Mercy, Zina, and Kate:

Virginia Sorensen's

Strong Women in a Man's Society

LuDene Dallimore¹

Curious Missie (New York: Harcourt, 1952) and Miracle on Maple Hill (New York: Harcourt, 1956 ) two of Virginia Sorensen's children's books, were the only titles familiar to me when she came to Weber State campus to read in October 1988. I was surprised by the breadth of her writing, as revealed by Linda Sillitoe's essay "Saints and Rebels: Introducing Virginia Sorensen's Novels.² The essay, read by her husband, John, introduced Virginia Sorensen's own reading of her works and her discussion of plans for future works. The titles of her novels, especially A Little Lower than the Angels, The Neighbor, Kingdom Come, and The Evening and the Morning³ were most intriguing to me. I might add that my interest perversely increased when it was mentioned at last years AML conference that obtaining copies was sometimes difficult. The challenge was rewarding for me as I read her eight novels and reread several. (The children's books were already on my own shelves.)

This paper will focus on three novels which use cultural influences, particularly polygamy and insider/ outsider conflict, as strategies for plot and character development of Sorensen's women characters. As a social observer, she uses the Mormon culture with its highly organized, closely structured religious beliefs and the practice (even though brief) of the biblical doctrine of family life. Polygamy and the patriarchal order placed women in situations where pressure from outside and internal strife (both inside the individual and inside the group) was intense. Using mixed desires for conforming and for breaking free, Sorensen develops women who show strength beyond the men who seem to hold the power over them.

All of her books mirror her own life--growing up in Sanpete County, attending Brigham Young University, and her first marriage, during which she traveled widely. She moved away from activity in the Church, but according to Mary Lythgoe Bradford, "as she moved 'outside,' her books became more 'inside."⁴ She writes of her own ancestors, grandparents, parents, and herself in a way that preserves something of every Mormon's personal history.

Sorensen confronts some myths of the West from a woman's point of view. Women hardly exist in the classic Western novels, except as obvious types; but most of Sorensen's central characters are women, seldom types, though their experiences are often typical. Sorensen's women are in a Mormon society, a very male society. Much of the tension developing among those women comes from their awareness of their sexuality and their need to find themselves or be themselves in their structured setting.⁵

Sorensen obviously sympathized with the women's dilemmas since, as Sillitoe noted, "the leading men... [were] supporting actors all," though she adds they "are understandable, believable, and often sympathetic."⁶ At other times, they are annoying and overbearing. The marvel at times is that they are objects of such intense loyalty and affection as Mercy grants Simon Baker, Zina, Dr. Niels Nielson, and Kate, Peter Jansen. In a letter to her biographers, L. L. and Sylvia Lee, Sorensen commented, "How being a woman was in my day and how protesting didn't work then--is probably the real subject of whatever book I write about Manti, and the Mormons in the next year or so."⁷

The title of Sorensen's first novel, "A Little Lower Than the Angels, published in 1942, comes from Psalms 8:

What is man that thou are mindful of him? and

the son of man, that thou visitest him?

For thou has made him a little lower than the angels, and hast crowned him with glory and

honour.

Thou madest him to have dominion over the

works of thy hands; thou has put all things under

his feet.

(Ps. 8:4-6)

The scripture is a compendium of most of the novel's themes, and most of those themes, in turn, are based on a contrast, a conflict of values.

The action of the novel takes place in Nauvoo and just across the Mississippi River in Iowa, during the late 1840s. Mercy, born in Rhode Island and living in Massachusetts when she met Simon, moves west with him. She brings her books with her, representing a kind of spiritual life that is opposed to the spirit of religion. Simon, on the other hand, objects harshly to the books. "They want folks that'll work, not folks sitting around on their hinders reading books."⁸ There is ambiguity in the statement, however, because pioneer Mormons valued books and education. Simon, lover and conqueror of the land, represented cruder aspects of westering.⁹

Mercy, Sorensen's first heroine, and also her first "outsider," is developed through the inner conflict of believing. Mercy is forever asking why. She and Simon, who already have five children, have uprooted their lives for the Church; yet she is still unconverted and unbaptized. Sorensen does not argue whether Mormonism is a "true" religion but rather uses it to show the effect of religion and society upon people. Mercy accepts her husband's religion, not because she deeply believes it, but because she deeply loves her husband. She rebels against the smug faith of simple believers. Increasingly concerned about polygamy (and knowing that Simon will accept whatever the Church authorities tell him), Mercy feels sympathy for both Emma Smith and Eliza R. Snow. Most of the novel is a working out of the dilemma of polygamy for the people

