Joseph and His Brothers: Rivalry in Virginia Sorensen's On This Star

Edward A. Geary¹

In the birth of desire, the third person is always present.

--Rene Girard²

About a Dozen years ago, when I first undertook a systematic reading of Virginia Sorensen, I rated On This Star as the least satisfying of her Mormon regional novels. I was put off by the melodramatic ending and by what seemed to me then to be insufficiently developed characters--especially Chelnicia Bowen, who is presented at the beginning of the novel as an engaging protagonist but who pales almost to insignificance by the end. But I have found it, in the years that followed, to be the Sorensen novel that stays with me the most insistently, whose human situations and local color remain most vividly in my memory, even more than those of The Evening and the Morning, which is a much more shapely and fully realized novel. The feeling that I have not fully come to terms with On This Star has brought me back to it once again--not in any sense to pronounce the final word, but to meditate on some of the elements that continue to ferment in my imagination.

In her 1953 essay "Is It True?--The Novelist and His Materials" (obviously written in a period when nobody worried much about sexist language), Virginia Sorensen laments the plight of the novelist trying to make Mormon materials intelligible to a wider audience:

Whenever you write about a "peculiar people" you will find yourself under the necessity of holding up the action of your stories, in a way most frowned-upon by the technicians , while you explain how your characters feel about heaven and hell, and why; how they are married and to how many different people and how this happened to happen; how they feel about food and drink; how many of their relationships are complicated, or sometimes enhanced, by the notion that they go on and on forever.³

Then she goes on to suggest some of the advantages presented by this very peculiarity, alluding to the complicated relationships of polygamous families:

Certainly, for example, it is true that jealousy has a different quality when it is directed at legitimate and not at illegitimate rival-lovers. This is one problem, at least, which is really peculiar to our own people, yet it adds many new possibilities to the customary simple triangular love stories that everybody else has to tell over and over: we have hexagons!⁴

Sorensen treats "hexagonal" love stories most extensively in A Little Lower Than the Angels and Many Heavens, but the complications of polygamous family life play a part in the background of her other Mormon regional novels, including On This Star, which is set a generation after the Manifesto. Mormon polygamy was defended by nineteenth-century apologists on the grounds of Old Testament precedents, and Sorensen has taken advantage of this model by creating an updated version of an Old Testament family.

The founder of the Tribe of Eriksen was Lars, who joined the Mormon Church as an idealistic young man in Denmark, attracted largely by its vision of a just and egalitarian society. He emigrated to Zion and was sent by Brigham Young to help colonize "Temple Valley" (obviously modeled on Sanpete Valley), where he entered the United Order and labored to build up the community. He married the prolific Christine (of Danish peasant stock, in contrast to Lars's educated middle-class background), who bore him twelve strong, blond children. With the end of the United Order, Lars adapted to the more individualistic ethic but preserved the spirit of cooperation in his own family, with the result that they have prospered beyond their neighbors. Lars's standing in the community made it obligatory that he take a second wife, the self-effacing Ida, by whom he had a daughter and a son, Erik, the novel's protagonist.

At the novel's opening, in 1926, Lars has been dead for several years, but both of his widows survive as do all of his children except for two sons killed in the First World War. The eldest son, Lars II, is a big sheepman with interests in a woolen mill; Ivor specializes in poultry, 'Nute in hogs, and Oley in fruit. The youngest son, Jens, has studied at the agricultural college and is preparing to establish the first modern dairy in the valley. They have built their holdings by a combination of specialization and cooperation, buying up the land of less successful farmers and helping one another with harvest, building homes, even bottling fruit. Though they have spread up and down the valley, the center of the family remains the big house where Christine presides in matriarchal glory. The entire family gather there for an annual reunion and photographic session during the county fair and also frequently for Sunday dinners, at the end of which each of Christine's children goes through the ritual of kissing their mother and saying "Thank you for food" in Danish. In a wonderful symbolic touch, Christine keeps the family's prize bull in her corral,

saying it was handier for the boys to bring their heifers here than to any other of the family establishments. And it seemed curiously fitting to her that the boys should still come to the source of their own lives for the seeding of their herds.^s

