Sister Marguerite, Our Darling
Illustration by Brent Croxton
by Brigham Barnes
In late August 2022, a certain very small corner of the internet was all worked up over the breaking news that the release of a new edition of late poet/historian/novelist Marguerite Young’s 1200-page novel Miss MacIntosh, My Darling, had been postponed from “imminent” to “sometime next year.” Last printed in 1993, to many this was the perfect opportunity to acquire the book without having to hunt down, and pay a premium for, an older edition. I counted myself among those grumbling over the delay, having fairly recently learned about Miss MacIntosh, My Darling and its author.
Well-received by critics and readers alike upon its initial publication in 1965, look up Miss MacIntosh, My Darling on the internet now and you’ll find articles with titles like “The Most Unread Book Ever Acclaimed” (Paris Review), “Forgotten Masterpiece? Marguerite Young’s Miss MacIntosh My Darling” (The Antioch Review), or “Sick of Streaming? Try This Really Long Cult Novel” (Jstor Daily). For me the most tempting type of novel is a long one. More so if the novel has a reputation for being difficult. Even more so still if the book is known, if known at all, for having only a small and particular following. The book itself was tempting on its own, but then I started to learn about its author.
Ask a Marguerite Young aficionado for a quick, interesting fact about this quintessential Greenwich Village eccentric and you may be told something like:
“Marguerite was born in Indianapolis and identified as a Midwesterner all her life, though she spent most of her years in a small apartment crammed full of books and dolls on Bleecker Street.”
“She studied at the University of Chicago, taught at the University of Iowa’s writer’s workshop, Fordham University, and the New School…but get this, she also taught Kurt Vonnegut’s homeroom class in high school!”
”It took Marguerite 18 years to write Miss MacIntosh, My Darling, though she thought it would only take her 2. She wrote a lot of it sitting at diners in the Village, between bites of tuna fish salad sandwiches.”
“Marguerite knew, and dropped the names of, nearly every relevant literary figure of her day—Richard Wright, Anaïs Nin, Truman Capote, Thornton Wilder, and Flannery O’Connor, to name a few. Capote called Young ‘the one who taught us all’ and O’Connor called Marguerite ‘the greatest grand mere,’ so that’s some reverse name dropping right there.”
But one factoid that Marguerite Young fans can rarely resist bringing up (check many an early paragraph in internet articles or undergraduate theses about her to see for yourself) is that Marguerite was a collateral descendant of Brigham Young, the second president of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
A challenging, 1200-page novel that took longer to write than Finnegans Wake which has dwindled to near obscurity over the past sixty years? Written by a beloved eccentric descended from Brigham Young? For me, an enthusiast of meganovels and not just a Latter-day Saint but a Brigham myself, I was quite intrigued! I quickly gave up on waiting for the arrival of my 2023 edition of Miss MacIntosh, My Darling and sprung for a copy from the 70s and proceeded to dig in, first for the joy of the undertaking and second to see if there were any evidences of Marguerite Young’s distant Latter-day Saint heritage to be discovered in it.
What I learned was perhaps as confounding as Miss MacIntosh, My Darling itself.
When Miss MacIntosh, My Darling begins, we find our narrator, Vera Cartwheel, on a bus traveling through the Midwest, hoping to find her mysteriously disappeared childhood nursemaid, the titular Miss (Georgia) MacIntosh. We remain with Vera on that bus only briefly before the book becomes a grand tour of Vera’s life and the lives of the people who make up the book’s expansive supporting cast, all united in their difficulty of discerning reality from illusion and illusion from reality.
Miss MacIntosh, My Darling is often compared to novels such as Ulysses or Remembrance of Things Past, but I feel the most apt comparison would be to The Life and Opinion of Tristram Shandy in the way that both books absolutely refuse to stick to the story you thought you were going to read and cannot resist frequent digression. For Young in particular it seems there is no digression or aside not worth making and no length too long for one of these narrative detours, the most spectacular totaling roughly 400 pages right in the middle of the height of the novel’s most intriguing point.
