Review
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Title: Dorian: A Peculiar Edition with Annotated Text & Scholarship
Author: Nephi Anderson; Eric Jepson, editor
Publisher: Peculiar Pages (El Cerrito CA) in collaboration with B10 Mediaworx (Liberty MO)
Genre: 1921 novel, revisited with criticism and scholarship
Year of Publication: Nephi Anderson, 1921; criticism and scholarship, 2015
Number of Pages: 316
Binding: paper (also available in hardcover and ebook, all formats)
ISBN13: 978-0-9911892-3-6
Price: $25.99 (hardcover)
Reviewed by Julie J. Nichols for the Association for Mormon Letters
Who is/are “Peculiar Pages”?
On September 13, 2011, a blog post entitled “Peculiar Pages” appeared on *By Common Consent* (http://bycommonconsent.com/2011/09/13/peculiar-pages/) by a “Guest” poster named “Theric” [aka Eric Jepson] which said, among other things, this:
“…I also feel strongly about recognizing the vitality and worth of Mormon arts for Mormon consumption. (Although I’ll rush to add that none of the books I’m about to talk about need be limited to Mormon consumption. Don’t think that.)
“It’s to that end that Peculiar Pages was born….
“Earlier this year I wrote [in a post at *A Motley Vision*] about how sad it is most Mormons are unaware of Nephi Anderson’s novel *Dorian* which is terrific and which I will defend against anyone. It’s a great novel. We should have been reading it constantly since its first release. And yet . . . we let it disappear.
“The response to that post [see http://www.motleyvision.org/2011/the-best-books-for-lds-homes/ ] made me realize that we need to not only make that book available (EVERY book is available in 2011) but also to treat it with the same respect we treat the better books of Austen and Twain and James.
“And so Peculiar Pages is — are you ready for this announcement? — releasing an edition of *Dorian* in 2012 that takes *Dorian* seriously. In addition to the novel’s text, we will have essays from a variety of scholars from a variety of fields. Among these essays are ‘A New Picture of Dorian Trent: Nephi Anderson, *Dorian,* and the Project of Twentieth-Century Mormonism’ by Scott Hales, ‘Integrating the “Best Books: Interwar Intellectualism and Extratextuality in Nephi Anderson’s *Dorian*’ by Mason Allred, ‘What is the “Mormon” in Mormon Theology?’ by Jacob Bender, ‘Dorian Who? Dorian Trent! Or How I Tend to Shoo My Prejudices Away!’ by Ángel Chaparro Sainz, ‘The Natural Man and the Natural Woman in Anderson’s *Dorian*’ by Arwen Taylor, and more! more! more!”
These words come from *A Motley Vision* and *By Common Consent,* stations on the Bloggernacle you probably know better than I do. Peculiar Pages has a website (http://www.peculiarpages.com) whose subtitle, when you Google it, is “esoteric Mormon literature,” “esoteric” because though the writers/compilers of the books the press produces may have an LDS background, the works themselves are not Deseret Book material. They may be “just plain fun,” like *Monsters and Mormons,* or they present “[characters] who struggle with faith. Characters who may or may not stay in the church. They may be very harsh about the church. They may have been created simply as character studies (e.g., Angela Hallstrom’s *Bound On Earth*). They may, horrors of horrors and the worst crime of all, may remain as ambivalent about the church as they were when the book started.”
Peculiar Pages, taking its name from the injunction (or the jibe) that Mormons be “peculiar people,” announces on its website that this press “focuses on two types of book: multiauthor anthologies, and critical editions of class Mormon literature.” And here’s where *we* come in: the abovementioned edition of Nephi Anderson’s *Dorian,* the first of these critical volumes three years later than Jepson’s ambitious post aspired to, has finally arrived.
And it’s terrific.
My classy, well-educated grandmother Eva Cragun Heiner (1894-1987) gave me a copy of Nephi Anderson’s *Added Upon* when I was a book-hungry kid looking for something to read on vacation in Utah many decades ago. I didn’t love it, but I think I knew even then that it had value for me, a reading Mormon girl growing up in heathenish California where, in my circle, e.e. cummings and Richard Brautigan were a lot more cool than anything Mormon. I thought: so this is how Mormons write novels? Hmmm. Later I took classes from Gene England and Richard Cracroft at BYU. (I was there under duress from my dad, who, though he subscribed to *Dialogue,* did not like the Berkeley-radical intellectual-wannabes I ran around with.) In those classes I discovered other Mormon novelists, whose work I sort of tolerated but which I valued mostly because it showed me something important about the history of writing among “my people,” the Mormons who were my grandparents’ peers. I wanted to write. It was valuable (I keep using that word “value”—I’ll come back to that) to see how my heritage was handled in these novels.
