Dennis Barone [USA]

Two American Religious Fictions

 By chance I recently read Brian Evenson’s new novel The Open Curtain and then a Green Integer reprint of William Dean Howells’s 1895 novella The Day of Their Wedding.  Both fictions describe particular aspects of American religious culture.  Evenson offers the nightmare of the cult whereas Howells provides a picture of religious sect as sylvan idyll.

     In Evenson’s novel a young Mormon boy, Rudd, has to do a high school research paper.  I laughed reading the teacher’s use of a three-part writing prompt for it sounds like an idea right out of a how-to-write-a-paper textbook: choose a hero, a place, and a time.  Rudd has difficulty choosing a hero perhaps because his father committed suicide.  He does have better success with the other two, and he picks New York City (it is far away from Utah) and the early twentieth century.  At the library he scans microfilm reels of The New York Times and discovers a gruesome murder from that time and place.  The perpetrator of the crime: grandson of Brigham Young, Mormonism’s founder and first leader.

     Rudd becomes obsessed with this history.  History in Evenson’s work is often timeless in the way that it is in Hawthorne’s.  One generation’s crimes haunt subsequent generations.  Rudd also has come to believe that he has a half-brother, Lael, living nearby.  One has intimations at times that this half-brother is but a projection of Rudd’s neurosis – or psychosis.  The Mormon perpetrator of the early twentieth century crime claimed to have had an accomplice.  Lael and Rudd mirror this relationship.  They repeat the early twentieth century history in the early twenty-first.

     This is horror fiction, deeply psychological yet with a surface realism and a compelling plain-style prose narration.  Some very odd things occur, including Rudd’s traditional Mormon marriage ceremony.  Be advised: in this novel, as in Evenson’s Lies of the Fathers, institutional religion does not offer sanctuary.

     William Dean Howells’s novella of one hundred and eleven years prior shows a less dystopian, more utopian view of American religious groups.  Here the Shakers are our representative church.  A young man and woman, Lorenzo and Althea, have left their community so that they can marry.  Remember: Shakers lived communally, but did not marry and prohibited all sexual contact.  This “angelic” life proved to be a less than effective way to perpetuate the earthly church.  I believe I read that the last two ancient Shakers, two women in rural Maine, died a few years ago.

     Howells very sweet young couple spend a day in Saratoga, New York, very much a bustling commercial resort town at the end of the nineteenth century.  They have tender and amusing trouble negotiating “the world outside,” from struggling to avoid the perceived oddness of their Shaker locutions to understanding the custom of tipping waiters and others.  During their day they meet a number of memorable and decent townspeople, especially a carriage driver and a minister.  With the former they see the sights, including the many luxury hotels (this brief narrative is a fascinating study of early consumer culture) and with the latter they discuss theology.  After some doubts, they do get married.  Yet, almost no sooner do they do so than they decide to leave “the world outside,” renounce their marriage vows, and return to the celibate and separate, yet communal and sheltered life of the Shaker community.

     Sometimes I offer students my half-hearted truism that the greatest discoveries are made by pure chance, not by studied intentionality.  I’m not being completely truthful when I say this.  I, for example, study with very clear and distinct direction every day.  Yet, what a joy it is when something does occur somewhat improvised and beyond the practiced harmony of scales.  These two fictions – Evenson’s The Open Curtain and Howells’s The Day of Their Wedding – offer a reader wonderful reading pleasure and also strike at the core issue of American religious history since the time of the first Great Awakening.  Are American religious traditions dangerous enthusiasms or the embodiment of heavenly design here on earth?  Remember, in one of the very first American novels, Charles Brockden Brown’s Weiland (1798), this debate forms its very modus operandi – a debate between Awakening enthusiasm and Enlightenment reason.  (In another early American novel, The Coquette [1797], Hannah Foster modeled her villain after one of theologian-philosopher Jonathan Edwards’s sons.)  Whether 1798, 1895, or 2006 – we see such issues unresolved, though in the pairing of Howells, whose novella leaves us smiling and saying something like “how charming.  God bless,” and Evenson, whose frightening novel leaves us with recurring bad dreams, the latter wins this round of debate.  It is the more powerful (if less pleasant) of the two.  America and American religious history is no tender land and far from paradise.

Copyright ©2007 by Dennis Barone

Dennis Barone is the author of several books of fiction and poetry, including The Returns (Sun & Moon Press) and Precise Machine.