Unsingular Subjects
by Andrew Walker-Cornetta
In recent years, the study of religion has been a particularly fruitful arena for exploring what’s often referred to as “intersubjectivity”—the sundry ways in which personhood is produced, experienced, and maintained as a dense weave of attachments and relationships. Through this psychoanalytic idiom, several scholars have found a way to reapproach otherwise out-of-fashion questions within our field about the terrains of belief and human interiority. They have pointed our attention to how religious actors’ conceptions and performances of their entanglements with others—from gods, to spirits, to kin—offer generative resources for imagining the self less as a possession that is secured through reason and will and more as something distributed, dynamic, and dependent—as relational. These interpretative moves have provided a way to continue in our attention to how religious subjectivities are lived and realized without reducing such processes to either individual agency or structural effects.
This work has also induced a rather challenging question: how is that one writes the inter-subject? What does it look like to attach persons to verbs who are other than singular? Individuals, yet not?
I’ve been made to grapple with these questions in my engagement with a particular source: a 1953 memoir that was penned by Hollywood megastar Dale Evans Rogers but that was authored, as Evans claimed, by her recently deceased child.
Angel Unaware tells the story of Evans, her husband (Roy Rogers), and their daughter, Robin, who was diagnosed shortly after birth with what her mother referred to as an “appalling handicap” (7). Doctors informed the Rogers that Robin was a “borderline mongoloid,” (the diagnosis that would soon be reclassified as Down Syndrome in a bid to shed its earlier racist description). In keeping with current medical wisdom, the Rogers were told that their child’s situation was hopeless, and many close to them advised that they place Robin in a residential institution and move on with their lives.
Against this wisdom, and in part thanks to their incredible wealth, the Rogers chose to bring Robin to join their growing family and to embrace her as one of its members. By their own reports, though they were initially troubled with feelings of resentment, shame, and dejection with respect to Robin’s condition, they quickly came to discern value in her person and, to their surprise, even her “handicap,” charmed by her affection and the tenderness she elicited from others.
However, this marked only the beginning of what the Rogers were to discover about their daughter. Tragically, Robin died just before her second birthday after contracting the mumps. And, in her state of mourning, Robin’s mother found that her child’s impress upon her life was very much unfinished. In the days that followed Robin’s death, Evans began to write furiously, under a power she did not recognize as her own.
What Evans recorded turned out not to be her own words, but Robin’s, relayed from beyond the grave, representing her child’s life story, just as she believed Robin had relayed it to her “Heavenly Father” after her death. In mediating these words, Evans became convinced that her daughter had been and was an angel, dispatched by God to “transform” and “strengthen [the Rogers family] in the knowledge and love and fellowship of God” (7).
But that was not all. Evans’ experiences as her daughter’s amanuensis soon persuaded her that the field of Robin’s mission was not exhausted by her family members, and in the months that followed her writing, Evans began a search for a larger audience for her daughter’s story. The result of these efforts became the third best-selling book in the United States, launched, of course, by the Rogers’ celebrity and all but guaranteed by a ringing endorsement (and introduction) from the equally famous preacher of positive thinking, Norman Vincent Peale. By the thousands and eventually millions, Americans gravitated to what the book’s promoters touted as this narrative of “triumph over tragedy,” a story in which icons of the American family transfigured the supposedly hopeless into lasting inspiration. In Robin’s voice, the same audiences discovered a warm and gentle reassurance—of which Peale himself was proud—that all of life’s circumstances stemmed from God’s “wonderful purpose” (12).
Scholars of intellectual disability who have written about Angel Unaware have rightly noted this book’s impact on the broader cultural politics of disability in the United States. The most prominent of its kind, Angel Unaware helped to spur a whole industry of memoirs from parents of children with intellectual disabilities in the postwar era, underwriting an emergent movement for this population’s rights. After its publication, the book and the Rogers became essential to raising the public profile of what was then known as “mental retardation,” precipitating far-reaching changes in public policy and popular sentiment.
Yet with respect to the book’s claims about its origins and Robin’s identity, most of these authors have been some combination of laconic and gently disapproving. While some have simply acknowledged the book’s identification of Robin as an angel as a mother’s attempt to find “transcendent meaning” in her child’s diagnosis, others have raised concerns about how the book’s depiction of Robin functions to occlude the Rogers’ real, “human” child behind a veil of supernatural power. The suggestion here is that Evans’ spiritual interpretation of her daughter’s impairment reiterates all-too-common violences whereby persons with disabilities are made to serve as symbolic resources or mouthpieces for the benefit of others.
Those of us in the field of religious studies are of course sensitive to such rhetorical operations—viz., the means by which particular vulnerable subjects are shaped into “repositories” for others’ ambitions and longings. My dissertation, which explores mid-twentieth century discourses surrounding intellectual disability, pays close attention to the sundry ends toward which putatively “able-minded” Americans mobilized their neighbors and loved ones who were identified as “mentally handicapped.”
Nevertheless, I am disinclined to allow our accounts of Angel Unaware to end with this kind of analysis, precisely because of the book’s own refusal of such interpretive clarity, whereby we locate all of our subjects in their proper places: actor and acted upon; subject and object; wielder of discourse and victim of it. To return to the conversations I introduced at the outset, what might we gain from attending to this source’s rejection of a tidy relation between the “real” Robin and the voice in this text; between mother and child; between child and angel?
Angel Unaware invites us to listen to how it is that one person might speak through another: to how a mother becomes subject to her daughter by way of the practices of dependence, love, and care; and to how such practices animate persons in ways that confound easy juxtapositions between vulnerability and agency, voicing and being voiced.
Indeed, this seems to have been what resonated with so many of Angel Unaware’s readers. Evans’ correspondence is dense with parents reporting their experiences of their children with intellectual disabilities’ capacities to shape those around them. Beyond simply laminating spiritual meanings on top of the supposed realities of impairment, Angel Unaware’s readers found in the book’s claims means by which to name and theorize their children’s abilities as matters which were not exclusively legible in terms of verbal communication or intelligence quotients, but as something that registered between people.
Viewed from this angle, a text like Angel Unaware surfaces as a provocation for scholars of both religion and disability to continue to think with care about how it is that people make up one another, to play with Ian Hacking’s useful phrase. Without eliding such sources’ and performances’ exploitative edges, or allowing “the relational” too mellifluous a ring, I find that this text presses me further into the challenges of determining who it is that is there in our sources and what challenges we face in listening to and summoning their—decidedly plural—voices.
Dale Evans Rogers, Angel Unaware (Westwood, N.J.: Fleming Revell, 1953).
Andrew Walker-Cornetta is a Laurence S. Rockefeller Graduate Prize Fellow at Princeton University’s Center for Human Values where he is a PhD Candidate in the Department of Religion with a Certificate in Gender and Sexuality Studies. His dissertation, "Spiritual Rehabilitation: A Religious History of Intellectual Disability in Postwar America," explores constructions of cognitive impairment in the middle of the twentieth century and the ways in which conceptions of disability interacted with broader cultural ideas about kinship, the nation, and personhood.