Previously mentioned narrator Vera Cartwheel grew up in an enormous New England seaside mansion (“I did not dream I lived in marble halls, for I lived in marble halls” [Miss MacIntosh, My Darling, 71]), effectively abandoned by her mother, Catherine Cartwheel, an opium addict who spends her days and nights lying in bed “heavily laden with jewels like a Greek corpse” and hosting hallucinatory visitors, the unreal having become more real than the real to her. These guest leave her bedroom “as filled with visitors as Grand Central Station” and include “some from the shores of Hades, voices of the dead, faded movie stars, imaginary telephone operators, spirits like long-nosed bird dogs, drowned pearl-divers, old kings, old queens, figures older than Oedipus or Troy, New England spinsters…jockeys riding the skeletons of dead horses, angelic birds” as well as “centaurs with lilies in their mouths, cherubim spouting fountains, great frogs with jewels in their foreheads.” (MM, 11)
This list of visitors is characteristic of the text, which overflows, overabounds with lists, repetitions, and poetically embellished details and language. There is just so much in these 1200 pages and each sentence seems like the product of both a compulsion for artistic perfection and a completely natural, effortless flow. At times reading the book felt to me like drawing my finger across the deep, rich frosting of a deeply, richly frosted cake and at other times I wondered, if I could wring the book like a sponge, how much of its words would fall out and what would I be left holding afterwards?
Hailing from humble What Cheer, Iowa, Miss Georgia MacIntosh stands in contrast with the East Coast decadence of Vera’s mother as the one stable and trustworthy presence in Vera’s life, the lone person that Vera knows who is grounded in reality and certainty. At one point, Vera pays this tribute to her:
This flat-footed Middle Westerner, Miss MacIntosh, my darling, so plain, so unadorned, and very far from feminine or fickle, a woman utterly unlike my sleeping mother, a woman completely without affectation or exaggeration, as she seemed then in my eyes, was far too simple, far too clear to be seduced by the soporific luxury which she could not even care to understand, the Oriental magnificence of dreaming mandarins and ivory and jade pagodas, the monstrous enormity of that old New England sea-coast house.… (MM, 46)
Whatever connection there is in the novel to Mormonism, I’ll argue that it is to be found through Miss MacIntosh herself. But at this point I will make my own digression to look at where else Mormonism appears in Marguerite Young’s works and interviews.
The earliest occurrence of a statement by Young concerning Mormons occurs in an interview with Vogue magazine in 1946, where she says:
As for the American myth, it is fabulous, too—I don’t know why we should ever been considered a plain people; our heads are in the clouds. Lately, I’ve been reading Fawn M. Brodie’s ‘No Man Knows My History’, the brilliant biography of that wild-eyed Joseph Smith who, looking for lost treasures in the ground, stumbled onto the writing of an American angel, and founded, as a result of the encounter, the Mormon Church. No, America is not dull, and I’m tired of all the neat little books which describe it as dull.
Incongruously, in 1945, The Nation published “Joseph Smith, Mormon Prophet,” a review by Young of No Man Knows My History, a year before Marguerite tells Vogue that she’s been reading Brodie’s book. At no point in her review does Young reveal or even suggest that she has something of a connection to the subject of the biography—and Young doesn't have much to say directly about Brodie’s book, either, except that Brodie “recaptured the spirit of a man whose history remains, just as he said, unknown, unknowable” from “court records…newspaper articles, memoirs, letters, and the dossiers of the women who were successively sealed to the prophet.” Instead, the topic of Brodie’s book serves as a jumping off point for Young to write her a two-page history of Joseph Smith in her own style.
Perhaps by design, the publication of Young’s review of No Man Knows My History in 1945 coincided with the release of her first prose book, Angel in the Forest, a history of two utopian communities that made their homes, one after the other, in New Harmony, Indiana. Utopian communities were one of Marguerite’s key interests, she herself remarking:
I believe that all my work explores the human desire or obsession for utopia, and the structure of all my works is the search for utopias lost and rediscovered…All my writing is about the recognition that there is no single reality. But the beauty of it is that you nevertheless go on, walking towards utopia, which may not exist, on a bridge which might end before you reach the other side. (Harp Song for a Radical, ix).
Young draws connections between the Harmonists (or Rappites), the first of the two groups to live in New Harmony, and the early Mormons several times during the book. The Rappites, under the direction of leader George Rapp, founded New Harmony, Indiana in 1814 after abandoning their first utopian effort in the “old” harmony, Harmony, Pennsylvania. A Latter-day Saint’s attention might be caught by this fact as Harmony is of historical significance to their church as well, being the location associated with the restoration of the Aaronic priesthood.
