Venetian-like city of
(56). Cassiodorus pronounces a malediction on
Tathea, which recurs in each of the subsequent
journeys: “Woman, . . . I know who you are. I
have your name on my hands and I shall
remember you in all the days that are to come”
(50).
In the city of Bal-Eeya, Tathea, acting like
Charlotte Pitt in Perry's mysteries, detects and
exposes the woman Dulcina as a selfish servant
of the Great Enemy, whereupon she, too,
swears in her hatred for Tathea, “I'll find you
wherever you go.” Next, Ishrafeli and Tathea
travel to Malgard, where the rulers have
banned change, pain, sadness, and death.
Ishrafeli, in singing a plaintive song, introduces
the city to the dark night of the soul which
makes more joyous the subsequent soaring to
great light. He understands: “I have broken a
dream with the hand of awakening” (97) and
has brought about the fall of Malgard.
Tathea, shocked at the pain which truth
has caused the innocents, complains to
Ishrafeli, who teaches her that “our pain is
incomplete if we suffer only for ourselves” (98).
After exposing the leader of Malgard as yet
another servant of the Great Enemy, who
desires to keep his people in ignorance, they
undertake their fourth journey, into the frozen
Lands of the Great White Bear, where they
join Kolliko and his band in warfare against
the evil Tascarebus and his barbaric army.
When Kolliko is killed, Ishrafeli says, “My
friend has gone his way and kept his first estate” perfect as I receive it; therefore follow my plan
(109). The alert reader (you and I), in an “Aha!” and let me have dominion over them—and the
experience, begins to sense that we are tracking
Tathea through the premortal existence, a fact
which is confirmed by Sophia, who encourages
them in their “journey of the soul.” She
155
explains that “what you have learned here you
will never entirely forget, and it will serve
you . . . in your second estate, when you will
have forgotten this” (121).
Tathea and Ishrafeli arrive at their fifth
canals ruled by the secret acts of the Oligarchs.
Separated from Ishrafeli, Tathea is attacked
and wounded. She is taken home by Ellida,
who possesses the gift of healing and will
reappear in her Second Estate as the Lady
Eleni, a healer. Betrayed to the Oligarch
Tallagistro, yet another Shadow of the Great
Enemy, Tathea is delivered to execution in
scenes which suggest the betrayal and execution
of “the Beloved” who died for all humankind
on all worlds.
Spared from death at the last moment,
Tathea is directed to a long, pillared gallery,
where she concludes her journey through the
premortal existence by being allowed to enter
into the presence of the “Man of Holiness”
(147) and to witness in vision the Grand
Council in Heaven and the ensuing war. The
first speaker before the council is new to
Mormon theology: Savior, a humanist, posits
an egotistical humanist agenda for humankind,
“this most marvelous of all creatures.” Such a
self-sufficient creature “does not need gods!” he
haughtily exclaims (149).
Then another steps forward, “so like Ishra-
feli and yet unlike him,” thinks Tathea. “I am
Asmodeus,” he says, leading us back to the
script. “I have a plan that is better than Savior's.
I will save every soul that is given me. Not one
of all the millions shall be lost; not one shall
perish or fall into sin!” (150). He concludes
ringingly: “I will bring back every soul as
glory” (151).
In response, Ishrafeli comes forward,
“sweet and sure, without shadow, yet as she
had never seen him before” (151). Speaking
not his own words, Perry carefully explains, but
“those of our brother who has already
redeemed the flesh of all worlds from the
corruption of physical death,” Ishrafeli outlines
a plan whereby every individual must have
choice—agency. “Let this be the plan,” he
concludes: “a world where every good and
every evil is possible. Let man choose for
himself, and the glory be thine.” The Man of
Holiness declares, tetragrammatonly, as in the
Book of Abraham, “Let him choose. . . . Prove
him, that he may work his own salvation and
inherit glory, dominion and everlasting joy, for
this is indeed why he was born.” Transfixed by
what she has witnessed, an exultant Tathea
realizes, “This was the truth. This was what she
had been searching for and paid such an
agonizing price to know” (153).
“Part II: The Book and The Mission”
begins at this crucial and culminating
moment—the end of her quest. Tathea is
introduced to the Book, “covered in beaten
gold and set with chrysolite and pearls, . . . its
workmanship unlike any she had seen. Its great
hasp was set with a single star ruby” (153).
She reads the first words: “Child of God,
if your hands have unloosed the hasp of this
Book, then the intent of your heart is at last
unmarred by cloud of vanity or deceit.” It
continues by revealing what Latter-day Saints
call the law of eternal progression: “When God
was yet a man like yourself, with all your
frailties, your needs, and your ignorance,
walking a perilous land as you do, even then
was the law irrevocable.” She reads further: “By
obedience you may overcome all things, . . .
until no glory is impossible. By such a path did
God ascend unto holiness” (154).
Filled with the power and spirit of the
Book, Tathea understands her charge: “She
would take [the Book] back to the world, share
with everyone this treasure, this key to all
happiness” (154). Ishrafeli leads her into the
presence of God: “In the center [of the room]
156
stood one Man alone, and in His face was the
love that has created worlds, and before whose
beauty the stars tremble” (156). Man of
Holiness places his hands upon Tathea's head,
and His words, “written on her soul,” stress
humankind's divine lineage, divine potential,
and divinely assured agency to choose in all
things:
“I bless you to go forth in the world and
teach My Word to all the people of the earth,
that they may know they are My children and
may become even as I am, and inherit
everlasting dominion and glory and joy. But
they are agents unto themselves, and in all
things they must choose.” (156)
Then, following the ancient pattern, Man
of Holiness exits; and Asmodeus, the Great
Enemy, enters, tempting, “his eyes glitter[ing]
with a hatred older than time.” Ishrafeli joins
combat with Asmodeus. The two marshal their
fantastic forces, which recall the book of
Revelation: the terrible Manticore against the
fantastic Unicorn, the Basilisk against the huge
White Bear, and the Dragon of Sloth versus
the White Swan of Compassion. Ishrafeli
triumphs and sends Tathea, cradling the Book,
back to her Second Estate, to begin her mission
to the world.
Part III explains “The Mission.” When
Tathea awakens on the shores of the Lost
Lands, she has forgotten everything about her
journey through the First Estate, but she has
not returned empty-handed: “There was only
one certainty, absolute and unchangeable, the
Book clasped in her arms was the source of all
that was beautiful and precious, the beginning
and the end of everlasting joy. The power of
the universe was in its pages. She must share it.
Everyone must know” (165). She retains, as
well, the knowledge that she must teach
everyone that “He was the Father of all
mankind. They were begotten in His likeness,”
that humankind carried “in its frail and foolish
soul the seeds of Godhood,” and that life was a
journey back to God (166).
Her own spiritual quest fulfilled, Tathea,
still an exile from Shinabar, travels to the land
of Camassia. She establishes herself, studies,
translates the Book from its ancient language,
and undertakes to teach its words. She begins
this task in Camassia, first to the royal family,
and then triumphantly returns to her native
Shinabar, which she conquers at the head of
Camassian armies. Daunted by the challenge of
presenting the Book to the Camassian
Emperor Isadorous, she reads the familiar
promise of Book: “I give no commandment
except I make a way possible for you to fulfill it,
if you will work in obedience and trust in me”
(191). She converts the emperor with the
simple but powerful truth that his power and
possessions are not his identity. Rather, “you
are a child of God. And that means you must
learn to behave like Him” (193). The emperor,
like all converts to the words of the Book,
enters into a covenant with Man of Holiness
“to walk in the teachings of the Book and keep
its word” (196).
At every juncture, however, Tathea is
opposed by additional manifestations of the
Shadow of Asmodeus, who tempts and tries
her and, on threat of destroying the capitol of
Shinabar, persuades her to abdicate the throne,
Alma -like. Leaving the original Book—there are
now many copies of the text—in the possession
of her first convert, Ra-Nufis, she leaves
Shinabar to teach the Book to other peoples.
