Sex, Money, and Food as Spiritual Signposts in Doris Betts's Sharp Teeth of Love

Abstract

am a storyteller whose themes are informed by faith, but I do not preach it, writes Doris Betts. In fact, one reader mailed back one of my novels complaining that it was filthy; with a magic marker she had blacked out everything she found offensive. When I saw that the first casualty was the mere mention of Jack Daniels bourbon, I knew there was no need to look any further. I mailed her a refund check (Sunday School 966). That disgruntled correspondent would likely uncap her marker to expurgate much of Betts's work: judicial malfeasance, abortion, kidnapping, child molestation, murder, even cannibalism have figured in the three short story collections six novels she has published since launching her writing career in 1953. She does not hesitate to depict the sex lives of her characters, either; her 1994 novel Souls Raised From the Dead, for example, raised eyebrows among the members of my undergraduate fiction class at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. When Betts visited the class, students quizzed her about Souls' descriptions of a divorced highway patrolman's sexual encounters with a newspaper reporter a riding instructor. once taught typing to highway patrolmen, the author informed the class, and I learned that they don't spend their Saturday nights sitting around knitting (26 April 1999). A commitment to verisimilitude is not, however, Betts's only reason for writing explicitly about sex, even she enters her seventies. If anything, I've gotten more frank with time;' she confesses. It's advantage to get older. Now you have gray hair, nobody's nearly so shocked, except that they thought with age you'd get over it! [...] I also find students somewhat surprised that we senior citizens even remember sex--they really think after 35 you're dead from the neck anyway (Greene 63-64). When such students express surprise about the frequency candor with which she addresses the subject, Betts has a ready reply. My answer is usually to quote C. S. Lewis, she explains, who said God made the pleasures. For me sex is a part of the celebration of life. I can imagine vivid lives that lack sexual fulfillment, but it seems a shame, a waste, to me, deep down (Greene 63-64). Although many Christian readers will affirm Betts's view, some will nevertheless question the persistence with which she depicts single characters' sexual experiences. Why in particular, they might ask, would a Christian write so uncritically about the sexual activity of even her never-married protagonists? Betts's most recent novel, The Sharp Teeth of Love (1997), provides the most complex satisfying answer to that question. Sharp Teeth carefully examines its lapsed Catholic heroine's attitude toward sex alongside her attitudes toward money food to reveal the material world's theological significance. As the book's central character, Luna Stone, develops understanding of the roles sex, money, food play in healthy human relationships, she finds herself also moving toward spiritual redemption. Whether Luna's changing sexual, financial, dietary behaviors make possible her budding faith or the reverse is difficult to determine; instead of arguing for a causal relationship, Sharp Teeth uses the triad of sex, money, food to suggest that physical spiritual wholeness are all of a piece. While grounding her protagonist's eternal salvation in such earthly matters may surprise some church-going readers, Betts is mining a deep tradition in Christian thought. Quaker theologian Richard Foster acknowledges in Money, Sex, Power: The Challenge of the Disciplined Life that while many Christians regard subjects like prayer worship possessing an aura of spirituality, they regard sex terribly 'secular' at best. Considering sex alongside money power, Foster asserts that as we come to these 'secular' issues we are treading on holy ground. To live rightly with reference to money sex power is to live sacramentally (xi). …