Pearl Diver -- The Writer's Dilemma

The first time I saw the closing scene of Pearl Diver, in which Hannah and Marian walk to the pond, and Marian casts the sheets of her manuscript onto the water, I was furious. Here was Sidney King, a young Mennonite filmmaker--and a Goshen College grad no less--retelling this old, old story of the Mennonite community pressuring the writer to sacrifice her work for the sake of communal harmony. "Hannah's agent must have kept a copy," I thought. Or, "Hannah must have photocopied it before sending it off and this is just a gesture." Even J. K. Rowling, too poor to photocopy the manuscript of her first Harry Potter book, typed out a second copy.

The reason King had chosen to create Hannah as a writer passionately attached to a manual typewriter now became painfully obvious--so he could build up to this ending of her sacrificing the only copy of her manuscript. In this case it also means the sacrifice of a six-figure advance, one big enough to pay all of her niece's medical bills, and a book that would have made her famous. But what do you expect from a woman wedded to a manual typewriter? She might just be eccentric enough to throw away a book she'd written and take up work as a farm hand for a Russian Mennonite immigrant.

Through the conversation on the class blogs about this scene, I've begun to see it in a new light. Hannah's manuscript has already done important healing work by the time she sacrifices it for her sister in the same pond where her sister once risked her life diving for Hannah's lost pen knife with the pearl handle. It has given Isaac enough information about the murder for him to realize that the robbers were after the valuable Russian necklace he'd brought as an engagement present to Rachel, the girls' mother, and then buried in a lunch box in his cornfield when he learned she was married to someone else. His telling this story to the sisters enables Marian to confess to Hannah that not only did she not live up to the Dirk Willems story when she had a chance, but as the traumatized daughter of a murdered woman she allowed her mother's murderer to drown in a manure pit without saving him. In fact, she made sure he would drown by moving a plank that might have served as a life line for him.

After Marian divulges her secret to Hannah she sleeps the sleep of the forgiven, and Hannah's story, while useful, is rendered inaccurate. Perhaps that's why she tosses the story--the truth of the story is too important to Hannah personally for her to be satisfied with a version she now knows is false. Rewritten to incorporate her sister's story, the book would expose Marian. Hannah is unwilling to do this. The healing that her story brings about among a few important people in her life would be undone by publishing a now false version. It's a somewhat contrived plot, and yet the dilemma it articulates is at the heart of every good memoir--whose story is this, and how much can a writer tell without harming others? The Mennonite value that comes forward at the end of King's film is that no work of art is more important than a human relationship. After Hannah casts her manuscript on the waters, Marian takes her hand--something she has not done since the night of the murder when she chose to carry her own shameful secret--for a deed that no one else would have faulted her for doing. For a writer's meditation on the writer's dilemma in Pearl Diver, see Julia Kasdorf's review.

While Hannah's position seems unfair to many of us, Rhoda Janzen's recent memoir, Mennonite in a Little Black Dress, is causing us to ask the same question--what is the role of the Mennonite Writer in relation to the community?--from a different angle. Stay tuned for upcoming discussions on this.