Many recent theorists of utopian thinking have pointed out that the strength of a literary utopia lies not so much in the particular social structure it portrays, but rather in how the utopian vision is portrayed. Since narrative strategies and formal devices encode ideological messages, the form of the literary utopia is at least as significant as its content. As Tom Moylan says:

… the utopian process must be held open as a symbolic resolution of historical contradictions that finds its importance not in the particulars of those resolutions but in the very act of imagining them, in the form of utopia itself.¹

Not surprisingly, then, analyses of Gilman's most well-known literary utopia, Herland (1915), have shown how the novel's formal and structural properties contribute decisively to its subversive utopian message.² The fundamental premise of such approaches is that imagined utopias are most effective and most subversive when they function less as blueprints than as thought experiments which throw critical light upon the status quo, and open up space for imagining new possibilities. Hence recent critics have tended to privilege and even prescribe a form of ‘critical’ utopian thinking which eschews narrative closure, authority and monologism in favour of emphasizing process, relativity and dialogism. Moylan, for example, argues that:

The task of an oppositional utopian text is not to foreclose the agenda for the future in terms of a homogenous revolutionary plan but rather to hold open the act of negating the present and to imagine any of several possible modes of adaptation to society and to nature based generally upon principles of autonomy, mutual aid, and equality.³

Valuable as such theories are, they undoubtedly reflect the current postmodern distrust of master narratives, and have led to the privileging of some utopian texts over others. In Gilman studies, the current appeal of Herland's self-reflexive narrative strategies has led to a critical neglect of her other utopian novels, Moving the Mountain (1911) and With Her in Ourland (1916). These two novels are less easy for critics to embrace because of their range of politically incorrect messages (especially about race and class), and their programmatic mode of utopian thought. Most recently, Carol Farley Kessler has described Herland as a ‘full-blown utopia for women’ which, she says, was prepared for by Gilman's previous utopian works, including Moving the Mountain.⁴ Thus Kessler says: ‘In Moving the Mountain Gilman sketches social changes that she would present more fully in Herland.’⁵ But if Gilman called Moving the Mountain a ‘baby Utopia’,⁶ it was not because she saw its vision as incomplete, but rather because she wished it to ‘grow’ in the minds of its readers. In fact, Gilman presents the utopia of the novel (America in the 1940s) precisely as a blueprint for the reader, an outline of a whole, workable society, or what Raine Eisler has called a ‘pragmatopia’.⁷Moving the Mountain—much more than Herland—aims to provide a whole picture and a broad scope. Whereas the fictional utopia in Herland functions not primarily as blueprint but as a narrative strategy to facilitate social critique, the utopia portrayed in Moving the Mountain functions above all as an authorized and naturalized ‘realizable utopia’.⁸

According to Moylan, such fictional utopias, designed to function as blueprints, fail to operate oppositionally but rather remain complicit within hegemonic power structures. He says: ‘a specific, homogenous utopian vision would be a betrayal of radical utopian discourse and would only end up serving the instrumentalization of desire carried on by the present structures of power’.⁹ But by looking closely at Gilman's conception of the nature of utopian thought, we can begin to see why she chose this particular narrative form for her novel. It enables us to see this choice not so much as a failure to appreciate the relationship between narrative form and content, but rather precisely as the desire to marry the two together as intimately as possible.

Moving the Mountain—this neglected novel—written only four years before the critically acclaimed Herland, surely raises the question of how utopias which are presented as blueprints are to be viewed critically today. Are such utopias to be written off as failures and written out of theories of utopian thinking? One way of avoiding this is to re-emphasize the importance of content (as opposed to—or as well as—form) in utopian texts. Whilst theories of utopian thought which centralize the importance of form are without doubt necessary and valuable, the tendency of many readers is nevertheless to focus primarily on content (even when the text demands attention to form). This means, I believe, that utopian texts whose purpose is to function as a blueprint can still have subversive effect, an effect that arises less from their form than from their thematic content.