She is accompanied by the High Priest
Tugomir, her once-implacable enemy who has
made a Korihor-like turnabout in his
conversion to the Book. Together they
undertake Paul-and-Timothy/Alma-and-
Amulek-like missionary journeys to convert the
forest people of Sylum and the Flemens.
Through her missionary journeys, we learn of
the mission of “the Beloved One”:
“There was a beloved Son, of whom God
spoke . . . , who lived on another world from
157
ours, in such a way that He might answer the
law and redeem worlds without number. I do
not know how He did it, only that He did. I
cannot touch such a thing with the furthest
reaches of my imagination, but I know that it
is so. . . . If you ask God yourself, He will
cause you to know it. You will feel a fire of
warmth inside your heart, a radiance, and a
great peace, and it will be the voice of God.”
(370)
Tathea's last missionary journey takes her
to the Lost Legion and into a long and thrilling
adventure in the Waste Lands against Yaltaba-
oth and his terrible horde. She is successful in
converting and bringing hope to the Lost
Legionnaires, who “drank so deeply of the
words of the Book,” that like the City of
Enoch,“they became of one heart and mind in
purpose, and every man sought his neighbor's
well-being” (397).
At the conclusion of the final battle, in
which she and the diminished legion thwart
the evil Yaltabaoth, Tathea receives “The
Vision of the Beginning of Time,” which,
“knowing it must never be forgotten,” she
engraves “painstakingly on thin, metal plates
which the farrier made for her because they
had no paper” (408). In the vision, a kind of
“gospel according to Tathea,” she sees a woman
in a beautiful garden being tempted by
Asmodeus. The woman, fully aware of her right
of choice and fully aware of the consequences
of any decision she takes, chooses to partake of
the forbidden fruit. She knows that “I have
eaten death, as well as life. But it is better so,”
for “without knowledge of good and evil I
cannot become like my Father. I know that I
walk a knife blade between light and darkness”
(405).
As the vision progresses, Tathea learns
that, just as the blessing of the fall came about
when one heroic woman in a garden made a
crucial choice, so humankind's future “depends
on one man in the meridian of time, who had
 offered to live without stain and at the
appointed hour, to face Asmodeus in another
garden.” Tathea sees that the woman “put the
fruit to her lips and ate,” thereby launching the
“exile of the great journey, with all its trials and
pain, its labor and grief.” Tathea “loved [the
woman and the man] with all her heart” (405);
In the same Alpha and Omega vision,
Tathea sees the advent of the Beloved. Listen to
Perry's moving rendering of her gospel:
The moment came, the day and the hour. The
man was born. He became a child, and then a
youth. . . . And the man came to maturity with
a pure heart and clean hands and began to
preach the Word of God with power. Some
listened to Him, many did not. . . . He shed
light about him[;] those who feared the light
conspired against Him, and the weak, the
cruel, and the self-seeking . . . hated Him with
a terror because He showed them the truth,
and they could not abide it. . . . It was the
moment. They sought to put Him to death,
and He prayed alone in the garden. His soul
trembled for what He knew must come, and
He longed to step aside, but He knew at last
what weighed in the balance. Eternity before
and after hung on this one battle.
And they took the man and killed him, and
He died in the flesh. But His spirit was whole
and perfect and living, and all creation
rejoiced. The dead of all ages past who had
kept faith with Him awoke and were restored,
and those who had died in ignorance were
taught in accordance with the promises of
God. And the man returned to the earth to
tell those who loved Him of His victory, and
they believed and were filled with a hope
which no darkness could crush or devour.
They taught in His name, and some
believed, and some did not. And when they
passed from mortality into immortality, their
words became perverted, even as the man had
foreseen in the face of hell. Evil things were
done in His name, and twisted doctrines
spread a new kind of darkness over the world.
But even while there was ignorance, war,
corruption, and tyranny, there was also love,
158
and all believing men and women who came
thereafter “kept faith that in that white instant
at the center of time, one man would come
who would stand alone in a garden and look
upon hell, and he would not turn his face away
from it” (406).
courage, and sacrifice, and a hope which never
quite faded away. Again men waited and
watched and prayed. (406-07)
Then came the Restoration (though never
called such in the novel): “And after a great
time, truth was given anew out of heaven, and
the old powers were restored, and the old
persecutions, because as ever the Word of God
was a sword which divided the people, and a
mirror which showed a man his face as it truly
was” (407-08).
Tathea returns to Shinabar, where she learns
that Ra-Nufis, her first convert, has betrayed the
Book and led the nation into apostasy, violating
the people's agency, perverting “the doctrines of
God” (445), promising life without pain,
teaching a false God, establishing a professional
priesthood, introducing nonrelated ritual, and
asserting that “Ra-Nufis's interpretation of the
Book is the only correct one” (463). Threatened
with death by the jealous priesthood, Tathea
storms the underground vault where the Book
is kept, kills Ra-Nufis in a thrilling encounter,
and flees with the Book, which she takes back
to the Lost Lands. Aboard ship, she battles the
Unrepentant Dead, who are dispersed only
when her companion raises his right arm and
commands, “In the name of Him who faced the
powers of hell and overcame them, I command
you to depart!” (495).
Coming full circle in her long and arduous
journey in defense of truth, Tathea returns to
the Islands at the Edge of the World. Here she
faces one last temptation from the tenacious
Asmodeus, whom she at last recognizes as “the
corruption of what had once been sublime.”
Resisting his last temptation, she rebukes him.
Carrying the Book, Tathea is met at the ancient
seashore by a man “like Asmodeus, slender and
dark with a face of marvelous beauty, and yet he
was also utterly different. In him was the
knowledge of pain and glory, and his eyes
shone with the light in his soul.” Instantly she
remembers Ishrafeli from the First Estate and
recalls the lessons of her early visions. Ishrafeli
gives her a surprising final charge:
You took the fire of truth from heaven. You
must guard it until there comes again one who
is pure enough in heart to open the seal and
read what is written. It may be a hundred years, The dream is a travesty!—Give him knowledge, a
it may be a thousand, but God will preserve
you until that time and the end of all things.
In that day I shall come again, and we shall
fight the last battle of the world, you and I
together. (504)
Ishrafeli kisses her and walks into the sun,
leaving Tathea on the shore, “the golden book
[sic] in her arms and the fire and the light of
God in her soul” (504). She waits there yet—and choose for himself, as I have chosen in
will wait there until the sequel, expected late in
2001, when she will find the boy who will “raise
the warriors who will be righteous and strong
enough to fight Armageddon” (Lythgoe “Anne
Perry” E3).
The last part of the novel is a coda which
contains “The Words of the Book.” In the
process of translating and teaching the words of
the Book to the people, Tathea introduces the
reader to most of its words and message. The
message in its entirety appears in a seventeen- semblance of it, a fire-shadow in the darkness.”
page coda. The Book's prologue begins: “The
conversation between Man of Holiness and
Asmodeus, the Great Enemy.” The body of the
Book is a transcript of the Great Conversation,
during which Man of Holiness describes his
plan of salvation, and Asmodeus presents his
dissenting and antithetical responses.
For example, the Man of Holiness,
echoing the doctrines of Joseph Smith's King
Follett discourse, says in stately words, “It is My
purpose and My joy that in time beyond
159
thought he may become even as I am, and
together we shall walk the stars, and there shall
be no end.” But Asmodeus counters, “[Man] is
weak and will despair at the first
discouragement. But if you were to set lanterns
to his path of rewards and punishments, then
he would see the good from the evil, and his
choices would be just.” And when Man of
Holiness promises that the obedient man will
one day hold “My power in his hands to create
worlds and dominions and peoples without
end,” Asmodeus retorts: “He will never do that!
sure path. He will never be a god, but he will be
saved from the darkness within him” (507).
