In Search of Women's Language and Feminist Expression Among Nauvoo Wives in
A Little Lower Than the Angels
Helynne H. Hansen1
VIRGINIA SORENSEN'S 1942 NOVEL, A Little Lower than the Angles, is a colorful, straight forward look at the Mormon experience during the four to five years in Nauvoo before the exodus West. A careful reading beyond the historical aspects of the text also reveals a novel that is seeking a phenomenon as yet unnamed in the 1940's--that of ecriture feminine, or a means of expression that is uniquely women's own.
Sorensen depicts through several different female protagonists in the novel the determined but ultimately frustrated search for a specific sort of language through which women can express themselves and discuss problems and emotions, both emotional and spiritual, that effect women in a way in which they could not possibly affect men.
Although the narration is shared from the point of view of numerous characters, fictional and non-fictional, male and female, including the Prophet Joseph Smith, the most touching and passionate narrative views are from the women characters, most notably Mercy Baker and the poetess Eliza R. Snow. The novel is several decades in advance of the phenomenon of feminist literary criticism (beginning ca. 1968) that urges casting off male discourse in favor of gynesis--a newly developed language that is conceived and expressed purely according to the women's history and women's experience.
Bits and pieces of women's thought and dialogue fall into place as A Little Lower than the Angels unfolds, and the Mormon women strive to express themselves according to the tumultuous and often violent history that is being made around them, despite its emotional upheavals that invade the very core of their personal lives.
The novel opens with Mercy Baker, newly arrived in Nauvoo, and not yet baptized into the Church, reflecting on her contentment with the special closeness she feels to her husband, Simon. "All the little things that made him Simon and nobody else, they were mighty important. The one Simon."2
The narrator reveals that Mercy keeps a likeness of herself in her Bible at the story of Leah. This expression of Mercy's perception of the beauty of her monogamous marriage and her place as first wife sets up an ambiance of contentment and peace that creates an effective tension with the completely different philosophy on marriage that will soon be thrust upon her, and explained away in terse, condescending, and totally male terminology.
Ann Rosalind Jones wrote in 1981 that Western culture has always been phallogocentric, and therefore, fundamentally oppressive, towards women. Such oppression is particularly evident in traditional language, which Jones describes as "another means through which man objectifies the world, reduces it to his terms, speaks in place of everything and everyone else--including women." Therefore women have typically written as "hysterics, as outsiders to male-dominated discourse."3
This involuntary and crippling genuflecting by women writers to male language was not being identified in the 1940s. Nonetheless, Sorensen is acutely in tune with her female characters' sentiments, and with their verbal struggle to make sense out of the Nauvoo experience, which was all but monopolized by male discourse. In A Little Lower than the Angels, early Mormon wives sought to articulate certain female experiences--polygamy, in particular--in strictly and uniquely feminine terms. The women's dialogue with the men and with one another, as well as their actions during the years leading up to the Utah exodus, all indicate that Sorensen was very much aware of the spirit of gynesis or, at the least, painfully aware of a lack of feminist expression during the 1840s and of how hurtful and destructive this lack proved to be in the lives of the most faithful of Mormon women.
This study will seek to identify in A Little Lower than the Angels the numerous examples of women thirsting and groping for an accurate, sensitive way to express themselves according to their own sense of their terrestrial selves and what they understand and believe to be their divine destiny. The struggle is neither easy nor successful for Nauvoo women. In many instances, one perceives the female characters, as Jones notes, striving to express their feelings and needs according to the strictly male terminology with which they have always been taught.
Through her female characters Sorensen is straining for a yet-unidentified mode of female expression. She is, as contemporary feminist critic Charlotte Hogsett describes it, "chafing at the restrictions placed on women writers, tapping along the walls (of male language and expression) in search of a way out."4 Sorensen is also aware of the male tendency to use and twist traditional male language and cliches to dismiss women's protests and to achieve their own ends.
The narrator notes that Nauvoo women and youths, many of whom love poetry, have been warned (by their fathers and husbands) against the works of certain English poets, since, in the words of Simon Baker, "that man Byron was notably wicked; and Shelley, a deserter of wife and children" (116).
