Reposted from Mormon Short Stories substack.
First, I am reading my short story, “The Mile High Club,” at the end of July at the Sunstone Symposium in Salt Lake City, so while I am in town, I wanted to invite any writers, readers, and/or critics of Mormon literature who will be in the SLC area to join me for dinner on July 31 or August 1. If you are interested in this Gathering of the Tribes, please email me at robert.bennett@montana.edu, and we can work out the details.
Second, because I have been working on my story, I decided to take a month off from my Substack and repost an earlier post to celebrate Jenny Rebecca Rytting’s “Sister Wives” which just won the AML best short story award and deserves to be more widely read and discussed. I cannot recommend this story highly enough, and this post was one of my earliest, so many of you may not have read it yet. If you have already read it, then you can take a month off, too, or better yet, take this time to read the story. It is included in the bonus issue of Irreantum 22 (Eternities of Cats) which is available both as a (very inexpensive) ebook and as an (inexpensive) print copy. This collection was also nominated for the AML’s best short story collection of the year, so you will be getting two award contenders for the price of one.
The bonus issue of Irreantum 22 (Eternities of Cats) includes three works: (two previously published)—Michael Fillerup’s long story/short novella, “The Year They Gave Women the Priesthood,” and Melissa Leilani Larsen’s play, Pilot Program—and one new publication—Jenny Rebecca Rytting’s long story/short novella, “Sister Wives.” I will leave aside Fillerup’s piece since I intend to do a separate post on it when I review his larger collection of the same name in which it was first published. In addition, the other two works deserve shared consideration because they share a common theme of the—at least the last time I checked—fictional restoration of polygamy in the contemporary church. Fillerup’s story does as well, but with a conceptual twist that puts it in a slightly different category.
Since I can highly recommend both works as must reads—as in you aren’t in the cool kids’ club unless you have read them—I do not want to spoil their clever plot twists and brilliant details. So, this isn’t going to be an in the weeds Cliff Notes summary of their plots and characters. Both works are far too good for such reductive analysis. You really have to read them yourselves. Instead, this is a 30,000 foot overview of their central conceit: that polygamy could be restored either as a pilot program (Larsen) or as a general directive to the entire church (Rytting). While Larsen’s play was first performed a decade ago and Rytting’s story is first published in this issue, the clever pairing of the two works in this bonus issue suggests that this particular idea has perhaps been brewing and percolating—if Mormon texts are allowed to brew and percolate—in the recent Mormon literary zeitgeist.
I want to explore why this theme might be so important—at this particular moment—for a variety of literary, social, and theological reasons. Admittedly, this is an entirely speculative analysis told from the perspective of a reader not the writers themselves. I have not consulted either writer, so I cannot speak to their authorial intentions, but I am more simply trying to explain how these ideas strike me as one reader who is deeply interested in the question that these two writers raise of why polygamy and why now? Why might multiple writers choose to explore the restoration of polygamy in the contemporary church? Let me count the ways.
First, the idea is laugh out loud funny, and doubly so with Larsen’s suggestion that it could simply be rolled out as a pilot program. This is a simple matter of incongruity. For well over a century the church has been desperately attempting to disassociate itself from its polygamist past. Its leaders have cut their beards. Its policies have created uninhabitable no man’s land barriers between the Brighamite church and its polygamous offshoots. Its leaders deflect any mentions of polygamy from the pulpit or in the press. It is routinely whitewashed and glossed over in the church curriculum. It is the history which shall not be named. To think that the church would simply reverse a course that it has so relentlessly pursued for over a century is hysterical.
Moreover, these two texts not only suggest that the church could reverse course on this issue, but they more ridiculously suggest that it might be able to do so relatively smoothly and seamlessly. Another possible humorous plot line: that Mormons are such sheeple they might actually go along with anything their leaders suggest, including a second go-round with polygamy. Another definitely humorous plot line: reintroducing polygamy would create numerous humorously awkward day-to-day interactions between husbands and wives. Much of the pleasure of both narratives is the way they so cleverly and carefully explore these uncomfortable intimate interpersonal dynamics. Rytting, in particular, reveals her expertise as a Jane Austen scholar with her deft handling of the comedy of manners genre. Much comic hijinks ensue.
