Historiography and Helen Mar Kimball

Jonathan Green

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Stephen C.’s most recent research roundup led to some discussion of Michelle Brady Stone’s article in the Journal of Mormon Polygamy (JMP), “Constructing Helen: Absences, Ambiguities, and Adjustments in the Historiography of Helen Mar Kimball.” Whatever status is conferred by peer review, and whatever reservations one might have about the journal, research publications ultimately have to stand on the strength of their own evidence and arguments. Fortunately JMP is an open-access journal, so we can just read the article and see for ourselves.

Stone’s article is a historiographic essay, which means she examines trends and patterns in how scholars have approached Helen Mar Kimball and the documentary evidence of her life, rather than directly attempting to re-evaluate the documents themselves. And in that regard Stone certainly uncovers noteworthy material about the uncertain dating of Helen Mar Kimball’s sealing to Joseph Smith at the age of fourteen in early June 1843, which serves as a marker for other uncertainties related to the sealing and the caution with which scholars have treated them (or not), and how various people have read things into the documents based on their (sometimes lurid) assumptions that the texts themselves cannot support. If you’ve ever suspected that some luminaries of Mormon Studies are not entirely careful in the conclusions they draw from documentary evidence, you will find material to support that view in Stone’s article, which is on the whole quite accessible and clearly written.

If you have done serious academic research before, you are likely familiar with the odd things you find when you dive into the footnotes. Ideas get fossilized in the scholarly record based on slender evidence, with an original formulation that is not nearly as confident or authoritative as later citations, and even famous scholars can be careless with documents. (This is partly an occupational hazard of historical research: It is difficult to find the right balance between getting bogged down in documentary minutiae, unable to see past the scribal punctuation practices just a few inches from the end of your nose; or flying 20 miles above the surface, blithely ignoring the intricacies of the textual terrain in your soaring interpretations, entirely untethered from evidence.)

Stone has identified some real discrepancies between Helen Mar Kimball’s outspoken defense of polygamy, and how she seems to have described her sealing to Joseph Smith; and in how contemporaries depicted Helen compared to other women sealed to Joseph Smith (in short: they didn’t; her sealing was all but ignored or unknown, and Helen did little to confirm the fact of her sealing when asked). Considering the outsized role Helen Mar Kimball, as the youngest of the women sealed to Joseph Smith, plays in today’s debates about plural marriage, there is a surprising amount of uncertainty, and for that alone Stone’s article is worth reading.

Stone does not deny the reality of Nauvoo-era polygamy, although Stone’s serial problematizing of the documents related to Helen Mar Kimball at times veers toward special pleading. Students are certainly allowed to problematize prior scholarly interpretations. Ultimately, however, grown-ups have to propose solutions to historical conundrums, even at the risk of being wrong.

And there are some facts that can’t be explained away by analyzing the historiography. Although reticent at other times, Helen Mar Kimball described her sealing to Joseph Smith in a letter written to her family in 1881. Stone points out multiple times that this autobiographical document was unknown before 1975, is of unknown provenance, and seems to diverge from Helen’s other numerous public statements in defense of polygamy. But the document is also an autograph in her own hand and can’t be dismissed. (It’s also viewable online and quite legible; see for yourself.)

So let me wade into a contentious debate far outside my area of expertise. The solution to the perceived contradiction between Helen Mar Kimball’s public defenses of polygamy, and the autobiographical family letter of 1881, is probably not to treat her defense of polygamy as her true perspective, or to treat the family letter as the actual truth, or even to locate the truth somewhere in between. Rather than contradicting each other, Helen Mar Kimball’s writings can be read in harmony with each other.

Just like her published defenses of polygamy, her family letter of 1881 was also meant for others to read. It is a representation of her life, not her life itself. The 1881 letter, just like other publications, offered a vigorous defense of polygamy and of the prophet Joseph Smith:

…the promises made to me the morning that I was sealed to the Prophet of God will not fail and I would not have the chain broken for I have had a view of the principle of eternal salvation and the perfect union which this sealing power will bring to the human family and with the help of our Heavenly Father I am determined to so live that I can claim those promises.