On these family occasions, Ida dutifully comes from her little house on the next block to Christine's big house. Her son, Erik, also comes, when he is in town, but he seethes with resentment. Erik, alone of all the family, has left both the valley and the faith, and spends the greater part of the year pursuing a musical career in the East. However, he comes back to the valley each summer to visit his mother, climb the mountains and fish the creeks, and pick up a little income by giving music lessons. As the only son of the second wife, Erik has always felt himself to be in competition with his half-brothers:

As Erik grew up, he was small and lean and dark against the blond stature of the other Eriksen boys.

So he was always Little Erik to the family. He had forced himself to excel in ways Christine's boys could never excel, outstripping them in school work, in public speaking, especially in music. But they took turns at getting him down, at washing his face with snow in winter, and out-fishing and out-hunting him in summer. All this was done with the same careless boisterous affection with which they pronounced the "little" before his name. (11)

This competition was intensified by the favoritism shown for Erik by his father, who "sometimes frankly referred to him as "The Joseph" and regularly took him along on his trips to Salt Lake, "especially when there was a concert or a play in Salt Lake Theater." Thus the explicit parallel with the House of Israel is established at the outset. Apart from her prolific mothering, there is no reason to think that Christine is a Leah figure, nor even less that Ida is a Rachel. Lars's strongest bond was evidently with his first wife, and there is no suggestion of anything more than a dutiful regard for Ida. But Erik fits the Joseph role not only in having been his father's favorite, but also in having been "sold" (albeit willingly) into Egypt--or Babylon--while his brothers claimed an inheritance in the Promised Land:

When Erik wished to study music, Lars was pleased.... There was controversy in the family over the expense of it. "All right," Lars said to his family, speaking in his mild voice, careful with his English, "there is land and there is money. Erik would rather have lessons than land. (11-12)

There are also suggestive parallels in the novel with other Old Testament family rivalries. Erik is the rebellious Cain who kills the faithful Abel. Erik is only a few weeks older than Jens; though born of different mothers, they are virtually twins in age. But like Jacob and Esau they are "as different as night and day"(8). Jens is blond, big-muscled, outgoing; Erik is dark and fine-featured and brooding, "his body like stretched elastic" (16). Erik recalls their childhood relationship in these terms:

Jens and I were rivals in a strange way. Being the two last boys and about the same age, I always had to shoulder up and pretend to be as big and strong as he was. I remember once when he took a ball away from me. I ran after him, and I still remember how awful it was that I couldn't catch him. I used to dream about chasing people and not being able to catch them. This time, though, he, fell down. He stumbled over something. And when I got to him he had turned over and was kicking. He landed one in my stomach, and I keeled over. When I came to, I thought I was still fighting him; I could hear him yelling and thought I had him for sure. I was so glad I felt like bursting wide open--and then I saw that Father had him over his knee. (71)

Like Jacob and Esau, too, they are rivals for a birthright, though Erik sees it as an intellectual heritage while Jens sees it as religious and economic. Both of them have made pilgrimages back to Denmark, Jens to study the dairy industry, Erik to seek out educated and artistic relatives and learn more about Grundtvig's social idealism, which had influenced his father.

The central plot complication in the novel, Erik's falling in love with Jens's fiancee, and she with him, seems on a first reading to be something straight out of a popular romance: an unsought but overwhelming passion against which both of them are helpless. Upon a closer scrutiny, however, I have come to see it as virtually a textbook example of what Rene Girard calls "internal mediated desire." Despite all his efforts at self-knowledge, Erik is what Girard calls vaniteux, one who "cannot draw his desires from his own resources; he must borrow them from others."⁶ Girard writes:

A vaniteux will desire any object so long as he is convinced that it is already desired by another person whom he admires. The mediator here is a rival, brought into existence as a rival by vanity, and that same vanity demands his defeat.