But second, the idea of reintroducing polygamy is no laughing matter at all. For all that the church has done to distance itself from polygamy, it has never quite cut the umbilical cord tying the contemporary church to its polygamous roots. It has never decanonized Section 132, for instance, or even denounced it as a false doctrine or a theological mistake. The Manifesto did, in fact, end polygamy as a practice, but not as a doctrine or a theology. The church has never explicitly stated whether polygamy might still be practiced (or perhaps even required) in the afterlife. It has continued to seal men to multiple women (living and dead) in its temples. It has current prophets and apostles who have set the example of being polygamously sealed to multiple women eternally. In short, it has (at least temporarily, at least sort of) ceased the practice of polygamy, but it has never cleaned up the hot theological mess that polygamy continues to cast over the church. What Carol Lynn Pearson calls The Ghost of Eternal Polygamy.
In the end, therefore, these two narratives are so funny precisely because they are not funny at all. The church may not be on the precipice of reintroducing polygamy anytime soon, but every Mormon woman faces the very real possibility that the minute she dies she could be instantly reintroduced to the principle. These texts may deflect that eternal reality into a temporal comedy, but they certainly suggest its possibility and explore its dynamics. The church has never claimed that this won’t happen. In fact, it has repeatedly hinted that it might. With Dallin H. Oaks even recently suggesting that we might have Mothers in Heaven, in the plural.
In short, the church wants to have its clean-cut Mitt Romney Mormonism cake and eat its polygamous history, too. It wants to claim that we would, of course, never practice polygamy today while still maintaining that its leaders were inspired to introduce and continue the practice for half a century. By suggesting that the contemporary church could reintroduce polygamy, these two stories highlight the fact that in crucial ways it has never entirely, altogether left the practice behind. Maybe it wouldn’t be so hard to reintroduce after all. All it takes is a few focus groups and a pilot program. And maybe 17.5 million sheeple.
Third, it makes for great literature and theater. As I have already suggested it makes for great comedy, sort of straddling the boundary between a comedy of manners and a comedy of errors. But even more so, it allows the writers to explore the fine details of the human comedy of manners. The multitude of subtle and nuanced ways that people act and interact in real life. And how actors and characters interact in fiction. If there is one compliment I can pay these writers, it is that they are not propogandists. They are not trying to score political or theological points. They are not concerned—or at least not primarily concerned—with making grand statements about the nature (let alone unmitigated evil) of polygamy. They are interested instead in exploring the many complex ways in which the interpersonal dynamics of polygamy might play out in life or in fiction. What makes these stories so compelling is the fine attention to detail that these writers pay to the human interactions in their texts. It is delightful to see them work through these dynamics without aggressively either condoning or condemning the practice or theology of polygamy.
Instead, they let the reader creatively imagine just what the dynamics of polygamy might actually feel like in the modern world. You just have three people on the stage or on the page trying to figure things out with their unique combinations of ingenuity and incompetence. If these stories depict anything, they depict the very real human struggle—the envies and affections, the slights and considerations—that polygamy was and would be. Comedy aside, these are masterful studies of the indomitable human spirit confronting an almost Sisyphean task. They are master sketches of what it means to be human and interact with other humans. Polygamy simply provides an exceptional setting for exploring the complex dynamics of human interactions, and both writers take full advantage of the possibilities this situation affords.
Finally, perhaps the most important reason these writers explore polygamy is to comment on contemporary gender relations in modern Mormon culture. These works are not just about the past of polygamy; they are equally about the now of Mormon gender roles and expectation. In this sense, they pair nicely with Fillerup’s story which also explores contemporary Mormon gender politics. If polygamy could slide so easily into the contemporary church, maybe this should give us all cause to pause to reconsider just how much today’s doctrine of gender complementarianism falls short of anything remotely resembling full-on gender equality.
Certainly, most Mormon men mean well, and if called by God would do their best to personally practice polygamy in as equitable a manner as possible. The problems with polygamy, however, are not simply personal inequalities, but rather structural ones. Suggesting that contemporary Mormon gender roles may still be—at least in some respects—closer to polygamy than to a feminist world in which women hold the priesthood—though Fillerup does explore that idea as well—certainly calls into question just how much men are still privileged over women in the church, from its beginnings to the present day and by all signs (pace Fillerup) well into the future as well.
Larsen and Rytting ask Mormon men just how much have they truly forsaken the gender inequalities of our polygamous past—and Mormon women just how far they are willing to tolerate these same inequalities. Larsen and Rytting’s polygamy may be a gentler, kinder polygamy, but at the end of the day they really are not suggesting that a polygamy 2.0 might be more tolerable than its predecessor; they are reminding us that we still have unfinished business. We must once and forever kill off the zombie-ghost that polygamy is: the not-quite-distant-enough past that seemingly resurrects itself in eerie and haunting ways. Their ghost of polygamy present may be genteel, but it is still polygamy, and it still needs a stake driven through its heart, or it may be coming to a pilot program near you.