Ironically, the Prophet Joseph Smith woos Eliza R. Snow into a polygamous marriage with a few lines from Shelley's inflammatory poem Epipsychidion:
I was never attached to that great sect,
Whose doctrine is, that each one should select
Out of the crowd a mistress or a friend,
And all the rest, through fair and wise, commend
To cold oblivion, though it is in the code
Of modern morals, that the beaten road...(90)
Although Epipsychidion is described by Shelley scholars as "the most outspoken and eloquent appeal for free love in the language,"5 it would appear that the words of Shelley, as radical and anti-Victorian as they may be, can become useful male language to achieve male purposes, even in Nauvoo. For certain goals and projects of Mormon men, Shelley's words can be cleverly interpreted to sound heavensent. "It seems to me that [Shelley] was inspired to write this poem," the prophet tells Eliza, "just the way I'm inspired to write my revelations" (90). In contrast to this perhaps self-serving statement, Snow experiences a genuine epiphany in comprehending the existence of a Mother in Heaven in Sorensen's sensitive, semi-fictionalized rendering of her writing the hymn "O My Father."
Sorensen employs a combination of third persona narration and free indirect style to create Eliza's thoughts and to describe her feelings when her poem is complete:
She was terribly excited, and her body was blazing with something besides the heat of the day. I have
something, I have made something; if you make something from what you believe, then the blessing of belief can never leave you. I have something to show [Joseph] that he will like. (129)
However, when Eliza seeks out the prophet in excited haste to share the poem and its new idea with him, he is preoccupied and anxious to send her on her way. He is well-meaning, like other men of the community, but painfully out of tune with a woman's striving for an expression and explanation of her own place in the Church and in life's eternal plan.
Nowhere in the novel is the contrast between self-serving male language and a lack of viable female language so evident as in the attempts to explain and to justify the practice of polygamy as vital, not only to the building up of the kingdom of God on earth, but also to the individual life-styles of men and women alike.
Joseph Smith's eloquence in explaining the divine nature of polygamy to Eliza is dramatically undercut by Eliza's sincere desire but complete inability to repeat his explanations convincingly to Mercy. Here the interpretation of the words of Shelley and the logic of the spiritual ideas as described by the prophet suddenly ring hollow. As two women now discuss the idea, not only do the words fall flat, but they barely come at all.
"I wish I could tell you just the way he told it to me," Eliza tells Mercy. "The most beautiful--" She spoke with unsteady lips and a shaking chin" (104). Eliza fumbles to recreate Joseph's exalted explanation for a higher order. "He tells you how it is and you see it differently, you forget about this world, and all you think about is the spiritual thing--about heaven" (107).
Mercy, however, can only see the worldly (and the male) aspects in the plan. "The human side of the whole thing, this side eternity," and she hopes the new idea won't get around. "You give men an idea like that and they'll all start looking around" (106).
As polygamy takes an increasingly stronger hold in the community, male efforts to justify the practice and the difficulties that inevitably surround it intensify. On the evening after Eliza has written "O My Father," the prophet tells his "little Eliza-wife" that he will visit her "when the moon is in the quarter" (142-43). Months later, after the party celebrating the finishing of Joseph and Emma's Mansion House, Eliza upbraids the prophet for not keeping his promise:
"Joseph--you said when the moon is in the quarter--
"Well," he said brusquely, "it isn't."
Eliza's voice turns "steely sober" as she reminds him.
"No, it isn't in the quarter now, but it has been.
Three--four times--since that last night. And if
I'm your wife, as I hope in the name of God I am, you
owe me at least a quarter-moon. Not a whole one,
I'm not asking that, but a quarter." (170)
Hogsett noted in 1987:
[Woman] is a secondary being who depends on the
male mind for her existence. Every word she speaks
travels out of her contingent place, its route to the
listener inevitably indirect, distorted. The primary,
fundamental role belongs to man. It is he who sub-
stantiates, who define, who decides on and imposes
meanings. He insists that she function in his world,
where he has established the links between signifier
and signified.6
Sorensen's women are slowly beginning to realize that they are being manipulated and put off by men's choice of metaphors and pretty expressions that may placate the wives for awhile, but which quickly turn out to be a mere means of sidestepping real communication, as well as a coverup for the full spectrum of men's true intentions.
A moving attempt to achieve a strictly female mode of expression for a heart-rending emotional situation comes midway through the novel from Melissa Vermazon, who has lost all four of her children to disease within the past few years. After the birth of Mercy's twins, Melissa inexplicably appears at the window of the Baker home, wishing to comfort the crying toddler-daughter, Beck, with the simple words, "Darling, Darling!"
