“We believe we are stewards of the Lord’s land. We may use it, but not abuse it.”33 Daniel’s eighteen-year-old son’s new buggy prominently displays a bumper sticker: “Milk, naturally!” For Workinger, the Amish are rational folk who make sane, healthy, and correct decisions in the midst of a nature-abusing society.
Strict Sectarians
Yet even the pastoral scenes that feed the nostalgia for a simpler life warn readers that living in an Amish sanctuary comes at the expense of values that outsiders hold dear. Some Amish-themed novels make clear that, despite any superficial resemblance to the American pioneers, the Amish are not rugged individualists committed to democratic ideals of personal freedom and equality, but rather they are uneasy, often frightened members of rigidly authoritarian, overly conformist, isolated and isolating settlements. The simplest of pleasures is suspect in the Amish world. In Beverly Lewis’s The Shunning, the young Amish girl Katie must be constantly on guard lest she hum forbidden tunes.
Whereas the dominant society values individuality, the Amish of many popular novels suppress it. In Gaus’s Blood of the Prodigal, Jeremiah Miller feels guilty for getting up early to enjoy the dawn, worried that this “could give him a sense of identity separate from the others.”34 Katie’s psychiatrist in Picoult’s Plain Truth asserts, “To the Amish, there’s no room for deviation from the norm. … If you don’t fit in, the consequences are psychologically tragic.”35
In these novels, the failure to fit in, to suppress individual difference, invariably leads to excommunication and shunning. With few exceptions, books by non-Amish authors present shunning as a final, unforgiving, and (for the outside audience) inconceivable act that destroys the life of the one who is shunned.36 Lewis’s protagonist in The Shunning “could remember her Mammi Essie telling about a man who had been shunned for using tractor power. None of the People could so much as speak to him or eat with him, lest they be shunned too. ‘It’s like a death in the family,’ Essie told her.”37 These stories typically minimize the role of baptism, church membership, disobedience, and confession, which are integral to understanding shunning, and they overplay its strictness. Gaus and Lewis both present characters who are banned without ever having joined the church in the first place. Nancy Drew and her friends are shunned by the Amish Kreutz family, which refuses to talk further with them—something Amish people would never do to English people.
For non-Amish readers, these works demonstrate the dangers of traditionalism. McDaniel’s Leah wants to ask Ethan why his family keeps watch over the body of his little sister before the funeral but “decided he probably didn’t know. He rarely knew the why of their customs, only that it was always done that way.”38 Lasky’s Meribah finds her life “defined not by herself but by others.”39 In fact, these popular novels imply that the Amish are a dour, supercilious bunch, eager to purge from their ranks those who ask too many questions or assert themselves.
Chaste Romantics
Novelist Helen Reimensnyder Martin first brought Amish romance to the literary world in 1905 with Sabina: A Story of the Amish. Over the next century, occasional Amish love stories appeared in print, but it wasn’t until 1997, when Beverly Lewis’s The Shunning appeared on the market, that Amish romance fiction—their front covers branded with petite Amish maidens alongside buggies or barns—emerged as a distinctive genre. Even as late as 2003, Amish-themed romance fiction was sparse, with novels appearing at the rate of one or two a year. Suddenly, in 2007, a burst of seventeen “bonnet novels” appeared on retail bookshelves, and the numbers skyrocketed to forty-five new titles a year by 2010 and then to more than one a week (eighty-five) in 2012. By 2010 a trinity of Amish romance novelists—Beverly Lewis, Wanda Brunstetter, and Cindy Woodsmall—had sold more than twenty million books. More than half of these were written by Lewis, whose success crowned her the godmother of this genre.40
The trio was not alone. At least forty other authors had two or more Amish love stories on their resumés as well. Written largely by evangelical Christian women for evangelical readers, Amish romance novels deliver an inspiring evangelical message of personal faith in Jesus, a chaste romance, and, in some cases, a critique of Amish faith. One Amish woman lamented, “Too often they have glaring inaccuracies and ludicrous plots and a disproportionate amount of widowers and Englishers wooing Amish maidens.”41 Yet “bonnet fiction” has influenced the lives of many readers. One Methodist grandmother, discussing how reading it has changed her life, said, “I don’t paint my nails as often, go shopping, or watch TV nearly as much as I used to.”42
The sudden success of Amish romance fiction raises the question: Why did interest in Amish romance, lying largely dormant for a century, suddenly explode after 2006? Valerie Weaver-Zercher tackles that question in Thrill of the Chaste. Among other factors, she points to the vast media coverage of Amish forgiveness in 2006 and the economic recession of 2008–2009. The swift Amish forgiveness of the gunman who shot ten young girls in the Nickel Mines Amish School stirred new interest in Amish spirituality. As bad times are wont to do, the recession pulled people back to the traditional values of parsimony, frugality, and simplicity, which the Amish seemed to emulate.
