“Tryed and Purified as Gold”: Mormon Women's “Lives”

BYU Studies Quarterly Volume 34 | Issue 4 Article 3 10-1-1994 “Tryed and Purified as Gold”: Mormon Women's “Lives” Maureen Ursenbach Beecher Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/byusq Recommended Citation Beecher, Maureen Ursenbach (1994) "“Tryed and Purified as Gold”: Mormon Women's “Lives”," BYU Studies Quarterly: Vol. 34 : Iss. 4 , Article 3. Available at: https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/byusq/vol34/iss4/3 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the All Journals at BYU ScholarsArchive. It has been accepted for inclusion in BYU Studies Quarterly by an authorized editor of BYU ScholarsArchive. For more information, please contact , . Beecher: “Tryed and Purified as Gold”: Mormon Women's “Lives” margaret gayjudd clawson 1831 1912 margaret Claw clawsons sons rambling reminiscence written in 1906 details her journey across the plains in 1849 when she was a teenager and her subsequent life in utah cour tesy utah state historical society Published by BYU ScholarsArchive, 1994 1 BYU Studies Quarterly, Vol. 34, Iss. 4 [1994], Art. 3 aryed and purified as gold tryed mormon womens lives apiece savedfrom A journal entry is a piece saved from rhe the padric fabric of a thefabric womans day ragged incomplete misshapen comans only its color andpattern fats and pattern are left to show how it aits fits with its mates itfits maureen ursenbach beecher and now that I1 have written this long disconnected rambling remembrances of the past wrote mormon pioneer margaret judd scarsly know what to do clawson in the late nineteenth century 1 I smarsly with it for who can be interested in the little things of the common everyday life of another another1I 1I for one and my colleagues are interested since the nascence some thirty years ago of the study of womens history we have valued every such text for the richness of its details its little things from just such rambling remembrances as those of margaret clawson we have been able to extract the details which analyzed and synthesized allow us to construct and illustrate a history of the mormon past female As 1I have worked in archives collections abstracting an overall picture however 1I have realized that my joy was not in the generalizat izations ions 1I could draw but in each life 1I was reading something in the handwritten sometimes penciled often naive misspelled uncluttered account each woman gave of herself drew me in and held me fast 1I would find the single detail or particular description 1I needed for my historical analysis then guilt nudging at my elbow to move to other sources 1I would read on and on and on each writer whom I1 viewed first as informant became by stages an individual a woman an acquaintance my friend my sister the historical data became a by byproduct product of what is now to me a much more satisfying search the life writings of mormon women a literature of its own richard cracroft and neal lambert in their anthology A believing people 1 BYU studies 34 no 4 1994 95 https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/byusq/vol34/iss4/3 2 Beecher: “Tryed and Purified as Gold”: Mormon Women's “Lives” 18 T ns BYU Studies byustudies fam ilys arrival introduced me to mary goble pays description of her familys in utah with the handcart companies we arrived in salt lake city nine oclock at night the I1lith I1 th of december 1856 three out of four that were living were frozen my mother was dead in the wagon bishop hardy had us taken to a home in his ward and the brethren and the sisters brought us plenty of food we had to be careful and not eat too much as it might kill us we were so hungry early next morning bro brigham young and a doctor came the doctors name was williams when bro young came in he shook hands with us all when he saw our condition our feet frozen and our mother dead tears rolled down his cheeks 2 the passage defies analysis by any of the criteria by which 1I was taught to recognize good writing simple sentences or run on or fragmentary Interject ions dangling modifiers little words only interjections intersections two with more than two syllables in the whole passage but a hopkins sonnet or a john donne sermon has not the power to move me as has this honest piece so simply written the literary canon must expand to allow it a place for our mormon manuscript collections are rich with the life writings of ordinary women from our recent past brigham young universitys harold B lee library among other local repositories dex boxes often untouched has such gems packed away in fiber fiberdex from year to year not the written for publication works of famous women these are either the daily cottings jot tings of mothers wives jottings daughters or the womens mature attempts to set their lives in order to explain themselves not to the world as newman attempted in his apologia pro vita sua but to their children and their childrens children in the puritan tradition of testimony bearing and lasting testament in loose sheets or bound notebooks lives they represent as incomplete as ilves they are as imperfect as the hives a peek through the keyhole as unfinished as mortality for all their simplicity and honesty the life narratives of women are deceptive representations we see only traces that is surely part of their appeal the intimation of lifes hidden intricacies which connect the bits we see in a voice imitative of that of the female life writer canadian novelist margaret atwood wrote its impossible to say a thing exactly the way it was because what you say can never be exact you always leave something out there Published by BYU ScholarsArchive, 1994 3 BYU Studies Quarterly, Vol. 34, Iss. 4 [1994], Art. 3 mormon womens lives 19 are too many parts sides crosscurrents cross currents too many gestures which could mean this or that too many shapes which can never be fully described too many flavors in the air or on the tongue half colors too many 3 nuances for how in discourse that is at best only conditionally tio nally referential and subject to infinite play of meaning can one recreate a life a year a day a single moment try as we would to hold a mirror to life we are up mary goble pay 1843 1915 1913 her ingen faced with the physical life fin sketch 1896 in uous begun and bous fact that the reflection is dished in 1909 speaks poignantly of her ished experiences as a british immigrant pio- at best a reverse image in neer mother midwife and community two dimensions in spite builder courtesy deseret book of the fact that autobiography is impossible wrote philippe lejeune this in no way prevents it from existing 4 to the general impossibility of writing a life add the specific difficulty occasioned by her gender of composing a comans womans life a woman whose literary models were those created mainly by men bives in a society that values what men value despite hives ilves about mens lives the fact that the first extant autobiography in english was written (...truncated)