In what follows, C.E. shares his thoughts on the readings for our 5th week together.
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Louise Erdrich’s The Plague of Doves utilizes an uncommon literary strategy in having multiple narrators. A complex story is woven, as each one has a unique voice, style, and experiences. Because of this fact, each narrator’s section also tends to have different over-arching themes and ideas. One particular narrator is Marn Wolde, a woman who grew up just off the reservation and near the city of Pluto. Through the experiences of her life between age sixteen and becoming an adult with a family of her own, Marn is exposed to a myriad of religions and systems of spiritual belief. Because of her particular tone and actions, Marn acts as a vehicle for criticism of organized religion. In each of her encounters with the various activities of organized religion, the next one seems more ridiculous than the previous.
Her narration begins with a then-young Billy Peace who is selling “spirit” to her family (140). This is a seemingly mundane event, as most people at some point or another have been on the receiving end of solicitation. Billy at that particular moment is somewhat like a Jehovah’s Witness or a Mormon, doing what he believes is right and trying to spread his faith to those who have not yet experienced it yet. While Marn’s mother decides to leave once Billy begins talking about his spirit-peddling business, Marn stays to listen because she has to “make up for her [mother’s] rudeness” (140). Before this conversation, she describes herself as not very religious, but she buys into Billy and thus organized religion. This begins the absurd journey of Marn Wolde, as she joins a belief system because of a smooth-talking boy who she finds cute (though she points out that she did not notice that at the time).
She follows Billy’s directions into town and listens to him speak. In this meeting, Billy is crusading against the satanic values of credit cards, one-upping his selling of the spirit. He gallivants down the aisle cutting cards with a pair of scissors which is referred to as “The sword of Zero Interest” (144). Such an antic seems like a comedy show, not a religious gathering. It is almost reasonable to put a mask and cape on Billy and call him Zorro of Nazareth. In a similar manner, the awe and glory that accompany the description seem excessive, almost as if to mask the criticism of the action and its apparent ties to organized religion.
Such mixtures of religion and absurdity are only beginning to blossom as Billy supposedly courts Marn. The first “date” of these two characters occurs immediately after the preaching incident, as Billy invites Marn to pray over an ailing member of his religious community. To many, this would be a less than ideal outing with a potential boyfriend or girlfriend. As it is described, the experience is anything but magical. The cult-like characteristics of praying over a person by “touching her with one hand and praying, the other palm held high, blind, feeling for the spirit like antenne” (145) has the effect of filling Marn “with the rushing dark of what she suffers” (146). This negative portrayal of what Marn experiences points directly to her participation in Billy’s religious courting, yet she stays with this man and his twisted sense of dating.
The biblical allusions in the couple’s early years of marriage also lend to the criticism. Instead of referencing many of the positive aspects of the Bible, Marn uses the phrases “wandered in the desert three years” and “bore two children” (147). As with many of Marn’s descriptions of her life’s activities, the choice of words always tends to lend itself to a negative connotation. Few people actively go wander in the desert to bear children, and even fewer still would describe it in such a manner. There is both an excessively religious word choice and a realistic tone which combine to sound like a dry mockery of the significance of the events. Both her place of residence and the birth of her children are given so plainly and with a lack of significance in a short sentence with great implications to the overall tone.
After moving back to her old home and the land where she grew up with her parents, children, and Billy, everything becomes amplified a hundredfold. Billy is the first to change, as he is described to expand without end. He becomes an immense and unstoppable religious force, as evidenced by his survival and apparent growth after being struck by lightning (156). His action of registering the farm as a church through the use of a lawyer also adds the blows taken at organized religion, as the initial purpose of the action was not to make the land into a place of worship, but to avoid having to pay taxes. This is almost like the Cake song “Comfort Eagle”, as it opens with the lines, “We are building a religion/ We are building it bigger” (azlyrics.com). The purpose of this religion doesn’t seem to have any “divine intervention” or even a divine intention; it is more of a wild idea of a very large man.