My purpose, then, is not to write Moving the Mountain off as a failure because of its non-conformity to the currently privileged paradigm of critical utopia, but rather to examine the novel to see why Gilman chose to make her utopia function as a blueprint, and to examine the ideological implications of such a strategy. As I shall show, Gilman's narrative strategies were deliberately chosen because of her theories about religion, social evolution, the utopian potentials of America and the nature of utopian change.

In 1898, Gilman had written to her future husband, Houghton: ‘I am immensely interested in finding sound sociology as I see it in the teachings of Christ; because I have long felt that our next advance must come through development of existing religious feeling and not in contradiction to it.’¹⁰ Her last published book was His Religion and Hers (1923) in which she argued that religion, as presently practised, did not direct people towards their real divine purpose as she saw it: that of ‘race improvement’. Consequently, she said, they would have to be taught to replace ‘the remote, uncertain, contradictory view concerning a book-derived God’ with a ‘sense of social responsibility, a social conscience, hope and purpose for society, knowledge of the laws of social evolution, lives governed and guided in accordance with those laws’.¹¹ It is undoubtedly indicative of Gilman's central concern with religion that Moving the Mountain's protagonist, John Robertson, returns to America from exile in Tibet, a place always associated in popular consciousness with esoteric religion and other-worldly spirituality. Moving the Mountain explicitly fuses the concept of utopian change with that of religion and spiritual revelation, by depicting utopianism as a ‘New Religion’ which makes real in the here-and-now the hitherto distant, always deferred, possibility of heavenly bliss. The ‘Preface’ to the novel makes explicit Gilman's conception of utopian thinking as a counter-discourse to the Judeo-Christian religious tradition:

One of the most distinctive features of the human mind is to forecast better things … This natural tendency to hope, desire, foresee and then, if possible, obtain, has been largely diverted from human usefulness since our goal was placed after death, in heaven. With all our hope in ‘Another World’, we have largely lost hope of this one.¹²

The novel's portrayal of utopianism as a form of non-theistic ‘Religion’, as the ‘right expression’ of the primordial life-force’, or ‘Social Energy’,¹³ places Gilman within a tradition of feminist utopian writers for whom envisioning alternatives is a political and spiritual imperative and for whom, as Adelaide Proctor says, ‘Dreams grow holy when put into action’.¹⁴ She can be seen as a precursor of late twentieth-century feminist writers like Ursula Le Guin, Penny Casdagli and Sally Miller Gearhart, for whom utopianism is intrinsically spiritual and theologically revisionary. Gilman's belief in the ability of the ‘change of mind’ effected by utopian thinking to change ‘real people, now living’¹⁵ corresponds to Gearhart's belief, as a spiritual feminist, that utopian envisioning can be visionary in a way which directly effects change. Gearhart's depiction of a lesbian-separatist utopian community in her 1979 novel, The Wanderground, is premised upon the assumption that utopian ideas become real, and that utopian envisioning is itself a political act. In Gearhart's utopia, to dream, to imagine, and to ‘envision’ are all to create reality: one of the utopian Hill-women's dream-vision of snakes takes place in the narrative as a ‘real’ experience; another ‘envisions’ a plant which physically and actually exchanges her fatigue for energy.¹⁶ These episodes function as metacommentary upon the process of utopian envisioning itself, asserting that envisioning can create reality, can make ‘what is not yet’ into ‘what is’.

Similarly, the crux of Gilman's utopian philosophy in Moving the Mountain is the reality of ideas. One of the utopians insists:

Ideas are the real things, Sir! Brick and mortar? Bah! We can put bricks and mortar in any shape we choose—but we have to choose first! What held the old world back was not facts—not conditions—not any material limitations, or psychic limitations either. We had every constituent of human happiness, Sir—except the sense to use them. The channel of progress was obstructed with a deposit of prehistoric ideas. We choked up our children's minds with this mental refuse as we choked our rivers and harbors with material refuse, Sir.¹⁷