So I learned about Nephi Anderson, as most students of Mormon lit do, through *Added Upon,* his best-known (not his *best*) novel. Christian Nephi Anderson, born in Norway in 1865, was the son of converts who immigrated to the Coalville/Ogden/Brigham City area in 1871. There he was raised, married (twice), and had a highly public and successful career as an educator, editor, and writer of essays, short stories, poetry, and ten novels. *Dorian* was the last. In Mormon lit lingo, Anderson is a prime example of the “Home Literature” school—the group that wrote didactic, moralistic narratives from the perspective of a people settling into an acceptable peace between 1880 and 1930, after the persecutions and other trials of the migration years, and before the “lost generation” took its first giant steps away from the security of Zion. *Dorian* (1921), as several of the outstanding essays in Peculiar Pages’s volume point out, is a finely-crafted literary exploration of a people in transition. Anderson was at the height of his powers.
The story in brief: Dorian Trent is a bookish kid, a “golden boy” whose widowed mother dotes on him as they work their farm together. Early on, Mildred Brown, a young city woman who has been well-educated and who dabbles in art, comes to stay at their homestead in hopes that the fresh air will do her health good. We are introduced, too, to Carlia Duke, whose rough-and-tumble family lives in Dorian’s town; they are rather careless, her father oblivious to the stress he’s causing her by having her do most of the work. Dorian falls in a kind of idyllic puppy love with Mildred, though he believes her to be miles above him. At the same time he develops a relationship with “Uncle Zed,” a nineteenth-century Utah type, I imagine, a self-educated thinker whose pronouncements about church and philosophy win him respect and love from the whole town. Mildred and Zed are Dorian’s ideals—until she dies of her mysterious illness. Shortly thereafter Zed also dies, of old age, leaving his library and his “mantle” to Dorian. Dorian feels the weight of Zed’s teaching, and determines to follow in his footsteps and complete his mission to reconcile, or harmonize, scientific learning with gospel truth.
Meanwhile Carlia has fallen in with the wrong crowd. After a strange period in which she vacillates between Dorian and the roguish Mr. Valmont, chastising Dorian for not paying her more attention while he’s increasing both his farm and his book-learning, Carlia disappears altogether. Eventually Dorian realizes it’s up to him to find her. He discovers her hidden away in the mountains, having had a stillborn child, the result of Valmont’s rape. They negotiate a new relationship, one of forgiveness and hope, and she comes home with him to help him in his project.
Seen through a contemporary lens, I don’t agree with “Theric”’s assessment that *Dorian* is a great novel we should have been reading continuously since its publication. I don’t think I’d recommend that it belong in every Mormon household. I just didn’t find it that gripping. However, I *do* think it’s an important work, consciously-written and genuinely literary, that deserves our attention now as an example of a significant stage in the history of Mormon literature. In my opinion, the truly spectacular contribution of this edition is to be found in the notes and scholarly essays that follow the novel.
The notes, compiled by Eric Jepson with input from a number of other scholars, explain the historical and social context and literary allusions of the novel with gratifying thoroughness.
The essays, which include most of those mentioned in the blog post above (under slightly different titles) plus two others by Sarah Reed and Blair Dee Hodges, shed a twenty-first century scholarly awareness on the novel’s Mormon-literary excellence (if I may coin a phrase). For me, it took Scott Hales’s incisive analysis of Uncle Zed’s position as a touter of beliefs born in the “Mormon Reformation” of 1856-57 (220) to help me appreciate how Anderson integrates multiple Mormon viewpoints in this novel of Dorian’s (and perhaps the Church’s) coming-of-age in the early twentieth century. Mason Allred’s perceptive discussion of intertextuality in the novel corroborated my own observations: Zed, and Dorian, in trying to “harmonize” science and religion, quote from a great many Mormon and non-Mormon tracts of the times. Far from being tedious, these quotes, and the conversations they engender, help ground the novel in particular ways of thinking specific to the times and revelatory of the characters’ personalities and motivations. A. Arwen Taylor presents a feminist take on the presentation of women (Dorian’s mother, Mildred, and Carlia) to very fine effect. Other essays are equally enlightening; as a long-time student and professor of literature, I found these to be as rewarding as the novel itself, or more so. (I do wish there had been contributors’ notes, just as I wish the website for Peculiar Pages was more forthcoming about *who* and *what* they are.)
Other features include deleted scenes (sounds like a DVD) and contemporary responses to the novel, as well as two short essays by Anderson himself, “A Plea for Fiction” and “Purpose in Fiction,” published in *The Improvement Era* in, respectively, January and February 1898.
The historical, contextual, textual, and literary light these features shed on the novel make this edition truly—dare I say it?—“added upon.” .
There are all kinds of reasons we should acquire and read books: for entertainment and pleasure, certainly; for reference and learning; sometimes for their historical value. In this case, add to all three of these the insight this edition provides into our heritage as Mormon readers and writers. Much can be learned, both from the novel and from the annotations and critical essays, about the Church as an institution, its people as human beings striving toward perfection, and the ambitions, hopes, and objectives of its writers as it was developing then and continues to develop. *Dorian* is an artifact of our heritage. Peculiar Pages has done students of Mormon literature a tremendous service by bringing out this edition. As Jepson says in that 2011 post:
“It’s only by recognizing our excellence in the past that we can grow into our excellent present and thus create a more excellent future. We need to take pride in our artistic heritage, celebrate our artistic present, and press forward to a greater artistic future.”