Sinking "Like a Corpse" or Living the "Soul's Full Desire": Shaker Women in Fiction and History

Abstract

Th is article examines the disparity between fi ctional and historical accounts of Shaker women. Th e fi ction, infl uenced by pervading social beliefs like the cult of true womanhood, usually portrays a woman who becomes dissatisfi ed with her Shaker life, concluding that it is a sort of living death that isolates her from love, marriage, and motherhood. Historical records reveal independent and fulfi lled women who became Shakers for religious reasons but also for secular opportunities unknown in the outside world, including companionship, refuge from sexual predation, and a chance for professional or governmental fulfi llment . When well-read Americans in the 1850s heard the name Shakers, strange images arose in their minds: reclusive religious zealots, fanatical whirling dervishes, or cold and emotionless adherents to an outlandish faith. For the next one hundred fi fty years readers of fi ction about the Shakers would not have taken serious exception to these images, unless they had actually become acquainted with some real Shakers, who seldom resembled their fi ctional counterparts. By the 1790s the historical Shakers, some twenty years after arriving in America with their founder Ann Lee, had developed a system of communal living that enabled them to establish in the next half cen- tury nearly twenty fl ourishing communitarian villages from New England through Ohio to Kentucky. Novels and short stories about Shaker life seldom describe the success of these communities, focusing instead on members who felt trapped and frustrated. Th ese stories, examined in the fi rst third of this essay, particularly distorted the image of the Shaker woman by showing how Shakerism extinguishes her soul, if not her life, how its faith and customs restrict her to an isolated village life, and how it denies her the fulfi llment of love and motherhood. Historical documents, described in the last two-thirds of this study, contradict most of the published fi ction, specifi cally revealing that Shaker women seldom remained interned in an isolated village, that they