E.B. Moore’s An Unseemly Wife provides a unique glimpse into Amish history
JANE STEEN
“Ruth gulped for breath, her eyes wide. ‘Ach, mein Gott, mein Gott in Himmel!’ The words flooded out, her grade-school English lost.”
In An Unseemly Wife, E.B. Moore’s lyrical exploration of her own family’s history, the Holtz family’s peaceful Lancaster County life is torn apart from the moment the first English people step onto their land. Their purpose is peaceful—to buy good horses for their journey west—but to Ruth Holtz they come as the traditional enemies of her Amish people, representatives of those who tortured and persecuted her ancestors, bringers of fear. Like the others of their Order, the Holtzes are committed to a life of separateness from the English community and it’s an abundant, sufficient life in all but one respect—the Amish do not have enough land in Pennsylvania to accommodate a high birth rate, and Ruth’s husband Aaron predicts the day when it will be impossible to provide farmland for every son.
Moore thus sets the scene for Aaron’s decision to join an English wagon train heading for Idaho. Aaron, she told me, “was a forerunner in the Amish expansion movement even though he failed . . . the Amish have stayed in small tight-knit communities, but these communities are now scattered all across the country.” Despite this expansion, Aaron’s prediction has come true in the present day: Amish farms, Moore says, “have been cut in smaller sections with trailers instead of stone farmhouses, and the people who were once farmers must work in town or on neighboring farms.”
Yet despite this pressure on Amish communities, Moore told me, “their commitment to staying separate is the same as Aaron’s. The communities are strong in their core beliefs, though not everyone is capable of retaining this kind of intense commitment, and I admire those who do.” As the Holtz family set out on their journey west, it is that commitment to separateness that is confronted and tested at every turn, and it’s within Ruth’s heart that much of the battle is fought.
Ironically, Ruth is the one who initially resists Aaron’s decision to leave. She is afraid of the dangers of the trail and of the English, and it’s Aaron who says the English don’t bite. She sees Aaron as betraying the Order, while lamenting her own inability to be the submissive wife she was brought up to be. It’s Ruth’s love for Aaron that wins her grudging consent, not her conviction that he is right to leave, and she carries that anger onto the trail as she is forced to give birth in a wagon and ignore the charity she’s been taught when faced with the hardships of the Appalachian people. The questions with which Ruth and Aaron’s community challenge them are central to the novel—how do you leave while staying separate? How can a life built on the foundation of a community hold up against the individualism inherent in the pioneering movement?
Once they join up with the wagon train, it is Ruth who struggles the most with keeping herself separate from the English. Aaron, Moore told me, “had no intention to break from his beliefs. He simply wanted each child to have the blessings he had. Ruth was the one who had to confront a crisis of faith.” Her first encounter with English women is a half-humorous, half-poignant series of misunderstandings, but as she spends time with Hortence, Sadie and the other women, their shared experiences and even their enmities create a bond that competes with Ruth’s commitment to her own background.
Ruth’s journey west ends in death and failure, a fate shared by many would-be pioneers, but for E.B. Moore, “the narrative of Ruth’s journey is confined to her personal failures, not that of the nineteenth-century vision. Many who made the trek found that the frontier lived up to their expectations. Ruth tried to accept the English ideal, and in so doing, she tainted her well-established vision of paradise, bringing into question her ability to ever reclaim what she’d lost.” Confronted with the task of caring for Aaron’s body, she is still torn between her resentment of his decision and her adoption of it: “But then she’d taken his vision as her own, and the two seemed one, love and trust, two sides of the same knife, the knife now gutting her . . . .” She takes the blame of Aaron’s decision upon herself: “She’d chosen his way over her own, over the Fold, chosen him over the Ordnung’s commandment.”
And in the end, it’s the Amish Ruth comes to reject, the English now a familiar presence in her life and representing a way forward as a return to her old life never could. It might be possible to see Ruth’s decision as another kind of Amish expansion, a carrying of beliefs and traditions into a world where a commitment to separateness is not necessary, where one community no longer needs to fear the other.
