Mary Griffith’s Three Hundred Years Hence: Utopia, Women, and Marriage

• Date: 01 November 2018
• Published date: 01 November 2018
• Author: Lillian M. Purdy
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/ajes.12245

Mary Griffith’s Three Hundred Years Hence:

Utopia, Women, and Marriage

By LiLLian M. Purdy*

Abstract. Mary Griffith’s Three Hundred Years Hence (1836) is the first

attempt by an American woman to create a literary utopia. With this

work, Griffith begins a literary conversation on women and marriage,

including women’s rights and gender equality, and she imagines new

laws and reforms that strengthen marriages, married life, and family

satisfaction. Griffith’s work situates marriage as an integral part of a

successful environment and imagines solutions to national concerns

regarding women that will be addressed later in the century. Griffith

tackles slavery, alcoholism, and divorce laws, as well as issues that

directly affected married women, particularly white married women. In

the novel, women have earned equality without negatively affecting

domesticity or female purity. Women’s daily lives are improved,

educational opportunities are opened to women, children’s lives are

valued in the new community, and order in the home and community

serve as the basis for utopia. Griffith’s vision is bold even as it is limited

because, while women are often the creative minds behind the utopian

improvements, in the plot itself, women are silent. Other weaknesses

in the plot include the oversimplified solution to slavery and the

ambiguous resolution of the fate of Native Americans within the utopia.

Tragically, in her vision, Griffith has eliminated both groups from the

community. Griffith mixes futuristic technological improvements with

biting commentary on contemporary social issues and the treatment of

women. Griffith uses the genre of utopian vision to present solutions

to many challenges facing 19th-century white women.

Introduct ion

Mary Griffith’s (1836) Three Hundred Years Hence is significant in part

because it is the first known utopian text by an American woman.

American Jour nal of Economics and Sociology, Vol. 77, No. 5 (Novembe r, 2018).

DOI: 10 .1111/ajes.122 45

© 2018 American Journ al of Economics and Sociology, Inc.

*Professor of English and Director of the Bridge Program at Louisiana College in

Pineville, Louisiana. She holds the J.E. Hixson Professorship in English. Email: lillian.

purdy@lacollege.edu

1210 The American Journal of Economics and Sociology

More importantly, the text anticipates and speaks to several reform

movements of the 19th century. Written during the early years of

America’s era of antebellum reform—primarily the 1830s through the

1850s—the text illuminates problems facing the white middle class

and begins a quest by American women to use imagined utopian

communities to suggest improvements for the nation. The institu-

tion of slavery, women’s rights, temperance, capital punishment, and

laborers’ working conditions were all issues that gave rise to reform

movements, and Griffith addresses these areas of concern particularly

as they affect women; the text thus becomes her response to some

of the social and political issues facing Americans. She portrays the

growing tensions in the United States in the 1830s and often accu-

rately anticipates new legislation as well as national concerns that

became important in the decades following the publication of Three

Hundred Years Hence (THYH).

Griffith’s vision is bold even as it is limited because, while women

are often the creative minds behind the utopian improvements that

are described, they are silent in the plot itself. Griffith mixes futuristic

technological improvements with biting commentary on contempo-

rary social issues and the treatment of women.

Using a utopian setting, Griffith begins a literary conversation on

women and marriage, including women’s rights and gender equality.

She imagines new laws and reforms that could strengthen marriage,

married life, and family satisfaction. Griffith’s work situates marriage

as an integral part of a successful environment. Unlike later utopian

novels written by American women that drastically change marriage

expectations or eliminate the institution altogether, Griffith’s novel

portrays cultural and physical improvements that support families

and enhance the United States without profoundly affecting the basic

structure of an 1836 marriage.

Griffith uses the utopian impulse for improvement and creates an

American utopia where women have gained gender equality and have

invented, created, or directed many of the initiatives. Her efforts do

not fit the current definition of feminism, but she begins an American

female tradition of imagining a better place. In Griffith’s text, wom-

en’s lives are improved because of the imagined social, physical, and

cultural changes. Griffith’s vision offers new opportunities in the lives

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Mary Griffith’s Three Hundred Years Hence

of the lower classes, but most of Griffith’s improvements for these

groups are part of larger goals in other reforms. In this work, the

women are absent while the male host interprets the work of women,

which makes the text at times appear to patronize women instead of

empower them.

Defini ng a Utopian Societ y

The plot of THYH takes place in both 1836 and 2136 and displays

physical, social, and marital changes that have been instituted in the

intervening years. The text involves a 31-year-old man, Edgar Hastings,

who is happily married when a steamboat explosion causes an ava-

lanche that buries him beneath many layers of ice. When Hastings

awakens 300 years later, he meets his descendent, also named Edgar

Hastings, who takes him to visit Pennsylvania and New York where

Hastings is shown the improvements and changes that have occurred

over the last three centuries. In the last lines of t he text, Hastings

discovers that he has just fallen asleep, the whole incident has been

a dream, and it is still 1836. The implication is that Amer icans can

immediately begin to incorporate the futur istic improvements and

thus see changes for men, women, and marriages in the 1830s.

While Griffith’s text is the first attempt by an American woman

to create a fictional utopian community, her work follows a histor-

ical tradition of seeing America as a utopia. The early settlers saw

the New World as a blank canvas, ready to be developed. In 1630,

John Winthrop and other Puritans sailed from England to the New

World, and at departure, Winthrop preached the sermon “A Modell of

Christian Charity.” In it, he explains his vision for the future colony and

his plan to create a successful theocracy. He refers to the new place

as a “City upon a Hill,” a biblical reference from the New Testament.

The scriptural text, Matthew 5:14, refers to followers of Christ who are

to set themselves apart and serve as an example and inspiration to

others. For Winthrop, North America had a special, spiritual destiny to

create a utopia for others to imitate. Two hundred years later, Griffith

also recognizes the utopian possibilities for her nation and creates her

own version of a secularized “City Upon a Hill.”