Moving the Mountain, Charlotte Perkins Gilman
Over the next five months, I’m reading and reviewing ten pioneering works of science fiction written by women. This is my sixth pick. Stay tuned for more.
Moving the Mountain (1911) is a novel whose plot is thinly veiled over the author’s political vision for the future. After thirty years of amnesia, its protagonist John wakes up in 1940 to a new order, finding himself in a world where people work two to four hours a day, there is equality between the sexes, and near-universal happiness. John’s sister Nellie gives him a tour of the new world, where he is horrified by the status of women.
John has no qualms voicing his discomfort with gender roles to the reader and others. After seeing his sister for the first time in thirty years, he writes “at least she hasn’t forgotten that woman’s chief duty is to please.” He regularly pens sexist gems such as “women always will have the last word,” words that ring disturbingly familiar more than one hundred years later. He is perturbed after Nellie describes a group of career women and “it was not once mentioned whether they were married or not, ever had been or ever wanted to be.” John challenges his sister on scientific progress, saying “precisely what have you lately discovered? That Horatio at the bridge was Horatia, after all? That the world was conquered by an Alexandra — and a Napoleona?”
Yet on subjects besides gender, John is unquestioning. Unfortunately, without a character who engages more critically with its utopia, Moving the Mountain falls flat. John asks Nellie, “You achieved Socialism without blood-shed?” She responds, “We did. It did not happen all at once, you see; just spread and spread and proved its usefulness.” Nellie also states that society “killed many hopeless degenerates, insane, idiots, and real perverts, after trying our best powers of cure.” Nellie’s contradiction between the assertion that the utopia was achieved non-violently, and the admission of mass executions is never addressed. She later reveals that society prevented “the birth of defectives and degenerates. Certain classes of criminals and perverts were rendered incapable of reproducing their kind.” She also shares that the “blind and crippled through no fault of their own” are housed in asylums and that society doesn’t “make that kind of people any more.”
John is initially taken aback that his sister is now the president of a college but has no reaction to the fact that the utopia comes at the cost of murder, eugenics, asylums for the disabled, and other horrors. By the end of Moving the Mountain he “grew to find the world like heaven” but I did not. In Ursula K. Le Guin’s short story “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas,” a caricaturized utopian world is predicated upon the misery of a single child. Most who live in Omelas accept this fact upon learning it in their teens, but some cannot abide it and leave the utopia forever. While Le Guin’s caricaturized utopia reverberates with a rich set of relevant moral questions, Gilman’s earnest utopia is unrealistic, irrelevant, and forgettable because of the unquestioning acceptance by the author and her characters of the trade-offs made to achieve it.
