The Mudsill, Vol. 1, No. 3
February 1, 2021
Readers,
We are delighted to bring you, once again, an absolutely outstanding collection of work from four gifted writers who have not appeared in our publication before. What an absolute honor to feature this fine work.
In Context, religious studies scholar Caris Adel explains the connections between the world of fiction and the cult of domesticity among today’s white Evangelical women in her historical essay, “At the Center of Their Own Stories.”
In Comment, historian Michael McLean explores the notion of manliness-as-commodity, available for purchase at your nearest Chevy/GMC, Dodge, or Ford dealership. His essay, “On Masculinity and Scratches Trucks,” is a timely read.
In Craft, author Christine Merser offers a stirring, deeply personal essay on sisterhood, addiction, and grief without reconciliation. “Sisters” is a stunning piece of writing that may hurt but can also help to heal.
In Critique, Holly Genovese, a critic, public humanist, and prison abolitionist, offers a sharp, smart pushback against dismissive criticisms of the Netflix series Bridgerton. Her essay, “What Not to Read,”
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And now…enjoy The Mudsill.
At The Center of Their Own Stories
Christian women’s fiction and the cultural formation of white evangelical women
by Caris Adel
There is a moral imperative to staying home right now and taking care of ourselves and our families. What if one outcome of this pandemic is dozens of novels describing the lives of people in isolation, novels that emphasize the importance of staying at home and detail all of the work required to do so? What if there were novels describing the highest aim in life to be the person who keeps the plants healthy, the sourdough living, the clothes clean and meals made? What if a whole quarantine genre were created, devoted to idolizing the unpaid labor of managing the terms of isolation? What if these books sold by the tens of millions, and a whole generation of people read them? Would the fictionalized lives of those who stay at home, baking their bread, making their Tik-Toks, and homeschooling their kids be considered insignificant, ephemeral literature? Or would future scholars study these books as a way of understanding how cultural attitudes towards staying home had political consequences?
This seemingly hypothetical genre, while not called quarantine fiction, does in fact exist. Called inspirational fiction, or christian women’s fiction, this genre is a significant cultural product of Evangelical Christianity. While today it is a more thematically varied field, the main aim of the foundational novels in this genre was to glorify the woman as a wife-mother, an object whose sole purpose was to sacrifice herself for others, reinforcing the notion that a woman’s place was in the home.
While there has been much scholarly work done on white evangelicals and politics, there has been less work done on how evangelical culture informs those political leanings. Yet cultural expressions such as novels were important to the political formations of white evangelical women in the 1980s and 90s. While the founding of christian inspirational fiction as a genre happened over a century ago with the prolific Grace Livingston Hill, who wrote from the late 1800s until her death in 1947, it wasn’t until 1979 and the publication of Janette Oke’s Love Comes Softly that the modern christian women’s fiction industry was born.
Studying this genre can illuminate much about the cultural formation of white Evangelical women and how it contributed to their political values and voting habits. Looking at Oke’s work in particular is helpful because she established the ground upon which the industry was built. Love Comes Softly was originally a stand-alone novel, but thanks to the enthusiastic reception of the novel, Oke turned her story into an eight-book series, adding four more books years later. She would go on to write over 50 fiction books (as well as children’s and devotional books), primarily Western pioneer narratives. In 1987 she received an honorary doctorate from Bethel College in Indiana for her work in literature, and in the 40 years since Love Comes Softly, she has sold more than 20 million copies of her books. In 2003, Hallmark Channel adapted the Love Comes Softly series into a set of 11 movies, and is currently running the television show When Calls the Heart, based on Oke’s Canadian West series.
If we examine Oke’s work in totality, we see clearly how the role of woman as a wife-mother was so foundational to white evangelicalism’s understanding of gender roles, their enthusiasm for the white nuclear family, and the way it became a feedback loop for women.