Her pathetic expression of hurt, emptiness, and the need to still give some measure of maternal comfort become a small legend among Nauvoo women. The unknown whisperer of soothing words from the window becomes known in the female community simply as "The Darling Lady."' While some women try to explain the mysterious voice as the spirit of the martyred Prophet come to watch over the settlements, the men, who had learned to sleep whether babies cried or not, thought the whole tale as a woman-thing, a fabrication, and simply let it be" (249).
Thus, even the most rudimentary attempts of Nauvoo women to express themselves in purely feminine discourse, tend to be written off by men as nonsense, while the women continue to search for and to hurt over the lack of an emotional and verbal language of their own.
When the matter of polygamy arises in the Baker home, the principle is explained and analyzed by Mercy, Eliza and other woman friends, but always according to male language--that is, the reasonable, logical justifications of the doctrine that come directly from the prophets (first from Joseph Smith, then from Brigham Young), and from Simon Baker's second-hand explanations. As Sorensen describes the women's struggle to make sense out of a practice that is putting their everyday lives in constant turmoil and wrenching them emotionally, the lack of a viable feminist expression becomes even more clear.
It is interesting to observe also that Chariot Leavitt, who is, in reality, one of the most admirable of all the women in the novel (she is intelligent, resourceful, creative, unselfish, compromising, and forebearing, among other qualities) comes off badly in the narrative simply because she is Simon's polygamous wife, and therefore, an interloper and a spoiler. Although there is no female language than can justify her troublesome presence in the Baker household, there is more than adequate male verbiage to make her position seem natural.
Brigham Young encourages Simon's second marriage with painstakingly logical phrases:
Now, that's what Brother Joseph said about it. He was thinking of men like you when he wrote that and of women like your wife. And he was thinking of women who have children and houses and don't have any of their own to take care of. And he planned it for men who were strong-minded, not for men who wanted a thing that's the least part of a woman ....If a man lives this principle as it should be lived, he learns to be impartial, like God. And women learn to be unselfish, they learn what's the best and the most important part of marriage, giving and sharing. That's the best part of any life, Brother Baker. (283-85)
After the death of Joseph Smith, Eliza tries gamely to continue his justification of polygamy, telling Mercy, "If you're big enough, you can climb up in the middle of the fence, and look at both sides. You don't have to sit and growl over what's on your side like the old dog in the manger!" (269).
Prior to that, however, after the bodies of Joseph and Hyrum had come home in the wagon, the narrator shows Eliza thinking to herself, "If I should die first, if I should go on before any of them, then I would be the only one for a little while. I'd be the only one until she came, and the others" (241). Sorensen manages to show subtly how Eliza, despite her outward male-originated attempt to explain polygamy, thinks of her marriage musingly, semi-consciously, in an entirely different way. In the privacy of her own mind, to which Sorensen allows us access, the fictional Eliza sees her union with the prophet ideally in monogamous terms, however briefly.
Also, as Mercy discusses polygamy with Portia Glazier, she recalls the reference to the dog in the manger, and muses, "Only, Portia, it always seemed to me that there was something to the dogs side of it. A property right, really. Maybe the straw kept him warm even though he couldn't eat it" (344). Thus, a piece of male language has been gently turned about and questioned without being defied.
In the midst of the constant bickering and unhappiness in the Baker household, Simon turns a blind eye and
a deaf ear to the very real difficulties and persists in viewing the situation in male terms only. He refuses to let
Chariot leave the family home and return to her own house in town. Simon thinks:
He must not be the first one to fail, or the second even, or the last...The blessed were those who bore
the burden in the heat of the day....Why should love alone be allowed selfishness? For a man it is
even unnatural--did not most men cast their eyes on many women, suffering under their instincts and
the burden of the other commandment? And did God smile on the rows of woman-bodies, unused and
lonely....Before the first terrible misstep, a simple ceremony that gave sanction and invested pleasure
with responsibility. It seemed a simple solution. (332-33)
Simon mouths such justifications continually to his wives, promising, as did Brother Joseph, eventual "world harmony, world perfection" (334). Mercy, however, knows that the pat, male phrases are impotent against the hurt and indignation of everyday reality. "'You can hold up a penny,' Mercy thought, 'and it will hide the sun'" (334). Such verbalized female insights are few, however.