The Rappites, founded by and perhaps best remembered for their practice of celibacy, which Young contrasts with Mormons who would found Nauvoo, Illinois “not an eagle’s flight from Harmony” (Nauvoo is actually 330 miles from Harmony) where “an angel named Moroni, would, within a few years” (the Rappites leave New Harmony in 1824, the Mormons found Nauvoo 15 years later), “bless polygamy in the temples” (or temple) “of Nauvoo.” (Angel in the Forest, 63). Factual precision in this statement gives way to Young’s lyrical inclinations and also an inclination to attribute all of the revelations within Mormonism to the angel Moroni.
Young draws comparisons between George Rapp and Joseph Smith and the respective orders with which they were associated, describing Rapp as:
…not so adventuresome in fact as Hebraic Joseph Smith…He was the arch-conservative, the savior of the sacred few…While Father Rapp pursued the even tenor of his days, Joseph Smith, the head of the polygamists, was murdered at Carthage, and its temples and schools were burned to the ground. While Father Rapp continued as he had been, Brigham Young, new head of the Mormons, led a remnant people through the untrammeled wilderness, to a desert hemmed in by something more than metaphorical mountains. There, they would be saved from extinction by God’s sea gulls who ate God’s locusts. Gabriel and Moroni, at times no more than a crow’s flight apart, were angels with separate versions of God’s word. Gabriel, the Rappite, was abstemious. Moroni, the Mormon, emitted spores as big as those of the octopus, like purple grapes in autumn. He was productive in the grand, archaic manner. (AF, 64)
After these early examples of Marguerite speaking on Mormonism, interviews, articles, and reviews are quiet regarding the church or any connection she might have to it until 1975. Then, in an autobiographical sketch Marguerite provided for John Wakeman’s World Authors, 1950-1970, she plainly states: “I am a collateral descendant upon my father’s side of Brigham Young.” Apparently this was a point of pride that had eluded publication up until then.
Pride over her relation to Brigham Young is just how author Steven Moore characterizes Marguerite’s view of her relation to the prophet. Having met with Young in the early 1990’s to arrange a republication of Miss MacIntosh, My Darling, Moore recalls that “The ‘business’ part of our conversation lasted about five minutes, but she spent an hour talking about everything else under the sun, especially people she knew and who admired her work (She was rather vain in this regard; she made sure I knew she was descended from Brigham Young, relayed her “dear friend” Saul Bellows’ opinion of her work to me, etc. etc.)
Marguerite would finally write extensively on Brigham Young in her last major book, Harp Song for a Radical, which was published in 1999, four years after her death. Harp Song represents a portion of what was meant to be a biography of Eugene Victor Debs, the father of the modern American labor movement. In telling Debs’ tale, Young’s strategy “was to use historical figures of the times as the focus for discussing the crucial political events and thereby create a palpable sense of the cultural climate in which Debs developed.” (HS, xi). And this focus leaves Marguerite with much to write about Mormonism—from the early life of Joseph Smith, the foundation of the church, the flight of the early Saints from the east coast to Ohio and then to Illinois—and the emergence of Brigham Young in the history of the movement.
I cannot help but sense a certain fondness for Brigham Young in Marguerite’s writing. She introduces him as “a man who could not spell the word “millennium” but with the spirit of reform on him could speak in bird tongues, angel tongues, foreign tongues, tongues of prehistoric peoples” (HS, 31) Marguerite describes Brigham as “seeing nothing but truth” in the Book of Mormon when he first reads it, assured that “this truth was the pure gold of the spirit of God and not the gold of a fool.” (HS, 121). In her telling, Brigham was “smitten by the spirit of prophecy” and “able to talk with bird voices to feathered angel bird men and saints long dead who came to his call” by the time of his conversion to The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (HS, 121). So, yes, she keeps repeating that he can speak with bird tongues.
When Brigham Young enters the action of her account of the murder of Joseph Smith, Marguerite brings up Brigham’s difficulty with spelling again right away:
Brigham Young, who had been on a complex missionary journey in America trying to arouse sympathy for the besieged head of the Mormon “harts,” as he spelled “hearts,” had been weary but happy in his calling which he spelled ‘cauling’....” (HS, 36).
Returning from this mission, Brigham Young is chosen as Smith’s successor when:
…the murdered prophet’s suddenly refulgent, resurrected spirit had seemed to all but the black-garbed widow and her small party to descend upon Brigham Young, upon whose stalwart back with its excellent melon head it had been placed. (HS, 36-37).