One source of difficulty is that much of the key passage is verse. People sometimes treat poetry as a distillation of truth, but verse is just another way to make statements based on linguistic convention. There is no guarantee that Helen Mar Kimball was a gifted poet (Kent will have to field that question), or that this bit of verse makes for a successful poem, or that every allusion comes across as intended. In fact, we should be more cautious in our interpretations, as the conventions of verse can distort meaning. Was Helen’s note that “pitying angels wept” an allusion to the lustful clutches of a predatory prophet from the youngest inductee into his harem? Unlikely, since the 1881 letter strongly affirms both the principle of plural marriage and the prophethood of Joseph Smith.

In her 1881 letter, Helen Mar Kimball contrasts her perspective as an adult with her limited teenage perspective, but her teenage foolishness can include both her naiveté before the sealing, and her dooming after it. The weeping angels might be excessive poetic diction, or they might reflect teenage angst as viewed from a mature perspective.

Rather than making vague allusions to the prophet’s seraglio, Helen Mar Kimball specifically identified the hardships that her sealing to Joseph Smith entailed: rumors spread in Nauvoo, her friends treated her differently, and she could no longer attend dances and other social events (although not in June, but only after December 1843, when her father finally put his foot down against her presence at what he saw as morally dubious activities).

Thy happy dreems all o’er[,] thou’rt doom’d alas to be
Barr’d out from social scenes by this thy destiny[.]
And o’er thy sad’nd mem’ries of sweet-departed joys
They sicken’d heart will brood and imagine future woes,
And like a fetter’d bird with wild and longing heart,
Thou’lt dayly pine for freedom and murmur at thy lot.

If the lines of verse seem overwrought, then perhaps that is the point. “We have lived happily together for over 35 years,” Helen writes, later in the same letter, about her marriage to Horace Kimball Whitney, whom she married in February 1846. Stone notes that another autobiographical account by Helen Mar Kimball describing these years suggests an “older woman’s bemusement as she looked back at her fourteen-year-old self imagining her life was over” (32) – and the same argument could be made about the 1881 family letter.

Historiography is genuinely fascinating, but there’s a reason that the obligatory chapter surveying previous research typically gets dropped before dissertations get published. The thorny historical problems still need to be solved (and there will always be a need for people who will push back on established consensus and pound on the documents). It seems like the pieces are in place for a compelling argument about Helen Mar Kimball’s sealing to Joseph Smith that respects the documents while putting the most salacious interpretations to rest.

Comments

19 responses to “Historiography and Helen Mar Kimball”

  1. Gary Bergera

    Thanks for this review, Jonathan. It’s very helpful.

  2. John C.

    This is actually shocking to me. When a child’s own words about being ‘doom’d’ and ‘fetter’d’ require scholarly reframing as melodrama, the question being answered is no longer what happened — it’s how to read carefully enough to avoid saying what it was. A 37-year-old man in a position of absolute religious and social authority sealed himself to a 14-year-old. The closing concern of this piece is that troubling interpretations of that fact need to be put to rest.

  3. Jonathan Green

    John, they are not a child’s own words. They were written 38 years later by a 52-year old woman who believed Joseph Smith was a true prophet and plural marriage was an essential gospel truth.

  4. Jack

    I think we moderns sometimes don’t know what to make of irony. I’m not sure why that is–but a lot of meaning can be lost on us as we try to understand how a beam can fit in someone’s eye socket or how a camel could possibly fit through the eye of a needle.

    Surely the early saints were well aware of the sometimes rather brutal ironies of life–and my guess is that Helen captured the feelings of her youth (in writing) in order to juxtapose them with her views as a mature lady in the faith. That’s good irony.

  5. John C.

    Irony requires a signal to the reader. Where is it? And why does every interpretive option in this conversation require her distress to mean less than it says?