The precise change which has enabled the utopia to come about is nothing more, and nothing less, than a change in ideas: ‘It involves no other change than a change of mind, the mere awakening of people, especially the women, to existing possibilities’.¹⁸ Gilman's narrative purpose is, of course, to change the ideas of her readers, and she aims to do this by providing them with the information, the conceptual ‘bricks and mortar’ with which to build a concrete utopian reality. Thus Gilman's textual decision to depict a blueprint in Moving the Mountain is illumined by her conception of utopian thought as a counter-religion based not on mystery and unknowing, but on total knowledge and full, unimpeded vision:

‘In place of Revelation and Belief,’ she said slowly, ‘we now have Facts and Knowledge. We used to believe in God—variously, and teach the belief as a matter of duty. Now we know God, as much as we know anything else—more than we know anything else—it is The Fact of Life.’¹⁹

Hence the novel's narrative is conceived as a broad overview, a ‘species of digest’ written by John Robertson (as he returns to America from an amnesiac sojourn in Tibet lasting thirty years) in order to ‘establish … a coherent view of what had happened’.²⁰ After reading Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward (whose utopian figure also to a large extent functions as a blueprint), Gilman commented, ‘I like a few salient and relevant facts—and then far seeing generalisation’, and as Carol Farley Kessler points out, Moving the Mountain provides a ‘panoramic view’ of a utopian society.²¹ John travels widely, experiencing the delights of the utopian world. But these experiences are largely reported to us, in the guise of his totalizing digest, rather than ‘experienced’ by the readers themselves. The status of John's narrative as a generalizing and totalizing one parallels the nature of the novel's utopian state, which is a totalitarian régime, albeit enforced not by violence or tyranny but by consensus and ‘common sense’.

To be ‘far seeing’ functions throughout the novel as both metaphor for and literal enactment of utopian thought. ‘Those far-seeing women were pioneers’, says Hallie, John's niece; and his friend, Frank, asserts, ‘ideas can be changed in the twinkling of an eye!’ (emphasis mine).²² The utopians are described as ‘able to see’ and benefiting from ‘the outlook broader’.²³ Visual scrutiny is the primary means by which John first encounters the utopian world, which is itself organized to enable maximum surveillance:

It was a big, handsome place. The front windows faced the great river, the rear ones opened on a most unexpected scene of loveliness … They gave me a room with a river window, and I looked out at the broad current, changed only in its lovely clearness, and at the changeless Palisades.

Changeless? I stared, and seized the traveling glass still on the strap.

… The water front was green-parked, white-piered, rimmed with palaces, and the broken slopes terraced and garlanded in rich foliage. White cottages and larger buildings climbed and nestled along the sunny slopes as on the cliffs at Capri. It was a place one would go far to see.

I dropped my eyes to the nearer shore.²⁴

Because Gilman views travel as both a means of and a metaphor for acquiring the ‘far-seeing’ utopian vision, she makes use of some of the conventions of travel writing in her narrative. Like the European male subjects of previous centuries' landscape discourse, whose imperial eyes scanned the lands they visited, John's primary encounter with the utopia is via visual scrutiny of the landscape. Yet Gilman reverses the power dynamic of much travel writing, whose specular subjects installed their own imperial discursive order and projected their own fantasy of dominance and appropriation in the act of seeing. Instead, Gilman portrays the visitor/observer as one who is to be assimilated.

Moreover, Gilman's narrative seeks to rehabilitate America as the fabled utopia, as a ‘new world’ of imaginary alternatives and utopian possibilities. This fable had been somewhat tarnished by late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century travel writers, who had found the reality of America less impressive than the myth. François-René de Chateaubriand's Travels in America, for instance, found the reality of American cities a disappointment: ‘The aspect of Philadelphia is cold and monotonous. In general the cities in the United States are lacking in monuments, especially old monuments’.²⁵ The narrative continues: ‘A man landing as I did in the United States, full of enthusiasm for the ancients, a Cato seeking everywhere for the rigidity of early Roman manners, is necessarily shocked to find everywhere the elegance of dress, the luxury of carriages, the frivolity of conversations, the disproportion of fortunes, the immorality of banks and gaming houses, the noise of dance halls and theatres.’²⁶ Most particularly, English travellers who visited America in the 1830s and 1840s had constructed America as anti-utopia. Books such as Frances Trollope's Domestic Manners of the Americans (1832), Harriet Martineau's Society in America (1837), Captain Marryat's A Diary in America (1837) and Charles Dickens' American Notes (1842) all portrayed America as an uncouth and vulgar nation. Gilman's fictional ‘foreign’ traveller observes an America which is designed to reverse such dystopian images. That she located her fictional utopia not ‘elsewhere’ but in an American ‘here and now’ only thirty years distant, testifies to her optimism and faith in the utopian potentialities which she believed to be latent within American social reality.