The Man of Holiness tells Asmodeus that
he is mistaken in thinking that the plan is
about power. Rather, “it is love. . . . It has
always been love” (508). At the heart of his plan
is agency. “I will not rob man of his agency to
eternities past, what he will do and who he will
become. . . . Wickedness can never be joy,” he
intones. “Even I cannot make it so” (508).
The journey to godhood requires
obedience and self-mastery: “If he would
become as I am, and know My joy, which has
no boundary in time or space, then the first
and greatest step on that journey is to harness
the passions within himself and use their force
for good. Without that he has no life but only a
He insists, “There must be opposition in all
things; without the darkness, there is no light”
(517).
Asmodeus argues that in exercising agency
man will abuse the procreative powers “above
all the other powers you give him. He will make
of that desire a dark and twisted thing. . . . He
will corrupt and pervert, distort its very nature
until it grows hideous.” But Man of Holiness
persists: “I know it, and My soul weeps. But it
must be. The more sublime the good, the
deeper the evil that is possible from its
debasement” (509). Still, he says:
I know him better than he knows himself. I
give to every soul that which is necessary for it
to reach the fullness of its nature, to know the
bitter from the sweet, which is the purpose of
this separation from Me of his mortal life. It is
a brief span for an eternal need, for some too
brief for happiness also. But to each is given
the opportunity to learn what is needful for
that soul, to strengthen what is weak, to
hallow and make beautiful that which is ugly,
to give time to winnow out the chaff of doubt
and impatience, and fire to burn away the
dross of selfishness. The chances come in
many forms and ofttimes more than once.
(510)
But at the end, to Asmodeus's scornful
question about why Man of Holiness would
undertake all of this “for a creature who is
worthy of nothing,” Man of Holiness replies,
“It is because I love him. . . . That is all. It is the
light which cannot fade, the life which is
endless. I am God, and Love is the name of My
soul” (522).
STYLE IN TATHEA
I present these lengthy citations from the
Book to address the question of style in Tathea,
which is at once off-putting for readers
accustomed to Perry's mystery novels, and
“virtuous, lovely, . . . of good report or
praiseworthy” (13th Article of Faith) for those
who read the book not only as an epic, full of
sound and fury and profoundly signifying, but
as alternative holy writ, paraphrasings of God's
with the moment of consecration, the
dilemma each of us could potentially face
when we are allowed to receive something that
is so important we wish to share it with others,
but realise that in doing so we will put our
own lives considerably at risk. At that point,
we reach the crossroads and have to ask
ourselves if we believe in what we are doing
enough that we would be willing to give up all
we have for it, if necessary even our lives.
(“Anne's”)
160
Word, and close to the mark. Perry's style in
Tathea must steer a tight course between
suggesting on one page the credible and
powerful presence of the divine in human life,
on whatever world; while evoking in the next
pages exotic desert and frozen landscapes, wild
seascapes, and even the holy halls of God; and
on a further page eliciting the fantastic through
evil, malformed dwarfs, a fairy-angel with bells
on his toes, ships manned by the Unrepentant
Dead, horrible Manticores and Dragons, stately
Unicorns and White Swans, not to forget a
princess who is a practitioner of white magic
and an evil king-mother who is a practitioner of
necromancy.
Not everyone will agree with me (O happy
day that would be!), but I believe she has
brought it off with distinction in this landmark
tour de force, which will hereafter occupy a
distinguished place in Mormon letters. If we
grant Anne Perry her données, or, as one of my
errant-prone missionaries used to plead, “cut
[her] a little slack,” I am persuaded that she has
brilliantly negotiated a literary Scylla and
Charbydis and written a book which is even
more than what she calls “a gripping story of
love and conflict that also looks at the great
challenges in life—the nature and meaning of
who we are” (“Anne's”). Tathea is vitally
important to Perry herself, and, by implication,
to every covenanted Latter-day Saint, dealing, as
she describes it,
In writing Tathea, Anne Perry has
courageously put her career on the line in
proclaiming her faith in and consecrating her
talents to the Restoration, by revisiting and
rendering, however obliquely, the plan of
exaltation. Furthermore, she has done it in a
fantastic, magically realistic, exciting, refreshing,
and spiritually moving way which heeds Emily
Dickinson's counsel to “Tell all the Truth but
tell it slant” (#1129).

RICHARD H. CRACROFT is former chair of the
English Department and dean of the College of
Humanities at BYU, where he has taught since
1963. A founding member of and past president of
AML, he is also an Honorary Lifetime member
(2001). He and his wife, Janice Alger Cracroft, are
the parents of three and grandparents of six.
Richard has been a bishop, stake president, mission
president, MTC branch president, and—best of all—
a four-year Gospel Doctrine teacher veteran.
NOTE
1. The dedication page of Tathea, quoted on
the jacket, does not appear in the Shadow Moun-
tain publication of the book: “[To] my mother,
father, step-father, and brother and his family . . . .
[to] Russell M. Nelson for setting the star to
follow . . . and for all who dream.”
WORKS CITED
”Anne's Own Comments (Written Especially for the
Mary Pondered: The Power of Mothers' Narratives
Kristi Bell
It was a cold February morning twenty-two
years ago when I first experienced motherhood.
I felt as prepared as any first time mother. I'd
attended the prenatal classes and listened
carefully to my doctor's predictions. I knew just
what to expect. And then I went into labor and
found out that I knew nothing at all.
My water broke at 4:00 in the morning
and we sped to the hospital. There the nurses
confirmed that my water had indeed broken
and sent me home with instructions to call the
doctor if labor didn't start by mid-morning. By
the time we got home, my contractions were
lasting about a minute and were approximately
ninety seconds apart. My husband informed me
161
Perry Chronicle).” Perry Chronicle: The Journal
for the Discerning Detective, 2.8 (November 5,
1999), 5.
”Customer Comments: Tathea.” Amazon.com
“The Jacket Blurb of Tathea.” Perry Chronicle: The
Journal for the Discerning Detective, 2.8
(November 5, 1999), 4-5.
Lee, Carol Ann, ed. “The Perry Chronicle Review
of Tathea.” Perry Chronicle: The Journal for the
Discerning Detective, 2.8 (November 5, 1999): 2-
4.
Lythgoe, Dennis. “Anne Perry: Her Life, like Her
Stories, Is Layered with Intrigue.” Deseret News,
August 29, 1999, E1, E3-E4.
—. “‘Tathea’ a Gold Mine of Mormon Doctrine.”
Deseret News, August 29, 1999, E3.
O'Brien, Joan. “For Perry, New Book Was 50 Years
in the Making.” Salt Lake Tribune, November
27, 1999 in aml-list@cc.weber. edu, December
1, 1999.
Perry, Anne. Tathea. Salt Lake City: Shadow
Mountain, 1999.
that I was not in labor because the contractions
were too close. After packing a bag, we returned
to the hospital. Five fun-filled hours of labor
and two memorable hours of pushing produced
a little girl who in the delivery room looked just
like me. For the rest of her twenty-two years of
life she has looked my husband's female clone,
only with hair.
Nothing about her birth was what I
expected, but then the following years have
held surprises as well. I love recounting my
children's birth stories; and while I try to stick
with the facts, I carefully choose some elements
to emphasize, shaping the stories to match the
unique nature of each child.