Other factors may be even more responsible for the popularity of Amish romance fiction. Hypermodernity, which many readers experience as an out-of-control pace of life, leads many to look for narratives about communities they perceive as “slower,” even as, ironically, hypermodern publishing and marketing strategies make possible the rapid-fire production of novels about such communities. Also, a gnawing disenchantment among evangelical Christians with what they consider the hyper-sexualized quality of much of popular culture increases the appeal of Amish romance fiction. As Weaver-Zercher cogently argues, the romance-laden but sex-free nature of Amish fiction provides evangelical readers with both a safe haven from the wanton sexual encounters of many mainstream romance novels and a reinforcement of the cultural values of sexual fidelity and chastity that they cherish.
A special shelf for Amish romance fiction in retail stores such as Walmart signals the financial significance of this genre. Valerie Weaver-Zercher
While other books mock, disdain, or merely question the group’s separatist lifestyle, some of the bonnet novels question, if not critique, the very religious beliefs that undergird Amish society. The covert message woven throughout much of the Amish romance fiction is that, despite the essential goodness of Amish life vis-à-vis mainstream American culture, Amish people are not truly Christians unless they have an evangelical-style “born again” conversion.43
One New Order preacher wishes that Amish romance literature “could be obliterated” because he is concerned that the excessive publicity might be “a means to our demise.”44 Even though a few Amish leaders such as this one have spoken out against these novels, some Amish bookstores sell them, and there is evidence that they are being read in many Amish communities, especially by young teens.45
Other Mediators of Amish Stories
Novelists are not the only English writers sketching images of Amish life. An abundance of Amish-themed children’s storybooks, coloring books, and Christmas books written by English authors for English readers have been published, especially since the last quarter of the twentieth century. Alongside these are literature aimed at tourists, photographic essays, and cookbooks, all mixing fact and fiction as they construct imagined views of a multitude of Amish worlds that appeal to audiences ranging from children at play to cooks at work in the kitchen.
Other writers using print to mediate the Amish to the outside world include the dozens if not hundreds of scholars and practitioners serving Amish people, as the citations in this book attest. Despite their commitments to impartiality and detachment, these mediators bring their own assumptions and biases—conscious or not—to their interpretations of the Amish worlds they construct. The historians have limited written sources, the informants used by anthropologists often represent only one point on the Amish spectrum, and the soci
ologists selectively gather data to advance theories about Amish life that they hope to prove. One of the special complications for researchers conducting fieldwork and doing long-term studies of Amish life is the fear of losing access to their subjects if their analyses are too critical.46 As we noted in the preface, by focusing on certain topics to the exclusion of others in this book, we too may be offering a lopsided view of Amish life.
Ex-Amish authors provide still other accounts of Amish life—what it was like to grow up Amish, the emotional struggle over joining the church, or the experience of excommunication.47 Those who left before joining or as children when their families departed describe Amish life at arm’s length. Regardless of their former spot in Amish society, ex-Amish people tell personal stories, narratives that were formed by caring or abusive parents, and exits from Amish life that are variously smooth or harsh.