    This was a horrific practice. What happened to Helen Mar Kimball was indefensible. The historiography is interesting but it doesn’t change what it was.

  6. G of C

    John C. Be careful when judging what you have not experiencedand yherefor cannot fully understand. The same goes for the rest of us. 1840s Nauvoo is an alien world to us. 1870s Utah is an alien world to us. We glean what we can from historical records and our commenaliyies, but we can never fully understand these people or the context they existed it

  7. Jonathan Green

    John, the signal that there is some ironic distance between Helen Mar Kimball the adult writer, and the teenage perspective of the poem, lies in the contrast between the gloom expressed in poetic diction and the sober prose statement of her happy adult life in the same document.

    Helen did not think her for-eternity sealing to Joseph Smith was horrific. Personally, I think Brigham Young had a better approach to organizing and supervising the principle of plural marriage than Joseph Smith did, and the approach of Wilford Woodruff (with the encouragement of the federal government) is even better. Since plural marriage was the historical path through which we arrive at the current teachings and ordinances around temple marriage and eternal families, which are highly meaningful to me and many others, I try to understand plural marriage in Nauvoo and Utah for what it was and accept the sacrifices made by others that I do not have to make myself. It’s part of the package deal.

  8. John C.

    A 14-year-old was sealed to a 37-year-old man who held total authority over her eternal salvation and her family’s standing. We know what happened to the women who refused. Nancy Rigdon refused. Her reputation was destroyed.

    This isn’t ancient history requiring careful contextualization. The framework that made this possible: that a religious authority can define the conditions of consent, that women who later defend the system are evidence it wasn’t harmful, that outside concern is unsophisticated or uninspired. That framework is intact and operational today. People are being harmed by it right now.

    You’ve told me you find temple marriage and eternal families meaningful. I don’t doubt that. But meaning purchased on these terms has a cost you didn’t pay. Helen Mar Kimball paid it at 14. The cost is paid by children and by the people with the least power to refuse and the most to lose by doing so. And the careful scholarship protecting that fact from plain description is not neutral. It is part of how the cost keeps getting paid by someone else.

  9. Stephen C

    “We know what happened to the women who refused.” Well, one of their sons became the President of the Church (Heber J. Grant)…So yes, your soundbites notwithstanding this was a complex thing going on at a complex time.

  10. John C.

    Noting that a woman who refused a powerful man’s proposal had a son who rose to lead the institution that man founded is not complexity. It’s the system working as designed. And calling that observation a soundbite is the same move that has been made throughout this conversation treating clarity as a failure of sophistication. The women weren’t complex historical puzzles. They were people. You are importing elaborateness where the evidence is actually straightforward and glossing over the genuinely complex question of what meaningful consent looks like inside a total institution like 1840s Nauvoo.

  11. Stephen C

    “They were people.” Right, people who are very capable of speaking for themselves, left their own accounts, and don’t need you to speak for them.

  12. Jack

    I read Helen’s letter through–and it seems to me that when she transitions into the rhyming section she’s telling the story of her sacrifice. But interestingly it’s the angels who weep for her because she, as a tender youth, didn’t understand the difficulties she would have to pass through because of her sealing to Joseph.

    But when she transitions back into regular prose–then we get her clear and unequivocal witness that she had done the right thing by being sealed to Joseph and that she and thousands of others would continue to be blessed because of the sealing she had received.

    And so, let’s be careful not to misjudge what she had experienced — as some sort of horrific abuse — when she herself sees it as the very thing that would bless her and her loved ones with exaltation.

  13. John C.

    The angels weep because she, as a tender youth, didn’t understand the difficulties she would have to pass through.

    A child who didn’t understand. An adult authority who did understand. A structure that reprocessed her distress as sacred sacrifice only recognizable through the institution’s own lens. That is a description of grooming. Not in the salacious and sensationalist sense this conversation has been careful to dismiss, but in the structural sense. The child doesn’t need to understand. That’s the point.

