REVIEW: JOURNAL OF
THE AMERICAL MEDICAL ASSOCIATION (JAMA), October 2, 2002
Books/Fiction
Time's Fool
by Terra Ziporyn, 231 pp, $28.79, ISBN 1-4010-0486-5, paper, $18.69, ISBN
1-4010-0487-3, Xlibris (http://www.xlibris.com), 2001.
Reviewed by
Eric
Howard Christianson, PhD
Time's Fool, about an early 20th-century venereal
disease specialist and a utopian community, is not your standard novel. We do
not encounter larger-than-life or humorous characters
in
fact, there is no glitz at all. But there is evidence of some unusual sexual
activity. So why should we consider reading Time's Fool?
To begin with, our author
is superbly equipped to tell a story that is richly textured and informed by
several scholarly traditions. Terra Ziporyn has undergraduate degrees in
biology and history from Yale University and received her doctorate in the
history of medicine and science from the University of Chicago, where she also
engaged in graduate study in biopsychology. She has made numerous contributions
as a medical writer, editor, and historian to making science and medicine
accessible to a wide audience. She is perhaps best known to health care
professionals and the general public for her Harvard University Press publications
on the health of women, families, and adolescents and her work as a former
associate editor in the Medical News & Perspectives section of JAMA.
Often authors of historical
fiction include a select bibliography to enhance the credibility of their work.
This may be one reason why Ziporyn does so, but she also encourages us to find
out more about a time that, for modern readers, probably will make truth seem
stranger than fiction. In her novel's imaginative reconstruction of the past,
we sense what it must have been like to live in a unique communal environment
whose members, while trying to avoid contamination from nonmembers, shared many
of the trials and tribulations of their counterparts in the outside world.
It is 1907 and the
fictional Dr Galton Morrow, a middle-aged venereal disease specialist, returns
to the Oneida Colony in upstate New York, where he spent his early years,
seeking clues about his origins in that once flourishing community. During the
19th century the United States witnessed the creation of many utopian groups
that often wielded stifling control over their members while seeking refuge
from a critical larger society. After the Civil War, John Humphrey Noyes, a
Christian perfectionist, started Oneida, attracted followers, and established
the rules for individual conduct in his commune. One of the characters in the
novel accurately relates Noyes' belief that "we shall begin by mating
within the inclosure, following the example of Adam and Eve, who began by
breeding close (for what other choice did they have?)." The Oneida
participants believed that children should be "fewer in number than among
the outsiders, and thus better and more scrupulously cared for . . . thus
leaving a simple pure and holy race." Members would share work and enjoy
open sexual relations, but "couplings" for procreation had to be
approved. This was known as stirpiculture and was contemporary with the
eugenics teachings of a Charles Darwin cousin, Francis Galton. There seems
little doubt how young Morrow got his name.
Long after leaving the
commune for the world of outsiders, Morrow continues to believe that, as the
apparent offspring of the approved coupling of Josiah and Lilly, he is truly a
successful example of the stirpiculture experiment. Such exclusive communal
practices, he maintains, would eliminate the "conspiracy of silence"
so notable on the outside. The reckless sexual cravings and liaisons of
nonmembers spread sexually transmitted diseases, which in turn cause sterility,
dermal lesions, and insanity and lead to a self-perpetuating silence rather
than explanation and prophylaxis. Although married, Galton becomes drawn to
Hope, another Oneida offspring half his age who announces that she has his
father's diary. Reading diaries written between 1869-1875 by his ostensible
father, mother, and other members of the "coupled" Oneida community,
and his relationship with Hope, force Morrow to question his origins and
purpose in life. Morrow does not totally escape from self-deception but does
move toward self-discovery.
Ziporyn's understanding of
late 19th-century Victorian attitudes toward gender roles and sexual practices
is derived also from diaries of the era, which are heavy with guilt, anxiety,
and hypochondria, yet show hope. She deals with concerns as pressing today as a
century ago. Just as we confront surrogacy and cloning, Ziporyn's characters
ask who are our biological parents and children, does it matter, and what are
we willing to do to create a better society?
AUTHOR/ARTICLE
INFORMATION
Eric Howard Christianson, PhD
University of Kentucky
Lexington