Mennonites' Minority Vision and the Outsider: Rudy Wiebe's Peace Shall Destroy Many and The Blue Mountains of China

Abstract

...Why must we...love only Mennonites? That question, asked by Thom Wiens, the young Mennonite protagonist of Rudy Wiebe's novel Peace Shall Destroy Many (215), poses the moral dilemma in ethnic literature: maintaining a minority vision without dehumanizing the outsider. In ethnic fiction, unlike mainstream fiction, the insiders are members of a minority group, and the outsiders are usually members of the dominant culture (or, perhaps, of another minority group seen from the point of view of this particular ethnic group). The writer of ethnic fiction faces the problem of portraying ethnic insiders' attitudes toward outsiders. How will ethnic insiders respond to those who have persecuted them? or those who have been similarly persecuted by the dominant culture? or those who simply do not share their customs and beliefs? Further, will the novels present judgment against or justification for the ethnic group's negative responses to outsiders? Rudy Wiebe, a contemporary Canadian writer, was born in 1934 in a Mennonite family on a homestead at Speedwell, in northern Saskatchewan, of parents who came to Canada from the Soviet Union in 1930. When he was four years old, the family moved to Alberta. Wiebe, whose first language was Low German, was educated at the University of Alberta and the University of Tuebingen in West Germany. In 1960 he received an M.A. in Creative Writing at the University of Alberta. Wiebe also received a Th.B. from the Mennonite Brethren Bible College in Winnipeg, edited the Mennonite Brethren Herald, and taught at Goshen College, Indiana. Since 1967 he has taught English at the University of Alberta. Wiebe's publications include, in addition to collections of short stories and a play, seven novels: Peace Shall Destroy Many (1962), First and Vital Candle (1966), The Blue Mountains of China (1970), The Temptations of Big Bear (1973) (for which he received the Governor General's Award), The Scorched-Wood People (1977), The Mad Trapper (1980), and My Lovely Enemy (1983).1 In his novels are depicted several ethnic groups: Indians, Eskimos, Metis, and Mennonites. In this essay, concentrating on the latter group (Mennonites), I shall examine