While Billy continues to strangely put his religion together, Marn meets a family who believes in the ability of snakes to cast out demons and joins in with this system of belief. The absurdity is shown in the fact that she goes out after this meeting and gets her own snakes to keep for her religious experiences. She begins to love and almost worship these snakes, and her most romantically described moment is when a venomous snake almost kills her and then supposedly tells her to take her children and leaveBilly (162). It is her version of Billy being struck by lightning: two dangerous and life-threatening moments which are depicted by these individuals as beautiful and divine. From the perspective of an outsider, this makes people in organized religions look nearly insane. Even though they are clearly extreme cases, the criticism seems rather blatant.
The final criticism in Marn’s narration happens through the ability of belief systems to create hatred and inflict harm on individuals. In Billy’s attempted utopian society on the farm and surrounding area, his strange religious rules seriously offend Marn. From taking away names and reassigning them to making children stand without moving for an entire day, this newly formed “Church of Billy” seems to have absolutely pointless and even harmful rules, a harsh criticism on organized religion. Even more disturbing, however, is how Marn decides to collect the poison of her snakes and kill her husband. This is almost a war between the two different systems of belief, and the pointless killing is the final, venomous stab into organized religion.
This journey from innocent but strange selling of “spirit” to a dark killing of a spouse and leader of a newly formed religion is absurd on one level, but completely believable on another. All organized religions have specific laws and ideals, which many people follow with blind faith. This becomes even more dangerous when these individuals start to blindly defend what they believe in and impose it on others. As seen in the many religious wars throughout history and in Marn’s killing of Billy, conflicts between organized religions tend to end with actions that do not represent the true purpose of the particular systems of belief. Marn Wolde’s narration shows just that and calls for a serious reconsideration of the purpose of organized religion.
C.E.
This blog entry, especially the explanations of the multiple biblical allusions in the narrative, was very interesting. I agree that Marn has a kind of cynical tone in her narration; I don't believe she ever really was religious. She just fell for Billy's preaching and his charm, like many other followers who "called telling Billy their car radios exploded in the word, their power tools cried out, their names went dead, all of a sudden no one remembered who they were. They did not remember their own names either" (169). I'm sure these followers were moved by Billy, but I'm also sure these strange occurrences didn't actually happen. I also agree that the religion Billy organized is ironic and hypocritical: he cheats on his wife, he abuses and neglects his children, and he threatens his family.
ReplyDeleteWhen we are first introduced to Billy Peace, before he goes to the army, he is extremely different. He wanted to protect his sister, and he was a nervous boy. We can imagine that the army brought on this change in him, but his intense focus and devotion might have brought on this dark change of heart.
-R.Y.
I like your focused reading of the Marn Wolde section explaining how it criticizes religion. However, you open this blog post by drawing attention to the various different narrators in The Plague of Doves, and I have interest in pursuing that further. Or rather, I simply point out that religion is a topic strewn throughout the novel, and I wonder if we can use Marn’s section to say anything about the others.
ReplyDeleteOutside of the Marn section, Erdrich provides a lot of discussion about Christianity, and she does not criticize it as blatantly as she does Billy’s religion. She certainly satirizes the church through Father Cassidy’s idiocy, but he ultimately seems comical rather than truly sinister. In addition, Erdrich’s presentation of Sister Mary Anita seems to counter Father Cassidy’s, since she seems to be a fundamentally good character who attempts to use religion in an attempt to atone for her family’s sins. And there are other characters too, such as Evelina’s devout mother, whom Erdrich does not seem to comment either way on their religiosity. My point is, Erdrich presents characters that show a spectrum of the good and bad of Christianity throughout the novel.
Nevertheless, I agree with your assertion that Erdrich provides criticism of criticize all organized religion. In fact, I argue that by making Billy’s religion nameless, generic, and stereotypical, Erdrich uses it to criticize all religion, including Christianity. She does not criticize Christianity so directly simply because she cannot: it is so prevalent throughout the novel’s society that to attack it at all times would interfere with the complexity of certain characters like Sister Mary Anita. Instead, Erdrich chooses to separate out of Marn section to contain the majority of her harshest criticism on religion. She uses Marn to remind the reader to think critically about how Christianity affects the lives of other characters in the novel, even when she does not discuss it directly.
J.M.