Mormon Enigma: Emma Hale Smith

By Valeen Tippets Avery, Linda King Newell

Reviewed by Harlow S. Clark
On 1/20/2009

University of Illinois Press, 2nd edition, June 1994. 1st edition published Jan 1, 1984, as MORMON ENIGMA: EMMA HALE SMITH. Prophet's Wife, Elect Lady, Polygamy's Foe, 1804-1879 Paperback:
432 pages
ISBN-10: 0-25206-291-4
ISBN-13: 978-0-25206-291-9 Price: $20.95

Review and comparison of two books on Emma

When Beloved Emma came up for review I offered to review it alongside Mormon Enigma, which I promptly checked out of the library, but Beloved Emma arrived so quickly I was only about 40 pages into it. Deseret Book timed the release of Beloved Emma for Christmas, and I finished it a day or two before, but hadn’t finished Mormon Enigma. Still haven’t, but I want to give some first impressions.

Beloved Emma is written for a lay audience of Latter-day Saint women. Mormon Enigma is written for an audience that cares about women's history, 19th century American literature and history, or Mormon history and studies, who may be LDS or not.

I suspect most people who are aware of both books will say, "Yeah, I thought so." Some will assume the previous paragraph means Beloved Emma is the work of an amateur, and not very reliable or accurate. Others will assume it means Mormon Enigma is the work of (un?)believers who have sold out their religious heritage to make points in the academic world.

So, which book did the following paragraph about the dedication of the Kirtland temple come from? It follows a quote from Prescindia Huntington describing a meeting of angels atop the temple.

Each church member responded differently to the spiritual gifts and extraordinary religious manifestations. Emma apparently did not speak in tongues or experience mystical phenomena, yet she did not seem to doubt those who did. Her letters to Joseph and later to her children clearly show that she relied on both faith and prayer. She was a practical woman and her religious commitment served her, as she in turn served others, in that light. (p. 60)

Keep in mind that this is a comment on an account of seeing people moving around on top of a building, appearing and disappearing, then realizing they were angels. Note the wording. I didn't say "an account claiming to have seen people," and neither do Newell and Avery. They accept the account at face value. The paragraph is poignant because of an earlier comment that Emma was never privileged to see the gold plates despite everything she did to help Joseph with them and with the translation.

Woodland doesn't mention the episode of the angels, but does mention that Emma never got to see the plates. Both books treat the episodes they discuss similarly. Beloved Emma is clearly the work of a believer writing for believers, while Mormon Enigma is the work of believers writing for a larger audience. The authors' approach follows the argument I ran across (in Richard Bushman's Joseph Smith and the Beginnings of Mormonism?) that when dealing with people's accounts of spiritual experiences we should let them speak for themselves.

Besides the difference in audience there is some difference in source material. Both use primary sources, but where Newell and Avery use Mother Smith's preliminary manuscript, Woodland uses Preston Nibley's edition of History of Joseph Smith, by His Mother, which is essentially Brigham Young's censored version. (For a discussion of why Brigham didn't like Mother Smith's manuscript see chapter 5, "Getting the Story Straight," of Jan Shipps' Mormonism: The Story of a New Religious Tradition, particularly around pages 94-97.) Woodland also uses Mormon Enigma as a source at one point.

From comparing the two books so far, Woodland's seems accurate and reliable, if a little terse, and allowed me to understand some things I hadn't before, like how much of the Church's early history took place in winter, and what that means to people who didn't have vehicles with internal heating. "And pray ye that your flight be not in winter." But the verse before that is also pertinent, "But woe to them that are with child, and to them that give suck in those days!" (Mark 13:17-18) How often Emma was pregnant during these winter flights.

And I learned something poignant about Emma's relationship with the the Reorganization. Most of us have some vague sense that Emma founded the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day (no hyphen, capital D) Saints and set her son Joseph III up as prophet. I didn't know until I was in graduate school, or maybe afterwards, and read Shipps' book, what the Reorganization reorganized, that is, the scattered groups of people who had been left behind, or had stayed behind when Brigham and the rest of the people went west. I did not know, until I read Beloved Emma, that the Reorganization happened independent of Emma and Joseph III, that he was recruited as prophet by RLDS missionaries, that he and Emma initially wanted nothing to do with their proposal, and that she did not tell her children about their father's teachings.

Reading that was an aha moment. Fred Korematsu is a hero of mine for challenging his internment in a concentration camp for American citizens with Japanese names. The challenge went to the Supreme Court, which ruled against Korematsu. I am not the only person who holds him a hero, but his own daughter did not know about his history until a junior high classmate did a presentation on him. And her older sister found out the same way. Heroism is not necessarily easy to talk about, or even to recognize in oneself, especially in that formal feeling and space that follows great pain.

I also learned from Beloved Emma how Emma became the largest landowner in Nauvoo when many of the departing Saints deeded their property to her, but I wish Woodland had said something about why the mob who drove everyone else out allowed some people to stay, why the mob didn't take her property, why the people who torched the temple didn't also torch the Mansion House.

When Jaymie Reynolds posted her review of Beloved Emma, Lisa Tait and Catherine Ockey asked whether the book treated Emma's deep struggle with polygamy, Jaymie replied that it did. However, the treatment is rather concise. Newell and Tippetts say that their original manuscript was 1,000 pages and they had to cut it by a third, which they accomplished by tightening up their sentences and cutting or condensing some well-known stories. While reading I kept wondering how much of Woodland's economy of style and treatment was also driven by space limitations.

I will be interested, when I reach the Nauvoo period in Mormon Enigma, to see how Woodland's treatment of polygamy compares to that of Avery and Newell. Their book originally carried the subtitle, "Prophet's Wife, Elect Lady, Polygamy's Foe," and is very much Emma's story, not the story of the wife of a prophet, or the mother of a prophet, or the nemesis of a prophet, nor the story of her supporting role in other people's stories.

Beloved Emma is more a biography of Emma and Joseph's marriage, so Woodland covers the last half of Emma's life in about 25 pages, while Tippetts and Avery spend about half the book on it. Woodland raises the question of why Emma lied about Joseph's involvement in polygamy, but her focus on Emma and Joseph's marriage tells us how successful Emma's fight against polygamy was. If someone says, "Tell me about Brigham Young's wife," we ask, "Which one?" but if someone asks about Joseph's wife we are most likely to think of Emma.


Copyright 2009