Girard continues:

Only someone who prevents us from satisfying a desire which he himself has inspired in us is truly an object of hatred. The person who hates first hates himself for the secret admiration concealed by his hatred. In an effort to hide this desperate admiration from others, and from himself he no longer wants to see in his mediator anything but an obstacle. The secondary role of the mediator thus becomes primary, concealing his original function of a model scrupulously imitated.⁷

This seems to me a very exact account of Erik's complex attitude toward Jens.

Rivalry and imitative desire are involved in Erik's feelings for Chel from the very outset. Although she has long admired him, he has been entirely unconscious of her existence until he meets her as Jens's fiancee, after having offered to give her some music lessons as a wedding present. Even after the first lesson, Erik is not especially drawn to her until he actually sees her on Jens's arm. His feelings are described in a remarkable passage that clearly demonstrate's Girard's claim, "In the birth of desire, the third person is always present"⁸

Erik was to remember that moment afterward, its whole substance--for it seemed to have a substance

of its own, a beginning and an end. It was in a frame within him, like a picture, a moment abstracted

from time and perpetuated. Jens took Chel's arm as though to help her over the ditch, an ancient courtesy even when there was a good wide bridge, as here. Something personal and proprietary in the gesture stopped Erik's heart. ]ens was magnificent, beautiful in his jeans and his open shirt,

and the lovely girl was his own, his right--womankind with her hand lifted and laid in the palm of

strength....

It was not thought so much as a surge of feeling, if the two are ever in any degree apart. It was the sight of the whole with the whole with the symbol behind it--Jens and all the rest of the big Eriksen boys

and their pretty selected wives. As they selected their cows and their fields and the properly seasoned lumber for their gigantic barns, the Eriksen boys chose their women. (19-20)

Note that it is Jens, not Chel, who first impresses Erik. He admires Jens as a possessor, and Chel at first is simply a generic possession: "womankind with her hand lifted and laid in the palm of strength." It is Jens's "personal and proprietary" gesture that stirs Erik's envy, which then broadens to encompass the entire rival-family, "the big Eriksen boys and their pretty selected wives"--with Erik excluded from the possession of women as he is excluded from the possession of size and strength and land and barns. Only when Erik's imitative desire has been fully aroused does it focus on Chel for her unique value, and even then it is not the value of a person but of a prized object, a work of art. Erik is not attracted to Chel in spite of her being his brothers fiancee but because of it. In Girard's terms, "the mediator's prestige is imparted to the object of desire and confers upon it an illusory value." Triangular desire is the desire which transfigures its object."⁹

The narrator declares, "they had not meant to fall in love" (61), but in fact Erik engages in a subtle courtship from this moment on. This is not to say he pursues Chel solely or consciously out of malice. He is profoundly lonely and desperately in need of someone who would also know what it means to belong to the Mormon community of faith and to leave it, someone "who had shared the struggle and outlived it" (241). But Girard links this kind of alienation also with imitative desire: "Romantic revulsion, hatred of society, nostalgia for the desert... usually conceal a morbid concern for the Other."¹⁰

Hoping to clinch his victory, Erik seduces Chel on his last night before leaving for the East, thinking that she will now be unable to marry Jens and will have to follow him to New York. She does feel physically and emotionally bonded to Erik, but this is not enough to overcome her fear of leaving the valley and her horror at Erik's rejection of Mormon values. She conceals her sexual indiscretion and goes through a temple marriage with Jens, only to become a frigid, barren, and fanatically dutiful wife.

Girard makes a distinction between what are termed, in English translation, "romantic" and "novelistic" works. Romantic literature presents imitative desire without revealing "its actual mechanism," while "the novelist alone describes [the] actual genesis of the illusion."¹¹ On This Star belongs to the romantic mode for the most part; but it approaches the novelistic at key moments, such as the passage discussed above that describes the origins of Erik's desire. The novelistic mode comes to the fore again in the episode of the deer hunt.