As Harp Song for a Radical weaves through the 19th century and its attention is brought to Salt Lake City, Brigham Young reappears as “the man who had made the Dead Sea to flower”(HS, 140). Brigham’s success in creating a city and community that could fall under her definition of “Utopian” most likely impressed and instilled more pride in Marguerite. For her descriptions of Young and Salt Lake, Marguerite relies much on Mark Twain’s account of the same from his Roughing It, which Marguerite criticizes for being an “elaboration and extension of [Twain’s] original notes” that occurred during the ten years between Twain’s trip and the book’s publication. Young portrays Twain as being out of his depth when coming into contact with he “who was called the Golden Lion of the Tribe of Zion” (HS, 139), “the very thought of [Brigham Young] filled Mark Twain’s somewhat porous brain with awe.” She faults Twain for staying with “the Gentile acting territorial power in the Salt Lake House” who “regaled [him] with all kinds of strange tales regarding the Mormons” (HS, 141-42) instead of staying amongst the Mormons of Salt Lake and learning about them firsthand. She also takes issue with the fact that “[Twain’s] stay in the Mormon paradise had been only about two days and three nights, scarcely time for the unwrapping and solving of all the mysteries of what was called the Mormon question (HS, 140-41).”
In a 1988 interview conducted by Miriam Fuchs and Ellen G. Friedman, eighty year-old Marguerite remarks, on the topic of her influences and favorite authors: “Theological, historical, philosophical—I’m as much influenced by Joseph Smith and the Mormons as I am, more so, than by [TS] Eliot. Actually, I’m much more influenced by the poetry of the Mormons.”
The statement strikes the seeker of a connection between Young’s works and Mormonism as just what they may have been looking for. Here it is, plainly stated, the claim by Marguerite herself that her work is much more influenced by Joseph Smith and the Mormons than certain modernist predecessors.
It seems now is the perfect time to return to Miss MacIntosh, My Darling and see how that influence manifests itself there.
Well, as it turns out, in the whole book, the word “Mormon” appears just once—by far the fewest number of appearances in any of Marguerite’s three main works—when we find a Mormon among the traveling salesmen known to Esther Longtree, a perpetually pregnant waitress at a small town Indiana diner:
The men, the men, all like moths in a storm, the traveling salesmen passing through, the General Electric representative, the man who was on his way to the Cumberland Gap and thought he had reached it, the man who was on his way to salty Utah, the Mormon, the soap salesman, the toy salesman, the bird-shooters, the bridge-menders, the butterfly catchers, the W.P.A., the men, the men, she could not count them, all so puny, sterile, unsatisfied…. (MM, 1022-23)
Given the amount of Mormons and Mormonism included in her two other major works and the importance attributed to the religion by Marguerite in her interview with Fuchs and Friedman, this lone use of “Mormon” is definitely fewer references than I expected. But the search doesn’t end with looking for occurrences of the word “Mormon” in the book. A reader of Miss MacIntosh, My Darling, will come across various details or statements that may seem familiar to a reader familiar with Latter-day Saint beliefs and practices.
From Miss MacIntosh, young Vera learns “the light which came from within was the only light by which to steer our way” (MM, 46)—similar to the Latter-day Saint doctrine of every human being being born with “the light of Christ” within them, to help them make correct decisions in their lives. It “behooved us at all times to be simple and direct with our minds made up and our conscience clear and our shoulders to the wheel, helping those who were not the children of fortune” (MM, 46)—putting one’s shoulder to the wheel being a popular Latter-day Saint expression and the title of a popular Latter-day Saint hymn.
Miss MacIntosh’s explains a purpose to life to Vera that bears a resemblance to the Latter-day Saint doctrine of the Plan of Salvation: “we were put here to be tested…This earth was the testing ground, and there was nothing but the test, so far as could be realized” and God “had wished to leave man free, and also, it was the testing ground for man with all his fleshly weaknesses about him, all those temptations which he must ignore, for he must develop his strength and character.” (MM, 51) “Life, she was sure, was intended to be a challenge and not a bed of roses, and we were given our opponent in order that we might struggle with him and overpower the darkness or else go down in it.” (MM, 50) “We were to be proved, and the truth was better than the lie, even should the lie seem truer then the truth, every lie containing a seed of truth in it, no doubt, but ours was the freedom to make a choice between the truth and the lie and the truth and the truth, to do what was good and right, leaving no uncertainty (MM, 51)” Miss MacIntosh “thought very little” of “anything that did not bear on use, for this world was a harsh place, a Slough of Despond, and we were put here to be tested, yet though all should fail the test.” (MM, 57).