Mercy, worn out by repeated pregnancies, breaks down physically, and it becomes obvious to both Mercy and Simon that somebody must be brought into the home to care for the house and children. Brigham Young recommends Charlot Leavitt, a strapping, healthy woman, whom Simon secretly marries as a plural wife. However, both Mercy and Jarvie, their oldest son, separately discover it. Bitter and unhappy, Jarvie questions the morality of the Church and its leaders' actions, thus representing a counterpoint to Simon's unquestioning zealousness. Both elements, interestingly enough, are still present in Mormon culture today. Mercy, ill and sorrowing over the loss of one of the twins, struggles to give Charlot her due. She had arrived to find everything in messy confusion but had swiftly reduced it to order:

She was competent, Charlot. And what was more, she saw that everybody else was. There was not a wrinkle in the household that she did not tackle and smooth out. The first few days she had Simon get two of the Yeaman girls to come in and the three of them cleaned house from the loft to the cellar. And everything washable went into the washtub. (292)

As Mercy gains strength, she attempts to reassert herself, but she cannot. In a short space of time, she has become dependent upon the strong, efficient, kindly Chariot even though it caused her intense personal pain. As Simon tries initially to explain the marriage,

she let him flounder, because she could not speak. The wash of icy blood in her was already familiar,

after one day, creeping into the fingers, down the thighs. . . . She heard him explaining, about

Brigham, about circumstance, about necessity, about another world, about Brother Joseph himself. And as he spoke, she was thinking: He hates this, he hates it. He always hated these terrible emotional things that tore at him. Especially he hates woman-emotion, uncurbed and hysterical; he's like other men, he gets out of the room before it, he shuns it, embarrassed.

He loathed woman-emotion, he shunned it, loathing. She knew that if she wept, if she cried out and accused and begged and chided, he would be sharp against her, and that she could not have, not now. Even here she could conquer. This morning she would have been incapable of it, but now there was a cunning in her made of pain and desire and of a new unfamiliar hate. (322-23)

In spite of Mercy's serious illness, Simon agrees when Brigham Young asks him to join the early group moving west. Leaving from Charlot's Nauvoo house (their Iowa house having been burned by gentiles), they crossed the road which leads to their burned-out house. Mercy does not speak and Simon thinks, "It's as well she shouldn't look; women are strange about such things" (427). His language is significant: Simon sees Mercy as representative of that strange class of beings called "women." He does not perceive her as an individual, despite the years of their marriage, despite his love for her, nor does he see her value. She is a "woman." As they pass, Mercy collapses and slips down from place head beside Simon--in itself a kind of feeble claim of her rightful place. She is dead.

Some critics have seen her death as a mechanical, contrived way to end the novel. Others say it is the only possible solution for Mercy. In the westward movement, her individuality did not count as much as the myths of the West have claimed.

In Many Mansions,¹⁰ Sorensen develops another of her well-defined, interesting women, Zina, in terms of the Mormon view of morality as chastity and polygamy. Set in a small northern Utah town just after the Manifesto, this story blends some of Sorensen's best themes: landscape and personality, physical love and spiritual love, the excitement of learning with simple domesticity, and the certainty of religious faith with the complexities of doubt.¹¹

Zina and Dr. Niels Nielsen are mutually attracted to each other while Zina cares for his invalid wife Metre. She goes to Salt Lake to study to become a midwife and nurse and then returns to the Nielsen household. A "believing member" of the Church, she nevertheless finds herself outside life's normal pattern by her long-term love for a man already married. Polygamy has passed, and community tensions over the issue form an early background for the novel. Many Heavens is reminiscent of Ethan From, in which Edith Wharton uses the poverty and severity of harsh winter weather and reticent, noncommunicative relationships to develop the characters of Zeena and Mattie, a crippled wife and younger, more attractive woman. Even the names--Zeena and Mattie in Ethan Fromm and Zina and Mette in Many Heavens--seem similar. The polygamous marriage, occurring after polygamy has officially been discontinued, makes the outcome far more pleasant in Virginia Sorensen's tale than in Edith Wharton's. (Four children are born to Zina and Niels, though they are not even minor characters.)