Finally, depictions of Amish worlds also come from those further afield—from writers and translators outside of North America—adding still other images of Amish life. Counting both translations and original works, fifty-six nonfiction books on Amish topics have been published in languages other than English, including Dutch, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Polish, and Swedish. Interestingly, the twenty-eight titles in Japanese equal the total number of titles in all other non-English languages.48 In addition, dozens of Amish romance novels have been translated into other languages.
The sheer number of images of the Amish now available in print evinces both the expansion of print culture among the Amish themselves and the rising cachet of the Amish among outside readers. Mediated versions of Amish society vary greatly in the extent to which they approximate reality, and despite their best intentions to faithfully represent the Amish in published form, Amish and English writers alike fabricate particular versions of Amishness. All of these depictions of Amish life are transformed into commodities that are traded on commercial as well as cultural markets.
The plethora of print-based Amish images is surpassed only by those cropping up in late-night talk shows, circulating in cyberspace, and being purveyed by the marketers of Amish-related products. In the next chapter we explore how representations of Amish ways are commodified through various forms of geographic and virtual tourism.
CHAPTER 21
TOURISM AND MEDIA
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Amish families began moving to the rural community of Parke County, Indiana, during the early 1990s, putting down roots and establishing a new settlement. Soon one Amish woman began selling pies and other baked goods through a country store in the village of Bellmore. Sales were modest until the store owner began advertising the items as Amish-made—a move that greatly boosted sales. Uneasy with this merchandizing plan, the woman asked the storekeeper to remove the sign, which he reluctantly did, and sales slumped. Parke County had a well-established tourism industry centering on its claim to be the “covered bridge capital of the world,” and visitors could easily integrate the Amish newcomers into that bucolic image. But the Amish were not sure how or if they wanted to be part of that picture.
* * *
Searching for the Simple Life in Amish Country
One of the greatest ironies of Amish life is that a people committed to remaining separate from the world have attracted so much attention from it. For many North Americans—indeed, for visitors from around the world—Amish communities are must-see travel destinations. The three largest settlements alone (in Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Indiana) draw some nineteen million tourists and generate more than $2 billion dollars a year.1 Simply put, the Amish attract tourists, and the dollars they bring enrich entrepreneurial pockets and regional economies alike. Moreover, tourism has profoundly shaped Amish society itself.
Amish-themed tourism draws on and creates popular images of the Amish—images that might not always match the actual lives of Amish people and with which the Amish might not be entirely comfortable. The myriad representations of Amish life reflect in many ways the hopes and anxieties of mainstream Americans as much as, if sometimes not more than, the realities of Plain living. Regardless, such depictions, mediated by tourist enterprises and popular media, have entered the arena in which the Amish negotiate their identity in twenty-first-century North America.
Curiosity about the Amish is part of the larger American fascination with its own past that has given rise to a booming industry in heritage tourism. Spurred initially by the development in the 1920s and 1930s of such sites as Colonial Williamsburg in Virginia, Greenfield Village in Michigan, and Old Sturbridge Village near Boston, Massachusetts, heritage tourism is “traveling to experience the places, artifacts and activities that authentically represent the stories and people of the past and present.”2 In traveling to well-known Amish settlements such as Lancaster County, Pennsylvania; Holmes County, Ohio; Shipshewana, Indiana; or Kalona, Iowa, visitors find living links to the past in the horse-drawn buggies, bonnets, straw hats, and close-knit communities.3 Many twenty-first-century North Americans see the Amish as living examples of a simpler, older time in which families stayed together, mothers stayed home with children, and children grew up to be like their parents. For mainstream America, the Amish demonstrate the stability and traditional values of a pioneer past that many see as vanishing.4
Religion scholar David Weaver-Zercher links the growing interest in all things Amish to the American search for the simple life: “The simple living ideal has long functioned in American life as a serviceable reform ideology, challenging material excess, technological progress, and mass consumption.”5 Whereas in the early part of the twentieth century, tourists sought craft products that a generation before had been neither special nor mass-produced, nowadays visitors seek the simple life—unhurried, old-fashioned, safe—in communities that seem the antithesis of their own.