Other instructions of Miss MacIntosh’s bear a resemblance to Latter-day Saint scriptures. In life, “Every shining moment must be filled with action, ideally for the good of someone other than ourselves” (MM, 51) and “We must prepare ourselves to live in the service of others, the cold, the starving, the poor, the maimed, the crippled, for the opium paradise was never God’s way of life.” (MM, 51) bring to mind Mosiah 2:17, “when ye are in the service of your fellow beings ye are only in the service of your God.” Vera describes Miss MacIntosh as having the “profound conviction that one soul was as worth saving as another” (MM, 53), which resembles the Latter-day Saint belief in the value of all souls, as expressed in Doctrine and Covenants 18:10 “Remember the worth of souls is great in the eyes of God.”
Miss MacIntosh was suspicious of man’s inclination to corrupt Holy Scripture for his benefit. Instead of scripture, her favorite books were those “good for the growing soul, such as Pilgrim’s Progress which she preferred to even the Word of God, for the Word of God was that which should be taken with a grain of salt and was that which could be subjected to so many contradictory interpretations and laid over with so many human exaggerations” (MM, 56) To her, the Kings James Version of the Bible “was not to be trusted because [it was] made for the vanity of earthly kings and for the unification of the British Empire” (MM, 268). Intentionally or not, Miss MacIntosh has a neighbor in the Latter-day Saint stance on the translation of the Bible, as stated in the eighth Article of faith: “We believe the Bible to be the word of God as far as it is translated correctly”, this belief reflected in a revelation from the Book of Mormon that states that, over the course of history, “there are many plain and precious things taken away from the book, which is the Book of the Lamb of God.” (1 Nephi 13:28).
Miss MacIntosh’s particular religious beliefs are never named beyond “Christian”, “she being the youngest of a large Christian family” (MM, 167), and perhaps Miss MacIntosh thought herself nothing more than a follower of what had been established by Christ. We know she was not Catholic, for “in her plain opinion” Rome was “a heathen and monstrous city idealizing the dead…a place which good Christians should flee from as from a plague, a place of cinders, one where she would not be seen” (MM, 59). Vera describes Miss MacIntosh as having “originated in Iowa among the primitive Christians of great works and little faith, not of great faith and little works.” (MM, 59). From its origins, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints identified with the primitive Christian church, the lengthy name of the church indicating that the origins and originator of the two were the same, all that separates them being their epoch. The connection is probably best known for being stated in the church’s sixth Article of Faith: “We believe in the same organization that existed in the Primitive Church, namely apostles, prophets, pastors, teachers, evangelists, and so forth.” And some view the belief system of the Church of Jesus Christ as prioritizing works over faith in the pursuit of salvation, or at least as requiring works as a manifestation of faith.
I’ll also note that “The Primitive Church of Jesus Christ” was also the name of one of an offshoots of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, splintering from the William Bickerton sect of followers who did not accept the leadership of Brigham Young after the martyrdom of Joseph Smith.
Miss MacIntosh’s “own dear brother” Richard “had gone out as a primitive Christian bishop from Iowa to convert the heathen of the Easter Islands and had never returned” (MM, 62). During a directionless period between her youth and maturity, Miss MacIntosh “thought of going to look for her dear brother Richard among the Polynesian head-hunters, where he was still preaching the old religion” this, it is explained, “was before Richard’s disappearance, which had so long baffled the elders of the church.” (MM, 923).
Richard MacIntosh’s departure to preach in Polynesia brings to mind Latter-day Saint missionary efforts in those same islands, the church having first sent missionaries “unto the islands of the sea” in 1843. Richard’s departure, and subsequent disappearance, brings to mind the story of Hagoth from the Book of Mormon, who set out by sea to the west and was never heard from again (Alma 63:5-8) and who is also sometimes attributed with having brought Nephite blood to the Pacific Islands. Marguerite’s missing brother also brings to mind the account by Amaleki in the Book of Mormon, who with his closing words tells of his brother who left for the wilderness, his fate and whereabouts unknown for the rest of Amalki’s days (Omni 1:30). And it also seems worth noting that the organizational structure of the primitive Christian church of What Cheer, Iowa appears to have included “bishops” and “elders”—well known roles in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, in spite of not being named in the sixth Article of Faith (apparently they fall under the “and so forth” category).
