The Shunning by Beverly Lewis

First published: Minneapolis, Minn.: Bethany House, 1997

Genre(s): Novel

Subgenre(s): Literary fiction

Core issue(s): Amish people; coming of age or teen life; freedom and free will; marriage; obedience and disobedience; self-knowledge; women

Principal characters

• Katie Lapp, born Katherine Mayfield, the protagonist
• Rebecca Lapp, the woman who raised Katie
• Ella Mae Zook, Katie’s great-aunt
• John Beiler, an Amish bishop, a widower with five children, engaged to marry Katie
• Laura Mayfield-Bennett, a wealthy woman living in New York, Katie’s birth mother

Overview

At age twenty-two, headstrong Katie Lapp struggles within the Old Order Amish community of Hickory Hollow (population 253) in rural Lancaster County, Pennsylvania. Although with her love of music, her passion for color, and her dreams of elegant fashion and embroidered fabrics, she has never been comfortable within the plain-style Amish life, she was baptized at age nineteen and is preparing to marry the community’s bishop, John Beiler, a forty-something widower with five children. The love of her life, Daniel Fisher, with whom she had shared her love of music, disappeared three years earlier in a boating accident in Atlantic City. She does not love Beiler (the marriage’s unpromising premise is underscored by the wedding being prepared even as an unforgiving winter descends), but she is willing to accept the submissive role long assigned Amish women.

When Katie is rummaging the attic for her mother’s wedding gown, she comes across a rose-colored satin infant’s gown embroidered with the name “Katherine Mayfield.” Her imagination ignited, she queries her mother, who tells her nothing. The next day, Katie discovers the gown is gone.

Even as preparations for the wedding continue, Katie runs afoul of the strict Amish code that forbids performing music other than hymns. As Katie conducts the family’s buggy along a back country road, she absently sings aloud a beautiful melody, the last she and Daniel had written (music, she insists defiantly, is part of what God created in her). One of Bishop Beiler’s children happens to overhear her and inadvertently reveals the offense during a dinner with both families. Such willful sinning is addressed in public confession, conducted by her future husband, who lectures Katie about the need to turn away from such godless inclinations and then insists that she destroy her guitar to restore her to the faith. Later, however, Katie cannot do it.

Meanwhile community members have noticed a fancy white car with a chauffeur and a woman with auburn hair, dressed in fur, an outsider, trying to locate a mother named Rebecca with a daughter in her early twenties. The woman stops at the general store and happens to meet Katie’s great-aunt, Ella Mae Zook, a wise and loving woman, nearly eighty years old. The woman gives Ella Mae a letter to pass on to the woman for whom she is looking. Ella Mae takes the letter to Katie’s mother. Rebecca knows the secret that has haunted her is about to be revealed. Long ago she had been taken to a Lancaster hospital to have her baby because of complications feared to be too much for an Amish midwife to handle, and her baby daughter had been stillborn. There, Rebecca had met a distraught teenager from a privileged family in upstate New York who had just delivered a healthy girl but who could not keep her. Rebecca and Samuel had agreed to take the baby (along with five hundred dollars) and give her a loving home in the Amish country that the teenage girl had fallen in love with. The letter confirmed that the outsider was Katie’s birth mother and that she was dying and wanted to find her daughter. Knowing the adoption was never legal, Rebecca burns the letter.

The wedding is now within days, and Katie again confronts her mother about the mysterious dress. Rebecca tearfully tells her the story. Katie receives the news calmly; it confirms what she had long suspected: that she did not belong among the austere Amish. During the wedding ceremony, when the minister asks if anyone objects to the union, Katie speaks up, saying that she is a sinner, willful and disobedient, and not worthy of the bishop. She flees the church and that night takes her horse to the city and goes to a dress shop, where she tries on a luxurious dress. When she returns to her home, she wants to be called Katherine and refuses to wear her kapp, setting free the fiery auburn hair that had always distinguished her from other Amish girls.