One reason for Oke’s success and the ensuing rise of a prosperous Christian fiction industry was the way that, in her novels, who were often marginalized in the power structures of the evangelical church were placed at the center of their own stories. Religious scholar Amy Hollywood, in her book Acute Melancholia describes how women have long used writing as a means of empowerment in societies that placed them under men’s authority, and Oke’s books are a part of this tradition. Oke (who is still alive) is the subject of a biography written by her daughter, who tells stories of Oke’s ancestors as well as providing a narrative of Oke’s own life growing up on the Canadian prairie before becoming a pastor’s wife. The family stories that have been passed down through the generations are stories of joy, love, and plenty of happy memories, but also years and years of hardship upon the women in the family as they cope with their husbands’ desires to move frequently and break new ground on new farms, enduring isolations and the burdens of caretaking. In her family histories there are no stories told about the desires of women—just their enduring sacrifices. Only one story features a woman leaving her husband in the early 20th century, unable to take the harsh prairie life. While the biography reserves judgment on this family episode and treats both sides as culpable, the Love Comes Softlyseries portrays a similar situation, and in that context, the woman who leaves receives all the blame.
Thus, While Oke sees her work as honoring the women of the past, we should take away some lessons for women of the present. We should recognize that a woman-centered story is not empowering simply because the protagonist is female. For such writing to be a true means of empowerment, it must not deny the true cost of the sacrifices women have been expected to make.
Indeed, Amy Hollywood describes spirituality as the lived experience of belief and she explains the concept of experientia as “that which is worked on and transformed through Christian practice.” These notions of a lived experience of belief, a transformation through practice, help explain how descriptions of women’s lives in books can serve as religious models in the lives of their readers. It is not hard to see that the characters that Oke creates in her multiple prairie series as well as her collection of stand-alone novels known as Women of the West served as emblematic stand-ins for her grandmothers and their sisters, and even for Oke herself. But instead of letting them fade into the past as unimportant women who were merely prairie settlers, in Oke’s hands these women become sacred examples through their embodied rituals of wife-mother work, the Christ-like sacrifice of a woman for her family.
Oke’s desire to put a sheen of holiness on all of this real sacrifice is understandable. Yet idealizing this lifestyle closes off imaginative possibilities for women rooted in anything other than death. As Lynn S. Neal describes in Romancing God, a book about the evangelical women who read christian fiction, both readers and writers use these books to maintain their identities as evangelical women.Therefore, Oke’s characters were not just characters. The women in Oke’s books were religious models living out their beliefs. Amazingly, readers even wrote to Oke, telling her that they were praying for these fictionalized women. The experientia of her characters, repeated across dozens of novels, has impressed upon Oke’s readers the belief that the only way to be a good Christian woman is to sacrifice oneself for others. But would Oke have been published if she had written anything else?
Hollywood’s discussion of how power and agency structure the formation and reception of women’s writings about their own spirituality reveals a long history of how the dynamic of men in authority over women can influence how women write about female spirituality. The social background that sets the stage for these books was the conservative political shift in the 1970s and 80s. As Daniel Vaca has written about in Evangelicals Incorporated, the Christian book industry was by and large run by white men. The people in charge of putting these books into the world were contributing to the creation of an evangelical subculture that would support the political goals of the conservative movement, a movement that was partially driven by an opposition to second-wave feminism. It makes sense that books which affirmed a woman’s place in the home and not in the workplace, where she could challenge the dominance of men, would be the ones getting published. The power dynamics involved in the publication of christian women’s fiction maintained cultural boundaries around white hetero-patriarchy, making the genre a powerful cultural tool for the formation of white evangelical women. Studying these books illuminates the ways in which fictional plotlines and character development may ultimately do their most potent work in the real-world voting booth.
A child of the evangelical 90s, Caris Adel is now a graduate student in the Religious Studies department at the University of Virginia, where she studies white supremacy in evangelical pop culture. Her thesis is on racialization in Janette Oke’s Love Comes Softly series. While she lives at the foot of the Blue Ridge Mountains with her 5 kids, she is more easily found on Twitter.
