Ah, Marriage: In Any Form, It’s A Mystery

Just when you think, after about 25 years in the marriage pond, you might be getting the hang of it, you realize there might be a whole other way of swimming than the one you learned—the one you’re still learning, actually.

That’s kind of how it feels when you have a burgeoning anthropologist in the family who is studying how polygamy has worked, over generations, in peaceful communities on a distant continent.

In this country, we’ve been widening our definitions of marriage recently, but the practice of having multiple spouses and raising children in common, well, that’s still not exactly embraced here.

In fact, just as our daughter was packing to resume her studies in Cameroon, there was a TV special,  “20/20” through ABC News, about a determined woman in Utah who, having herself escaped the clutches of the “Fundamentalist Latter Day Saints,” was rescuing—the term they used was “extracting”– her children from an enclave of this outlawed branch of Mormonism. Clearly, because of the level of overall weirdness not to mention dangers involved, she was in the right and they were in the wrong.

The plot thickens, however, when you listen to what some scholars are saying about the practice of polygamy, more broadly. Janet Bennion, a professor at Lyndon State College and a Mormon herself, has just written a book called Polygamy in Primetime: Media, Gender and Politics in Mormon Fundamentalism. Bennion argues that it’s healthy for the practice of plural marriages to come more out into the open, so people can see it for what it is—certainly not all good, and carrying with it inherent risks, but not all bad either. She presents evidence that some women actually benefit from a greater degree of economic security and more social bonds. She says, “this is a real marriage form. Some of it is poor-functioning; some of it is well-functioning.”

Don’t get me wrong: I haven’t become an advocate for what is, let’s face it, a really different way of life. While it’s true that one of my friends, who shall go nameless, did say that she’d be glad to share her husband because it might give her a new dose of freedom.…I’m definitely not in that camp.

But I am saying that just by imagining dramatically different ways of living, we can expand our panoramas.

I’ll admit it—the little that I’ve known about Mormonism has always made it seem about as far away from my own experience and comfort level as it could be. My brother and his wife lived in Northern Utah for a number of years, and we heard many tales of what it was like for them to be on the outside, looking in — always aware of large families disappearing into huge temples. But polygamy? Just about gone.

And now, with the Episcopal Church about to have its big Convention in Salt Lake City, I’m wondering what this mix of religions will bring. I mean, it’s not as if all those delegates and bishops and clergy won’t be cognizant of the enormous, soaring temple right downtown. Reliable sources tell me there’s strong interest on both sides for mutual understanding.

In fact, although I won’t attend the Convention, I have already been having a kind of mix-it-up with the Mormons, albeit through fiction. In a way, I feel as if I’m in one of those windowless hotel rooms where you get to meet other clergy spouses.

A new book has come out, and it’s called The Bishop’s Wife. “What’s this?” I thought, when I first heard about it on the radio. “Somebody’s beaten me to the punch?!” As if it weren’t enough that there are already TWO movies with the same name! Frankly, it’s getting pretty crowded out here in Bishop Wife Land.  But wait—turns out this one is a murder mystery. “Phew,” I thought, “My story’s just a bit different. No murders, just plenty of sports.”

The cover really gives a nice, bright view of religion, doesn’t it? Pushing aside, for the time being, Jane Hawking’s engrossing memoir about her life with her brilliant but physically handicapped husband —Travelling to Infinity— I’m now in about the third chapter of this novel, written by Mette Ivie Harrison.  She is herself a Mormon and, like her protagonist, is a woman with five children. There’s no sign of polygamy here (only slight mention of how it can still give the mainstream, still vibrant religion a bad rap, kind of like an old embarrassing relative who’s been put in his place) just devout nuclear families living in a tight-knit community. And the bishop actually earns his living from another job— he’s an accountant. Now that’s different all right.

Ms. Harrison is clearly no slouch either: she got a PhD as well as had all those kids before writing the book. It took a whole lot of nerve to portray, as she does, the darker side of her own faith community, specifically how domestic abuse can often go unrecognized. She’s interested here in what can go awry, within the framework of a highly structured religion, in people’s private lives, especially when men are still the ones in key dominant positions. The main character, our heroine the bishop’s wife, is trying to “out” the truth. But Harrison doesn’t want to bring the whole faith crashing down, either. In fact, she hopes to leave the reader with a sense of how powerful many Mormon women actually are even though they may seem, at first glance, to limit themselves by being so feminine.

Honestly, it’s not easy to know how to take all of this in and make any real sense out of it. I think I’ll do the following: 1) Learn as much as I can about other ways of life, other cultures and other religions, strange as they may sometimes seem, without judging them and 2) Keep trying to stay afloat, no—thrive even, in my own particular pond. At least that’s what I think the spring peepers are trying to tell me…and what a racket they are making on these evenings!