Latter Day Saints in Popular Culture - in The 19th and 20th Centuries

In The 19th and 20th Centuries

Arthur Conan Doyle's detective novel A Study in Scarlet is one such portrayal that caused controversy. Mormons viewed the portrayal of the Danites in the book as highly erroneous, being yet another instance of anti-Mormon antagonism in popular media. Conan Doyle, according to his daughter, had relied upon what had been published about Mormons by former Mormons (historians believing these probably to be Fannie Stenhouse, William A. Hickman, William Jarman, John Hyde, and Ann Eliza Young), believing those accounts to be factual. Conan Doyle visited the United States in 1923, and one leg of his lecture tour took him to the University of Utah, to lecture on spiritualism. During his stay he received a letter from a Dr. G. Hodgson Higgins, who had formed his impressions of Mormonism based upon the portrayal in A Study in Scarlet, which "gave the impression that murder was a common practice among them", and who suggested that Conan Doyle "express his regret at having propagated falsehoods about the Mormon Church and people". Conan Doyle refused to withdraw what he had written about the Danites and the murders, on the grounds that it was a matter of historical record, but stated that his treatment in the novel was more "lurid" than the treatment by a history textbook would have been, and promised that in the future his portrayals of the Latter-day Saints would be based upon his firsthand experience of them on his visit. Subsequent Mormon characters in Conan Doyle's work were indeed more sympathetic.

Jules Verne's classic novel Around the World in 80 Days references a "Mormon Elder" who launches into a diatribe about his religion in a railcar where passenger Passepartout becomes a captive audience. Verne follows the 19th century propensity to view polygamy as central to Mormonism, going so far as to call it, "the sole basis of the religion."

Portrayals of Mormons and of Mormonism in movies have also drawn criticism, with critics such as d'Arc describing the bulk of what the world heard of Mormons in the 19th and early 20th century, via the literature of the day, as "polygamy, mystic revelations to modern prophets, golden bibles, and scheming missionaries adding continually to their harem of wives", and stating that that this portrayal found its way into movies. He gives two examples of the films from 1905 to 1936 that incorporate this: the 1911 Danish film A Victim of the Mormons,1 where a young Mormon missionary in Copenhagen lures the fianceé of a close friend to elope with him to Utah, whereupon he locks her in his basement (a film whose showing Governor of Utah William Spry fought to prevent); and the 1917 film A Mormon Maid,2 incorporating what d'Arc describes as "the innocent-daughter-catching-the-eye-of-powerful-Mormon-leader formula". D'Arc argues that the reason that such portrayals became sparse in the 1930s was the introduction of the Hays and later Breen regulatory codes, which sharply curtailed the portrayal of polygamy in movies.

Portrayals of Mormon characters in popular writing have not been universally viewed as negative by Mormons. The portrayals of Mormons in the work of Orson Scott Card, himself a Mormon, have been viewed as sympathetic portrayals of the Mormon world view that reach hundreds of thousands of readers worldwide, and thus that form a useful starting point for Mormons to explain Mormonism to non-Mormons. Similarly, the portrayals of Mormons and of Mormonism presented by Charles Dickens (describing the industrious, orderly nature of the Mormon emigrants he encountered on a ship leaving England), John Stuart Mill (using Mormon beliefs as test cases for his assertion that government should not interfere in the private lives of individuals), George Bernard Shaw (carrying Mill's argument further), Wallace Stegner (in The Gathering of Zion), and Harold Bloom (extolling Mormonism as the quintessential American Religion and Joseph Smith as "an authentic religious genius, unique in our national history") are all seen to be sympathetic to Mormons.

Mormon literary critics such as Michael Austin consider the portrayal of Mormons in popular writing to have completely changed over the course of the 20th century, with the portrayal of Mormonism in the 19th century and at the beginning of the 20th century being that of "a harsh, theocratic, and conspiratorial frontier community" and "a sinister secret society bent on tracking down and destroying its enemies wherever in the world they tried to hide" and of Mormons being icons of lawlessness, chaos, and sexual promiscuity, conceptions of Mormons and Mormonism that he views to have been incorporated into the works of Mark Twain, Robert Louis Stevenson, Jack London, Arthur Conan Doyle, and Zane Grey (and even the 1995 made-for-TV movie The Avenging Angel3); whereas the portrayal at the end of the 20th century, in works by writers from Tom Clancy to Tony Kushner, being that of people who are "hyperobedient, patriotic, conservative, and, in all probability, sexually repressed". He argues that although the portrayal has changed, its relation to mainstream society has not. In both cases, the portrayal of Mormons and Mormonism is highly distinct from the mainstream, he argues, with the 19th century portrayal being in stark contrast to the Victorian values of the time, and the late 20th century portrayal being (ironically) that of a "Victorian misfit in a promiscuous society". He argues that the role of Mormons and Mormonism in popular writing is "to establish a foil for the values supported in the text".

After a lengthy analysis of Mormon stereotypes in popular fiction, Austin draws the following conclusions:

• To the extent that popular literature is able to reflect popular sentiment, Mormons are not as well perceived in the larger American culture as most people would like to believe.
• Most of these negative images have been fixed since the 19th century.
• These stereotypes should not be confused with genuine political critique.
• By studying the way that Mormons are portrayed in popular genre fiction insight can be gained into the way that Mormonism functions as a category in American culture.