 While a birth may be the product of a few chooses to raise and nurture children, there
hours, the story of the birth is often a reflection remains a lovely facet of the mosaic which is the
of days, weeks, and years. Folklorist Bruce birth of her children. As Jackson claims, “At
Jackson wrote, “These stories of ours, these the private level . . . stories are strategic. They're
reports of our lives, are living things. They wax told for reasons overt and covert, understood
and wane in detail and emotional shading and not understood, articulated and not
depending on when and where and to whom articulated” (12). And the reasons change over
they are being told. Different listeners elicit time as a result of the pondering.
different versions of the narrative, and the same The Brigham Young University Folklore
listener elicits different versions of narratives at Archive houses around a dozen projects
different times” (5). This version of my devoted to birth stories. Other birth stories are
daughter's birth is different from the one that I embedded in numerous projects dealing with
tell her and other versions that I have told personal narratives. Comparison of these
different people over the years. The tale I tell is projects emphasizes the place that pondering
tailored to meet the storytelling event. plays in shaping birth narrative. In 1993, Nicole
According to time and place, I stress different Wistisen collected women's narratives of their
details and themes. Mothers' narratives not only first labor and delivery. The women ranged
make sense of the birth experience but also from their twenties to their fifties, and all were
help to define the child and her place in the at least a year away from the delivery. The
world. stories were rich, warm, and witty. While they
The most famous birth story in acknowledged pain, it played a minor role. In
Christendom is Luke's account of the birth of contrast, in 1994 Sheryl Cragun Dame
Christ. This birth was a miracle of eternal collected stories from men and women
consequence. Angels, shepherds, and wise men recounting the birth of a child within the last
celebrated the coming of the Savior. But what year. Each of these narratives focused on the
of the human most intimately involved in the intensity of the pain the women endured and
events? As she listened to prophecy and how they dealt with it. The narrative had not
observed the adulation of her son, “Mary kept yet fully developed past the pain.
all these things and pondered them in her heart” One mother in Wistisen's project, Patricia
(Luke 2:19). But Mary is not the only mother to Thorne (a pseudonym) told the story of her
ponder. And with the pondering comes an eldest daughter's birth more than twenty years
ordering of events and feelings—a story designed earlier. While Patricia acknowledges the pain,
for sharing. And through sharing, mothers other details help mark the uniqueness of the
validate their experience and begin to birth. Patricia and her husband were unable to
understand the significance of one of the most be together for the birth. Her husband had
vital events of their life. been drafted and was to be sent to Vietnam. To
Mary Catherine Bateson claims that “wom- gain time to finish another semester of law
en who have devoted themselves to school, he had challenged the order based on
homemaking and childcare have had to put circumstances and was waiting to hear back
together a mosaic of activities and resolve from the government while attending school.
conflicting demands on their time and Patricia was living with her parents. There
attention” (13). The mosaic of modern mothers' wasn't money or time to transport Patricia east
lives grows ever more complex as activities pull when he went back to school. As a result, she
them away from home; but for any woman who delivered their first child in Provo while her
162
husband was in North Carolina. Here is an
excerpt from Patricia's narrative:
I went into the delivery room, and within five
minutes our little daughter was born, and that
was the first time I experienced that absolutely
amazing sense of relief that comes after the
pain, which is almost by contrast worth having
experienced the pain. Having experienced the
pain makes the moment of delivery and the
relief and release of that, just so
overwhelmingly wonderful, and in
combination with being face to face with this
little person that you've loved during the time
that you've carried the baby. Just as I was going
[into the delivery], I didn't have that chance
then to share that moment with my husband,
and that was an extremely lonely feeling, but at
the same time, I was very close to my parents
and I could share that with them. . . . I had
called my husband when we went to the
hospital, and that was a Saturday night. She
was born about six in the morning, on Sunday
morning; and so I called him in North
Carolina as soon as I could get to a phone
after the delivery, and he was still there, almost
on his way to his church meetings for the day.
So, I was able to tell him in some detail—share
that with him—and feel how absolutely thrilled
he was to be the father of this little, beautiful
daughter. And he told me afterwards that
when he went to priesthood meeting . . . and
was just so proud and excited to be able to
share that with at least the family of our ward
members in our church, even though we
couldn't share that together at the time. (13)
Jackson asserts that “we all use stories to
texture and contextualize our worlds. Stories
are often the devices by and with which families
define themselves” (9). Thorne's birth narrative
places her daughter's birth within their family's
values. Thorne and her husband lovingly
welcomed their daughter within the context of
their immediate family, their extended family
(grandparents), and their church family.
Creating a cohesive, functioning family
may be the ultimate act of creativity; however, it
163
is one that modern society often fails to
acknowledge. Anthropologist Mary Catherine
Bateson writes: “We see achievement as
purposeful and monolithic, like the sculpting of
a massive tree trunk that has first to be brought
from the forest and then shaped by long labor
to assert the artist's vision, rather than
something crafted from odds and ends, like a
patchwork quilt and lovingly used to warm
different nights and bodies” (4).
Creating a family is a bit like a patchwork
quilt, only on a more significant level. Dana
Adams's (a pseudonym) account of her first
pregnancy and delivery is a good example:
I found out that I was going to have our
first baby, Kathy, and I was really sick. Things
seemed to go along all right until I was about
four and one half months pregnant, and I
began to hemorrhage, and they took me to the
hospital, and I was in labor. I had one doctor
who said, “Let's just take the baby,” and
another doctor who said, “No, the heartbeat is
still strong; we are not going to take this baby.”
I remember how devastated I was, thinking
that I was going to lose our first child; but they
sent me home, and I had to be in bed for
about the next four months, flat on my back
and [my husband] was working and he was
going to school. So about the only person I
had to keep me company was this little baby
that I talked to all the time while she was still
in my womb. I worried a lot because people
said that she would be deformed or that there
would be something wrong with the baby; but
when the baby laid real still for very long, I
would put my hand down on my stomach and
I'd say, “Move, so I know that you're all right”
and she would kick her little feet. We had
some pretty good conversations. I read books
to her and just had a lot of quiet time, just the
two of us. So you can imagine what it was like
for me when she was born and we found that
she was all right. (Abbott #1)
While Dana's pregnancy was physical and
a process of nature, her approach was creative.
Dana's narrative provides her daughter with
information that allows her to place herself
within her family. (See Jackson 12.)
An excellent example of a mother placing
her child within a family is Lucy Mack Smith's
account of her son Joseph's history. In History of
Joseph Smith by His Mother, Lucy reduces the
actual birth of her son to one line; “Here it was
that my son Joseph was born, December 23,
1805, one who will act a more conscious part in
this [narrative] than any other individual”
(Proctor 62). But, Smith actually devotes ample
preparation to the birth and role of her son.
Jackson claims: “Our stories aren't only our
histories, our version of what happened;
sometimes they're our scripts, our map of what's
going on now and what's going to happen next”
(16). Smith provides such a script as she
outlines the religious histories of her son's
ancestors and the visions which she and her
husband have that are to be fulfilled by their
son (Proctor 14, 20, 60, 63, 65, 89, 90). Smith's
account, while probably familiar to her family,
is carefully crafted in her history to focus on her
son's divine mission.
Smith's narrative, as well as the other
narratives mentioned, is likely the result of
pondering. As Mary discovered, it is only by
keeping sacred experiences, such as the birth of
children, in our hearts and pondering them
with our whole soul that their significance can
be comprehended to any extent. Jackson
explains: “What historians do for a living the
rest of us do all the time. We organize the
Stories Worth Telling?
Harlow Söderborg Clark
. . . and as often as this story was told it was always
one telling from extinction.
164
events of our lives in terms of . . . narratives.
These stories are not just file cabinets or movies
of ordinary life; they are also the devices with
which we explain and justify ourselves to others”
(1). This sentiment is echoed in every mother's
narrative.
KRISTI BELL is the folklore archivist at Brigham
Young University where she also teaches
composition. She and her husband Jim are the
parents of six daughters.
WORKS CITED
Abbott, Tara. “The Miracle of Birth: Male vs.
Female Memories.” Project #1481. 1997. BYU
Folklore Archive, Harold B. Lee Library,
Brigham Young University, Provo, Utah.
Bateson, Mary Catherine. Composing a Life. New
York: Plume, 1990.
