"Big Love" and "Good" Patriarchy

Last season "Big Love" really began to genuinely explore women's role in religion--particularly women's role in a highly-patriarchal religion which they believe and willingly embrace.  As I wrote last year, reproduction and its role in the polygamist collective were the hot topic throughout the season. The show's writers made a point of highlighting the way that the "principle" of polygamy subsumes female bodily autonomy for the sake of the family's entrance into celestial eternity--the more kids the family produces, the higher their immortal status. Therefore Nicki's choice to use birth control is seen as a huge betrayal, a blow against her clan. Amanda has a good summary of how the point is furthered by the plot with Sarah, Barb's daughter:

And if we don’t get the point, later Barbara, when talking to her daughter who is discovered to be sexually active, straight up tells her she can’t just see use her body how she wants.  It grates on the ears of anyone with a semblance of humanism in them; it’s meant to.

Although the family was nominally re-knit together at the end of last season, the wives' struggle between their own feelings and their beliefs and deferrals to Bill have reared right back up and are taking center stage once more. Barb--who married Bill as a regular old Mormon and has followed him doubtingly but dutifully down every path he's taken--is a brittle mass of contradictions, and the younger Margene is coming into her own financially and beginning to question the family structure. But Chloe Sevigny's Nicki, a pathologically-lying, contradictory mess of a character, is always the most compelling to watch. Now, the show is beginning to delve into the root causes of her erratic behavior. Her father, the late prophet of Juniper Creek, put her in the "joy book" for potential husbands to browse, when she was very young, and later married her off to the sadistic JJ, whom she loathed so much she gave up her daughter in order to escape.

On Sunday night, we learned more about Nicki's beliefs, and watched them unravel. Her brief romantic interest in a polygamist-prosecuting DA whose case she was trying to sabotage (yes, it's a soap) shattered her understanding of love and marriage. She had married Bill because she felt an alliance between their families was destined, she says. But now that her feelings for him are uncertain, she begins to doubt everything-- particularly whether her father, who essentially abused her, was a true prophet. She desperately tries to repair the cracks in her faith by imagining her pseudo-estranged husband taking his place. Nicki also wants to give her newly-returned daughter Cara Lynn all the chances she herself was denied, but her daughter has grown up inculcated with the FLDS mentality--Cara Lynn finds living with the Henricksons confusing because the women "talk back" to Bill (even if he has the final say). And even as Nicki begins to doubt her faith and upbringing, she and Barb are genuinely convinced that if their oldest daughter, Sarah, who is disenchanted with polygamy, gets married in a civil ceremony and says the words "'til death do us part," she will be denied salvation.

It's in moments like these that the show makes its most subversive case against patriarchal religion: we realize that the lingo of "choice" is all very well when women espouse it, but how much choice does one really have when one actually believes that one's father is God, or His prophet, and must be obeyed at every turn? As Nick Kristoff recently noted in his controversial column and follow-up blog post, sometimes religion merely aids and abets an underlying culture of misogyny. But sometimes, religion is directly to blame for misogyny. Nicki's struggle looks to be at the center of the show's message that those who practice fundamental religion can indeed be deeply human and worthy of sympathy--but that having the tenets of extreme patriarchy imbued at an early age is tantamount to a form of abuse, necessitating either blind allegiance, the trauma of disillusionment, or the wrenching pain--which Sarah, Nicki, and Barb all experience-- of having to break with your family. And this message can be expanded from religious patriarchy to any kind of patriarchy.

It's a pretty radical idea for a soap opera.