On Masculinity and Scratchless Trucks
By Michael McLean
A curious feature of modern consumerism is the ability to purchase an identity, no matter how ridiculous you look. Someone decides they want the identity of a writer, so they buy a typewriter, the complete works of Ernest Hemingway, and too much liquor. Someone wants the identity of an athlete, so they gear up at DICK’S Sporting Goods.
We all do this, telling ourselves little lies about who we are through our stuff. Despite a Ph.D. and rave reviews from students, I am not a professor, and will likely never become one, but that did not stop me, back when I was on the academic “job market,” from buying things that made me feel like a professor: certain clothes, a certain kind of bag, a certain collection of classic historical books… just in case.
The real way to get an identity—the hard way—is to actually do the things associated with that identity. A writer writes. An athlete trains, testing him or herself against competitors. A professor teaches at a university. Along the way, they will likely accumulate a lot of stuff, but those purchases will be the consequence of their experiences, not the cause, each purchase reflecting a specific moment of growth, learning, or necessity.
Usually, people who try to buy an identity are harmless, if not a bit comical. The problem is, that is not always the case, especially when we look at modern masculinity.
My late grandfather, a WWII Navy veteran who grew up as an immigrant in the Bronx, was a masculine man by any metric. After the War, he married, got a job, and bought a house in rural Connecticut. There, he got into a number of new hobbies he did not have access to back in New York. A child of the Depression, he built a toolshed so he could keep the house running cheaply. He took up duck hunting, which required him to buy guns and ammunition to shoot the ducks, a black lab to retrieve the ducks, a tin boat with an outboard motor to access the ducks, and a small red truck to pull the boat.
From what my mother tells me, my grandfather also drank heavily, an experience that was all too common for his cohort. Alcohol consumption spiked in the mid-1940s and grew into the 1960s. This was self-medication. The War had traumatized an entire generation of young men.
Fast-forward to the present, and what I see are men desperately trying to buy the masculine image that my grandfather built piecemeal over the course of decades. They are buying tools, guns, ammunition, work dogs, boats, booze, and, above all else, trucks. They have a vague sense that these items are associated with masculinity (a sense that advertisers triumphantly nurture), but many men no longer remember the original purpose of each item.
The result is a kind of public and private impotence. At the local supermarket, I see enormous pickup trucks lined up next to each other. Some have custom features and raised suspensions. Many of them easily clear thirty thousand dollars. Men use all this money, all this “horsepower,” all this energy, for a run to the grocery store. The beds of the trucks appear to be empty, unused, pristine. Our parking lots hold fleets of scratchless trucks.
This is not a shot at the working class, to be clear. Men and women who are working class actually use their trucks, just as they use other traditionally masculine items. They put a lot of money into those trucks, not out of vanity, but as part of an investment in a functional, money-making role. Subsequently, those trucks get beat to hell, and necessitate further investment. I am not talking about the working class here; I am talking about working class cosplay.
The problem, of course, is that eventually the reality starts to sink in for the owners of our scratchless trucks. Unconsciously at first, the man starts to realize that he has been had. The image of masculinity so adeptly sold to him by major corporations has not been attained. He is the same person he was before, just with more stuff.
This is an extremely painful realization. Faced with this harsh reality, he can either seek another identity—one that he is actually willing to work for—or escalate the process. Perhaps he will support politicians who cater to his fantasy. Perhaps he will bully people to feel strong, finding scapegoats for his internal strife like women, immigrants, and people of color. Perhaps he will keep going down the masculine-consumer path, buying guns and body armor. After all, what is more masculine than a soldier? What could possibly go wrong?
At some point, we are going to have to redefine masculinity for good. There is a growing movement to scrap the term all together, moving our attention from male-centric “masculinity” to more universal traits that we want men to have: honesty, fallibility, selflessness, optimism, integrity, humor, humility, compassion. Replace John Wayne with Jimmy Stewart.
