Mormon Healer and Folk Poet: Mary Susannah Fowler's Life of "Unselfish Usefulness."
2004; Western States Folklore Society; Volume: 63; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
2325-811X
Autores Tópico(s)American Constitutional Law and Politics
ResumoMormon Healer and Folk Poet: Mary Susannah Fowler's Life of Unselfish Usefulness. By Margaret K. Brady. (Logan: Utah State University Press, 2000. Pp. xi + 222, acknowledgments, introduction, notes, bibliography, index. $44.95 cloth, $21.95 paper) Mary Susannah Fowler (1862-1920) was one of those remarkable women whose unsung lives occasionally come to our readerly consciousness. Plural wife, mother, healer, poet, religiously obedient, hard-working, smart-she was the sort of woman whose courage and enterprise we love to admire from afar, from this other country that is our own century. Working from maddeningly few documentary sources, Margaret K. Brady has recreated as much as she can of the emotional and intellectual life of a beloved healer and poet. Poised somewhere between an academic study and an appealing pioneer history, the book is modeled on the studies of Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, whose reading of a diary in A Midwife's Tale (1990) opened the female world of eighteenth-century New England to us. All this makes for a really great book. Why am I so bothered by it? The whole is greater than the sum of its parts. There just aren't enough parts here. Brady has a few diary entries (wrote a letter, heard that Sister X is ill, canned tomatoes). Relief Society records show that Sister Fowler spoke on the Joys of Motherhood. Sweet, clever poems she wrote for friends are lovingly preserved in newspapers and in minutes of meetings. That's all there is. Brady hangs her study on reader-response theory, through which readers themselves construct the text, and identity construction is the proper work of each reader, each writer, each storyteller. But in an effort to remind us of these different possible identities, Brady confusingly changes Fowler's name here and there, and with novelistic flair hints at crucial psychological information-for example, the drowning of Fowler's sibling while her mother was reading, revealed only at the end. When in Rome, do as the Romans do. Family memories are risky, as anyone knows who has tried to collect family folklore. Brady faces double barrels here: Fowler's church, which Brady respects, and Fowler's family, whom Brady loves. How could she ever provide analysis that goes beyond the predetermined confines of her subject's idealized life? Fowler obeyed church authority, cared for her apparently difficult sister-wife, lent her considerable intelligence to the service of others (healing) and to fluffy, romanticized literary endeavors. Serious thought was suspect; her Literary Society was terminated by church leaders. Here, I confess, I became so angry with both Fowler and the church that I threw the book down and wondered how I would ever write this review. Fowler did me one better, though-she acquiesced, followed another adage: Don't cry over spilt milk. What choice did she have? …
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