Thrill of the Chaste: The Allure of Amish Romance Novels by Valerie Weaver-Zercher (review)

409 Book Reviews Thrill of the Chaste: The Allure of Amish Romance Novels. By Valerie WeaverZercher . Young Center Books in Anabaptist & Pietist Studies, ed. Donald B. Kraybill. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013. Pp. xvii + 315. ISBN 978-1-4214-0890-3. $50.00 hc. ISBN 978-1-4214-0891-0. $24.95. In flipping through a Christian mail-order gift catalog this past summer I was startled to find, among the cotton tunics, costume jewelry, and prayerful plaques, a sizeable number of romance novels featuring Amish heroines. One or two forays into the fascinating cultural landscape of the Amish would have been unsurprising, but book covers graced by demure young women in white “prayer kapps” popped up on page after page. Intrigued into some impromptu statistical analysis, I found that nearly half of the romance novels in the catalog, fifteen out of thirty-three, were Amish-inspired. Two of the twelve cookbooks, moreover, featured Amish and Mennonite cuisine. Here was new territory for the scholar of popular culture, and I lay aside the catalog with a desire to explore its meaning. Fortunately, editor and writer Valerie Weaver-Zercher has paved the way with Thrill of the Chaste, the first scholarly monograph to analyze what she terms “the marriage of inspirational fiction and the Amish” and its offspring, the “Amish romance novel” (xii). Weaver-Zercher’s engaging study builds on two strains of scholarship: analyses of contemporary evangelical fiction by scholars of religion and popular literature such as Lynn S. Neal, Anita Gandolfo, and Pamela Regis, and cultural studies of the Amish, a field that sociologist John A. Hostetler pioneered in the mid-twentieth century. Weaver-Zercher’s analysis incorporates the work of several of Hostetler’s academic descendents, including linguistic anthropologist Karen M. JohnsonWeiner , sociologist Donald B. Kraybill (series editor), and historian David L. Weaver-Zercher, the author’s husband. Her critical method combines cultural criticism with transactional reading theory. Weaver-Zercher, however, also writes from her own experience. She readily acknowledges her enjoyment of Amish romances and is equally transparent about her religious affiliation (she and her husband belong to the Mennonite Church). In composing her study, Weaver-Zercher elected to blend her “social location” into her analysis and to make her engagement with her subject matter a story in itself. In this she succeeds very well, for the resulting work of “narrative scholarship” has a liveliness that, without sacrificing scholarly rigor, makes it accessible to interested lay readers (xiii). Despite the “allure” that Amish romance holds for her, WeaverZercher maintains a critical distance from her subject. Thrill of the Chaste is divided into ten chapters and roughly three parts. In chapters 1-3, Weaver-Zercher sets the stage by examining the sudden rise of the Amish romance novel to popularity. Chapters 4-7 examine various social and cultural functions the genre plays in the lives of both producers and readers, while chapters 8-9 assess the reactions of the Amish themselves. Chapter 10, which serves as the conclusion, speculates on the future of the genre. Christianity and Literature 410 The Amish romance novel, as Weaver-Zercher presents it in chapter 1, is less than two decades old. The trend began with the publication of Beverly Lewis’ The Shunning in 1997, but grew exponentially beginning in 2008. The author provides a chart showing the number of titles published roughly doubling every year between 2008 and 2012, while noting that the three most popular writers, Lewis, Wanda Brunstetter, and Cindy Woodsmall, have sold a combined total of twenty-four million books (5). While acknowledging that the 2008 recession may have increased public interest in Amish simplicity, Weaver-Zercher attributes the striking popularity of the Amish romance mainly to its capacity to provide an antidote to two aspects of contemporary life that many readers find oppressive, namely, hypermodernity (excessive speed and intensity) and hypersexualization. Noting that most readers of Amish fiction are evangelical women, she identifies the Amish heroine as one manifestation of the “purity culture” that evangelicals have created in reaction to the spread of pornography into mainstream culture (7-14). Another reason for the popularity of the Amish novels, Weaver-Zercher suggests, is simply that they are...