Non-Amish entrepreneurs have responded by creating symbolic Amish houses and even small villages that fulfill the nostalgic yearnings of tourists for a pioneer yesteryear. These representations of Amish farms, schools, and homes, sometimes with reenactors in Amish-like dress, help visitors imagine not only real Amish life but also the American past of their expectations. The “Amish” in these staged representations are clean, orderly, and very moral. Without TVs, video games, or disturbing posters on the walls of children’s bedrooms, their “homes” eschew the obvious consumerism of twenty-first-century American life. The Amish family, as presented for the tourist eye, works together, and the children are picturesque and obedient, seen but not heard. As one writer put it, “The seemingly simple way of life of the Amish is envied by members of mainstream society who are ‘plugged in’ but would really like to unplug.”6
Amish-centric tourism is a twentieth-century phenomenon motivated by the growing divergence between Amish society and American life. The 1936 publication of Henner’s Lydia, a popular children’s book by Marguerite de Angeli, helped to channel the national yearning for the simple life toward Amish society.7 Henner’s Lydia is filled with appealing illustrations of Amish folk engaged in everyday tasks such as sewing, plowing, walking to school, and caring for animals. It tells the story of a young Amish girl who takes a trip to the city to work at the market, sees many strange things, but is glad to come home to the safe embrace of her family. The tourists Lydia encounters at the market wonder at “homemade” apple butter, and Lydia marvels at “boughten” food. The chasm between Lydia’s small Amish community and the larger English world was already, in the 1930s, large enough that mainstream readers were eager for fictional bridges across it.
Widely reported Amish protests of public school consolidation further reinforced their image as old-fashioned traditionalists resisting the intrusion of modernity into their quiet communities. Yet while the New York Times and other publications characterized Plain life as “drab,” “odd,” or, at best, “quaint,” the public began noting Amish devotion to faith, tradition, family values, and simplicity. And while many Americans in the 1960s witnessed a world in which generations seemed a
lienated from each other and individuals feared losing control in an ever complicated modern society, Amish children were still working with their parents, doing their chores, and attending one-room schools. Besides, as mainstream divorce rates increased, the Amish continued to marry for life. Amish people—satisfied to stay at home in a world in which everyone else was moving up and moving on—soon became exotic and fascinating.
The exotic nature of Amish life helps to explain its power to entice visitors, because the appeal of a tourist destination rests on its difference from ordinary life.8 In one of the earliest tour brochures, the 1961 Meet your Amish Neighbors, Alma Kaufman and Flair Travel Consultants invited clients to meet the Amish, whose “insistence upon living 17th century lives in 20th century America keeps puzzling their neighbors.” The brochure adds that “climaxing the tour you will visit an Amish home where the lady of the house will serve cookies fresh from the oven. Then you board your bus for the return to Wooster [Ohio], your mind full of memories of people who have found happiness in a simple way of life.”9
The search for the simple life in “Amish Country” is aided by opportunities to experience the smells and sights of a bygone society. A recent guide to the Amish community in Perth, Ontario, for example, suggests that visitors “slow down and take a traditional horse-and-buggy ride to see the country as [the Amish] do.”10 A similar refrain in the 2012 Holmes County Map and Visitors’ Guide offers visitors “authentic tastes, goods, and culture … charming bed and breakfasts, friendly people and scenic drives” and a “comfortable pace.” Inviting tourists into an old-time world with a picture of a young Amish couple in a horse-drawn wagon, a Pennsylvania visitors’ guide declares “America Starts Here.” The text, underscoring “the simple, timeless pleasures,” is overlaid with the phrase “Plain and Simple” in larger print. Other states use similar text and images to market Amish Country and tourist-oriented businesses.11
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