Sarah Churchwell says the American craze for Amish romance novels — ‘bonnet-rippers’ — is just one part of a strange new fashion for conservatism and abstinence
It has been 25 years since Peter Weir’s hit film Witness, in which Harrison Ford plays a policeman who falls in love with an Amish woman while investigating a murder. In America the Amish existence has a romantic appeal, it’s a return to a simpler way of life, and Witness exemplified this in its most famous scene, when the detective and the Amish woman dance to Sam Cooke’s 1960 classic oldie ‘Wonderful World,’ a song that begins, appropriately enough, ‘Don’t know much about history’.
Millions were seduced by Witness — it was one of the top 10 US films of 1985 — but since then, modern America’s flirtation with the Amish has blossomed into a true romance. The publishing industry, in particular, has been startled by the sudden popularity of a string of Amish romances — so-called bonnet books, or bonnet-rippers. Over the last few years, millions of novels in which young Amish girls fall in love in the rural fields of Pennsylvania have been sold — and the trend shows no sign of slowing down.
The bonnet-book phenomenon isn’t due to a sudden surge of Amish readers, nor are they written by Amish writers. In fact some Amish preachers warn their flocks against the dangers of novel-reading, much less novel-writing, and bonnet-rippers sell well on Kindle — whereas the Amish don’t even have electricity. No — it’s the ‘English’ (as Amish call all non-Amish) who hunger for tales of chaste rural romance. Some authors check their facts with real Amish. Cindy Woodsmall, whose When the Soul Mends spent five weeks on the New York Times bestseller list last year, researches her books among the Pennsylvania Amish, and has a friend there who reads her manuscripts for her.
So what’s the explanation for this Amish nostalgia? The most obvious answer is that it’s a fantasy world apart from the stresses of increasingly cluttered 21st-century life — no email, no mobiles, no need for fashion. Like the Mennonites, from whom they split, the Amish are cloistered farming communities who reject modern technology and continue to live, farm, dress and speak pretty much as they did in the 19th century. The women wear long handmade dresses and bonnets; the men wear beards and hats and follow a conservative religious faith, based on literal interpretation of the Bible.
The irony is, though, says Woodsmall, that today’s Amish teenagers are tired of outhouses and would prefer indoor plumbing. Her friend has also informed her that the Amish don’t have expressions for ‘quirky’ or ‘women’s rights’. These examples seem telling: it is a world of rigid rules, especially regarding domesticity and gender roles. They don’t have a word for quirky, because they emphasise conformity; they don’t have a phrase for women’s rights because they emphasise — er, patriarchy. The popularity of bonnet-rippers has even spawned books about other cloistered communities, including the Amana, the Shakers, and the Puritans — evidently there’s nothing like a theocratic throwback to kickstart American publishing. Christian publishing was hit by the recession — one study said sales were down over 10 per cent in 2008 — but is bouncing back with these tales.
Wanda Brunstetter, one of the most popular authors of Amish romances, told reporters that her readers say they like her novels not just because they offer escapism, but because they offer lessons during straitened economic times. ‘People are learning from the Amish novels how they can simplify and set their priorities straight,’ Brunstetter said.
In fact, these romances are full of lessons about domesticity, family values and monogamy, either instructing young women, or affirming for older readers that they made the right choices. In A Merry Heart, a woman who is worried about her daughter explains her feelings to her cat: ‘I think Miriam could learn a lesson from you, Callie. She needs to take the time to relax more, enjoy each precious moment, and carefully search for the right man to love.’ The cat has carefully searched for the right man to love? Never mind. You get the picture. Miriam has fallen for Nick, who isn’t Amish. (‘I find you to be quite fascinating, Miriam, yet your ways are a bit strange to me and hard to understand.’) Luckily, after she delivers a series of lectures about Amish life, he concludes tolerantly: ‘It sounds pretty hard to live like that, but I suppose if you’re content and feel that your way of life makes you happy, then who am I to say it’s wrong?’
It might seem that the Amish romance craze couldn’t be more different from the widespread resurrection of vampire tales in recent years, spearheaded by the phenomenal success of Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight books and films and the new HBO series True Blood, based on Charlaine Harris’s Southern Vampire Mysteries, which is now being shown on Channel 4. But these trends are, in fact, different aspects of the same cosmology. Forbidden love is the name of the game; and abstinence is how to win. Harris takes her heroine Sookie’s moral issues very seriously, especially the sexual ones. It’s only the bad bloodsuckers who have unthinking promiscuous sex. Harris is, incidentally, the senior warden of St James Episcopal Church in Magnolia, Arkansas.
Meyer’s Mormon values similarly define the moral framework of the Twilight books, in which the modern young couple with Victorian names (Bella and her lover, Edward) embrace each other by embracing abstinence. Bella — a supposedly modern American teenager — also cheerfully accepts all domestic chores for her single father (including cooking, laundry, house-cleaning and family accounts), while welcoming the love of a vampire who wants to kill her — but heroically restrains himself. Meyer has famously claimed that her tale came to her in a dream: ‘I saw two characters talking about the fact that they were in love. He was telling her that his problem was that he wanted to kill her because she smelled so tasty.’ Some might consider this her problem, as much as his.
The cover of Twilight shows two hands offering an apple, and Meyer has explicitly said that the cover comes from Genesis — which she helpfully explains is the part of the Bible that comes after the table of contents. For Meyer, the apple represents ‘forbidden fruit’ — and certainly sex is forbidden in these books. Twilight may seem to be set in the modern world, but its outlook is Victorian. As a feature in Time magazine noted, ‘Bella never stops gasping and swooning and passing out and waking up screaming from nightmares. Her heart is always either pounding or stopping.’ The writer took this as an indication of normal adolescent histrionics, but there is another interpretation: Bella is as much a 19th-century throwback as any Amish heroine.
So it all fits together more neatly than at first it might appear — the vampires and the Amish, two sides to one cultural coin. The currency of a cultural backslide. And neither are going away. ‘To inject some bucolic appeal to your outfits,’ said one Parisian fashion journalist recently, ‘opt for simple outerwear, a great pair of lace-ups, and a fun wide-brimmed hat that, when pushed back to sit at the crown of your head, feels more chic than country.’ You can tell that the Amish influence is serious when it has the courage to appear on the catwalk.