The community reacts quickly, imposing the harsh sanction of a Meinding, or shunning. Katie is to be ostracized from any social contact for six weeks and then given a chance to repent and return to the wedding arrangement. Over the next few days, Katie languishes in total isolation. Only Ella Mae breaks the imposed quarantine and tells her grand-niece that she now has the world to explore and her own self to discover. The old woman also tells her that her birth mother has been in town looking for her. When Katie’s brother coldly refuses to let her even hold his newborn, Katie knows she must leave. Guitar in hand, she departs tearfully (her mother relents despite the shunning and gives her daughter the money from her birth mother, which has accumulated in the bank to eighteen hundred dollars). At the end of the novel, Katherine is renting a spare room, ready now to find out who she is. Her heart is sad, but her soul is free.

Lewis provides a closing scene in which Katie’s birth mother, in a mansion in the Finger Lakes, wonders whether she will ever meet the daughter she now regrets abandoning. After Katie has departed, Daniel Fisher’s sister receives a registered letter from Daniel, saying that he is alive and wants to return to the community—and to his Katie—to ask forgiveness.

Christian Themes

Before The Shunning, Lewis was known as a prolific writer of inspirational young adult fiction that encouraged readers to embrace the love of Christ and the good news of the Christian gospel. The Shunning was her first foray into adult fiction. Although she meticulously re-creates Amish ways (particularly the courtship and marriage rituals) and lovingly describes her native rural Lancaster, Lewis is not Amish. Hence, she does not endorse its lifestyle—her narrative disputes the sect’s rigorous tenets, specifically its views of women, its suspicion of music (Lewis is a classically trained pianist), and its harsh xenophobia. Daniel Fisher has introduced Katie to an entirely different reading of the Christian God (he has been secretly attending a Bible study group), a reading that suggests it is faith—not works or commitment to a church community—that opens the soul to God’s love. In tracking the difficult liberation of Katie Lapp, Lewis parallels Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter (1850). As in that text, a woman of powerful emotional and artistic sensibilities is trapped within an oppressive patriarchal religious community (suggested in both cases by a wild mane of auburn hair kept under a cap), where passion must be suppressed to maintain a place (the discovery of the rose-colored infant’s gown early in the novel parallels the Surveyor’s discovery of the scarlet letter). Clearly Lewis cannot endorse Christianity when it becomes unyielding and cruel, suggested by the shunning, a vehicle for enforced conformity.

Here the powerful message of Lewis’s Christianity must be indirectly perceived: Christianity encourages, rather than discourages, expressions of the heart, a respect for both sexes, a celebration of aesthetics (beauty, color, music), the embrace of the powerful pull of love (although Lewis shies away from sexuality), and ultimately the consecration of each individual as an expression of the love and wisdom of the Creator. Unlike Hester Prynne, however, Katie is finally freed.

Despite the lack of tidy resolution involving Katie and her birth mother and the sudden resurrection of Daniel Fisher (Lewis continues Katie’s story in two subsequent volumes in the Heritage of Lancaster trilogy), the book is complete in itself—Katherine does not need her birth mother or her boyfriend to begin her journey. Rather Katie is ushered toward a moment of emancipation appropriate to Lewis’s conception of the individual as a celebration of God’s handiwork.

Sources for Further Study

Garrett, Ruth Irene, and Rick Farrant. Crossing Over: One Woman’s Escape from Amish Life. San Francisco: Harper, 2003. Helpful, often disturbing nonfiction account of the oppressive conditions of women within contemporary Amish culture (set in Iowa).

Hostetler, John A. Amish Society. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993. The landmark definitive examination of the Amish culture with particular attention to the psychology of a shunning.

Lewis, Beverly. The Confession. Minneapolis, Minn.: Bethany House, 1997. The second volume in the trilogy tracks Katie’s reunion with her dying mother in upstate New York and her disappointing discovery of the materialism in her mother’s lavish lifestyle.

Lewis, Beverly. The Reckoning. Minneapolis, Minn.: Bethany House, 1998. Closing volume of the trilogy in which Katie reunites with Daniel Fisher and makes her peace with her Amish upbringing.

Ryan, Mary Beth. “Lancaster County Roots Fertile Ground for Former Residents: Contemporary Christian Writer Bases Heritage Trilogy on Amish Ways.” Lancaster New Era, September 25, 1997, p. D1. Lewis discusses the Heritage of Lancaster County trilogy and her other writings, including books for children, as well as her beliefs and values.