BIG LOVE, SMALL WORLDVIEW

Ojai author Zoe Murdock grew up around the corner from Warren Jeffs, the leader of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. Jeffs was sentenced to two consecutive prison terms of five years to life in 2007 for being an accomplice to rape, and is currently awaiting trial for arranging the marriages of girls as young as 13 to men often three times their senior.

While Murdock was not raised in a fundamentalist environment such as the one where Jeffs’ followers were, her Mormon father did, for a time, flirt with becoming a polygamist. His interest in plural marriage had a negative effect on his family and, Murdock believes, is to blame for the illness that eventually killed her mother.

In her first novel, Torn by God (2009, H.O.T. Press), Murdock attempts to understand the events surrounding her family’s brief confrontation with polygamy. Set in Utah in the late 1950s, the story’s protagonist, a young girl named Beth, attempts to bridge the troubled waters threatening her family as she reconciles her mother’s descent into depression, her father’s obsession with fundamentalist Mormon concepts, and her own blossoming sexuality and spiritual development.

Her father’s evolving relationship with a Jeffs-like character brings great despair, and eventually poverty, to his family.

Denounced by the Mormon Church in 1890 in response to outside social and governmental pressure, and illegal in the U.S., polygamy is still practiced by fundamentalists but is considered radical by mainstream Mormons. The tendency to redefine and, to some extent, rewrite Mormon doctrine is as controversial as a man taking more than one wife. While plural marriage is often lived out in isolation, suburban polygamy, as it’s portrayed on HBO’s acclaimed series Big Love, does exist.

In anticipation of her upcoming book signing at the Ventura County Women’s Expo, Zoe Murdock spoke with the Reporter about her story.

VCR: What compelled you to write this story?
When I was a child, we were raised Mormon, and my father got interested in polygamy at some point. It was something that was very much behind closed doors. But I knew it was very damaging to my mother, and she ended up dying very young of colon cancer when I was 25; then my father died a few years ago of Alzheimer’s, so I felt like I wanted to go back and try to figure out what happened between them and what was so devastating to my mother. So it’s a reconstruction of things that I don’t have access to. I put it in the town where I was born, and I had journals of my mother’s and my father’s, which gave me some insight, and I knew about the Church and some of what was going on. So I was really sort of looking for the psychological/philosophical truth as much as anything. Most of what happens [in the book] took place at one level or another.

VCR: How old were you at that time?
I’m not really positive but I think around 12. It’s so buried that I’m not even sure. I just knew that it happened.

VCR: What makes polygamy so fascinating to people these days?
For men and the “Big Love” idea, it’s like a fantasy of being with three or four women. For the women, I think it’s probably, they look at it as an impossibility, at least most women do. It’s all in one direction, you don’t hear about a woman having three men. It’s just such a foreign idea.

VCR: Can you explain the Mormon doctrine of plural marriage?
In the Mormon religion, a man can evolve to be a god in the afterlife. And this idea of plural marriage got tied in with that idea, that in order for a man to become a god he had to practice plural marriage. There are some books that said Joseph Smith just wanted to have a lot of women, but within the Mormon Church it was a message from God and it had to be done. Also in the Mormon Church the family is very, very important. The family is supposed to have been together in the spirit world before they got their bodies, and then they’re supposed to go together to this new world in the afterlife. They are married for eternity and the children are sealed to the parents, so the family is supposed to endure through it all. And plural marriage is part of that. I don’t know if it’s that you need more than one wife to inhabit a whole world or … create that many spirit children. I don’t know, it kind of breaks down.

VCR: Why did Mormons reject the idea of plural marriage?
Around 1890, the U.S. militia was headed for Utah to arrest everyone who was practicing polygamy. There was a big uproar about it. Actually, there were two times when the militia was coming. One time when Brigham Young was in charge, they were coming out and my great grandfather actually hid Brigham Young in a mill. Later the law was rescinded because of the pressure and they wanted Utah to become a state.