When Zina and Niels decide to resolve their love problems through the institution of polygamy, it comes after years of suffering; appropriately enough, it is Metre, the first wife, who suggests to Zina that when a man loves two women and cannot have both, one will always be afraid and the other alone, with no problems solved. "Why should all of us go on suffering so much?'' To her the solution is obvious: since Niels loves both of them in different ways, why can't they all find peace? (347) Her ability to reach such a conclusion stems from experience; her own mother had been second wife to her father, and Mette had grown up in a happy home with memories of a satisfactory relationship.

Since the novel is told in first person by Zina, through use of the flashback technique Virginia Sorensen liked to use, the novel leaves the impression of a happy outcome. Though the three achieve a surface kind of approval from many, the novel avoids a direct confrontation with social sanctions. One of the few exceptions is neighbor Jim Kerr, who angrily accuses Niels: "Them that live like you and that nurse-woman--they can't afford to throw stones! Look where I found the two of you! I'd heard it aplenty. But I didn't believe it--you with a crippled wife! And her the one to tell me where I'd find you!'' (9).

As the title suggests, there are "many heavens," and the principal characters must work out their own salvation under conditions of ambiguity and uncertainty. Zina herself suffers from uncertainty about the eternal implications of her decision. She says, "It's not as she [Mette] says, that we prefer this way or advocate it for other people. All we believe is that for us it happened to do'' (349). Later she ponders, "And the law? If it ever came to that (and several before Jim Kerr thought they could drive a bargain with us), Wid says he could probably get us a special dispensation and rescue Niels from jail.'' More tellingly, she says, "Though I was married and I was not, though some of the people knew, and some didn't. Even though it may be I'm eternally damned in that transaction, or it may be that I'm eternally blessed" (352).

The novel's major weakness is that it does not confront the larger social issues that lie at its basis. In compensation, it is a rich compendium of Mormon folklore and Utah's medical history. It begins and ends on an ambiguous note:

Shadows roll down the mountain every night to hide whatever they must hide in mercy--but the sun comes up every morning to show--as Niels likes to say--that whatever has happened will be all

right, after all. (352)

Kate Alexander, the heroine of The Evening and the Morning,¹² is a complex, fascinating personality whose manifoldness reflects the world she comes from. She surely symbolizes the outsider but is not a simple, sympathetic rebel. She has both rebelled and yet still accepts some aspects of the Mormon world. Not completely innocent, she has been headstrong, selfish, and insensitive to others--her husband and children. After rebelling against God and her implacable surroundings, she discovers later that active rebellion brings only heartbreak unless one can turn the rebellion into a satisfying way of life. Kate tries to replace God with love:

It had sometimes come to her that she had lost God too early, when she still needed the sustenance of her belief, and she had given love the reverence she must give to something, had been loyal to it, made sacrifices to it, believed in it without proof.

But love fails her too, She laments:

If you were a woman and a rebel, the only thing you could tear to pieces was your own life. So you turned upon yourself. There was no institution you could rend except at the place where it touched you; and so always you were the thing to be cut apart.

It is only through a long struggle within herself that she finally finds comfort in the knowledge that her life will go on through her daughter Dessie and her daughter's daughter Jean (304).

Structurally, Evening and Morning calls up the Mormon world. The narrative is divided into six "days," the biblical week, and the form creates a living connection between the religious world and the imagination. The flashback, a usual technique of Sorensen, is especially effective in allowing the past to be carefully integrated into a structure that at each step illuminates the present.

The character of Kate Alexander is drawn largely from the actual person of Sorensen's maternal grandmother, at least as the real person is recreated in Where Nothing Is Long Ago.¹³

The novel begins with Kate returning to the small Mormon town (Manti) of her youth, her marriage, and her long-term affair with Peter Jansen. As she moves through the six days, she reexperiences her life and makes a crucial decision regarding her future. The flashbacks reveal Kate's marriage at sixteen to the widowed Karl Alexander, her love affair with Peter (who is married to Karl's first wife's sister), and Kate's pregnancy with Peter's child Dessie. To Kate, Dessie was a symbol of their love; to Peter she was a symbol of a great wrong.

