He Said: Book Review: Stolen Innocence

Elissa Wall with Lisa Pulitzer, Stolen Innocence: My Story of Growing Up in a Polygamous Sect, Becoming a Teenage Bride, and Triumphing over Warren Jeffs. New York: William Morrow, 2008.



Elissa Wall with the help of Lisa Pulitzer does a good job painting the FLDS as a very repressive people with some very controlling behaviors and Warren Jeffs as a scum ball. I have never had the respect that my wife BiV has for fundamentalists and her romanticized view that they are just good religious people trying to live the "principle." Wall reinforced my viewpoint that living polygamy is almost impossible due to the selfish behavior of the participants to control one another. I think if I were a member of the FLDS Church in my current maritial condition that I would have ended up much like Wall's father with my original wife in the end. My own children might have very well gone down the road that Wall's siblings did--or end up the opposite, as very gungho FLDS.

The premise behind this book is that fourteen is too young to lose your innocence, with which most of us in the United States or Canada that are not FLDS would have to agree. Being the parent of seven daughters I personally would not have allowed Wall to be married at such a young age. Even if I were a member of the FLDS faith I wouldn't have let any of my children go anywhere without my keeping in contact on a weekly or monthly basis even if I had been stripped of the priesthood like Wall's father. If anything I would have been more determined to regain my children. I would have known if anyone was trying to coerce a daughter of mine into a marriage that wasn't mutually agreed on by all parties that it just wouldn't happen. Her father is not totally blameless here since he was an absent caregiver out of choice. I read constantly how Wall was talking to different people by cell phone so why not call her dad from time to time. The FLDS are not like the Amish--they drive cars, play in the symphony orchestra and have telephones. They aren't totally as shut off from the world as Wall portrays in her book. She did after all work at the Mark Twain where I am sure even outside truckers frequented for a good home-cooked meal and where she got to know her future lover and current husband.

Wall paints a picture of her family being tragically broken apart by the FLDS leaders for their inability to get along with one another. The FLDS leaders were just trying to help, as I see it, the father being a weak leader and unable to control his family. I saw something even more ominous in that her own mother destroyed her father's family. The mother is very controlling and comes from a fundamentalist family that is well-connected while the father is a convert and has little influence.

Wall and Pulitzer paint a picture of passivity for the mother but from the readings I see that she was quite forceful when she wanted to be particularly in dissolving her marriage from Wall's father. When the mother can't get her own way she takes down the whole family so she can get herself married to a high ranking FLDS leader who is some old guy close to death. The mother seems happy when she remarries now that she is near to the action again. The mother was very manipulative and Wall downplays her own mother's role as being passive when in reality she probably had a great deal of input in to what happened in Wall's life including the marriage that toppled the FLDS leadership.

We learn in the end of the book that Fred Jessop rather than Warren Jeffs orchestrated the marriage. The mother had direct access to Jessop since she occasionally slept with him. She could have suggested when the daughter should be married or even the timing. I find it hard to believe she didn't say something to Jessop in a tender moment. Even after Wall is married the mother is always encouraging Wall to get along with her new husband. Wall never really makes much of an effort to get along but rather goes out of her way to be disobedient. It makes you feel sorry for the husband who is just some teenager without much social skills. She is constantly denigrating him including when he testifies near the end of the book. She never gives the guy a break as you paints him as a buffoon who is weak and spineless. I mean when her boyfriend goes out with a larger group and tells him to buzz off he goes quietly. Then he testifies he would have stayed married to her.

Then when the family members leave the FLDS faith one by one she paints it as if they are merely victims of a bad system when in reality it is their desire to live their lives differently than the what mainstream FLDS follow. Her sisters run off with men they fall in love with as do many of her friends. The truth is that they all left because they wanted to and wanted to follow their own lifestyles. Walls could have left sooner if she really had wanted to since she went away at least twice to Oregon and Canada. I think her staying with her former husband was more complex than simply wanting to remain "sweet."

In the end she leaves the very same way committing adultery, divorcing someone she married for time and all eternity and taking down Warren Jeffs. I agree that she lost her innocence involuntarily when she was forced in to marriage at fourteen but I disagree that the sequence of events had to transpire the way they did after that point. I think she could have adhered to her beliefs and still have broken free. Being a fundamentalist didn't help her live a very moral life in the end. Elissa Walls voluntarily lost the rest of her innocence by her choices from sixteen through eighteen. If Wall were really the good faithful Saint that she portrays herself as being, she certainly wouldn't have been out there listening to Bon Jovi, questioning her religious beliefs, drinking beer in the deseret, fighting with her husband, not having children with him nor sleeping with Lamont Barlow. I give her the benefit of the doubt that she was immature but there are literally hundreds of FLDS youth and tens of thousands of LDS youth who wouldn't have done any of those things particularly committing adultery when they are sealed to another man for time and all eternity.

