The Giant Joshua, Chapters Three and Four

By Andrew Hall

These chapters present a microcosm of several themes and conflicts found in the novel, including stirring depictions of the faith that led the pioneer Saints to make such enormous sacrifices in their mission of building a Zion society. Here too, we see some of the less appealing aspects of the colonizing generation—its fear and cruelty towards Native Americans, its child marriages, and the heartbreak that could result from plural marriage.

St. George pioneers and the tragic price of faith
Chapter Three opens with the Saints having just arrived in what would become St. George in 1861. Whipple provides a geographic description by having Apostle Erastus Snow, the real-life leader of the Cotton Mission, observe the valley from the Sugar Loaf, a high steep rock in the red cliffs to the north. At this point, he sees his people still living in their tents and wagons, but he will return often to that spot as the settlement grows, and the Sugar Loaf becomes a landmark for the town.

After the novel’s descriptions of the difficult trek south and now an arrival at a barren, dangerous land, any reader might be wondering why these people would agree to such a mission. Whipple answers this question with a magnificent section in which the young protagonist Clory (scolded by her husband and sent to sit alone in her wagon bed), listens to the conversation of the tired colonizers outside around the campfire. She hears Snow encouraging the pioneers to remember and recite their Latter-day Saint history—the sufferings, the injustices, the miracles, the examples of faith, the charisma and saintliness of the leaders.

As Clory listens to the stories, she recalls her own tragic background. When she was eight years old, her Philadelphia father converted and took her and her brother away from her unbelieving mother to join the trek of Latter-day Saints heading west. On the way he joined the Mormon Battalion and entrusted his children to Abijah MacIntyre, one of the missionaries who taught him. Clory’s father is killed after being discharged from the Battalion, and Clory and her brother (who dies tragically in Utah) are raised by Abijah and his wife Bathsheeba. At 16, at the urging of Brigham Young, Clory marries Abijah as his third wife, and joins him on the journey to settle St. George. While not pleased with her new husband, she comments, “Things ain’t stopped happenin’ to us by a long shot. But I thank God I’m right in the thick of it . . . Saints or Fools, in a hundred years from now it’s folks like us that’ll be fillin’ up the history books!” (p. 91).

Clory, who finds it difficult to remain reverent in church meetings, has her own personal conception of the Divine. “At such times she would sit very still, hands clasped in her lap, not moving, and close and hold her breath and wait for the Great Smile to come, the Door to creep open . . . and something so real and live and vast that it fitted all the splintered fragments into place . . .” (p. 83).

Sexuality in The Giant Joshua
While Whipple shows the miraculous experiences and spirituality which helps to drive these pioneers, material which would not be out of place in an inspirational novel, she also describes the physical and emotional trauma and heartache of the pioneer generation, especially as it applied to plural marriage. For a book about the Latter-day Saints published in 1941, the novel is relatively explicit, especially in these chapters. The content here, while far from graphic, probably explains why Elder John A. Widtsoe described it in an Improvement Era review as “straining for the lurid.”

Abijah and Clory were married just before leaving on the trek for St. George, and the marriage has not yet been consummated by the time they arrive in Dixie. Clory has often slipped and called Abijah “Uncle Abijah,” which annoys him. Abijah, frustrated by Clory’s childishness, is simultaneously sexually attracted to her. Clory’s thoughts, however, are directed toward young men closer to her own age—a gentile soldier she flirted with in Salt Lake City, and Abijah’s oldest son Freeborn, who is similarly attracted to Clory.

In Chapter Four, Abijah takes Clory on a wagon ride/picnic, where he shocks her by initiating their first sexual encounter. Whipple uses the incident to describe the mechanisms of power men had over women in the pioneer generation, mechanisms that were still largely in place in the mid-20^th century when she wrote the novel. Whipple herself had been a victim of rape a few years earlier, at the hands of a stranger in a small-town boarding house where she lived.[1] It is not clear whether she saw any connection between the forced sexual initiation of a 19^th-century teenaged wife with the rape that she herself had suffered. While she portrays Clory as shocked and upset by the encounter, she does not present it as “marital rape,” as I and most current readers would describe it. It functions in the story in a way similar to the rape of Scarlett by Rhett in Margaret Mitchell’s 1936 bestseller Gone With the Wind and the 1939 movie of the same name.

Whipple presents Abijah as infatuated with Clory after their first sexual encounter, and he spends every night with her for weeks, to the amusement of the camp and the humiliation of Bathsheeba, the older first wife. Clory is also embarrassed, but comes to accept her situation, finding some enjoyment in the encounters, and aware of the power that Abijah’s attention gives her in the family.

Clory, subject to be seized any moment these days by breathless wonders and awakenings in the soft, young-girlish core of her, was thinking she wanted to be a good wife, if only he’d not be so scary and stern . . .  maybe she was bad for thinking anything so sacred might also be fun . . . but if only he’d play a little. (p. 102).

Whipple portrays Abijah as stern but, in many aspects, a good man. However, his attitudes toward women and sexuality are his worst attributes, and here they are greatly on display. Abijah senses Clory’s lack of real affection for him but remains infatuated. After Erastus Snow reproves Abijah for not treating his wives fairly, and for sexually overtaxing Clory, we are treated to this odious description of Abijah’s thoughts.

