Fawn Brodie and Five Other Self-Punitive Rebels (article)

Fawn McKay Brodie (1915-1981) shared three attributes with the five men who were the subjects of her biographies. All six individuals were extremely intelligent, were highly literate, and rebelled against or diverged from the norm for their families. Most biographies, including the five by Brodie, are about people who became famous because of great achievements. Their self-destructive and other maladaptive actions are best explained by the psychoanalytic concept of self-punitive feelings of guilt because of rebellion against or divergence from their early indoctrination.

Brodie’s books on Joseph Smith, Thaddeus Stevens, Sir Richard Francis Burton, Thomas Jefferson, and Richard Nixon are conventional biographies with the addition of psychological interpretations. The author was aware of psychological and psychoanalytic theories throughout her adulthood. An asset for her psychoanalytic interpretations was her treatment for chronic mild depression and difficulties with sexuality as a patient of a psychiatrist, Dr. Lewis J. Fielding, after she began work on Thaddeus Stevens.

The information in each book is documented by extensive endnotes or footnotes. The second book was published 14 years after the first, and the last three were each published seven or eight years after the preceding one. The long intervals are attributable partly to Brodie’s concurrent fulfillment of her domestic role as a wife and mother. Much interesting information is contained in a biography of the biographer, Fawn McKay Brodie: A Biographer’s Life by Newell G. Bringhurst (1999).

Brodie’s first biography, No Man Knows My History: The Life of Joseph Smith (1945), gives convincing evidence for lies by Joseph Smith, the founder of the Mormon Church. He fraudulently attributed to God the source of his many “revelations.” He

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practiced polygamy, contrary to his denials. In the second edition of the book, published 26 years later, a Supplement interprets the lies as expressions of inner conflict between what he really was and what he most desperately wanted to be. Smith blurred the distinction between fantasy and reality.

In the second psychobiography, Thaddeus Stevens: Scourge of the South (1959), Brodie summarizes the character of Stevens in the first chapter. His ethical ideology induced him to urge free public schools and emancipation of Negroes. Previous biographies had condemned him as a Radical Republican who advocated punitive Reconstruction following the Civil War and the impeachment of President Andrew Johnson. A clubfoot and paternal desertion suffered by Stevens contributed to his self-hatred, sympathy for enslaved Negroes, and passionate preoccupation with punishment. “Indignation served him instead of love, and a sense of injustice was his substitute for hope.

”Next, Brodie wrote about Sir Richard Francis Burton in The Devil Drives: A Life of Sir Richard Burton (1967). The final chapter summarizes his character. Burton’s childhood was mostly in France instead of his native England, with a loving but restrictive mother and a selfish, indolent father. In accordance with the book’s title, The Devil Drives, Burton became a compulsively adventurous explorer and diligent writer of many books. He mastered many languages and assumed many different disguises and roles. After several romantic involvements and much sexual experimentation, at the age of 39 he married a woman who, like his mother, adored him but was sexually frigid. He became sexually impotent with her soon afterward. His initial craving for independence from her, expressed by prolonged absences, changed to dependence as he aged and became physically debilitated.

In the fourth psychobiography, Thomas Jefferson: An Intimate History (1974), the first chapter summarizes the highly complex character of Thomas Jefferson. Subsequent chapters present convincing evidence that Jefferson, while he was a widower, committed miscegenation as the father of the seven children of his slave, Sally Hemings, and adultery with an English wife, Maria Cosby. Most prior biographers denied both sexual liaisons by Jefferson. His most prominent conflict was between his advocacy of individual freedom and his ownership of many slaves. In common with many other slave owners who desired to be dominant in their social and sexual relationships, he yielded to the temptation that his slave was the optimal sexual partner. The book also identifies influential childhood experiences: he was 14 years old when his father died and he had a hostile relationship with his mother. Jefferson’s adult behavior featured leadership of and friendship with other men, intellectual and solitary interests, secrecy about himself, and financial extravagance.

Brodie summarizes the character of Richard Nixon in the first and last chapters of her fifth psychobiography, Richard Nixon: The Shaping of His Character (1981). Brodie despised Nixon and characterized him as a compulsive liar. In contrast, she liked and envied the subjects of her other psychobiographies, especially Thomas Jefferson and Sir Richard Burton. The Nixon book describes extensively his childhood and early career. He learned to conceal his bitterness in response to being abused and rejected by his father and recurrently abandoned by his mother. He apparently became sexually impotent in his marriage prior to his presidency. Brodie describes suggestive evidence for homosexual activities during his presidency with his friend Bebe Rebozo. Brodie’s terminal illness forced her to curtail the account of Nixon’s life after his eight years as vice president.

I believe that Richard Milhous Nixon’s lies were tactics to conceal his bitter feelings and to win elections. His principal conflict was whether to imitate the Quaker pacifism and good deeds of his mother (his middle name was his mother’s maiden surname) or the combative, angry behavior of his father. He mostly tried to be as unlike his father as possible. When he was elected president, he stopped using his middle name. This rejection of his mother’s family name probably expressed his decision to identify with his father by being a strong and aggressive president.

I admire all five of Brodie’s psychobiographies. A limitation attributable to human nature is that her insightful psychoanalytic interpretations do not sufficiently describe a conflict that the author shared with each of her five subjects. All of them were strongly indoctrinated in expected behavior during childhood. Their subsequent lives were dominated by rebellion against this expected behavior. Masochistic self-punishment was a prominent

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symptom of their conflict.

Fawn McKay Brodie was raised as an obedient and well-behaved Mormon girl in Utah. An uncle, David O. McKay, became president of the Church. She and her older sister, Flora, were close companions throughout childhood. Shortly before Fawn’s 21^st birthday, she married Bernard Brodie, who was an atheist with Jewish parents, and on the same day she was awarded her master’s degree in English literature at the University of Chicago. Soon afterward she renounced the Mormon religion. She was excommunicated by the Mormon Church following the publication of her psychobiography of Joseph Smith. Her choice of five men as subjects of her psychobiographies was influenced by her feeling that she “‘should have been a man’” (Bringhurst, Fawn McKay Brodie, p. 269).

Fawn Brodie’s self-punishment was indicated by episodes of depression throughout her adult life. “She felt ‘compelled’ to do research and writing, even though she found it incredibly hard to do” (Bringhurst, Fawn McKay Brodie, p. 268). She died of rapidly spreading cancer at the relatively young age of 65 years, slightly more than two years after her husband died of the same disease at the age of 68 years.

Self-punishment was also evident in Brodie’s five subjects. Joseph Smith responded to persecution by identifying himself with the great martyrs and did a number of things ultimately contributing to his own martyrdom. He borrowed large sums of money and alienated several important supporters by excessively authoritarian behavior. He frightened neighbors by forming an independent religious society with a militia to defend itself, and was killed by a group of neighbors. Thaddeus Stevens was chronically angry and aggressive. His moralistic, irascible behavior prevented him from attaining his ambition of election to the United States Senate. Sir Richard Burton was a bold explorer who repeatedly risked his life. He spent money extravagantly and his financial enterprises failed. He impaired his health by heavy drinking. Thomas Jefferson had several episodes of depression and withdrawal from political activity. He injured his right wrist while with Maria Cosby. He drank expensive wine with companions in spite of his steadily mounting debts. Richard Nixon alienated many people by his excessive deceit and aggression behind a façade of piety and virtue. He injured a knee after his nomination for president in 1960. He repeatedly became intoxicated near the end of his presidency.

Self-punishment may be a human universal. It is a special affliction of rebels against conventional or expected behavior.

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