I don't fault her for taking down Warren Jeffs for that she should be commended. I think she was hypocritical for absolving her father and mother who in my opinion caused the situation when they converted to the FLDS faith. To be fair Wall should have also taken down her own father for getting her in the mess in the first place as well as Fred Jessops (if he had lived longer), and any and all FLDS men who pressure girls under eighteen in to forced marriages.

Warren Jeffs only had the power that Wall and the other believers gave to him. The group had a few opportunities to stop him and looked the other way. The Centennial group proved that when their feet did the walking. If the FLDS had stood up to Jeffs he would have had to back down. Even today they are feeling the heat from the Texas debacle. Now that outside forces are putting pressure on them they are finally able to say we won't be bad anymore. Now they have a revisionist mentality we don't engage in girls under eighteen being married is their public statement.

I think from my reading that most FLDS are pretty spineless people including the heroine of the story. For one thing I think the whole concept of letting people out of marriages and giving them to other people is against what Jesus taught except for the cause of fornication or adultery no divorces should be given. If polygamous preached there will be no divorce except for physical abuse or adultery there would be fewer broken homes like Wall's parents had. The father would then have been put to the test since he was let off as an absent parent.

The problem with polygamy is that anyone can get out of a bad marriage if they want it bad enough and complain hard enough. Wall wants to say she tried a couple of times but when she had Allen in the position where she could have delivered the death blow to her marriage she slept in her car and avoided him while messing around with Lamont. If she had gone every other week to Jeffs and said I am going to run off with Barlow he would have whisked her off some place else and gotten her out of the marriage. Of course she would have been married to who Jeffs and the leading elders wanted not Barlow perhaps. She got the same effect in the end she was free but she and Barlow are now on the outside looking in. The truth is she wanted to be with Lamont Barlow not whoever Jeffs would have chosen.

I think Wall and the Utah court case and the recent events in Texas have started to reform their practices. Will they completely adhere to this practice of only marrying legal age wives? I doubt it. I mean after all they are breaking the U.S. law by entering in to polygamy in the first place. I think if they were smart and didn't want the United States government to crack down on all fundamentalist like they did one hundred years ago they would agree among all independent groups and FLDS groups to only marry legal age wives and stick to that practice. Otherwise I think they should suffer the full extent of the law and should be prosecuted.

I don't deny Warren Jeffs got what he had coming and he did what she probably said. But her mother who was her legal guardian gave permission and she should also be prosecuted. She knew full well what was going on. Her mother is no more the dupe of the FLDS than other FLDS woman. Unlike a bunch of innocent women in the Texas compound who didn't have underaged daughters married off Wall's mother did and in my opinion should have her remaining children given to non-FLDS family members or placed in protective services.

In the end the principles Wall purported to believe in didn't keep her on the moral path. Her victory is that she took down a bad man in a very screwed up cult. I admire her for getting out of a bad situation but she could have done it a little more nobly. She would have had a greater victory if she had taken Jeffs down while remaining true to her moral compass.

She Said Book Review: Stolen Innocence

As you can see, Dr. B. and I have decided to include book reviews on our blog. Occasionally we will read the same book, and I think you might find our discussions interesting. Case in point: Stolen Innocence by Elissa Wall and Lisa Pulitzer. I think Dr. B.'s review may show more about him than it does about the book. I am sure my review will do the same.

Just looking at this photograph of Elissa Wall at age 14, the age at which she was constrained to marry her 19-year-old FLDS cousin, one can see that the title of Elissa's memoir is apt. This child was much too young for marriage, and the story she tells in her book is tragic. There are many reviews available for this particular book, so I won't try to summarize or duplicate what's already been said. Instead, I'd like to look at the polarization caused by the FLDS practice of arranged marriages. Elissa introduces us to the heartbreak caused by this practice when she describes how her father, Douglas was found by Warren Jeffs to be unworthy of the Priesthood and unable to control his family. This was evidenced by physical fighting between father and sons, and complaining on the part of the wives. Warren decided to solve the problem by "assigning" Elissa's mom, Sharon, to another man. Now I realize that it is a very flat pancake that doesn't have two sides. Warren may have felt that Sharon truly was not happy in the situation she was in, and that the family problems could be solved in this manner. But in Stolen Innocence, we see the turmoil this decision brought to the family members, especially the children, as they were torn between the teachings of their religion to follow the prophet's counsel in all things and their attempts to keep a troubled family together. I agree with Dr. B. that this could have been our family. We're not a perfect model of good LDS teachings, but the Church is deeply ingrained within us, and we are more than willing to follow our leaders' well-meaning advice. So I can see how some of the problems the Walls encountered happened, and I'm hesitant to blame either Sharon, Doug, or Warren Jeffs. But I think the breaking up of the family caused many problems later, including the horrible marriage into which Elissa was pressured.

