Voice in the Wilderness

Sessions's journal documents her experience as a frontier midwife/healer and polygamous wife during the period of westward migration and the colonization of Utah. It enacts a poetics capable ofaccommodating the continual improvisations of existence in a geographical, spiritual, and literary wilderness. Thejournal also marks Sessions's linguistic disenfranchisement when the imagistic voice ofprivate and communal event is finally silenced by the dictates of larger social and religious order. It thus represents a world of social possibility and celebration now all but lost. Patty Bartlett Sessions's journal begins with the mass migration to the Salt Lake Valley in early 1846 and ends 21 years later in the settled and organizationally readjusted center of the western Mormon community. Besides marking the catastrophes of frontier life, 24-hour midwifery, and polygamous marriage, the journal enacts the linguistic binds of public and private accounting, of spiritual and earthly accountability, and-for the critic as well as for Sessions herself-raises questions of genre delineation. Although Sessions was known by her contemporaries as both a spiritual and a medical authority and was said to have received angelic visitations, she had no obvious interest in discussing method or cure or in recounting her life as an introspective plotting of spiritual struggle; her day book is neither exclusively private nor self-aggrandizingly public. Although she was a leader within the evangelical subcommunity that developed during the trek west, her account of its events of spiritual feasting are celebratory rather than dogmatic. Other than the often cinematic drama ofthejourney itself, what distinguishes Sessions's journal from similar autobiographical documents is partly its evasion of the fixed generic status assigned to conversion narratives, memoirs intended for public appraisal, and the wholly private notational auto

Aesthetics · Archaeology · Art · Drama · Frontier · Introspection · Literature · Period (music) · Poetics · Poetry · Political science · Sociology · Wife · Wilderness · American Constitutional Law and Politics · American History and Culture · History · Law · Mormonism, Religion, and History · Psychology