Thoughts on Mennonite in a LBD

Reading Rhoda Janzen's memoir riles me up a little bit. I feel at times like she's being a little too flippant, boiling Mennonites down to the stereotypical bits like borscht and a Quirky mother (as Jeff Gundy puts it). While it's fine and even fun to read these little Mennonite "inside jokes" (borscht- haha, it turns your tupperwares pink, etc) I get a little frustrated with Janzen for taking the easy way out with these things.

Of course, I justify what she does by saying she needs and was intending to reach a wider audience than just Mennonites, and in attempting to do so must de-dynamize some of what she writes.

At times it seems to me as though she's trivializing a community that I feel a very strong tie to, that I truly love and feel fortunate to belong in.

Which brings me to the question I asked in my previous post, which was, in thinking about MLBD in relation to Pearl Diver, Why does Janzen choose to tell the stories she does and where might she have taken a cue from Hannah and chosen to leave something out in respect to her community or someone she was close to?

Though Janzen does have some fairly interesting and honest and insightful things to say about growing up in a Mennonite family and really speaks to me as a reader in the way that I feel I can relate to the way she's grown up and the struggles she faces as a person nebulously of the Mennonite faith today, she still strikes me as taking advantage of the quirks and intricacies of the Mennonite community to sell her book (oh my goodness! a Menno in a little black dress -- so scandalous! she talks about tits, what a rebel!). I wish she didn't rely so heavily on generalizations and shock value for the success of the story.

Which all makes me feel more negatively in retrospect than I actually feel while reading the book. It's an engaging, entertaining read, which makes me struggle all the more with the question I asked in my last post, and feel like I'll be asking throughout this class, "How does a writer decide what stories to tell, especially a writer that feels they owe something to someone or some community?"

Pearl Diver Response

What interested me most about Pearl Diver is what affects me the most as a (wannabe) writer: Hannah's dilemma in knowing what to write, how to write about it, and who it affects. There is always the question, in writing, about what stories need to be told, what stories do people need to hear.
I was very interested to see how Hannah handled this, because she very obviously NEEDED to tell the story of her mother's murder. She had the same thing happen as I do when I have inspiration and find myself needing to write about something -- she sat down and just wrote and wrote and wrote. We get the impression that writing is cathartic for her (as, obviously, it is for lots of writers.. big deal, Annie), and so, by the end of the movie, regardless of the revelation that's just been made about Sam's innocence, I desperately wanted her to publish the story, if only because there is something about the story that needs to be told, and I can empathize with Hannah in the way that I don't want her to waste everything she's just done. Though, obviously, it made a much better movie that she tossed the pages into the pond, however painful it was to see all that hard work literally washing away.
This ending didn't help me at all grapple with "What is the role of the Mennonite writer?" because our example in Hannah leads us to believe that our role is first to be a Mennonite, and only if writing fits peacefully into that lifestyle should we attempt it. Or at least that's how I interpreted it.

This tied in well with our class discussion of Mennonite in a Little Black Dress today. Though obviously there were different circumstances involved in Rhoda Janzen's life and the lives of Marion and Hannah, I find it interesting to think about why Janzen told what she told of her story, and whether or not she should have taken a page from Hannah's book (not literally. Heh) and chosen to respect the feelings of people she loves or once loved, or even Mennonites in general, instead of cashing in on their stories, which is what I felt she was doing at times.

The other aspect of the movie that I found particularly interesting, especially as an ethnically Mennonite viewer who spent a lot of my most formative years bumming around the town in which this movie was filmed, was how the film painted and explored the differences between Hannah and Marion as characters and the worlds they inhabit, and used these differences to speak to larger issues of what it means to be a Mennonite today, and how "ought" Mennonites to behave/believe/dress, etc? Though at times, as an "insider" in this world, I found myself getting a little frustrated with the use of stereotype in portraying the sisters, I also found a lot of things about their identities resonating with me, as someone who is neither a city mouse Mennonite like Hannah or a country mouse Mennonite like Marion, but perhaps a college mouse for now.

THIS IS SO EXCITING

my very first blog.
it's going to be about mennonite literature.


EDITOR'S NOTE: "my very first blog." CORRECTION: this was misleading. this, apparently, is my 2nd blog, though hopefully it won't also vanish from my memory as did the first one.