Erik, bitterly disappointed at Chel's failure to follow him to New York, stays away from the valley for two years. When he returns, he takes a perverse satisfaction in the discovery that Chel has suffered and that Jens has found more frustration than fulfillment in his marriage. He invites himself for the first time to participate in the great Eriksen deer hunt.

Erik is both indirectly and directly responsible for Jens's death. The chain of causation is set in motion when Erik's return reawakens Chel's interest in music, which she has given up since her marriage. Stirred by renewed feelings for Erik, she spends the evening before the hunt playing the piano instead of getting Jens's gear ready like a dutiful wife. When she hurriedly and guiltily attempts to make up for this lapse, she forgets to pack his red hunting coat. This omission is not discovered until the party is in the mountains, and Jens is therefore compelled to wear his brown chore coat with a red handkerchief tied to his head. Erik and Jens are posted at adjacent stands; Erik wounds a deer, follows its trail, thinks he sees it through the underbrush, and, predictably, shoots Jens. When he reaches the body, the face is turned away, but "Erik knew, before he fell on his knees, that it was Jens. It seemed to him that he had known it before he saw, before he even broke through the bushes. As he fired" (247).

The killing is technically an accident, but psychologically it is murder, and in Erik's responses the novel provides its deepest insights into the love-hate relationship involved in imitative desire:

He had not loved Jens before, God knew; but he had hated him and envied him, knowing what

these were. It had been ]ens's perfection and his ease that he hated; the rich thoughtless exuberance

of Jen'[s] taking everything. Jens had not meant to hurt anybody, but, simply as a child, he had gath ered in with all his strength and built with all his strength. There had been no struggle with life, but

a perpetual conquering by mere forwardness, like an army moving forward with banners flying, without resistance. He had received the kingdom without a struggle, and now, without fault, he had lost it. What he had been, glorious and apparently unlimited, Erik loved when he saw it destroyed. He knew this because of the very depth of his sorrow. He saw Jens'[s] running, jumping, laughing, overpowering

boyhood, his openly desiring face and ready lips, his strong red skin shouting with blood when he splashed at Christine's washbasin. Jens had been good to touch. (251)

The erotic quality of these feelings is sufficiently obvious. But then follows a crucially revealing line: "It seemed now that Erik had destroyed his own desire." And indeed, from this point on, there is no indication that Chel is an object of desire for Erik. It is only out of helpless pity that he escorts her home after she has come to him on the night of the funeral, her mind unhinged, convinced that all has happened according to divine plan to provide her with a man she can love physically and emotionally in this life and a faithful Mormon male she can have spiritually in the hereafter. The final irony is that Erik himself is killed by a jealous brother, Ivor, precisely at the point where nothing remains to be jealous of.

That is the final irony in the linear unfolding of the text--indeed, a too-abrupt and shocking termination, as though the narrative itself could not survive the extinction of Erik's consciousness. But the implications of imitative desire go further. If Erik desires Chel because Jens possesses her, how are we to understand Jens's feelings? The novel gives us very few interior views of Jens; and the implication is that, compared to Erik, he has a rather simple interior life. But we cannot avoid being struck by how little passion he exhibits as a lover. We are told that Jens has a reputation as a ladies' man, but he conducts himself toward Chel with extreme respect and restraint. He never seems to take seriously the possibility that she could be interested in Erik--even though Ivor, the most observant brother, realizes early on that Chel and Erik are attracted to each other and tries to warn Jens. We are left to conclude either that Jens is very stupid or that his contempt for "Little Erik" is so complete that he cannot imagine him as a rival. But as Girard points out, contempt is itself a sign of rivalry:

In the quarrel which puts him in opposition to his rival, the subject reverses the logical and chronological order of desires in order to hide his imitation. He asserts that his own desire is prior to that of his rival; according to him it is the mediator who is responsible for the rivalry. Everything that originates with this mediator is systematically belittled although still secretly desired.¹²

