Virtuous Women by Ann Goltz; Contemporary Literature Novel Skewers Religion, Cults, and Restrictive Traditional Gender Roles
By Julie Sara Porter
Bookworm Reviews
Spoilers: Now we return to a favorite topic of this blog: Religion and Religious Cults. The Quiverfull Movement is a Christian theological position which encourages marital procreation with the intent to create large families. Its followers abstain from contraceptives, family planning, and sterilization reversal. Among the most famous, or rather infamous, adherents are Jim Bob and Michelle Duggar of reality television fame.
Virtuous Women by Ann Goltz is a brilliant Contemporary Literature Novel that skewers religious cults and the Quiverfull Movement by showing the detrimental effect that they have on the women who are involved within them. In a time when women’s rights are eroding because of interference from Christian Evangelicals, the dangers that such a strict environment can bring cannot be stressed enough.
Hope Wagner is the oldest girl in a religious family of ten children. Because of her status, she has to fill the motherly role towards caring for her younger siblings left by the death of their mother. However she is soon to approach the marrying age of 18 and her father, Michael will be left without a housekeeper. The elders of the Church of the Covenant order Michael to get remarried and they have the perfect candidate. Enter Jennifer Levine, a newcomer to the Church from an outsider background.
Goltz’s writing is brilliant with how she captures how people fall into such Fundamentalism and how people can be destroyed when they religiously (pun not intended) follow such a path.What is fascinating about the first half of the book is that the Church of the Covenant seems deceptively alright.
If you read a lot of Inspirational Fiction or watch a lot of Hallmark Holiday Rom Coms, you might recognize the pattern: Big city career woman with secret longing for a simple life finds herself in a cute old fashioned town with good old fashioned values. She meets a handsome rugged salt-of-the-earth local, usually a widower with children. Complications ensue but she decides to ditch her old life behind, stay in the town, marry the local, and conform to his ways. Expect quirky locals, beautiful natural settings, a sob story about the couple in question, detailed Holiday seasons, and definitely a trip or two or three to church to remind you that yes these are Faith-driven locals.
That's all present in Virtuous Women, but something seems off about it. The Wagners seem at first like a decent family albeit very strict. Some details like the kids being home schooled could be attributed to their Conservative upbringing. They seem to be in a community whose members genuinely look out for and communicate with each other. Michael might be stern but he is honest and appears free of religious hypocrisy.
In this fast paced world of immediate gratification, ever present technology, and gloomy and doom-driven news, it's understandable why someone like Jennifer would want to be a part of this life, especially someone like Jennifer.
Jennifer is the type of modern woman who has the past in a nostalgia filter. She reads Classic Literature and wears vintage clothing. She works as a nanny and secretly resents her employer’s affluent attention seeking lifestyle. Her career driven parents were more interested in obtaining wealth and status than parenting. She is the type probably much like many of her Readers, who would like to go into a time machine, travel to the past, and stay there. But her vision of the past is not the same as the reality.
There are some early red flags that suggest that life in this Church isn't all that was originally advertised. Those signs are designed to make the hair stand on the back of the mind and eyes narrow in suspicion wondering what Jennifer is getting herself into.
There's an early moment where Hope is assaulted on her way home from grocery shopping and her father blames her for the attack. There is the moment where Jennifer enters the church wearing period clothing but one that is too ornate and showy for the plain clothes congregation. There are plans to marry Hope off right away to Joel, a young man who comes from another family of believers even though she's only 18 and her younger sisters are also preparing for their future weddings. One of the biggest warnings occurs after Jennifer uses her money to buy her future stepdaughter’s wedding dresses and Michael becomes furious and physically violent, accusing Jennifer of violating his commands as the man of the house. They are present and definitely can't be ignored. It doesn't take long for Jennifer to realize that she may have gotten the old fashioned life that she thought that she wanted but she also got all that came with it including Christian Nationalism and subjugation towards women.
Jennifer is an example of someone from the outside who stumbles into a cult where everything is new and fresh to her and all rules have to be explained. Since she is so new, she questions everything around her when her suspicions and concerns manifest themselves. She sees a patriarchal system where women are second class citizens. Where God's love and forgiveness is minimized and his judgemental wrath and punishment are emphasized. Where education is limited to only what the church allows to be taught and advancement is diminished for boys and practically non-existent for girls. Where distrust in the government is so high that they don't go to hospitals even if they're dying or seek welfare when they are starving. Where girls are raised solely to be wives and mothers and are ordered to breed lots of children and have no choice in the matter. Once Jennifer realizes the dangers that she has gotten herself into, she begins to look for a way out.
Jennifer may have been thrust into the Church of the Covenant but another character reveals the pain of having been born into it: Hope who, after Jennifer leaves the book, becomes the primary protagonist. She had been raised by her father and the Church and never knew any other life. Her brainwashing began so early that she doesn't acknowledge that's what it is. Every time she mildly questions her upbringing, slightly disagrees with the lessons being taught, or considers a career in midwifery, she believes that she is sinning and that she needs to pray and read the Bible to seek attrition. She isn't even allowed the freedom to disagree or think for herself in her own mind. Her father's church has her convinced that as a woman, she is a weak vessel who needs to be controlled and made submissive.
Those nagging worrisome doubts that came into Hope’s head and then disappeared come to surface with the arrival of Jennifer and her subsequent marriage to her father. Suddenly those doubts come in a human form that becomes a catalyst for Hope finding her own independence. She sees the life that she has complacently accepted as one that imprisons and restrains those within it. The seemingly charming old fashioned plot gives way to something darker, more sinister, and more realistic than the life Jennifer imagined and Hope lived with every day.
With such a savage take down of cults, I sort of expected the book to climax in a violent and bloodthirsty manner which resulted in the death of the cult. That is not actually what happens. The cult instead destroys itself. It is destroyed from within as young members grow up and break free from their programming and older members refuse to go beyond their rigid beliefs to accommodate and adapt to the changing world.
The Wagner Family themselves implode as the children fall into early death, domestic violence, unwanted pregnancy, estrangement, elopement, and rebellion. Some leave and then come back penitent. Others settle into unhappy marriages in which they outwardly follow the values in which they were raised but now makes them inwardly miserable. They become aware that their rigid religious upbringing left them unprepared for the world and in many ways was responsible for the troubles in which they found themselves.
The only way that some of the Wagner Children can receive any type of fulfillment and contentment is to leave the Church and their family and make a clean break from the way of life in which they were raised.
Virtuous Women is the type of book that reminds us that religion can be a good thing in small doses but for all too many, it is used as a means of control and oppression. Sometimes the most courageous, faithful, and virtuous thing that a person can do is live outside of and out speak against it.