    Stephen C. says Helen doesn’t need anyone to speak for her. Correct, I agree. Jack just let her speak. The angels wept because she didn’t understand what was being done to her.

    The question this conversation has been avoiding is not whether Helen later found meaning in her sealing. It’s whether a child who didn’t understand what was happening to her was in a position to consent to it. I think Jack has answered that question.

    And I guess we’re expected to receive this as a faith-affirming reading, extend scholarly courtesy, and move on. The framework Jack has just described with perfect clarity continues to operate today. Not as history. The institutional structures that made a 14-year-old’s confusion into sacred sacrifice are intact. The interpretive machinery that converts a child’s distress into testimony is still running.

  14. Chad Nielsen

    John C., I think that you are right in what you are saying, but I also think that you’re not quite speaking to what the original post was trying to say. Having child brides in Mormon polygamy (or anywhere else) is sick and wrong, no matter who the husband was and when it happened (or happens). I had to deal with this issue in the biography of an ancestor who married a 13 year old girl during the Mormon Reformation and got her pregnant right away. It’s hard to stomach and something we need to protect against today. I very much agree with your perspective and the point you are making.

    That being said, the argument Jonathan is making is against someone who is saying that Helen Kimball didn’t have that experience at all and the story was a fabrication to support a later polygamy structure. Given that he was answering a different question than the one you want the conversation to be about, it makes sense that the answer would be different than the one you want him to give.

  15. John C.

    I appreciate this more than anything else written here. Child brides are sick and wrong, full stop. We don’t currently have a Journal of American Slavery dedicated to careful historiographic analysis of whether enslaved people’s later testimonies should be read ironically, or whether the complexity of the antebellum economy requires us to avoid “soundbites”, or whether we are being too modern in our moral judgments. That journal doesn’t exist because somewhere along the way we decided that some institutions are not neutral objects of analysis requiring careful suspension of judgment.

    The question of whether the sealing happened is only a scholarly question worth careful treatment if the institution that produced it is granted legitimate scholarly status. Slavery historiography exists. But nobody writes careful documentary defenses of whether a particular enslaved person’s “sealing” to their owner was historically verified. Or worse, that the enslaved person actually benefitted from being enslaved in some way.

    I genuinely don’t understand the goal here. Appreciate the respectful conversation nonetheless.

  16. Jack

    John C.,

    I wasn’t clear. I meant to convey the notion that she didn’t know the trials she would suffer as a *result* of the sealing. The angels could see her (near) future–and the troubles she would endure because of being misunderstood by respectable society. That’s what they lamented–not the “fact” that she was being forced into an obscene arrangement.

    And I should add–for further clarification–that Helen seems to view her sealing to Joseph as just that: a sealing only. And so, while it is difficult to calculate an alternate future (e.g., what would’ve happened had Joseph had not been killed at Carthage) the whole thing seems to be the result of an effort on the part of Joseph and Heber to create an unbreakable link between them and their families.

    And so while the situation may seem to bear some of the earmarks that should raise our modern hackles–and being a father of five daughters I really do understand your concerns–she was not given to Joseph as a “child bride.” It was a “dynastic sealing” as some folks like to call it and nothing more–so far as I’m able tell.

  17. John C.

    Dynastic sealing is not Helen’s language. It’s not in her letter. It’s a category invented after the fact to drain the sealing of its content and applied to a child’s life by people who were not that child. The angels now weep not at what was done to her but at how society misunderstood her. Every time the plain description gets close, the framework produces a new term, a new reframing, a new category. That’s not historiography.

    That’s what a closed system does. It doesn’t defend a position. It generates positions. The specific content of each defense is less important than the capacity to keep producing them. To ensure that plain description never quite lands, that there’s always another layer of complexity, another term, another reframing available.

    I don’t know what the solution is here or a path forward to better understanding.

