Gloriavale’s rose-tinted ceremony
Bachelorette handed a husband in once-over-lightly peek at community
TV review seem fine with it. Oh well!
Everything that has or will ever happen to these women in their lives is simply a result of God’s will.
“I can’t do anything to get pregnant,” claimed Angel, “God just gives me the baby when he wants me to have it.”
She gave birth to her sixth child on a still summer’s night. “It was easy,” said her husband.
Dove, who stole the show in last year’s Gloriavale: Life and Death with a painfully detailed account of the logistics of doing washing for over 500 people, was still hard at work in the industrial laundry this year. She also does shifts in the kitchen and as a seamstress, so she has her finger in the pie of just about every job available to a woman at Gloriavale.
A Woman’s Place followed her ascent to the most glorious job title of all: wife. The community’s council of elders met and decided to set her up with 17-year-old Watchful Steadfast, to be married in a doubleheader with her sister Jemima and newly-appointed partner Hopeful.
Dove described Watchful’s proposal as if she was delivering a victim impact statement: “I heard footsteps on the porch, then I heard a young man’s voice and my mum and dad talking . . . I went in and he was just standing there with the flowers.”
Dove is an endearing figure — individually, most Gloriavale members seem kind and likeable, even if the community as a whole still feels deeply sinister. Nowhere was this feeling more palpable than at the wedding.
As Dove and Watchful and Jemima and Hopeful slipped away to consummate their marriages, their celebrant offered an explanation of what they would be getting up to: “God has given something wonderful to the human female,” he crowed. “He has given her a seal, a guarantee! And that guarantee and that seal is to be given to her husband. He is the one to open it, and that is what marriage is about . . . ”
The man speaking was Hopeful Christian, aka Neville Cooper, a founding member of Gloriavale who in 1995 was found guilty on three charges of sexual abuse of young community members. No acknowledgement of that, or any of the myriad other dark clouds which hang over the community, during Wednesday night’s visit.
Instead, Gloriavale: A Woman’s Place ended up a lot like its subjects: unfussy and cheerfully uncritical, completely unwilling to rock the boat by asking a single tough question. Whatever it takes to be invited back next year.
[Gloriavale] women still live in submission to their husbands and do what they say, but [they] seem to be happy with that arrangement. Male narrator