If Erik has experienced Jens as a lifelong rival-twin, always bigger and stronger and more beautiful, how has Jens experienced Erik? We know that he teased and bullied Erik when they were children, and that he was frequently punished by their father for doing so. We know, too, that Erik was "the Joseph," the favored son. We have to wonder--even though the data is lacking to answer the question-how much of Jens's life has been devoted to an effort to win his father's favor. He has been the "good" son, following his father's path of religious duty and serving a mission to the Old Country. How much submerged resentment is there in his contempt for Erik's accomplishments? At the beginning of the novel when Chel tries to suggest to Jens that Erik is a man of distinguished achievement, he reacts with incredulity:

"Distinguished!" ]ens shook his head, laughing. "Good Lord, Chel, he's the same age I am. He never

could do much but play piano." The superiority of a man who has a talent for manly things lay in ]ens' voice. It was a big joke in the family, the way the musicians came flocking to Templeton, just to pay Erik ten dollars an hour. (10)

And yet, though Jens cares nothing about music himself, he is proud of Chel's talent, and very eager to have Erik recognize it. Jens in effect throws Chel and Erik together, then assiduously stays out of the way, allowing their attachment to grow.

Even though the evidence is sketchy, there is reason to suspect that Erik mediates Jens's desire much as Jens mediates Erik's. Jens is like the husband in Cervantes's tale of Anselmo and Lotario, who presses his best friend to try to seduce his wife--ostensibly in order to prove her virtue, but really because only his friend-rival's desire can make her desirable to him.¹³

I have said little about Chel Bowen, and I am not prepared to unravel the very real perplexities her character poses. When Girard claims that the value cast upon the object of desire by the process of mediation is "illusory," he does not mean that the object possesses no intrinsic value, but rather that mimetic desire is not primarily a response to intrinsic value but to rivalry with the mediator. But there are other senses in which Chel Bowen's value is illusory. She is initially presented as an attractive and sympathetic character. Indeed, a good case can be made that she, rather than Erik, was originally intended as the novel's protagonist. She is the flower of Mormon culture: product of a close and loving family, sensitive and intelligent yet at the same time filled with an unquestioning belief in the rightness of Mormon doctrine and the goodness of the Mormon way of life. Why, then, does she become so pitiful a figure, naive, deluded, fanatical, utterly incapable of coping with emotional crises? It seems to me that the author's attitude toward Chel changes as the novel proceeds, and she is increasingly used--victimized, really--as a means of criticizing elements of Mormon culture that Sorensen herself dislikes. In a sense, Chelnicia Bowen becomes a scapegoat. Rene Girard has some interesting things to say about that process as well. To explore those ideas would further demonstrate the strange power of this flawed but strongly imagined novel to stimulate speculative inquiry. But that would be a topic for another essay.

Notes

¹Edward A. Geary is a professor of English at Brigham Young University and a former AML president. He is the author of Goodbye to Poplarhaven: Recollections of a Utah Boyhood (1985) and The Proper Eye of the Sky: The High Plateau Country of Utah (1993). This paper was delivered at the annual meeting of the Association for Mormon Letters, 28 January 1989 at Weber State University, Ogden, Utah.

²Deceit, Desire, and the Novel: Self and Other in Literary Structure, translated by Yvonne Freccero (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1965), 21.

³Virginia Sorensen, "'Is It True?': The Novelist and His Materials," Western Humanities Review 7 (1953): 290-91.

⁴Ibid., 291.

⁵Virginia Sorensen, On This Star (New York: Reynal and Hitchcock, 1946), 190. Quotations from this work are hereafter cited parenthetically in the text.

⁶Girard, Deceit, Desire, and the Novel, 6.

⁷Ibid., 10-11.

⁸Ibid, 21.

⁹Ibid., 17.

¹⁰Ibid., 15.

¹¹Ibid, 17.

¹²Ibid., 11.

¹³Don Quixote, Pt. 1, chaps. 33-35.