There is virtually no language that either Mercy or Charlot can employ that will assuage the pain or temper the emotional chaos that Charlot's mere presence brings to the home. Although Charlot runs the Baker home with cheer and uncommon efficiency, Mercy is driven to mute rage by Charlot's very presence, the older Baker children detest and defy her, and we the readers also resent her. In the midst of this unfortunate swirl of bad feeling, Sorensen herself does nothing to calm the storm. The readers observe the unhappiness in the household cinemagraphically through dialogue and incidents. There is little probing into the women's minds except a brief note that Mercy calls this time the Era of Man's Patience (abbreviated E.M.P.) in her journal. Simon admires this reference, but the sensitive oldest son, Jarvie, knows that this is not really his mother's true self (340).
Thus, the words and thoughts of the women themselves present no indications that women can actually come to understand and accept polygamy because of their husbands' rote explanations. Sorensen's paucity of revealing female discourse here indicates that the polygamous family situation can be neither explained nor justified, nor even tolerated, if approached through women's language.
Thus, Sorensen begins in the last few chapters of the novel to employ a tactic that is traditionally a pathetic, although ultimately effective technique of eighteenth-, nineteenth- and early twentieth-century women to express themselves in a world of men's rules and men's language--the technique of silence.
"No one questioned the authoritative way in which a man could write [in the nineteenth-century]. He shaped the world," noted Michelle Stott in a recent symposium address at Brigham Young University.
Women was the Other. She couldn't shape, criticize, or speak in a voice of authority. Therefore, she used the strategies of self-effacement and self-deprecation that would direct irony inward and against herself. Her silences, omissions, and self-protective rhetorical devices were meant to conceal and yet to reveal.
When Mercy Baker falls into an inexplicable illness toward the end of the novel, her situation becomes another dimension of this strange, yet effective oxymoron--woman's expressive silence. The narrator and dialogue provide no fully satisfactory physical reason for Mercy's confinement to her bed. True, she had a tendency toward weakness, and the recovery from each birth takes longer and longer. However, she has recovered from the twins' birth and from the death of tiny Mary, and is up and about when she discovers the secret of Simon's second marriage to the woman whom she had been led to believe was hired help.
When Simon awkwardly tries to explain, again with the same male platitudes, Mercy realizes there is no woman's viewpoint he will tolerate from her. "He hates woman-emotion, uncurbed and hysterical; he's like other men, he gets out of the room before it, he shuns it, embarrassed" (322). All attempts at explanation, at verbalization from a woman's point of view are void. Mercy's silence now is her only weapon.
There is an interlude of several months between Mercy's recovery from the twins' birth, and the collapse that leaves her an invalid. During this time, the two wives can communicate only in terms of their disagreements over household chores and habits--"a waffle iron on a different hook...the plates piled in a different corner of the cupboard" (329). Complaints to Simon are cut short by the usual references to the doctrine of practicing "unnatural unselfishness" (333). However, what he says only serves to "stifle her words, not her feelings" (335).
The wives' efforts to understand and accept their situation through male language is consistently undercut by a deep and festering silence, a rage that goes unarticulated, but which is manifest in indirect ways--such as their power struggle within the kitchen and their vying for the children's love and favor.
It is evident from the narrative that the true cause of Mercy's final illness is her inability to express her real feelings, her linguistic incapacity in the face of male prejudice and male language. Because Mercy is unable to verbalize her emotions, she is ultimately unable to cope. Her sickness has no apparent physical cause, yet the narrator eventually tells us she is, "sick at heart" (370), and Portia Glazier observes that Mercy's spells "are in the mind, not only in the body" (417).
When the Baker home is burned by persecutors and the family must move into Charlot's house, the silence intensifies. Mercy withdraws increasingly into herself; she and Charlot rarely speak. "Neither thought to find a way around their feelings; some things are not spoken" (381).
That her sickness is psychosomatic is evident as Mercy seems miraculously able to arise from her sickbed and sit by Simon's side as the wagons leave Nauvoo. However, as she looks across the river to the bluff and sees the site of the home where she was once happy as a monogamous wife, the image and the emotions are too much. There is no way, no language to express her feelings as woman, to articulate her sentiments of betrayal and loss; and there on the wagon seat, Mercy slumps forward and dies.
