The Wine-dark Sea of Grass
by Marilyn Brown
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Salt Press (Springville, Utah): 2001. Hardcover: 393 pages. ISBN-10: 1-55517-529-5 Suggested retail price: $24.95 (US) Tags: Historical; Mountain Meadows Massacre; Native Americans; Religious Tactical strength: [5/10] |
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In The Wine-dark Sea of Grass, Marilyn Brown examines how the Mountain Meadows Massacre affected the lives of the Mormon settlers in rural southern Utah. The novel starts several months before the massacre and builds up tension well to demonstrate how the Mormon settlers worked themselves into a state where they could justify killing an entire party of pioneers traveling through Utah to California. We see the massacre and its aftermath through the eyes of the fictional Lorry family. Elizabeth, a foster daughter to the Lorry family, longs to marry John D. Lee and to join his already large polygamous family. Instead, her foster father, J.B., gets permission from the local church authorities to marry her. Elizabeth's longing for one thing but having to settle for another sets up a recurring motif.
Since Elizabeth could not have witnessed much of the foundational events that preceded the massacre, Brown needed an additional viewpoint character. Through Jacob Lorry, J.B.'s teenage son, we see the massacre itself. In spite of the amount of time we spend watching through Jacob's eyes, he never develops into a well rounded character. For example, Brown gives Jacob two characteristic responses to his circumstances: inaction and insomnia. Whenever faced with a critical situation, Jacob cannot speak. He loses his ability to speak so much, that I began to wonder if he suffered from a biblical curse of dumbness. Following such critical events, Jacob cannot sleep. I don't think Jacob got any sleep during the first third of the narrative. At first Jacob imagines himself marrying Elizabeth, but Jacob (only fifteen) sits silently by while his father marries Elizabeth. Jacob then has romantic intentions toward Lee's daughter Anna Jane, but J.B. announces his intention to marry Anna Jane. Again, Jacob becomes speechless and cannot confront his father about the issue. (Jacob does get to marry Anna Jane when his father decides that he wants nothing to do with Lee or his family.)
Although the chronology takes Elizabeth and Jacob from teenagers to middle-aged adults, the narrative never really develops their characters into plausible adults. Elizabeth continues to pine for Lee. Jacob becomes a mere camera through which we see events which Elizabeth would not have witnessed. In fact, several chapters that start from Jacob's point of view (which Brown carefully labeled for our benefit) shift unannounced into Elizabeth's point of view. These characters meander through their lives without any real direction or goals. We get an interesting glimpse at early southern Utah life, but nothing drives these characters. Jacob and Elizabeth follow Lee like lost puppies with no personal motivation. Eventually, the book winds up with the trial and execution of Lee. The trial takes place entirely off stage. Jacob and Elizabeth make the journey and witness the execution, which provides an unsatisfactory denouement that pales in comparison to the emotions and tension in the massacre scene 300 pages earlier.
Brown does several things very well. Before the massacre, she built tension well and developed a situation that would explain how a group of religious settlers could bring themselves to justify murdering an entire wagon train. Brown also gives us an interesting view of polygamy. Through Elizabeth, we see how a woman might want to join an already large polygamous family. See sees Lee's wives and children doting on him, and she imagines that she would rather have one-eighteenth of a happy marriage than her bad marriage to J.B. Brown shows that like regular marriages, some polygamous families work and others don't -- not because of the institution itself, but because of the personalities of those involved in the marriage.
With all the discussion of polygamy, I wondered why these characters seemed to never discuss spirituality. For a deeply religious people, Brown's characters never seemed inclined to pray or look to the spirit for guidance or comfort. On occasion, sick people get priesthood blessings, but the characters seem to rely upon the arm of flesh. Perhaps Brown wanted to show that those involved with the massacre lost their link to spirituality, but she never contrasted these people against those who do have a deep spirituality.
Brown's choice to use entirely fictional characters limits the amount of interest we can have in the events surrounding their lives. We know that much more important events and people exist just on the periphery of Elizabeth and Jacob, but we only get faint glimpses of those characters and events. Instead of following the stories that seem to me interesting or historical, we have to follow the romantic and hormonal indecision of a couple of teenagers who seem developmentally stuck even as they move into middle age. The Wine-dark Sea of Grass draws an interesting picture with some interesting foreground details, but it seems that those details float in front of an unfinished landscape that hints at even greater unrealized whole.
