While on that point, I wondered if Elsie Carroll might have been related to one of my English professors at Weber State, Dr. LaVon Carroll. She was primarily a teacher of modern British literature, with D. H. Lawrence being her favorite author, but she also wrote poetry and fiction. She was a great teacher, and helped me with understanding more about how to write. It would be interesting to know if there was a family link.

I agree with Ardis that the technically inexperienced character of many of these stories is what provides a great deal of their charm. These stories are neither the polished work of gifted literary writers nor mass produced genre fiction, they are an entirely different kind of offering—an offering of love, at the risk of sounding mawkish.

And issues of relative “literary merit” are often beside the point. At least, that’s the position I work from as a teacher. I’m more interested in exploring how various narratives, from all levels of culture, work for their readers: what understandings of the world they allow for, what understandings they omit or discourage. For example, this story is grounded in some assumptions about “human need” that have historically been, as Ardis said, a part of Mormon culture (as well as overlapping with larger elements of American culture and American frontier culture as well). While I might argue that these assumptions are truly central to the core of Mormon belief (well, I would argue that!), I don’t know that they have always figured in dominant ways, or even at times been all that visible. The “feel” of the Mormonism I grew up in was distinctly anti-aesthetic, yet even as a child I could see vestiges (usually architectural ones) of a Mormonism where “art” seemed to have mattered a great deal.

Ack! I have to go teach a class now and can’t work my ideas out more clearly. A lot of thoughts about Mormonism and literature (and religious literature in general) have been clanging around my brain lately; hopefully at some point they will become magically distilled into a lucid bit of writing…

We have kevinf commenting on the technical clumsiness — the women (most of our authors have been women, although we’ve seen at least two male authors) have, for the most part, been untrained, “natural” writers, doing the best they can, with often uneven results. I love that quality! I can imagine many of these women squeezing time for their writing between household chores, doing it because they loved it, doing it despite their lack of training. The Relief Society Magazine and other Church periodicals gave them opportunities that wouldn’t have been available to many of them outside of Church channels.

Julia has responded to the content of the story itself — in this case she “likens the [story] unto [our]selves.” I love that, too! I imagine that is exactly what the LDS readers of the 1930s and ’40s and ’50s (the era of most of the posted stories) did. I suspect that’s what the Magazine editors and authors intended in many cases, especially when so many of the stories have a sometimes obvious didactic purpose (stay home and make a home for your husband and children! Get along with your mother-in-law! Do your visiting teaching!) She’s recreating LDS history.

Mina identifies the meta-lesson of this story, which is probably the whole inspiration for Elsie C. Carroll’s writing this story in the first place. I especially love that. Mina takes us beyond the events of this particular story to think about principles that are not unique to Mormonism, but are at the same time very, very Mormon.

Thanks for taking the time to spell out your different perspectives. This is what a book club ought to be.

Given the rural, poor situation of Cedar Basin in this story, when the oil idea came up, I had a picture of the Clampett family all loaded up in their truck and moving to Beverly Hills, and Ike’s aw-shucks dialogue just led me right into that.

Sorry, I kind of lost control there for a moment.