Dame, Sheryl Cragun. “Pain and Wonder: Mothers'
and Fathers' Birth Narratives.” 1994. Project
#1166. BYU Folklore Archive, Harold B. Lee
Library, Brigham Young University, Provo,
Utah.
Jackson, Bruce W. “The Stories People Tell.”
www.acsu.buffalo.edu /~bjackson/stories.
htm
Proctor, Scott Facer, and Maurine Jensen Proctor,
eds. The Revised and Enhanced History of Joseph
Smith by His Mother. Salt Lake City: Bookcraft,
1996.
Wistisen, Nicole. “First Labor and Delivery
Narratives.” Project #1113. 1993. BYU
Folklore Archive, Harold B. Lee Library,
Brigham Young University, Provo, Utah.
Stories. Libraries. Places to find and keep
stories. I stand here in BYU's library, looking
through old Speeches of the Year collections to
find the comment I am using for my epigraph.
But they're devotional and fireside addresses
mostly, and this talk was neither. Memory tells
me it was from a forum address by N. Scott
Momaday, sometime in the early 1980s. (Since
I graduated in ‘84 everything is some time in
the early ‘80s.) I can't find the quotation.
Perhaps it's in one of his books, like The Man
Made of Words. I don't have a library card, don't
have $35/year to get one. I will have to use
interlibrary loan.
I want the quotation. It reminds me of
how fragile stories are. I often hear about
immoral art. I hear people express concerns
about the power of art to corrupt society. But
stories only have power if they are retold. I have
been pondering for months the implications of
saying that certain stories are not worth telling.
So let me tell you a story: My grandmother—
born in the 1880s—told this to her son, Ray.
When she was in school the formula for
learning addition was “2+2 the sum of which is
4. 4+4 the sum of which is 8. 8+8 the sum of
which is 16.” Grandma couldn't make sense of
this phrase, “the sum of which,” so she would
say “2+2 the sonofabitch is 4. 4+4, the
sonofabitch is 8.”
Is the story worth telling? Part of my joy in
telling that story, certainly, is imagining my very
proper grandmother saying a naughty word—the
very thing that would make the story not worth
telling for some people. Another part of my joy
is imagining how Florence May Lloyd, growing
up in Salt Lake City near the last turn of the
century, learned that word. Indeed, this story
fascinates me for its grammar. Grandma did
not understand the phrase “the sum of which,”
but recognized it as apposite “2+2.” Appositives
are pronominal so she substituted a phrase she
had heard that she probably didn't understand
but which is often used as a generic pronoun.
She did all this without thinking about it,
165
analyzing it, or using adjective forms of
common nouns like appositive and pronoun,
which suggests to me how complex and
marvelous is our understanding of language.
But the story's emotional value to me is
greater than simple (or complex) joy in language.
As a descendant of Florence May Lloyd Söder-
borg, I value the story for its connection not
only to the 19th century but also to a dying
generation whose parents and children
straddled two centuries in times of rapid change.
Between June 28, 1995 (my birthday, ironically),
and February 5, 1998, my mother lost four
brothers, one in each year: Don (the youngest),
Alvin, Ray, Lloyd.
I vaguely remember Ray telling the story
about Grandma's addition learning at a family
reunion. Or maybe I heard it from my mother.
Or both. I connect the story with one of those
four funerals. Not Ray's, but Lloyd's the oldest.
We are standing outside in the wind—a little
rain, perhaps, perhaps graveside. Ray's youngest
son, Joseph, begins to cry. I fold my arms
around him and hold him. Death is an insult, I
tell him. The last enemy that must be
conquered, as Paul said.
Later, are we eating funeral potatoes and
jello--at the wardhouse where Lloyd's son is bish-
op? Joseph tells me again and again “2+2, the
sonofabitch is 4. 4+4, the sonofabitch is 8.” The
story brings the dead closer to us. Death may
ravage the mind, destroy the body, but the
stories remain, and the word resurrection tells us
that the lips which formed the stories that death
could not take away will break away from the
embrace and woo of death, break death's story-
smothering kiss, and tell us more.
*
A need to hear and tell stories is essential to the
species Homo Sapiens—second in necessity
apparently after nourishment and before love and
shelter. —Reynolds Price (3)
 So another story, last year's Christmas and the only thing I might write about as a
essay, that grew out of my need to tell a certain missed opportunity was the time Elmer told me
story. at choir practice that he had cancer, it was in
remission, and please don't tell my parents, he
Elmer's Trading didn't want many people to know. That was
All my growing-up years Elmer and Edna during the two years Donna and I lived in my
Terry's flowers graced the stand at church, parents' basement until my mother came
where the choir, the bishopric, the speakers sat. downstairs one day and said, “It's time to buy a
Every Sunday in growing season a large floral house. You've got a job now and Matthew is
arrangement would receive mention from the almost two and doesn't need four adults telling
pulpit. The Terrys were not florists—Edna him what to do.”
taught school and Elmer was a lawyer—but they I guess Elmer didn't want people making a
had a good-sized garden plot and Elmer had a fuss over him, so he missed an opportunity to
client, a farmer. receive their compassion, but that's not what I
My father looked at the rich brown pile of wanted to write about with a title like “Elmer's
steer manure in Elmer's garden one day as we Trading.” The title just holds too much
were driving or walking past, smiled, and said, celebration for me to want it to explore the dark
“Looks like Elmer's been trading shit for brains side of my parents' generation's self-reliance.
again.” Something Elmer had told him, a Frost came early this year. I was working
comment his client had made to a friend about graveyard at the post office; and coming home
a load of manure he was delivering, “I'll trade September 1, I felt crunching under my shoes.
shit for brains any day.” Who would think to cover the tomatoes the last
My father also had a source of manure. night of August? If not for a few cold nights in
About once a year, sometimes more, we'd drive September and October, we would have had
out to Mapleton and visit a couple of former tomatoes until Thanksgiving. I love tomatoes.
students, sheep ranchers, and come home with They remind me of Jesus' comments about a
a load of their driest. We did this for several well of water springing up into everlasting life.
years in the VW Vanagon we bought the year Tomatoes keep producing even when there's no
Dad taught at the University of Oulu, Finland. hope of the green fruit ripening. And indeed a
We'd fill big plastic trash bags, cram as many as few did ripen, even after the first freeze.
we could in, tie more on top. Later we'd use a I drove the Datsun over to pick up my
little Datsun truck my parents bought to drive father's roto-tiller one Saturday in late
back East and see autumn leaves the year Dad November and stopped to pack in 20 or so bags
retired and could see Robert Frost country in of leaves— old tradition. Unloaded them and
autumn, instead of just having his students read drove around the tree streets for another load.
about it. They will fertilize my father's garden, and next
“Elmer's Trading,” I thought. “What a summer he'll have too much growing down
great title.” The title wandered my brain for there to eat and will probably take some to the
years looking for some words to go under it—if food bank. I don't see a lot of leaves around my
Elmer's trading, what is he trading? Is the trade- neighborhood.
off worth it? I brought the tiller over, pulled out the
Too heavy a question, the kind you ask if tomato plants, and cornstalks (saved the dried
you want to write about missed opportunities ears that never got picked for some reason—
while someone was too busy in a profession, good for soup), put them in my compost pile
166
with all the weeds I've pulled the past few years,
and set to work. It always surprises me how
much that garden holds and how small it looks
when it's just a tilled plot of earth, how much of
that garden can fit into a compost cage about
four feet across by four feet high. Three cages,
now, one ready, one a-preparing, one getting
started. So all my hours in the garden end up in
a compost pile or sewage treatment plant.