VCR: Doesn’t that speak to a lack of faith?
To change it so easily? That’s what my point is in the book. How can God say, “Oh, well, I changed my mind”? And the other interesting thing is that Mormon people still believe they will practice polygamy in the next life, but marriage has to take place on earth, it’s an earthly covenant.

VCR: So some things don’t add up.
No, and that’s a big issue because some people in the church, some men particularly, believe in this idea that they can become gods and they’ve heard about polygamy, especially in the 1959 time period, which was sort of a transitional period still, and they’re confused. If they practice polygamy now, they’ll be excommunicated and it’s against the law, but in the next life they’re going to do it, and in previous times with Joseph Smith they did it. So it’s very confusing and I think it causes problems.

VCR: What about the idea that women are the weaker or “gentle” sex?
That’s been an issue, too, because they sort of changed this rule, too. In the past, women only had access to God through men. That’s a real problem for women who don’t get married. Recently I read that they’ve kind of softened that down. They’re kind of trying to move away from past doctrines and pretend that they didn’t exist.

VCR: There’s a pivotal moment in the story when the wife shaves her head, and this seems to signify a loss of spirit or her feminine identity. When a woman is asked to share her husband, is it unnatural for her?
I saw [her shaved head] as shame. It’s also that feeling of rejection. She tried to dress up and be appealing to her husband but, yes, her femininity is not working anymore. I think it’s just a demonstration of the terrible wound inside her and I think that’s very much a part of my mother’s experience. She felt rejected by my father and she didn’t understand why he wanted another woman, and I think she never really felt like he loved her after that.

VCR: The polygamist in the story and other men who practice polygamy are often seen by the outside world as sexual predators who are hiding behind faith. Yet their scripture does validate their lifestyle.
I don’t believe that all polygamists are bad guys. But I do worry that people in that position have a tremendous amount of power and particularly, not just a man who has a number of wives, but a man who’s in charge of other men having many wives, and who has the power to take wives away from one man and give them to another man. And to take their family away from them and tell them not to wear red, and every day it’s a new thing about what God won’t let them do. It’s just a huge amount of power. And also to take money from them, and that’s who Brother Reuben [the Jeffs-like character in the book] is to me. He’s not all practicing polygamists. He’s a man who’s in it for self-aggrandizement, for his own power and wealth. I think the father is the man who, if he had gone all the way, would have been doing it for religious reasons.

VCR: How do the kids growing up in these families fare?
Adults can make their own decisions about what they want to do, but if you were born into a Warren Jeffs situation, your mind is so narrow because nothing is allowed in from the outside world. And how can you make your own decision about anything if reality itself has been structured in this narrow way and you think everyone else is evil? As a Mormon, I was happy that I could enter the rest of the world, which I did fairly early on, which I’m grateful for because even the [modern] Mormon church is fairly narrow in its doctrine and what’s allowed and what isn’t, and I couldn’t live in that narrow a space.

VCR: Did you feel like your mom’s illness was caused by the stress of your dad’s interest in polygamy?
I think she just didn’t feel loved by him. After she died he talked to me and he said, “I never told her I loved her.” And he started crying, thinking about it.

VCR: So where does your faith stand today?
I think you can have a personal relationship with God. I don’t like having an interpreter because I think that’s how someone takes the power and uses it however they want to. As we see in the Middle East, terrible things can be done by someone taking the will of God and then deciding what God wants you to do, like blowing people up. I think I’m a very spiritual person and I’m very interested in the many versions of who and what God is, and I think it’s very important to humans to have a concept of God. But I don’t want someone else interpreting that for me.    

Zoe Murdock will be signing books at the Women’s Expo on Saturday, March 14, from 2 to 3 p.m. Ventura County Fairgrounds, Harbor Boulevard, Ventura. www.womensexpo.net.

michel@vcreporter.com