Of Many Hearts and Many Minds: the Mormon Novel and the Post-Utopian Challenge of Assimilation
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Of Many Hearts and Many Minds: The Mormon Novel and the Post-Utopian Challenge of Assimilation by Scott Hales A dissertation submitted to the Faculty of the University of Cincinnati in partial fulfillment of the requirements of the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English & Comparative Literature APPROVED: Jay Twomey, Chair Jennifer Glaser Leland S. Person March 26, 2014 Cincinnati, OH For much of their nineteenth-century history, Mormons rejected the novel as worldly entertainment that corrupted the young and propagated offensive Mormon stereotypes. This changed, however, when Mormons began to recognize the form’s potential for promoting social betterment, teaching wholesome moral values, and using its popular appeal to draw people to the Mormon fold. Interestingly, this shift in attitude toward the novel came at a time when the Mormons, once a militantly separatist people, sought greater assimilation with the American mainstream by abandoning overt utopian practices, like polygamy and communal living, for practices that would no longer alienate them from the nation’s Protestant majority. In my dissertation, I explore the relationship between this transitional period and the development of the Mormon novel, arguing that Mormons embraced the novel as a cultural site for mediating their paradoxical desire to separate from and participate in the American mainstream. Indeed, I show how the novel allowed Mormons to express their utopian principles—if not their utopian practices—as mainstream America compelled them to take what I call a “post-utopian” stance toward society. Moreover, I show how adopting the novel form also enabled Mormons to contribute to and engage American literary culture, construct Mormon identities, and explore their ambivalent encounters with others from inside and outside their ranks. Throughout this study, I draw upon utopian theory and Mormon history to understand the Mormon novel as a “post-utopian” product of the ongoing challenges of Mormon assimilation into mainstream American society. Beginning with the first Mormon novels of the late-nineteenth-century, I track how Mormon writers have borrowed from and enriched the American novel in their efforts to preserve and promote Mormonism’s utopian principles, construct and define Mormon identities, and explore their ambivalent encounters with others ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This dissertation could not have been completed without the aid of a number of individuals and organizations. I am grateful to the faculty and staff of the Department of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Cincinnati for their expert instruction and assistance. From the beginning, my dissertation director, Dr. Jay Twomey, has been unfailing in his support of this project. His thoughtful insights have helped to shape my arguments in ways that are too numerous to mention here. Jennifer Glaser and Leland S. Person have also provided invaluable guidance and wisdom as members of my dissertation committee. Additionally, Michael Griffith and Jonathan Kamholtz, who have served as the department’s Director of Graduate Studies during my time at the University of Cincinnati, also deserve my sincere thanks for their support and encouragement. I am likewise grateful for financial support from the Department of English and Comparative Literature, the Charles Phelps Taft Research Center at the University of Cincinnati, and the Religious Education Department at Brigham Young University. I am particularly indebted to the Religious Education Department for awarding me a BYU Religious Education Dissertation Grant. Without it, the final year of this project would not have gone as smoothly as it did. Also helpful was the staff at the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints’ Church History Library in Salt Lake City for assisting me in my research on Mormon novelist Nephi Anderson. I am also grateful to Joseph Soderborg, whom I chanced to meet the library, for providing me with rare documents related to Anderson’s membership in the Salt Lake City Tenth Ward. I wish him luck on his important research. i The Association for Mormon Letters and its online community also deserve recognition for keeping Mormon literary studies alive. I am especially grateful to Kjerste Christensen, James Goldberg, Eric W. Jepson, Jonathan Langford, Kent Larsen, William Morris, and Sarah Reed for their contributions to the cause and for being ever-willing to answer my questions and brainstorm ideas. As Faculty Cataloger for Contemporary Mormonism at Brigham Young University’s Harold B. Lee Library, Kjerste Christensen has been particularly helpful in tracking down and scanning rare Mormon literature articles for my research. Finally, I would like to thanks my parents, Robert and Kathy Hales, for never encouraging me to pursue something more practical than a doctorate in English, and my siblings—Jason, Rebecca, Amanda, and Christopher—for always