I think about that rich black pile of steer
manure in Elmer's garden, the end of all his
Odd to think of a lawyer's words as
liabilities. But they are like a writer's words—
words not spoken, not written down, not
shared, not tested against other words weigh on
the soul. Even two words, like “Elmer's
Trading,” might weigh a soul down if not
spoken or written, inviting other words to join
them and make something. Why they chose
Christmas to make such invitation, I'm not sure,
except perhaps that Christmas is about
redemption, about taking the painful and
worthless things of our lives and giving them
value. Archibald Macleish, who retold Job's
story in his play J.B., once said he is moved by
the ending of the story. Job has lost everything,
suffered the pain of all loss, yet when God
offers it back to him, with the implicit
possibility of losing it again, he takes it.
In Mormon tradition Jesus was born and
died at the same time of year—Caesar Augustus
perhaps took advantage of Passover gatherings
to gather taxes—so the celebration of His birth
has overtones of His death. And rebirth. Like
Job He took the pain upon Himself again. He
had suffered a most agonizing death but, before
that, had suffered a greater agony that caused
“myself, even God, the greatest of all, to
tremble because of pain, and to bleed at every
pore, and to suffer both body and spirit—and
would that I might not drink the bitter cup,
and shrink” (D&C 19:18). But He took it back,
the source of all His pain, the body that had
167
legal education. If I wanted to take a potshot at
lawyers, I could say that Elmer knew the value
of his profession, but it's more likely that he
knew the value of manure. His words might
protect someone's legal rights but could not
nurture flowers. The rancher's manure might
grow flowers, but the steers would trample them
if they were right there in the pen. There's also
the runoff into streams. So Elmer and his friend
traded liabilities, each ending up with benefits.
expressed in blood the suffering of His spirit.
Next to that kind of redemption, my words
are worth about as much as the weeds I try
redeeming in my compost piles. “Don't compost
the weeds,” Donna says. “That just redistributes
them throughout the garden.”
“Not if I get them in there before they go
to seed,” I say, pulling the small weeds growing
atop the pile and piling more on top of them. I
think about the weeds growing in Elmer's
garden, flowerless since he died years after Edna.
The new owners may sell that half of the lot, put
up another house there. I ponder all that rich
brown earth, years of it, being trucked away to
some place that may never know the value of a
legal education, to people who may not know
what that dirt can grow.
I suppose Elmer is still growing flowers. I
wonder what he uses for fertilizer? Of course,
perhaps spirit steers still don't metabolize
everything and have plenty to give. I certainly
hope writers will still take in words and sounds
and memories and give out something of
comparable worth.
*
Another story, a shorter one.
For some reason my brother's sixth-grade
teacher, Mrs. Arrowsmith, was a legend to me,
so I was disappointed that she retired before I
got to sixth grade. She did teach our class once
though, as a substitute, maybe for a few days. I
don't remember. What I do remember is a
poem she read us about an old violin that an
auctioneer is about to auction off cheap, but an
old man comes up and plays it and the
auctioneer and everyone else sees the violin's
real value.
I thought it a clever poem. It was evident,
even before the last stanza, that the poem was
talking about more than a violin, and indeed,
Mrs. Arrowsmith asked us to write about what
that more was. But I couldn't. The author
already said everything that could be said about
her meaning in the last stanza:
And many a man with life out of tune,
And battered and scarred with sin,
Is auctioned cheap to the thoughtless crowd
Much like the old violin.
I felt cheated. Perhaps that was the start of
my intense dislike of didactic poetry. I have
since developed a certain affection for this
poem as part of my culture, though I still don't
much like it as a poem.
These three stories are about the need to
tell stories. Each bided its time until a form
presented itself. The first is part of a work in
progress about my uncles and the way they link
me with World War II. The essay is partly a
response to Paul Fussell's discussion of verbal
subversion in Wartime, partly a way of
understanding what it means to me to have
grown up in the post-war generation. “Elmer's
Trading” is like that picture of Escher's hands
drawing each other, an essay about the need to
write an essay, which becomes the essay you're
reading. The third story took shape one night
when I was in Seagull Books with my niece and
saw Greg Newbold's edition of The Touch of the
Master's Hand. I wrote up a review and posted it
to AML- List, primarily to tell the story about
Mrs. Arrowsmith (what a wonderful name).
168
*
But these three stories are also stories that
some people would not consider worth telling.
Indeed, some would consider the first two
stories acts of verbal subversion, and that's part
of their charm for me. They take words we don't
normally say in our rather conservative culture
and suggest that those words have value,
perhaps even value we couldn't do without.
Indeed, the first story has an added charm.
While writing this essay, I began to think the
story was just too well-crafted to be someone's
actual experience. And after I read this paper at
the AML conference, my brother Dennis
motioned me over to where he was sitting. “You
do know, don't you, that that story didn't
originate with our family?” “That occurred to
me. I'm going to put in a footnote about it.” “I
think you should put it in the body of the
paper.” Dennis associates the story with a book
of stories from Reader's Digest he read at
Grandma's house.
That raises an interesting question. Does
the story's value depend on whether it actually
happened? Often a story's value does. I think
this story's value has more to do with how it ties
generations together than with whether my
grandmother ever said “2+2 the sonofabitch is
4.” But if it's not an incident from my
grandmother's life, that changes my relationship
to the story. It also raises the intriguing question
of how it came into the family.
It's possible the story really is an incident
from Grandma's life. The joke's grammar makes
it possible that a child in school could mistake
the phrases. Someone noticed the similarity.
Perhaps many people at the same time noticed
it and crafted a joke to exploit the similarity.
The fact that it makes a nice joke wouldn't stop
it from also being someone's experience. We all
have similar bodies and similar experiences, and
the perception that allows someone to pun on
“2+2 the sum of which is 4” could have allowed
someone else to misunderstand the phrase.1
It's more likely Grandma heard the joke
somewhere and told it on herself in the way
parents sometimes say naughty things to shock
their children. Or perhaps Ray heard the joke
and applied it to his mother in adolescent
rebellion,2 or heard it as an adult and wanted to
tell it without offending people, so he attached
it to his mother. However it came into the
family, I'm glad it's here to keep family
members in memory.
As for the third story, after I posted my
review I found an on-line LDS newspaper out
of California that had a lot of book reviews and
sent my review in. I got one of (I think) two
rejections I've ever received that rebuked me for
my writing. Lost in an e-mail disaster, it said in
substance, “Our readers aren't interested in
your opinions about the book. They want an
objective account of the book; and just because
you didn't like it doesn't mean they won't.”
Which, oddly enough, was a point I had made
in the review, though I much like the
illustrations, finding them better than the poem.
That is, some people would think the
three stories I've told aren't worth telling
because they could be seen as an attack on
either the sensibilities or tastes of an audience. I
spent a good deal of my writing time a year ago
wrestling with this image of literature as attack.
I'm concerned with the costs to both artist and
society of seeing art as alien to society, as
beyond culture, in Lionel Trilling's words.
Two more stories to introduce those costs.
One night in 1986 after a very emotional home
teaching visit to a friend who had suffered
horrendous sexual and physical abuse as a boy,
I decided to write down a story I had been
aware of for several years. Here is the first
sentence:
A decade and a half later (long after he had missionary who molested him, then—not
169
made his peace)—as he stood in the chapel
holding his third child in his arms, stood
before the congregation in the late November
sun, a noon-tide of sun washing gently the
circle of his father, father-in-law, brother,
brother-in-law, hometeachers and bishop,
stood to speak the hopes of his listening wife,
and of himself, stood to speak blessings of the
Lord, stood and said, “We take this infant in
our arms to give her a name and a blessing”—a
thought passed through his mind that at
fifteen you are still only a child, which gave
him small pause before he could say, “and the
name by which she will be known upon the
records of the Church,” a pause he was afraid
would be filled by someone prompting him, a
pause almost filled by tears, as when, standing
in the delivery room holding this wondrous
creature whose head had so suddenly appeared
after all the hours of her mother's body
straining against hers, so suddenly appeared for
the doctor to suction out the mucus from the
nose and mouth with his aspirator, he had
almost wept to think there were men who had
recently earned space on sheets of newsprint
for enacting their lusts on small children,
defiling whom they should protect, a pause
that ended as he pronounced her name then
said, “Bronwen, I give unto you a father's
blessing,” drawing in breath to form to words
in the thanks-giving, sun-graced knowledge that
fifteen years ago he had been only a child, a
child walking along the river.