That movement will take a lot of work, but in the meantime, we have to understand what a consumerist vision of masculinity is doing to men. It is leaving them unfulfilled, impotently grasping at a self-image that is far beyond their reach. It is causing severe health problems in the aggregate, both physically and mentally. It is making them very, very angry.
Sisters
by Christine Merser
My sister is dying. And, to make it truly sinister, she isn’t dying one of those honorable deaths that come from cancer, or a heart attack, but rather the slow, bitter suicide dance of Alcoholism and Addiction. (I capitalize them here and now, not because they deserve it, but because they can’t be overlooked as if they were words like all the others in a sentence.) I don’t know what to do with her dying, or the feelings of pain and sadness that blanket me as I fight the inevitable end that mirrors the setting sun’s surrender to darkness.
I feel like shouting, “Somebody do something! Hurry! Take her to the hospital! Tie her up. Make her go to rehab! Please, somebody, do something!” I envision a bevy of activity around her by friends and family, but in truth, they have all left months ago after the second or third failed intervention attempts where she politely offered them beverages and expressions of appreciation for their misguided concerns.
I hear your question. Why don’t I do something about it myself? Fair enough. My sister and I are estranged; we haven’t spoken kind words to each other in ten years.
It was easy to write her off as an evil person. I did a kind thing for her and bought her a house when she was in the depths of bad places after one of those toxic relationships that we complicated people seem to wear like sunglasses. They shade our own potential and our own strength. He was a famous, powerful person, and she could live only as an adjunct of his power rather than owning her own.
So, when he left her and she had to leave the house and gardens that she loved so very much, I bought her a house. The long and the short of it is that she embezzled many dollars in the process and then blamed me. And, she didn’t just blame me to me, which would have been bad enough, but she blamed me to our common community. She was the poster child for no good deed going unpunished.
I remember telling my therapist that I was going to walk from recouping my investment in the house and the confrontation it would cause. “You might as well get your money back,” he told me. “She will hate you either way. It was never about the house.”
And the years passed. It’s not as easy to hate someone you finally recognize is mentally and physically ill and not capable of being good, or evil for that matter. They just aren’t anything at all.
In my mind, I lash out at my parents. The enablers. My dying sister’s ex-husband. She was a drunk for years, and when she was arrested for drunk driving, endangering the life of a minor, and resisting arrest years ago, shouldn’t he have taken their child then, before she was at stage five and too far gone for a comeback? And, when I reached out to my parents to step in, they did nothing. Deep inside though, I know it’s no one’s fault. On some level, it was her choice. On another level, it was her destiny.
My sister has always been fragile.
When I was in high school and my now dying sister in college, I was home taking care of my other sister. My mother, you ask? Well, she was thousands of miles away trying to win back a wandering husband who had left her long before his commute to St. Maarten from Bloomfield Hills, Michigan. The phone rang, and it was my older sister’s college saying she was in the infirmary. Apparently, it was exam time and she started laughing, and then crying and couldn’t stop. I drove up there and she seemed fine. I don’t remember speaking of it again.
Years later, she was very pregnant and called me in a panic to help her get a late term abortion. Somehow I made that happen. I don’t remember how. And, we never spoke of that again either.
And, then there was the breakup, and the house deal, and the demise of what was obviously a one-sided sisterhood anyway.
So, now I search and search in my head for some memory. Just one. I know that we spent a New York City night together in the seventies during the big black out. She mentioned it once as a special time together, but to be honest, I don’t remember it other than that it happened.
