Emma Smith: My Story (2008)

The figure of Emma Hale Smith, the first and only legally recognized wife of the Prophet Joseph Smith, is a difficult figure for mainline Mormons to grapple with. While intensely loyal to her husband she was vehemently opposed to polygamy, actively worked against it in Nauvoo. During the difficult succession crises following Joesph’s death Emma sided not with the pro-polygamy Brigham Young, but rather with the monogamy supporting Sidney Rigdon. She would go one to"poison" her children against the mainline Church, lending her support, if not terribly proactively, to the RLDS movement under her son Joseph III. She would even have a twenty year marriage to a non-Mormon Major who ended up cheating on her, and whose son by a mistress she would raise as her own. It is perhaps no wonder that her most well known biography is titled Mormon Enigma.

The complicated character of Emma Smith made me particularly intrigued to see how she would be rendered in a mainstream Mormon film like this one. I had not high expectations, and perhaps that’s why the film surprised me so much. I was in fact so impressed immediately after viewing that I could probably have raved about the thing, yet I held back and gave myself time to ruminate on the proceedings, knowing full well that if I thought about it awhile my enthusiasm was likely to moderate. It did. This not to say that I came to view this as a bad film, it is in fact a good film, with an engaging narrative and satisfactorily inspiring to mainline Mormons. Neither is it a historically inaccurate one, I myself noticed only one out and out inaccuracy.(1) However it is a carefully framed film, in which the events of Emma’s life are carefully culled to present a faith promoting picture fit for a Relief Society class. Any difficulties in the Smith marriage (of which we know there were a number) are completely neglected, save for polygamy (which would have been THE ISSUE of the final two or so years of the marriage) which is dealt away with in a mere sixty seconds of dialog, in which an elderly Emma tells her daughter Julia the she "will not speak of it".(2) In short the marriage comes across as though it were something out of Jane Austin.

But the story of Emma was ultimately a sad one and the movie does capture a good bit of that, the constant moving and persecution, her estrangement from her fathers family, the deaths of a number of her and Joseph’s children, Joseph’s death, and Major Biedman’s subsequent betrayal, all ending in a death from cancer in 1879. She bore it nobly I think, this movie certainly wants to make that point. The film however does not deal with its subject figure in the fullness of her identity but rather gives us a sympathetic and faith promoting construct, a mythology that will provide for the believing Mormon an acceptable model for approaching Emma Smith. But what more could one expect, nor how much better or more complete could her life be rendered, we have no way of knowing for sure what went on behind those walls in Harmony, Manchester, Hiram, De Witt and Nauvoo. Indeed it is as true of Emma as it is of Joseph, no man knows her history. Three out Five.

1. The publishing of the early (in fact the first) anti-Mormon book: Mormonism Unveiled, is implied to be around 1832, when in fact it was published in 1834.

2. Such dialog is in itself not at all a stretch, as Emma didn’t like to speak of plural marriage and throughout her life insisted to her children that their father never practiced polygamy, but rather that such arraignments had been introduced to the Church by Brigham Young and others, something she knew to be false.