Like Latter-day Saints, the Christians of What Cheer baptized by immersion, but in What Cheer “baptisms were total immersion in a cold or ice-bound stream, a great hole being chopped in the ice, and sometimes the baptized were drowned” (MM, 59) — later in the novel we learn that young Georgia MacIntosh was among those that nearly drowned at their What Cheer baptisms (MM, 888).
Moving away from Georgia MacIntosh and What Cheer, some additional possible allusions: When Vera Cartwheel introduces herself to the reader, she does so with language bearing a resemblance to the opening lines of the Book of Mormon: “I, Vera Cartwheel, I, the imploring daughter of a mother under the sway of opium, a mother more beautiful than angels of light, I, Vera Cartwheel, had wandered through the streets of great, mysterious harbor cities… (and then she continues with a long description of the great, mysterious harbor cities and the spectral faces and forms encountered therein) while Nephi writes in the first lines of 1 Nephi 1:1: “I, Nephi, having been born of goodly parents, therefore I was taught somewhat in all the learning of my father; and having seen many afflictions in the course of my days….” Both authors begin by introducing themselves in an “I, (name)” form, then describe their parent(s), what the parent may or may not have provided for them, and then move on to summarize the journey of their life so far.
Another parallel between the narrators of these two works:
On the night of Vera’s 14th birthday, after a dreary and lonely party that Vera suspects Miss MacIntosh may have sabotaged (turns out she did), Vera lets herself into Miss MacIntosh’s private quarters without permission, resulting in consequences that may have lead to the possible death of Miss MacIntosh—or I should say, from the first chapter it is clear from Vera’s narration that Miss MacIntosh is dead, but it is not clear if Vera accepts that she is dead, her odyssey to find Miss MacIntosh in the Midwest suggests that Vera believes she lives on. Reflecting back on the incident as she narrates it, questioning if the fateful intrusion had been God’s will, and if so, was she absolved of guilty for it? Vera asks “Was it murder of the key turning of itself in the lock? Whose hand at the door knob? Was it God’s hand, and if it was God’s hand, was it still murder?” (MM, 166).
These words bring to mind the experience of Nephi being directed by the Spirit of the Lord to slay Laban early in the Book of Mormon, Nephi being absolved of guilt because the death of Laban was God’s will—”Slay him, for the Lord hath delivered him into thy hands; Behold the Lord slayeth the wicked to bring forth his righteous purposes.” (1 Nephi 4:12-13).
Estimates of Nephi’s age at the beginning of the Book of Mormon put him at 14-17 years of age, so he and Vera cross a similar threshold at a similar age, a threshold which would lead into their adulthood and journeys to the west in search of that which their homes couldn’t offer them anymore (even if Nephi’s journey to the west may have required him to travel east to get there).
And speaking of Nephi’s journey to America, a question by Miss MacIntosh to Vera suggest she may be aware of his family’s journey to the Americas: “When, Vera Carthweel, did the first Viking land upon this bleak New England shore?” she would intrude upon my delicate thoughts which were so personal. “Let us waste not our spirits speaking of Christopher Columbus, for he was but the second or fourth explorer to arrive here in this new world.” (MM, 168) A knowledge of others arriving in the new world ahead of Columbus or the vikings could imply a belief in, or awareness of, the opening books of the Book of Mormon.
A connection between ancient Israelites (the Lost Tribes, in particular) and the Americas also appears in a dream Vera has while she is a child, a priest in the dream asking her “Where, my dearest heart, is Issachar? Where is Nepthalin? Where is Reuben who begot a horde? Where is Manasses? Where is Kansas? Where is Iowa?” (MM, 181).
Miss MacIntosh teaches Vera of an age of accountability for children, though MacIntosh sets the age at 12, not 8 like Latter-day Saints: “My twelfth birthday, Miss MacIntosh said, was the dividing between my irresponsibility and my responsibility, for I had reached the age of wisdom in both the eyes of God and in the eyes of man. She had always promised that after I was twelve, I was to make my own decisions, for she should not be responsible and held to account in the book of life.” (MM, 172-73) This sentiment of Miss MacIntosh resembles the Latter-day Saint belief that parents bear the responsibility for a child’s decisions after the age of 8 if the child is not baptized (Doctrine and Covenants 68:25).
I also may as well note that Georgia MacIntosh is not a smoker of cigarettes/user of nicotine or tobacco (MM, 171) and, unlike Vera’s mother, is not mentioned serving or drinking wine.