In the book, Elissa insists that she made her objections to her marriage to Allen Steed known to her mother, her mother's new husband, Fred Jessop, to Warren Jeffs, and to Allen. This picture I found of Elissa and Allen seems to me to be a perfect illustration of the reluctance that she describes. While Allen looks happy to be married, Elissa is turned away, stiff, she even looks frightened. He looks straight into the camera, while Elissa's gaze is elsewhere, embarrassed. At 14 years of age, the FLDS girls knew nothing of what was expected in marriage. I feel sorry for her that she had to endure the trauma that she did. In addition, I feel a lot of sympathy for the 19-year-old Allen.

Even through Elissa's story, one can see that Allen was really trying to make the marriage work. The marriage was not consummated for some time. Allen seemed to be patiently trying to figure out how to win Alissa's love. He wrote her love notes, took her on trips, and stumblingly attempted to teach her the ways of marriage. No wonder that it was less than a success. Some commenters have opined that Allen should have been tried for rape, and was as guilty as Warren Jeffs for this crime, but I am not so sure. Allen himself was young, and had been taught that his marriage to Elissa was proper, and seemed to show great restraint for someone in his situation. Elissa writes that she was forced to have sex, but fails to support that Allen raped her by her own descriptions of what happened. She instead portrays herself as reluctantly submitting to Allen's pressure, as in the following paragraph:

“I’m doing it out of love,” Allen declared. Everything he did was a contradiction, and before I knew it he was playing the guilt card again. As he continued to put his hands all over me, I just froze.

“Okay, fine,” I uttered. “Get it over with.”

In her description of their sex life, Elissa betrays a lack of understanding of the consideration that the newly-married, passionate young Allen was extending her:

It felt like we were having marital relations all the time, at least once or twice a week.

As I read on, I found the story more and more heartbreaking, as Elissa continued to search for love and friendship outside the boundaries which her family and religion would find acceptable. The conclusion of her tale brought forth a mix of emotions in me. I was relieved that she was able to find strength within, enough to find her own voice and to escape the bondage of Warren Jeffs. I was happy to see her reunite with her siblings and her father. I am glad she has found joy with her new husband, Lamont Barlow. But I ached for Allen and for her mother, both of whom endured great hardship to remain true to their faith and the things they had been taught.

I think it is incumbent upon us to read this book with compassion toward all who are involved. There is a great temptation to blame Elissa Wall's situation, and other failures in FLDS family life on Warren Jeffs and the practice of arranged marriages. As far as I am able to tell, the strict control of a prophet over the marriages of the people of a Mormon-based religion is limited to Warren Jeffs. Jeffs' father and previous leaders of the FLDS did not require this, and neither do other fundamentalist groups of which I am cognizant. Now that Jeffs is in prison, it seems clear that he was at fault. I feel no compunction to defend him. But I feel that it is important to be aware that there is another side of the FLDS story that I wish I knew better. We have Elissa Wall's and others' depictions of Jeffs as a fearsome, controlling, dictatorial leader. But I have seen pictures of a slight, gangly, geeky-looking Warren. I've heard tapes of his soft-spoken voice. I've heard the testimonies of those who have met him of his unassuming character. As Dr. B. has said, I think Warren Jeffs had power because his people gave him respect and authority over their lives. They believed the words he spoke to them.

There's a blog I read sometimes that is written by a man in Douglas Wall's situation--his wife and children were taken away from him by Jeffs because he was deemed unworthy. This man continues to defend the faith and to strive to one day be worthy to get his blessings back. He has a different way of looking at all of this. My heart hurts when I read about him and I wish I could hear more of his thoughts. He joins the ranks of Sharon Wall, of Lamont Barlow's grandfather, and many other faithful FLDS. Where do they find their faith? I'd like to read their stories too.