Mormon Healer and Folk Poet: Mary Susannah Fowler’s Life of “Unselfish Usefulness” by Margaret K. Brady (review)

BOOK REVIEW S ence, they explore the reception of Cabeza de Vaca’s work and its widened sphere of influence after the 1555 Valladolid relación. Adorno and Pautz con­ tend that the 1555 edition of the relación represents Cabeza de Vaca’s crown­ ing glory in a distinguished public career. They argue persuasively that it is not a justification for errant endeavors as some scholars suggest, explaining how such a justification more appropriately defines the 1542 text. Adorno and Pautz’s Alvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca: His Account, His Life, and the Expedition of Pánfilo de Narváez is an important research tool for schol­ ars and students of the American West, particularly those interested in the intersections of place and autobiography, narrative, and literature in the early West. Adorno and Pautz’s clearly articulated, tenaciously researched work marks it as the definitive study to date about Cabeza de Vaca and his experi­ ences in Texas and Northern Mexico between 1528 and 1536. Mormon H ealer and Folk Poet: M ary Susannah Fow ler’s Life of “ Unselfish U sefulness.” By Margaret K. Brady. Logan: Utah State University Press, 2000. 222 pages, $19.95. Reviewed by Jennifer Sinor Utah State University, Logan The only way to begin a review of Margaret Brady’s Mormon Healer and Folk Poet: Mary Susannah Fowler’s Life of “Unselfish Usefulness” is with the acknowledg­ ment that the review itself creates another story, another layer, in the continual, collaborative construction of its subject, a Mormon woman named Mary Fowler living in Utah at the turn of the last century. A t the most basic level, Brady’s pro­ ject is the recovery of this ordinary woman’s life, a life that would typically pass unnoticed by most. And as with other recovery projects, in piecing together a story, Brady relies on historical documents that have survived. What makes Brady’s study distinct, though, is not only the sheer number of discourses she considers— Fowler’s own diary, the diary kept by her husband, interviews with living descendants, minutes from Relief Society meetings, biographies, and Fowler’s poetry— but the powerful and compelling way in which she brings these multiple discourses into conversation with each other by grounding them within the Mormon cultural ideal of interconnectedness. What emerges is a complicated and changing picture of an ordinary Mormon woman who establishes and reestablishes the value of community through her writing, her healing, and her daily example. Mary Susannah Fowler grew up in southern Utah in the Mormon communal town of Orderville. Brady argues that such a communal context strongly shaped Fowler’s belief in mutual interdependence and selfless service. Those living in Orderville economically, physically, and spiritually relied upon one another, constantly performing the cultural ideal of community in their work, their family life, and their church service. Brady does not, however, simply describe 1 9 2 WAL 3 6 . 2 S u m m e r 2 0 0 1 what such interdependence looks like on a daily basis; rather, she demonstrates how this Mormon ideal so fully permeates Fowler’s sense of self that her work as a folk healer, community leader, and poet replicates and extends the value of community. One of the aspects I find particularly compelling about Brady’s work is what we learn about the reciprocal relationships established between Mormon women, in particular between mothers and daughters and between wives and sister-wives. As Brady points out, these women were often alone as their husbands would regularly travel for long periods of time to complete missionary work. Even more than typical nineteenth-century women, Mormon women relied on the existence of a “female community of caring” (61). Women would share their work, their reading material, their personal experiences, as well as their husbands. Fowler learns the value of service by watching her mother’s role in sustaining the community, and she transfers the image of the caring mother to her practice as a folk healer. Dissolving the line between mother and healer, Fowler is able to nurture the larger Mormon family by bringing the sick back into the community with the healthy. Brady shows that her...