Among her visions, Catharine Carthweel is described as dreaming of “great cities of minarets and phaetons in lands which had been unpopulated, where only the raven had spoken? The raven had flown with a golden book in its hands.” (MM, 450-51) And while it’s just one small detail of a hallucination of Catharine’s among so many, the mention of a golden book will likely always cause a reader with thoughts directed towards Mormons to at least take notice and perhaps raise an eyebrow, if even only slightly.
But, in spite of these possible references and connections, weaving references to Mormon beliefs, practices, scripture and history into a reading of Miss MacIntosh, My Darling could very well be asking too much of Miss MacIntosh, My Darling. We have found bullet holes, but not a smoking gun, and many of these references I’ve cited are not uniquely meaningful to Latter-day Saints.
Unlike authors such as James Joyce who left behind copious notes that account for the origin of nearly every word and line of Finnegans Wake, Marguerite Young left behind no almanac to trace the sources of her ideas and who specifically they may have been borrowed from or if they came directly from her own imagination, flavored, perhaps, by things she had heard and read.
Just as Miss MacIntosh, My Darling does not burst with the overt references to Mormonism I had hoped to find, I have also discovered that it’s difficult to determine exactly how Marguerite was related to Brigham Young.
With the helpful help of the volunteers at my local FamilySearch library, I found that Marguerite’s genealogy on the Young side tracks fairly easily back to her great grandfather, Peter H Young, who was born in “Ohio” in 1833 and died in Decatur, Indiana in 1899. The trail of Marguerite’s ancestors trail stops cold with Peter. With no parent listed, it’s up to conjecture as to how Peter Young might have been related to Brigham Young. With his 1833 birthdate, Peter could have conceivably been a son of one of Brigham Young’s brothers (or even a grandson of his oldest brother, John Young Jr.) and Peter’s birth in Ohio in 1833 does match up with the migration of the Saints to Kirtland, Ohio in 1831. The problem is none of Brigham’s brothers are listed as having a son named Peter, and while it’s possible a son could be missing from their records, it also seems doubtful, as the immediate progeny of the Young brothers appears to have been thoroughly accounted for by their descendants. If there is a connection between Marguerite and Brigham, it seems likely it would have to be further up her family tree, which would leave Marguerite collaterally related to Brigham Young, but not descended, as she had described herself.
So, just as it seems that if Miss MacIntosh, My Darling was influenced by Mormonism, it was in ways more distant than expected, it also seems that if Marguerite Young was related to Brigham Young, it was also in ways more distant than expected.
With what we have seen, I am inclined to say that Marguerite was interested in Joseph Smith, Brigham Young, the Angel Moroni, and Mormonism for how they connected to her interests in angels, the interplay of the seemingly real and seemingly unreal, and the religious utopian communities of the nineteenth century. Brigham Young’s embodiment of the utopian spirit—first in leading the Saints from Nauvoo to Utah, then in the development of Salt Lake City—must have appealed to her and her perceived personal connection to him creating an additional bond to the work and community. What Young learned of Mormonism from learning about Brigham Young and Joseph Smith may prove to have provided character details for her stalwart Miss Georgia MacIntosh, whose Midwestern character stood in contrast with east coast decadence in the same way the early Latter-day Saints stood apart from the world around them.
Sources and Additional Reading:
Moore, Steven, 16 March 1999, from “Comments New and Historical” 16 March 1999 https://margueriteyoung.site/who-is-marguerite-young/board-room-archive/
Friedman, Ellen; Fuchs, Miriam “A Conversation with Marguerite Young”
Neville, Susan, “Sailing the Inland Sea”, 2007, Indiana University Press
Email correspondence with Steven Moore
Email correspondence with Professor Ellen G. Friedman, College of New Jersey
Email correspondence with Professor Susan S. Neville, Butler University
Works by Marguerite Young:
Miss MacIntosh, My Darling (MM), 1965, cited from 1976 Harvest/HJB Edition
Angel in the Forest (AF), 1945, cited from 1994 Dalkey Archive Press Edition
Harp Song for a Radical (HS), 1999, Knopf
Inviting the Muses: Stories, Essays, Reviews, 1994, Dalkey Archive Press
The new printing of Miss MacIntosh, My Darling by the Dalkey Archive Press is currently scheduled for release on June 6, 2023 and is available for pre-order here: https://dalkeyarchive.store/products/miss-macintosh-my-darling