"Masculine society has traditionally repressed woman's voice," says French feminist critic Helene Cixous. "Writing has been run by a libidinal and cultural--hence, political, typically masculine--economy...where woman has never had her turn to speak. In this 1975 essay, Cixous boldly proclaims, "It is time for women to start scoring their feats in written and oral language. . . . Women should break out of the snare of silence."8
In 1942, Sorensen lacked the terminology and the tight sisterhood of modern feminist writers which would allow her to break out of this snare by verbalizing precisely what polygamous wives were facing in Nauvoo. From a historical point of view, Sorensen is aware that the Mormon women of the 1840s lacked any method of explaining to themselves or to one another their sentiments and perceptions about their bewildering new situation. Feminist language was simply a phenomenon which could not be expected to develop in their era.
Feminist writers and critics of the late twentieth century are able to bolster and sustain one another in growing confidence and solidarity. However, this kind of sisterhood, as it existed in Nauvoo, only diminished under the onslaught of polygamy, the ensuing difficulties of expression, and the eventual silences among women in the 1840s.
An early chapter of A Little Lower than the Angels shows a gathering of Nauvoo women at a quilting bee where Mercy is happy to learn that they can discuss together with ease anything from domestic concerns to sexual matters (38). However, as the novel progresses, we see such sisterhood unraveling. Some good feelings among the women remain, but the erosion is evident as one realizes that, at the novel's beginning, Emma Smith and Eliza R. Snow were close friends and confidantes. Also, it is logical that, under different circumstances, Mercy and Chariot might have easily been friends as well. In the course of the story, however, polygamy has taken enough of a toll on female solidarity in Nauvoo to scotch much development of common, sisterly expression and communication.
There is, therefore, some truth in Cixous's assertion that "almost everything is yet to be written by women about femininity."9 Nevertheless, Sorensen's perceptions of the lack of a female mode of expression is made clear in her novel through her creative, varied narration and dialogues. Effective also is her method of backing away at times to let the story tell itself cinemagraphically, thereby letting the characters' difficulties and silences represent their lack of language on a personal level. Sorensen's novel, therefore, is an effort towards a strictly female mode of expression that begs departure from accepted 1940s norms of thought and verbalization.
In short, in Sorensen's novel, Nauvoo women struggle gamely for self-understanding and self-expression through the restrictions of men's explanations, men's stereotypes, men's cliches, and traditional male language. Their success is limited and their concept of the individual female self and her role in an unusual society is bewildering. We readers are left vaguely unsatisfied and disappointed in the women's inability to protest and to cope.
Nevertheless, Sorensen's creativity in allowing readers to see the true sentiments and Perceptions beneath
the surface of male-dominated doctrines, and beyond the silences of courageous women is an early foray into
the now-prolific realm of feminist language and expression.
Notes
1Helynne H. Hansen is an assistant professor of French at Western State College of Colorado, and a former visiting assistant professor of French at Brigham Young University. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Utah. This paper was delivered at the conjoint session of the Association for Mormon Letters and the Rocky Mountain Modern Language Association, 17 October 1992, at Weber State University, Ogden, Utah.
2Virginia Sorensen. A Little Lower than the Angels. (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1942), 5. Additional quotations from this work are cited parenthetically by page number.
3Ann Rosalind Jones. "Writing the Body: Towards an Understanding of l'ecriture feminine," in Feminisms: An Anthology of Literary Theory and Criticism, edited by Robyn R. Warhol and Diane Price Herndl (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University
Press, 1991), 358.
4Charlotte Hogsett, The Literary Existence of Germaine de Stael (Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois Press, 1987), 65.
5Harold Bloom, "Introduction," Modern Critical Views: Percy Bysshe Shelley (New York: Chelsea House Publishers, 1985), 21.
6The Literary Existence of Germaine de Stael, 26.
7Michelle Stott, "Speaking Silences: Literary Discourse of Nineteenth-Century German Women Authors, Symposium, Department of German and Slavic Languages, Brigham Young University, 6 March 1992; italics mine. Notes in my possession.
8Helene Cixous, "The Laugh of the Medusa," in Warhol and Herndl, Feminisms, 337.
9"The Laugh of the Medusa," 342.