After Karl's death, Kate is too ill, too weak, and too guilt-ridden to fight for her rights and those of her children. A woman in a man's society, Kate loses everything to Karl's son by his first wife. She asks Peter for help, but he can do nothing. She leaves her children to be cared for separately and leaves everything behind to try to survive. Returning years later, ostensibly to try to obtain a pension from her husband's war service, she reconnects with Dessie, filling in gaps and trying to reestablish their relationship. In the process, Dessie gains new appreciation for some qualities of her husband, Ike. Not unlike Kate, he is an outsider, outspoken and liberal.

Going by train to visit Peter, Kate takes Jean, her granddaughter, whose red hair and features make her resemble Peter far more than Dessie does. There Kate comes to recognize her greatest illusion--her love for Peter. He, a widower, at last is free to care for her but is now a Mormon bishop, proud of his respectability. When he asks her if she wishes to stay, Kate cannot avoid noticing that his motive is mere duty. She refuses his proposal and is disappointed to note how obviously relieved he is.

The novel ends with Jean's innocent comment about resting after the long train ride prompting Kate's recollection of the scripture learned long ago:

"And He rested....And God saw everything that he had made, and behold, it was very good ....Looking down at Jean, she thought again . . . it was very good. Perhaps our old allegories were not so bad, after all. Each one making what order he could from his own chaos. It could mean that, couldn't it? There had been a woman and she loved a man and through this love men and loves were multiplied. Perhaps one traveled in a great circle from love to love, first receiving and taking comfort only, as a child does, and finally coming to the love given to another child and no longer received. And behold, and behold, and behold, it was very good. And the evening and the morning were the sixth day, morning after evening so one would never make the mistake of thinking anything ended without being also a new beginning. (339)

Looking out the window of the train, she "watched herself moving beside herself, out there alone" (340). Linda Sillitoe described Kate in these terms:

Kate differs from other heroines in Mormon novels of this vintage--Virginia Sorensen's among them--in that she does not wither, go mad, or die a faithful and bloodied saint. While she sins more blatantly than her more innocent counterparts, she suffers, no more than the most righteous. Some may read punishment or even damnation in the fact that she ends the book alone and outside the church; however, she retains her sanity, her family, her independence, and projects living and growing into the future.¹⁴

All in all, not that bad, many might say. These three women--Mercy, Zina, and Kate--were all outsiders placed in similar circumstances, a closed culture. Virginia Sorensen obviously held all three in high esteem. The effort and strains of fitting in juxtapose dynamic issues of conforming, of believing, of self-acceptance, of blooming or wilting under authoritarian power. Each copes in her own way. They are more than just memorable. They represent not only Mormon women, then and now, but all women who attempt to find meaning in fulfilling the measure of their creation.

Note

¹LuDene Dallimore is an instructor of English at Weber State University. She received her bachelor's degree from Brigham Young University (1959) and her masters at the University of Hawaii (1962) and has also taught at BYU-Hawaii. This paper was delivered at the annual meeting of the Association for Mormon Letters, 27 January 1990 at Westminster College in Salt Lake City.

²Linda Sillitoe, "Saints and Rebels: Introducing Virginia Sorensen's Novels,^~ 17 October 1988; copy in library, Weber State University, Ogden, Utah.

³A Little Lower Than the Angels (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1942), The Neighbors (New York: Reynal and Hitchcock, 1947), Kingdom Come (New York: Harcourt, 1960), and The Evening and the Morning (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1949).

⁴Mary Lythgoe Bradford, "Virginia Sorensen: A Saving Remnant" Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 4, no. 3 (1969): 60.

⁵L,L. Lee and Sylvia B. Lee, Virginia Sorensen, Boise State University Western Writers Series, No. 3 (Boise, Ida.: Boise State University, 1978), 8.

⁶"Saints and Rebels," 1.

⁷As quoted in Lee and Lee, Virginia Sorensen, 11.

⁸A Little Lower Than the Angels (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1942). Additional quotations from this work are cited parenthetically by page number.

⁹Lee and Lee, Virginia Sorensen, 19.

¹⁰Many Mansions (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1954). Additional quotations from this work are cited parenthetically by page number.

¹¹"Virginia Sorensen, 59.

¹²The Evening and the Morning (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1949). Additional Citations from this work are cited parenthetically by page number.

13See Lee and Lee, Virginia Sorensen, 30. Where Nothing Is Long Ago (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1963).

¹⁴"Saints and Rebels," 10.