I have one picture in my mind. When I got married, she and her famous boyfriend stood up for us at our wedding. Then at their home in Sag Harbor on a cool September day they made us a wedding dinner for four that rivaled Le Bernadin, and we all celebrated. I have a picture from it. She is hunched over and coyly looking down in the garden. She is as fragile as the flower she gently touches in the picture. She is winning and showcasing the vulnerability that was her perfect ruse. She wasn’t vulnerable at all, but rather the great manipulator. I wasn’t the only one who stepped in when she came calling. Friends came to her rescue as well. And, because she was very, very good at her game, it usually worked.
Now, on this day, fifty-seven years after I came into her life, I sit here on the opposite coast of my dying sister wondering if I should email her. Or call her? Reach out one more time. Find some sort of connection. Plead with her for the sake of someone other than herself. But who am I to step in the way of her chosen path?
We all get to chart our own journey. She has chosen hers. I can’t bear, though, that she might die alone, in her house, and no one will know for days. Eventually, one of her past friends, or my father, mother or sister will get that pit in their stomach that sends the message something is amiss and will call someone or other to break in. That’s the part that leaves me frantic.
So, I create a vision. I sit on her doorstep and say, “I know we aren’t friends, or even sisters anymore, and I’m not here to try and drag you to the rehab you politely refused to others more meaningful to you than me. But I don’t want you to die alone. So I thought I’d sit here, on the other side of your front door, and wait with you until you are gone. I hope that’s ok.”
I sit there for a few days, leaving only to use the bathroom and get some food, and finally I hear her crawling to the other side of the door. I put my hand on the door, and in my mind’s eye she puts hers on her side of the door, knowing through shared childhoods just exactly where my hand rests. Our hands are touching each other through her front door and we both know it.
And we sit like that until she whispers something I can’t hear, and I know she is gone.
Christine Merser runs a marketing company by day and writes most of the rest of the time. She has had her essays published in The New York Times, Newsweek, and Good Housekeeping to name a few.
What Not to Read
The misplaced critiques of Bridgerton
by Holly Genovese
“It was the usual sort of academic battle: footnotes at ten paces, bolstered by snide articles in academic journals and lots of sniping about methodology, a thrust and parry of source and countersource. My sources had to be better.”— Lauren Willig, The Deception of the Emerald Ring
In all corners of Al Gore’s internet, people have been writing, tweeting, ranting, and stewing about Bridgerton, Shondaland’s latest production. People are complaining about this adaptation of Julia Quinn’s Bridgerton novels: It’s historically inaccurate. It’s too racially diverse (what?). It's fan-fiction, poorly written, derivative of Gossip Girl. (If anything, Gossip Girl, first published two years after Quinn’s first Bridgerton novel, learned a lot from Lady Whistledown’s society pages). It’s a poor Jane Austen riff.
To be clear, I don’t think you have to like Bridgerton. But it doesn’t seem like many understand what Bridgerton is, nor do they have a sense of its cultural significance.
In the 10th grade, I stumbled across a book, The Masque of the Black Tulip by Lauren Willig, in my local borders. I read it in one go, sprawled across the couch, immediately realizing it was the second in a series. I quickly read the other books in the series and wanted more. On Willig’s website she listed some of her favorite regency romance authors, including Georgette Heyer and Julia Quinn. Willig’s were always my favorite—framed as they were by a graduate student who wore Jimmy Choo boots and dated a handsome British man with a huge library.
After reading Heyer and Quinn, as well as many of the recommendations on Willig’s website, I understood where Willig came from, literally (New York) and intellectually. She had half a history Ph.D (just as I would, one day). She was writing Regency Romances (with mystery and a modern frame story thrown in), making references not to Jane Austen but to Georgette Heyer, Julia Quinn, and the Baronness Orzcy. She included (and still does) historical source recommendations on her website.
And like any genre or academic discipline, the Modern Regency Romance has a history, one often disparaged and ignored because of its audience, because of its lack of cultural prestige, and because of the problematics of the genre and its founder. In an episode of Darren Starr’s Younger, a show set amongst a very fictionalized New York publishing landscape, the fictionalized romance writer Belinda Lacroix says of the dismissal of the genre, “that kind of snobbery is just sexism in a tweed jacket. Men decide romance is silly and women feel embarrassed about reading it.” She follows her statement by asking about her Netflix deal, a seeming impossibility even in 2015.
