Linda King Newell & Valeen Tippets Avery, Mormon Enigma: Emma Hale Smith, 2nd ed., (University of Illinois Press, 1994), 394 pages, paperback, ISBN 0-252-06291-4
Written by two LDS women — one (Avery) a history
professor and the other (Newell) an independent writer in
Salt Lake City, this award-winning* biography of the first
wife of Mormon founder Joseph Smith, Jr., is the fruit of
nine years of extensive research, and has been well-received
by Mormon scholars, including the late BYU historian Marvin
Hill.
The authors tell us in their introduction that they
have written, "neither to support nor to dispute doctrine,"
and they cite the words of General Authority Brigham H.
Roberts to express their guiding philosophy for treating the
facts: "to frankly state events as they occurred, in full
consideration of all related circumstances, allowing the
line of condemnation or justification to fall where it may
..."
The book's title expresses the fact that for many Emma's
legacy has come down through history as an enigma: though a
model of the virtuous, supportive and submissive wife, Emma
rose up in revolt against the doctrine of polygamy, which
she found personally odious, and in direct conflict with the
Book of Mormon. She stubbornly opposed Joseph at every turn
in his attempt to practice and teach plurality of wives. The
authors present a mountain of evidence to dismiss the
negative picture of Emma as strong-willed and shrewish — a
caricature spawned by Brigham Young, who deeply resented
Emma's adamant rejection of polygamy, and feared the refusal
of the slain prophet's widow to make the journey to Utah
would harm the vulnerable sect.
It is striking to learn that while Emma was polygamy's
tireless foe, she was neither a prudish nor judgmental
woman. The book documents that Emma was a personal witness
to Joseph's infidelity with 19-year-old Fanny Alger during
their years in Kirtland, Ohio, and yet, she was ever willing
to forgive her husband for this and other sexual
indiscretions. What she did find intolerable, however, was
Joseph's attempts to build an elaborate doctrinal
justification for the violation of the monogamous marriage
bed. While Emma Smith is the central character in this book,
it also marshals damning evidence against the duplicitous
character of her first husband. In Nauvoo, 38-year-old
Joseph repeatedly used the claim of divine revelation to
coerce teenage girls to become his wives. Surely a more
self-serving string of revelations would be difficult to
imagine. One cannot avoid the irony in the fact that on the
very night before the arrest that would lead to his brutal
murder, Joseph was secretly plotting to use his fugitive
status as an occasion for a period of protracted
cohabitation with several of his young plural wives. And all
the while he was writing labored expressions of intimacy to
the unsuspecting Emma.
The implications of the evidence for our estimate of Joseph
Smith's character are sobering. In the words of Lavina
Fielding Anderson, editor of the Journal of Mormon
History,
the [Newell and Avery] biography of Emma Hale Smith was deeply disturbing to me for the documentation it provided about Joseph Smith and the origins of polygamy .... Let me be specific. I was shocked and disgusted to discover that Joseph Smith married a fourteen-year-old girl, fully consummated that marriage, and concealed it from Emma. My image of "prophet" did not accommodate this kind of behavior. I could not begin to find holy motives for such behavior ("The Garden God Hath Planted: Explorations Toward a Maturing Faith," in Sunstone, October 1990, 26-27.
At least in respect to polygamy, subsequent Mormon
history has vindicated the character and convictions of Emma
over those of Joseph. The Church finally abandoned the
practice in 1890, 11 years after Emma's death.