How do you hear that? I wrote it thinking
of the chapel on Second North between Fifth
and Sixth East in Provo where my father's
student ward met for many years, the way I had
seen the late afternoon light fall across the
podium once. For me the opening affirms my
culture and its rites. I wanted it to have a lot of
light because there's a lot of darkness in the
story. The thing Brendan starts thinking about
as he's blessing his daughter, the thing that
happened 15 years earlier, is a returned
knowing he was talking to another Mormon—
tried preaching the gospel to him. Disturbing
story, you say? Not to the others in my
University of Washington writing workshop.
Didn't faze them (so you can imagine my
surprise when they were shocked by the rocky
mountain oyster scene in Levi Peterson's The
Backslider).
I took the story to California where the
family was gathering for Christmas at my sister's.
I thought my father would react much as he did
when my brother Dennis read a section from
his story “Answer to Prayer” at this gathering a
few years earlier: “The people who will
appreciate the story's spirituality are likely to be
offended by the language in the prayer, and the
people who appreciate the literary craft are
likely to be offended by the spirituality.”
Instead, the story quite disturbed him. He
was afraid it placed me with those who wrote
well about Mormon culture but used the
culture's symbols as metaphors rather than
expressions of faith.3 Had I known how hurt
my parents might be by the story, I would have
discussed it with them before giving it to them
to read. But it's worth telling here for another
reason, which I want to introduce by telling a
story about one of the unpublished gems of
Mormon literature.
Béla Petsco's “The Blackness of the
Darkness,” can be described as a story about a
boy in a 19th-century polygamous southern
Utah town who murders people so he can sing
“O My Father” at their funerals. It was rejected
by both Sunstone and Dialogue in the early 1980s;
and shortly after the Dialogue rejection I ran
into a friend who told me, I don't know why,
that though he had great respect for Béla's
special gifts, he just didn't think we needed
stories like “The Blackness of the Darkness” in
the Church and had recommended that
Dialogue not publish it. I asked him what he
170
thought about all the imagery—including the
title—from the epistle of Jude and the pruning
imagery reminiscent of Zenos' allegory of the
olive trees. A short time later Béla told me he
had received a letter from this man apologizing
for rejecting the story: He had reread it and
understood it much better.
So what we have are two very good readers
missing important clues in stories about their
culture, missing details that could have helped
them better understand the author's views of his
culture. How did this happen? I've pondered it
for a long time because I imagine it happens in
every culture, even in family cultures.
The most poignant statement I've heard
about offense recently came from Marilyn
Brown, commenting on I Cannot Tell a Life, the
autobiography of her mother-in-law, Florence
Child Brown. The book is a remarkable
instance of what Reynolds Price calls the
pressure to “narrate or strangle” (28). As
Marilyn said on ALM-List, commenting on a
review of Mikal Gilmore's Shot in the Heart, “The
value of anyone's telling how they saw it, as
painful as it may be, is inestimable.” She then
commented on I Cannot Tell a Life, saying, “Just
want you to know the family hated it and has
ostracized their little old 77 year old mother in a
wheelchair in a nursing home. Some of them
won't even visit her or call anymore. Hope they
mellow out someday! Only the ‘literary one'
survived it. He's been through so much that he's
cool—the one whose wife married his father.”
Brown has painful stories to tell, but the
impression her stories leave is not that she
wants to castigate or call to account. She simply
wants to tell her life as fully and honestly as she
cannot.
It is a tragedy that Florence Child Brown's
children choose to interpret their mother's
autobiography as attack. I think about
interpretation as a choice when I think about
what my papers have been trying to accomplish
in the nine years you've graciously sat here and
listened. Seems they've been struggling mightily
to understand the consequences of modern
literature's enormous energy—which, I've
suggested more than once, was called forth by
Joseph Smith's dedicatory prayer for the
Kirtland Temple.
Lionel Trilling and the others at
midcentury who extended literary criticism and
theory into the modern period and beyond
interpreted that enormous energy as directed
against society, like a howitzer. I'm interested in
two consequences of interpreting art this way.
(1) To define art as attack, no matter how
corrupt the society being attacked, unavoidably
gives art a satirical/didactic rhetorical stance. (2)
This stance unavoidably pits artists against their
culture.
The first consequence shows us the depth
and breadth possible to a didactic/satirical
literature.
The second consequence is tragic.
Trilling's 1965 book Beyond Culture opens
with the essay, “On the Teaching of Modern
Literature,” which talks about an approach
Trilling developed in the '50s. His approach
and assumptions were still being used in the
'70s in Joyce Nelson's marvelous AP English
class at Provo High, in the '80s at BYU and the
University of Washington and in the '90s at
UVSC and other places. Indeed, it can be seen
in Martin Naparsteck's recent review of Robert
Hodgson Van Wagoner's Dancing Naked:
No other Mormon writer, with the exception
of Levi Peterson, has explored the nature of
sexuality within the Mormon culture so
effectively, with such a sense of honesty, a
sense that the author is willing to confront the
most uncomfortable truths. Peterson's best
works, including the novel Aspen Marooney, are
gentle and accepting critiques of the same
culture Van Wagoner pillories. Peterson's
171
novels and stories are the whisperings of a
loving father, while Van Wagoner's are the
shouts of the angry son. It is the shouting that
gives Dancing Naked its power, its drive, that
instills in the reader a compulsion to go on.
There is not one single character in Dancing
Naked to like, none are amiable, but all are
human and deserving of our love. It's a literary
achievement reminiscent of D. H. Lawrence's
Sons and Lovers and Ivan Turgenev's Fathers and
Sons. Like Lawrence and Turgenev, Van
Wagoner has written a novel of rejection, one
that forces the reader, if the reader opens a
heart to often unlikable characters, to face
some uncomfortable truths: The culture that
shaped us is flawed, the values we build upon
are made of sliprock, the children we love are
not us, the truths we believe in are lies.
That is, for half a century the idea of
literature and art as acts of violence against
society has been prominent in literature
classrooms. And society has at times reacted
violently. Sometimes when my necktie is a bit
tight I start thinking about Ken Saro-Wiwa. I
haven't read any of his plays yet, but I imagine
him with a rope around his neck because Sani
Abacha (a dictator whose name sounds
strikingly like the unabbreviation for SOB (sons
of Belial—see 1 Samuel 2:12)) felt threatened by
the things he wrote. I imagine, try not to
imagine, the platform giving way and the rope
tightening, crushing my adam's apple, stilling
my voice.
Most writers in the United States have not
had to pay that kind of price, but my essays for
the last 10 years have been trying to count up
what price they have paid. If I consider the
concerns that have taken them over in the past
year, I note the essays began last year by inviting
everyone to re-image writing and art as a hunger
and thirst after writeousness, rather than an
obsession of some kind. They moved on to
consider the price Ray Carver paid for Gordon
Lish's dark (nihilistic?) vision, then invited
people to consider literature as a lucid dream—
not passive, but something the dreamer shapes.
Next they explored the cost to Maurine
Whipple of her beloved culture interpreting her
novel as attack—and the loss to that culture of
what we know she would have written. Now I
find them teasing out the implications of saying
that some stories just flat shouldn't be told.
* interpret, accept or reject it.)
. . . and as often as this story was told it was always
one telling from extinction.
The following assumptions keep surfacing:
Interpretation is always a choice. Works of
art do not interpret themselves.
Because art is created for others, is
therefore communal—an act of communion,
creating art is inherently moral.