checking in on me and my family. I am likewise grateful to my grandparents, Ronald and Ella Kiley and the late J. Vern and Lucile Hales; my in-laws, Glenn and Susan Unklesbay; and my grandparents-in-law, Paul and Marion Thoms for their ongoing love, kindness, and support. A scholar could not ask for a better extended family. My most heartfelt thanks, however, go to Connor, Emily, Ella, and Lucy for their patience, love, and understanding during the entire graduate school process. They deserve a lifetime of video-gaming and cartoon-watching with their dad. My gratitude to them is second only to that I give to Sarah, whose twelve years of companionship, love, and sacrifice have helped me see this dissertation to the end. ii TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction 1 “[M]ade subservient to the building up of Zion”: The Utopian Roots of the Mormon Novel Chapter One 58 “Not altogether a play ground”: A Theory of the Mormon Novel Chapter Two 95 In “hearty accord with the work of moral reforms”: Nephi Anderson and the Early Mormon Novel Chapter Three 143 Removing the “smiling mask”: Faithful Realism in an Age of Correlation and Retrenchment Chapter Four 199 “A Terrible Psychological and Nearly Physical Disturbance”: The Mormon Historical Novel, Mountain Meadows, and the Problem of “What Actually Happened” Chapter Five 230 More than a “Subspecies of American Literature”?: Obstacles towards a Transnational Mormon Novel Conclusion 263 The New Mormon Novel iii Introduction “[M]ade subservient to the building up of Zion”: The Utopian Roots of the Mormon Novel “For over fifty years the gospel has been preached to the poor and lowly. It will yet go to the high and mighty, even to kings and nobles, and penetrate and climb to places hitherto deemed inaccessible. “Our literature will help to take it there; for this, like all else with which we have to do, must be made subservient to the building up of Zion.”—Orson F. Whitney, 1888 In Vladimir Nabakov’s Lolita (1955), Humbert Humbert’s meandering, cross-country road trip is cut short when Lolita comes down with a “bug” in the Rocky Mountain town of Elphinstone and has to be hospitalized for several days. Anxious and “stunned by [his] new solitude,” Humbert drives aimlessly through the town, listlessly taking in the view of the “domed silence” of a “pale temple of some local sect” (243). For readers, the imagery is unremarkable and nondescript. Elphinestone, like other fictional towns in the novel, is almost generic in its lack of specificity. It is only when Lolita’s nurse—a “ripe young hussy, reeking of urine and garlic”—gives Lolita a copy of the Deseret News to read that we can finally place Elphinstone in Utah, where the most prominent pale temples are those of the Mormons (245). Indeed, with this localizing insight, the details of Humbert’s description of Elphinstone fit easily within the familiar gridiron layout of Mormon cities and towns in Utah: Elphinestone was, and I hope still is, a very cute little town. It was spread like a maquette, you know, with its neat green-wool trees and red-roofed houses over the valley floor and I think I have alluded earlier to its model school and temple 1 and spacious rectangular blocks, some of which were, curiously enough, just unconventional pastures with a mule or a unicorn grazing in the young July morning mist. (248) Why Nabakov uses a Mormon setting in his novel is neither immediately apparent nor probably very significant. Likely, the vaguely Mormon landscape is a simple byproduct of Nabokov’s own experience with Utah towns, gleaned from vacations to the mountains near Salt Lake City, as well as an incidental testament to the rather unassuming and pedestrian place Mormonism has come to occupy in America’s cultural and religious landscape.1 Mormons appear more overtly—though perhaps no more meaningfully—in other places in American literature. In Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Blithedale Romance, for instance, Miles Coverdale comments in passing on a wax figure of “the Mormon prophet” (229). Both Herman Melville’s Pierre (1852) and The Confidence-Man (1857), likewise, reference Mormonism, with The Confidence-Man describing a utopian community “originally founded by certain fugitive Mormons” (76). Mark Twain’s memoir Roughing It (1872) provides a lengthy, humorous account of Twain’s visit to Salt Lake City in 1861 as well as an extended, satirical review of the Book of Mormon. Other appearances of Mormons in fiction by well-known authors include Zane Grey’s Riders of the Purple Sage (1912) and The Rainbow Trail (1915), Jack London’s The Star Rover (1915), Allen Drury’s Advise and Consent (1959), Ishmael Reed’s Mumbo Jumbo (1972), Don DeLillo’s White Noise (1985), Tom Clancy’s Clear and Present Danger (1990), Gore Vidal’s Life from Golgotha (1992), Cormac McCarthy’s The Crossing (1994), E. L. Doctorow’s The Waterworks (1994), Jane Smiley’s The All True Travels of Lydie Newton (1998), Jacquelyn Mitchard’s Cage of Stars (2006), Gary Shteyngart’s Absurdistan (2006), Louise Erdrich’s Plague of Doves (2008) and David Ebershoff’s The 19th Wife (2009).