    I guess one solution that has somewhat works is external pressure – or internal fracturing. The beneficial slavery literature didn’t collapse because abolitionists out-argued it in footnotes. It collapsed because the moral consensus outside the institution became impossible to ignore and enough people inside agreed and took action. I think the Gospel Topics Essays and the Saints books are some evidence that’s some of this is happening inside the Church. We have had to acknowledge certain facts because denial became untenable.

    Again, thanks for the good conversation here. I do appreciate the good faith engagement on this sensitive topic.

  18. Jonathan Green

    John, “Noting that a woman who refused a powerful man’s proposal had a son who rose to lead the institution that man founded is not complexity. It’s the system working as designed” doesn’t make logical sense, but it’s not the main topic here so let’s move on.

    I think you’re mistaken about what historical research involves, so you’re looking for a value judgment in my post that isn’t there. Where relationships are contested or ambiguous – including in the context of slavery – then yes, part of the process is clarifying someone’s status on the basis of documents or other evidence. That process of clarification isn’t a defense of anything, it’s just establishing the facts or the most likely interpretation of evidence.

    In the case of Helen Mar Kimball, there are contested facts and ambiguity, so some basic historical work is required before the argument about value judgments can begin. Helen seems to describe the sealing to Joseph Smith as “for eternity” only:

    I thought through this life my time will be my own
    The step I now am taking’s for eternity alone,

    (You asked above about signalling irony: I see now that I forgot the lines that make the ironic distance between adult author and teenage subject explicit:

    But could’st thou see the future & view that glorious crown,
    Awaiting you in Heaven you would not weep nor mourn.

    Sorry, my bad.)

    Of course that’s expressed as verse, and is a 52-year-old woman’s woman’s recreation of a 14-year-old girl’s thoughts, about which opinions can differ. But I think the preponderance of evidence points in the same direction: a sealing “for eternity” as part of Joseph Smith’s expansive project of linking the human family, rather than a case of child marriage similar to that of Chad’s ancestor impregnating a 13-year-old. Todd Compton regards the relationship between Helen Mar Kimball and Joseph Smith as unconsummated.

    So, about those value judgments. You bring up the question of consent, as does Helen: “This promise [of eternal salvation and exaltation for herself and her family] was so great that I willingly gave myself to purchase so glorious a reward.” But also: Her mother “had witnessed the sufferings of others who were older and who better understood the step they were taking…but it was all hidden from me.”

    Does that sound like how we want to organize sealings? No, it does not. We agree on that point.

    But I lean toward accepting the past on its own terms, and we shouldn’t overestimate anyone’s freedom of action in a context that was radically more impoverished and precarious than anything we know today.

    I don’t know how much more we agree on. I agree with Helen Mar Kimball that Joseph Smith was a prophet, and that the salvation and exaltation he spoke of are real rather than tools of manipulation, and that the principle of plural marriage allowed my grandfather to be buried between the graves of my grandmother and the wife he married after my grandmother’s death, secure in the knowledge that both relationships would continue after death. I don’t know how much of this is included in the frameworks or structures you mention and seem to regard as illegitimate.

  19. REC911

    my 2 cents on the subject based on my limited study of it….

    At best, polygamy is a hot mess. You had so many versions of polygamy/sealings/adoptions/marriages etc that were being done, I think we try and lump them all into one thing/type and we cant. It was also a moving target, meaning what they did and did not do changed over the years.

    To pretend we know/understand what actually happened or what people actually felt/experienced (good and bad) 190 years ago is almost impossible to get accurate based on our current world views.

    I am sure we have many members in the past who felt 100% that polygamy was from God and were blessed to be a part of it. The opposite can be found as we all know.

    IMO, none of us are qualified to correctly judge what they did and why. We have current scholars that are on completely opposite views of basic polygamy. (JS did it, no he didn’t)

    I have my own strong opinions and views based on my current knowledge and info today. I could be completely wrong.

    Polygamy is just a hot mess.

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