The classic comedy about both
assumptions is Mel Brooks's The Producers. Two
friends realize that if they could produce a show
for less than their investment and it flopped,
they'd never have to pay back the investors, so
they sell a few thousand percent in the show to
a bunch of old ladies, find the worst musical,
Springtime for Hitler, the worst actors, the worst
director. They sit in on opening night and
watch the stunned audience, then slip out to
the theatre's bar to toast their failure. But then
Act I ends, and the audience pours out into the
lobby, laughing. They have decided the show is
so bad it must not be serious. It must be satire.
The audience just can't believe anyone
would do something so morally offensive as to
mount a Broadway show praising Hitler,
especially one with such poor acting and
direction, so they refuse the interpretation the
producers offer them and change the show into
camp.
An audience can always subvert, co-opt,
172
disregard, or extend and deepen a writer's
intentions because language is community
property. It belongs to the people who speak it,
rather than to any one speaker. (This is also why
people can use words with clearly good intent,
such as scripture, to inspire and justify immoral
behavior, as Thom Duncan has often pointed
out on AML -List about the Lafferty brothers.
Once a word has been published, it is the
public's responsibility to decide how they will
*
Only the story which declares our total incurable
abandonment is repugnant and will not be told for
long. —Reynolds Price (25)
Thinking about this need stories have to be
told, consider again, briefly, Béla Petsco's “The
Blackness of the Darkness.” Not only the title
and imagery but the story's moral sensibility
come from the epistle of Jude, which is a
jeremiad on the Saints' corruption. But Jude
pauses in the middle of his diatribe, when it
sounds as if he's just about ready to consign
everyone to hell, to remind himself and his
audience that Michael the archangel, when
contending with the devil about the body of
Moses, “durst not bring against him a railing
accusation, but said, The Lord rebuke thee”
(Jude 9).
“The Blackness of the Darkness” does
precisely this. It allows the Lord to rebuke evil
while it tells the story of redemption from evil.
The folk who hear the young man singing at
community funerals never know he has
murdered the people he is singing for; but the
Lord does, and the Lord rebukes him. The story
ends with the boy's parents reading a letter from
his missionary companion about a tragic storm
at sea that occurred just after their son sang in
his lovely voice at a child's funeral. The letter
ends with Jude's doxology: “To the only wise only.
God our Saviour, be glory and majesty, One day she walked over to the bookcase,
dominion and power, both now and ever. found Alex Shoumatoff's history of the human
Amen” (Jude 25). Those are almost the last family, The Mountain of Names, and started
words in the story. When I think about that reading it, perhaps because the dustjacket
ending, about how Béla managed to end his mentions a chapter about the LDS Church's
story in unabashed praise of God, and make granite genealogical vaults, a true mountain of
the ending highly ironic, and suggest that the names.
story of redemption is more important than the Shortly before Christmas I saw Ron
story of damnation, his silence is all the more Carter's The Clearwater Union War at the Timp
poignant to me. Bookstore in Orem. Since Mom lived so many
And one last story if you will. Donna's years right across the street from the Clearwater
mother is dying—I suppose. We haven't told her. River, Donna bought her the book. She began
We don't want her to give up hope. Nor has she reading it, but her eyesight is not so good. She
told us. “I've been dreaming about Dad lately.” doesn't do a lot right now, doesn't eat as she
Hints, but I suppose she doesn't want us to give should, has lost twenty pounds she didn't have,
up hope. About two and a half years ago, she but still surprises us with her persistence. She
made enough of a recovery that her home endures the pain of several bones in her back
teacher could make a bed for her in his van and broken from osteoporosis, and has enough need
drive her the eight or nine hundred miles from now that the thought of a man sometimes
Orofino, Idaho, to Pleasant Grove, Utah. She helping her on and off the potty chair no longer
has been a great blessing to our family. embarrasses her. We honor her for her
Mom never graduated from high school endurance and we thank you for caring enough
and has never been a great reader—occasional about the culture she loves to write words that
romance magazines. But she has found the aid her endurance. Our best love and faith and
television here a poor companion—her hearing, prayers to us all as we continue.
perhaps, so she asked me for books to read. I
figured The Work and the Glory would hold her, AFTERWORD
but a mere five or six thousand pages don't go Elethia June Matthews Lee loved to do
far when you have all day to read, even if you laundry; and on July 13, 2000, she was walking
read some twice. Five or six Dean Hughes out of the laundry room with a load of dried
novels came next: As Wide as the River, Under the clothes on her walker. She lost her balance and
Same Stars, Facing the Enemy, Cornbread and fell, breaking her right arm in a spiral pattern
Prayer, Brothers, perhaps Rumors of War. Then which couldn't be set without surgery, but the
Marilyn Brown, Thorns of the Sun, Shadow of doctor said she would probably not survive
Angels, Royal House, Statehood, perhaps Goodbye, surgery, so he splinted it and put her arm in a
Hello. And there were others, including Lynn sling. She found it difficult to recover her health
Gardner's Diamonds and Danger. I thought she and died at 9:00 A.M. August 25, 2000, after
might like R. F. Delderfield's To Serve Them All suffering a stroke three days earlier. She would
My Days (I've only seen the Masterpiece Theatre have been 80 on September 5. She was a fighter
production), but what she wants are stories and will be missed by her children,
about her culture, her people. And not fiction grandchildren, friends, and home health aids
173
and nurses who gave her much loving care.
NOTES
1. This phenomenon has implications for how
we understand scripture. People who love scripture
stories but don't want to believe their factual claims
often say the stories are unreliable as history because
they were written down many years after the fact, or
they have archetypal and symbolic elements that
mirror other stories. I've responded to such claims
in a couple of unpublished essays. Reynolds Price
has also talked about them in A Palpable God and
Three Gospels, where he defends the Gospels and
other scripture stories as accurate accounts of
someone's experience. Robert Alter also discusses
the idea that scripture is only metaphorical in the
introduction to his translation of Genesis. He calls it
“the heresy of explanation” and discusses at length
how the desire to explain what the writers really
meant, rather than accurately convey the words and
images they wrote, corrupts a translation.
2. Dennis says the joke is part of the group
where the school marm from the East comes out
West to teach the cowboys, and it's meant to make
the schoolmarm look silly—a protest against
easterners who come out and tell the westerners
how to behave.
3. This morning's panel discussion on young
adult literature gave me an insight into my father's
reaction when Chris Crowe said he never worried
about what his children were reading until they
became teens. “I don't want to tip them over into
something worse than what they're flirting with.” I
suppose my father felt the same way, but I never felt
I was flirting with anything. I was simply using the
best tools and training I had to tell a story about my
culture, a story I wanted to tell as an insider, not an
alien of any kind.
HARLOW SÖDERBORG CLARK is a freelance
scholar, reports the Lindon Utah city council news
for the Pleasant Grove Review (www.newutah.com),
writes features for NewsUtah! and the Provo Daily
Herald. He also does business research and writing
for a high-tech company.
174
WORKS CITED
Alter, Robert. Genesis: Translation and Commentary.
New York: Norton, 1996.
Brooks, Mel. The Producers. Film. MGM, 1968.
Brown, Florence Child. I Cannot Tell a Life.
Springville, UT: Salt Press, 1999.
Brown, Marilyn. Rev. Re: Gilmore, Shot in the Heart.
AML-List, 24 Jan 2000.
—. Goodbye, Hello. Sandy, UT: Randall Book, 1984.
—. Royal House. American Fork, UT: Covenant
Communications, 1994.
—. Statehood : A Novel Celebrating Utah's Centennial.
Murray, UT: Aspen Books, 1995.
—. Shadows of Angels. American Fork, UT: Covenant
Communications, 1993.
—. Thorns of the Sun.American Fork, UT: Covenant
Communications, 1992.
Carter, Ron. The Clearwater Union War. Salt Lake:
Bookcraft, 1999.
Clark, Harlow S. Rev. “NEWBOLD/WELCH, The
Touch of the Master's Hand. ” AML-List, 03 Jan.
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