But romance novels are huge sellers—cheaper than most paperbacks, available in grocery stores, Dollar Generals, and the occasional Wal-mart—and they are accessible to those who might not have a local bookstore or a Kindle. Though the Regency sub-genre isn’t the top seller anymore (people tend to prefer contemporary), these books are essential to the publishing landscape as a whole—financially, aesthetically, and intellectually. Yet adaptations are still missing.
The Regency Romance in particular, as a genre and form, was created by Georgette Heyer, a problematic but nonetheless thorough researcher and writer—beginning in the 1930s. Heyer has issues. Her papers reveal blatant anti-semitism and her early books follow many of the romance novels’ worst tropes: those involving domineering, controlling men. Her later books reversed this trend, as she famously tried to remove her early books from publication. Heyer wasn’t writing academic monographs, but she kept meticulous files on the time period—from historical events to fashion trends, Heyer knew the minute details of her subject, something historians writing during the time often didn’t bother with. Jane Austen was an inspiration to Heyer, but in setting alone. She was not someone Heyer emulated—she wanted to capture the time period in a vastly different way. While Jane Austen wrote barb-filled cultural critique, Heyer wrote romance.
Of course, Regency Romance novels dramatically changed by the time I picked up Willig’s books, then Julia Quinn’s, then a whole host of other exemplars. For the most part, the books got less historically accurate as time went on. They included much more sex, following trends in romance as a whole (and bringing to mind the scene inFriends when Joey discovers Rachel’s romance novel). But comparing Julia Quinn’s novels (and TV show) to the work of Jane Austen or holding the story to academic standards regarding historical accuracy is unfair.
It is also sexist. Many of those critiquing the racially diverse casting as being historically “inaccurate” didn’t seem to mind when Lin Manual Miranda did the same thing with actual slave owners (please read The Haunting of Lin Manual Miranda). Nor did they complain when Wyclef Jean showed up in Dickinson. There is certainly a need for books and TV shows created, from the start, with Black characters in mind. But Shondaland’s interpretation fits seamlessly into her own body of work: her racially diverse retelling of Romeo and Juliet (Still Star Crossed) and the even less realistic racial diversity of surgeons on Grey’s Anatomy (set in a city with a black population of 6 percent).
Netflix has made hyper-visible a genre often hidden, derided, and considered lower-class. By featuring the show on the home screen and debuting it on Christmas day, Netflix brought a Regency Romance novel onto the TV screens of those least likely to be aware of their existence: men.
Before critiquing Bridgerton for its racially diverse casting and historical inaccuracy, consider the history of the genre itself, and why it has taken 86 years for Regency Romance to get its star-treatment TV debut. It took two behemoths, Netflix and Shondaland, to make it happen. For it to be dragged—not for its interpretation, story telling, or horrid ending (we know, its rape, we read the book)—but because its not Jane Austen, “historically accurate,” and lets be honest—written for women, is to ignore the significances, contributions,—and real downfalls—of the work.
According to Megan Sweeney’s book Reading is My Window: Books and the Art of Reading in Women’s Prison, romance novels are among the most popular books for incarcerated women. Books to Prisoners organizations across the country support this finding, citing romance novels as some of their most requested (and often denied) books. If some of our most vulnerable citizens are finding comfort, enjoyment, and worth in these books—regardless of the books’ accuracy or literary influences —we can’t deny their cultural significance or the significance of finally seeing an adaptation on prestige television. If we do, we confirm what many women, poor people, people of color, and romance readers have known all along: literature, and literary adaptations, are for the rich, the well-educated, those with the cultural capital to know what not to read.
Holly Genovese is pursuing a PhD in American Studies at the University of Texas, Austin.
