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LITR 5431 Literary & Historical Utopias
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1st
Research Post 2019
Angela Pennington
17 February 2019
Utopic Visions in Utah
The four-episode docuseries
Three Wives, One Husband follows a
group of fundamentalist Mormon families living in the Rockland Ranch community
in the Utah desert. This intentional community has two major goals, as outlined
by its members: to live in a harmonic environment populated by a group of people
with shared values, and to prepare for self-sufficiency in the event of an
apocalypse—an
eventuality that all families within Rockland Ranch accept as a part of their
religious beliefs. There are three aspects of fundamentalist Mormon communities
that I feel connect to our study of literary and historical utopias: their
intentional isolation from the “outside world,” the collective support that the
community members provide for each other, and the attempt to “build a nation”
which was described by the mothers of Rockland Ranch.
As Armand L. Mauss notes, the Church of Jesus Christ of
Latter-day Saints arose out of “basic quest for order and authority in radically
new communities that would insulate their adherents from the social
disintegration endemic to Jacksonian frontier America”
(1267). The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints began as “one of
many nineteenth-century efforts [in America] to create a new society in response
to perceived social disorder … The Mormon utopian vision was formed by a desire
to restore individual and community order and by a belief that all could be part
of the immediate building of Zion [the Land of Israel] on earth” (Dunfey 525),
and the founding members of the original Mormon communities viewed their
building of Zion as more important than any individual earthly goals the members
may have previously had, often releasing all rights to their properties and the
properties of their heirs to the church (America's
Communal Utopias 139). In addition to a sharing of communal property, a
member’s “self-control and self-denial for the good of the group” were
considered to be of extreme importance within the original Mormon communities,
and these values persevere within the Mormon fundamentalist sects today. How,
though, would plural marriages contribute to the restoration of social and
religious order?
Fundamentalist Mormons view plural
marriage as a part of “their religious and ideological commitment to a utopian
society” (Dunfey 524). As Julie Dunfey describes, plural marriage can only be
understood through a survey of “the utopian origins of the Latter-day Saints
church” (525). Mormon women of the nineteenth century “pointed to the corruption
of Gentile society from which they had removed themselves to create a new
society patterned upon relationships which would restore order,” with defenses
of plural marriage often citing stories of “infanticide, alcoholic and abusive
husbands, desertion, divorce and prostitution as evidence of the corruption of
the larger society” (Dunfey 527-528). Only “a return to the patriarchal marriage
system of the Bible” could “purify corrupt society” because “every woman would
be able to marry a worthy man able to support her” (Dunfey 528). Mormon women
saw, and see, themselves “as curbing the passion of depraved men … argued that
injustice was built into monogamy, an attitude which hinged on their view of
men” as being “depraved” (Dunfey 529). This was not a far departure from the
popular ideology of the Victorian era society at large, which “stressed the pure
and passionless qualities of the ideal woman in contrast to the lust of man”
(Dunfey 528-529), ideology linked to “a fear of disease and eugenic control”
(531). Eugenic control was made more possible by plural marriages, early Mormon
women argued, as it “allowed women to share the few good men” (Dunfey 532).
The mothers of Rockland Ranch are still
attempting to build a utopic nation of children from these “few good men,” just
as their foremothers have, through plural marriages. Dunfey notes that “the
contention that polygamy produced healthier, better children brought the
argument in favor of plural marriage back to the utopian mission of the
Latter-day Saints Church” (532). Still, just as in the nineteenth century, “only
the first wife [has] any status, legal or otherwise, in the larger society,” and
an inability to secede from that larger society continually creates tension
between sister-wives (Dunfey 525).
Works Cited
America's Communal Utopias,
edited by Donald E. Pitzer, The University of North Carolina
Dunfey, Julie. “‘Living the Principle’ of Plural
Marriage: Mormon Women, Utopia, and Female
Mauss, Armand L.
American Journal of Sociology, vol. 89, no. 5, 1984, pp. 1267–1271.
Three Wives, One Husband.
KEO films, The Complete Camera Company, 2017.
Netflix,
