The Altar at Home: Sentimental Literature and Nineteenth-Century American Religion

Chapter 4. Derelict Daughters and Polygamous Wives: Mormonism and the Uses of Sentiment

CHAPTER 4 Derelict Daughters and Polygamous Wives Mormonism and the Uses of Sentiment In 1872, a bimonthly women’s periodical began publication in Salt Lake City, Utah. In its mission statement, Woman’s Exponent announced its twofold ambition both to promote the “diffusion of knowledge” among its Mormon readers and to correct the poor public image of Mormon women, who are “grossly misrepresented through the press by active enemies who permit no opportunity to pass of maligning and slandering them.”1 In response to these alleged misrepresentations, Woman’s Exponent presented itself as a venue by which Mormon women may “represent [them]selves” and in so doing keep up with current events and receive information on subjects ranging from recipes to international politics. Patterned after the suffragist periodical Woman ’s Journal founded two years earlier, Woman’s Exponent primarily contained content composed by local Mormon women, but it was not averse to reprinting material originally published in the mainstream press, such as Hearth and Home and Appleton’s Journal.2 Literature figured prominently in this dual endeavor to reshape the Mormon woman’s public image and to circulate “interesting and valuable” information, and Woman’s Exponent represented the Mormon woman as a knowledgeable, discerning reader interested in keeping up with contemporary literary developments. In support of such an image, the periodical featured announcements of new literary releases, biographical sketches of such distinguished writers as Alice Cary and George Eliot, and bon mots by such writers as Fanny Fern. Woman’s Exponent also cultivated female literary ambition by hiring Mormon women to serve as writers, editors , and compositors, and it likewise published the occasional work of locally authored fiction. 143 Derelict Daughters and Polygamous Wives Poetry was especially significant in this effort to remake the Mormon woman’s public image, for each issue featured a poem, usually by a local woman, in the upper-left corner of the second page. This poet’s corner participated in this effort of image correction by offering abundant evidence of the sensibility, literary taste, and education of Mormon women. Lu Dalton’s poem “A Mother’s Resignation,” published in November 1872, typifies the kind of poetry published in Woman’s Exponent. Composed of seven octaves, it employs the familiar poetic idiom of sentimental consolation verse and recounts the efforts of a grief-stricken mother to reconcile herself to the death of a child. With faultless meter and elegant diction, Dalton’s poem communicates her full command of convention, both literary and cultural. For instance , in describing the “beauty of the tender face,/Small fingers, clasping flowers pale and sweet,” Dalton demonstrates at once her personal composure in the face of grief as well as her command of literary genre, for her poem participates in the widespread nineteenth-century poetic form of the child elegy, a genre that also produced such works as Lydia Sigourney’s “Death of an Infant” (1827) and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s “Resignation” (1849).3 After several anguished stanzas, the poem concludes with a reiteration of the conventional language of feminine resignation amid worldly suffering, which appears in countless works of nineteenth-century women’s literature: despite her profound sorrow, the poem’s speaker resolves to embrace and submit to “God’s will,” because it . . . is wiser than our frail desires, His mercy tenderer than our purest love; And I can yield to this since He requires [my son].4 For readers of literature composed in the sentimental mode, this is familiar rhetoric used widely to express both the struggle of emotional self-control amid life’s heartbreaking vicissitudes and the belief that proper, pious femininity mandates the acceptance of divine will, however hurtful or seemingly unjust. This poem thus advances the stated ambitions of Woman’s Exponent by presenting an image of Mormon womanhood that is both familiar and normative, her command of poetic forms evidencing her sensibility and the poem’s contents expressing her full absorption of sentimental notions of proper feminine response to grief. Dalton’s poem and Woman’s Exponent highlight the centrality of sentimental discourse to nineteenth-century efforts to refashion the public image 144 Chapter 4 of Mormon women. This effort is particularly noteworthy because sentimentalism proved one of the most damaging rhetorical weapons leveled against Mormonism in the mid-century. The runaway success of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin inspired the publication of countless novels that similarly depicted the sufferings...