Abijah was like a small boy caught stealing apples, but stubborn too—he’d be damned if anybody ‘ud stop him as long as the apples were sweet to his palate! But . . . he nevertheless was wondering uneasily of anything he enjoyed so much as sleeping with Clory could be right. He resented women, anyway, because he thought in his heart they were the one means of keeping him from being absolutely pure. Women couldn’t quite belong to the Kingdom. He felt that Brother Brigham and he saw eye to eye in that. But since they seemed to be inevitable one might as well get what one could out of them, always remembering to keep them in their place. His favorite sermon was on the theory that behind every sin man ever committed you could find a woman . . . She was like a drug in his veins, and he hated her. (p. 102).

Folklore in The Giant Joshua
Finally, we should recognize Whipple’s remarkable use of southern Utah folklore in her writing, by quoting from the Mormon folklore scholar William Wilson’s “Folklore in The Giant Joshua”.[2]

“Before Maurine Whipple became a novelist, she was a folklore collector. And partly because she was a folklore collector, she became a successful novelist . . .

“She loved to talk to the old people [of Dixie] and listened eagerly to their tales of pioneer times . . . Incorporating what she had learned into her novel, she created in the process one of the best collections of early Mormon and Western lore yet published, a work surpassed only by Austin and Alta Fife’s Saints of Sage and Saddle. The book contains scores of proverbs, superstitions, remarkable providences, folksongs, legends, and humorous anecdotes. It is equally rich in descriptions of material culture and particularly of folk practices—of games, of dances, of holiday celebrations, and of arts and crafts. It contains, for instance, over sixty references to foodways alone, thus providing us with a fairly clear picture of the daily fare of the impoverished Dixieites.

“But The Giant Joshua excels not just because Ms. Whipple scatters a substantial number of folklore items through its pages, but because she sets these items in context—that is the social milieu in which they exist and in which they function in the lives of those who possess them. All too many collections of folklore have provided pages of folklore texts but have left untouched the human beings who lie behind the texts. Thus when we have looked through, let us say, a list of folk beliefs and superstitions, we have found it easy to smile at whimsical-sounding cures like mare’s milk for whooping cough, at bacon fat wrapped around the neck for a sore throat, or at gargles of rough elm bark for the black canker. But when we are forced to look beyond such a list to actual mothers in The Giant Joshua and when we see them struggling to keep their children alive and turning desperately to these traditional remedies as their only hope, our smiles soon turn to tears . . . 

“The Giant Joshua succeeds as a work of folklore because Ms. Whipple, as a novelist, had to surround that folklore with life. On the other hand, the life in the novel frequently rings true because it is based on folklore.”

Questions

–Clory’s marriage to the person who had essentially become her father seems strange to us in our time, beyond the fact of plural marriage. How does the novel so far color your feelings about plural marriage?

–How do you find Whipple’s depictions of sexuality? Do you think they successfully advance the ideas of the novel? Do you find them “lurid”? Elder Widtsoe’s review was mixed, with positive comments about her portrayal of characters and history with criticisms of her depiction of plural marriage and the “lurid” comment. Do you think his review is fair?

–What lifestyle and folklore details of the chapters stood out as interesting views into pioneer life?

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Notes:

[1] Veda Tebbs Hale. “Swell Suffering”: A Biography of Maurine Whipple. Greg Kofford Books, 2011, p. 90.

[2] William Wilson. “Folklore in The Giant Joshua”. Association for Mormon Letters Proceedings, 1978-1979, p. 57-64.

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Maurine check-in
Maurine submitted a synopsis and the first two chapters to Houghton-Mifflin in January 1938. She was awarded a writer’s fellowship and a book contract in May 1938. She spent the next months engaging in research on the pioneer period and doing publicity (including a trip to Boston). She also shared her time and new-found money with her poverty-stricken family. As a result, she was not able to produce any more chapters for a year. Concerned, her editor Ferris Greenslet arranged for her to live at the Yaddo Artist Colony, near Saratoga, New York, in June-August 1939. Although she complained about the infantilizing rules and isolation of the colony, she was able to produce three more chapters there, and several others later that Autumn.

After sending Chapter Three to Greenslet in July, he wrote, “Paul and I [are] all steamed up over Chapter Three . . . You have ripened during [the] fallow year. [The] flashback of Mormon history best ever writing . . . This is sincere as hell . . . The imagistic resume of Mormon history is such hot stuff as it stands that there would be no earthly reason to break it up and spread it through other chapters . . . I honestly think the writing is better and the imagination shown more powerful and convincing than in Chapters One and Two.”

Real-life models for the protagonists
Maurine’s maternal grandparents, Cornelia Agatha Lenzi McAllister (1844–1920) and John D. T. McAllister (1827-1910) are undoubtedly the main models Maurine used for her protagonists, Clorinda (Clory) Agatha Lenzi MacIntyre and Abijah MacIntyre. John D. T. McAllister has some renown as one of the great missionaries and pioneers, teaching in Europe and the Eastern United States, traveling back and forth over the plains several times to help bring companies to Utah, writing The Handcart Song, and serving as a stake president and temple president. In later posts we will talk in more detail about the similarities and differences between the fictional characters and their real-life models, as well as other figures (in particular Jane T. Bleak and James G. Bleak). For now, here is an essay Maurine wrote about her grandmother in the mid-1920s, probably as a college English assignment.