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Sarah Churchwell says the American craze for Amish romance novels — ‘bonnet-rippers’ — is just one part of a strange new fashion for conservatism and abstinenceIt has been 25 years since Peter Weir’s hit film Witness, in which Harrison Ford plays a policeman who falls in love with an Amish woman while investigating a murder. In America the Amish existence has a romantic appeal, it’s a return to a simpler way of life, and Witness exemplified this in its most famous scene, when the detective and the Amish woman dance to Sam Cooke’s 1960 classic oldie ‘Wonderful World,’ a song that begins, appropriately enough, ‘Don’t know much about history’.Millions were seduced by Witness — it was one of the top 10 US films of 1985 — but since then, modern America’s flirtation with the Amish has blossomed into a true romance. The publishing industry, in particular, has been startled by the sudden popularity of a string of Amish romances — so-called bonnet books, or bonnet-rippers. Over the last few years, millions of novels in which young Amish girls fall in love in the rural fields of Pennsylvania have been sold — and the trend shows no sign of slowing down.The bonnet-book phenomenon isn’t due to a sudden surge of Amish readers, nor are they written by Amish writers. In fact some Amish preachers warn their flocks against the dangers of novel-reading, much less novel-writing, and bonnet-rippers sell well on Kindle — whereas the Amish don’t even have electricity. No — it’s the ‘English’ (as Amish call all non-Amish) who hunger for tales of chaste rural romance. Some authors check their facts with real Amish. Cindy Woodsmall, whose When the Soul Mends spent five weeks on the New York Times bestseller list last year, researches her books among the Pennsylvania Amish, and has a friend there who reads her manuscripts for her. So what’s the explanation for this Amish nostalgia? The most obvious answer is that it’s a fantasy world apart from the stresses of increasingly cluttered 21st-century life — no email, no mobiles, no need for fashion. Like the Mennonites, from whom they split, the Amish are cloistered farming communities who reject modern technology and continue to live, farm, dress and speak pretty much as they did in the 19th century. The women wear long handmade dresses and bonnets; the men wear beards and hats and follow a conservative religious faith, based on literal interpretation of the Bible.The irony is, though, says Woodsmall, that today’s Amish teenagers are tired of outhouses and would prefer indoor plumbing. Her friend has also informed her that the Amish don’t have expressions for ‘quirky’ or ‘women’s rights’. These examples seem telling: it is a world of rigid rules, especially regarding domesticity and gender roles. They don’t have a word for quirky, because they emphasise conformity; they don’t have a phrase for women’s rights because they emphasise — er, patriarchy. The popularity of bonnet-rippers has even spawned books about other cloistered communities, including the Amana, the Shakers, and the Puritans — evidently there’s nothing like a theocratic throwback to kickstart American publishing. Christian publishing was hit by the recession — one study said sales were down over 10 per cent in 2008 — but is bouncing back with these tales. ...