If Gilman's fictional visitor to America-as-utopia encounters it primarily through visual scrutiny, the utopians themselves are portrayed as uniquely observant—‘Nellie, [was] always unobtrusively watching me’—and the utopian society reproduces itself via mechanisms of surveillance.²⁷ The children, for example, are ‘observed intelligently’ by the baby culturists in order to fit their environment to their needs.²⁸ Myopia is symbolic of dystopian lack of vision: ‘“I see no child in glasses!” I suddenly remarked one day … I recalled the Boston school children and the myopic victims of Germany's archaic letter-press; and freely admitted that this was advance.’²⁹ Education ensures that, we are told, ‘In the mind of every child is a clear view.’³⁰ When John encounters his cousin Drusilla, her ‘reactionary’ lifestyle is reflected in her inability to see clearly and look closely—‘she dropped her eyes and flushed faintly’—whilst her potential for utopian thought is hinted at by her ability to ‘flash … a grateful look’ when John criticizes her family.³¹

Such an emphasis on seeing reflects Gilman's belief in the possibility of a perspective of rational objectivity, one which she portrays as essential for the achievement of a utopian vision. Early on in the novel, Nellie asserts the difference between ‘subjective’ bias (‘the objection and distaste you feel is only in your personal consciousness’), and supposedly ‘objective’ fact (‘Everything is better’).³² Throughout the novel, Gilman portrays travel, particularly travel within utopia, as a supremely valuable mechanism for achieving this supposedly broad and objective point of view. All the technological innovations described in the novel (noiseless airships, electric trains and boats, well-organized roads) are ones which facilitate efficient travel. Whilst goods are no longer needlessly transported over long distances, nevertheless people are encouraged to travel, and all the utopian children spend a year travelling as they approach maturity. In this, Gilman again hints that the fictional utopia has its potential in the actuality of early twentieth-century America, which afforded unique opportunities for country-wide travel.³³

Most particularly for Gilman, the broad, objective view is both literally and metaphorically a ‘flight of the mind’. As John Robertson explores his home afresh, he notices particularly the impact of the noiseless airships that have been developed, which, he says, ‘opened up a new world of delight to me’.³⁴ Time and time again, there is in the novel (often gratuitous) mention of these airships, whose ubiquitousness has turned the utopians, so we are told, into ‘a race of flying men [sic]’.³⁵ From these airships, John develops a theory that links the achievement of utopia with the assumption of a supposedly objective, all-encompassing point of view. He says to his companion:

Look here, Owen, I think I have the glimmer of an idea. Didn’t the common use of airships help to develop this social consciousness you’re always talking about—this general view of things?

Owen replies in the affirmative, saying:

You see few people are able to visualize what they have not seen. Most of us had no more idea of the surface of the earth than an ant has of a meadow. In each mind was only a thready fragment of an idea of the world—no real geographic view. And when we got flying over it commonly, it became real and familiar to us—like a big garden.³⁶

Roberta F. Weldon has pointed out that much of the American literature of the nineteenth century is a ‘literature of movement’, most particularly a literature fascinated by speed:

The characteristic American journey tends to be imagined in at least two common ways. The first of course, is that the American journey moves westward, and the second, that the mode of conveyance which the traveler chooses probably depends upon how quickly it can bring him [sic] to the destination.³⁷

Yet she also draws attention to a flourishing tradition, the ‘Literature of Walking’ represented by authors like Thoreau and Hawthorne, who portrayed walking as an imaginative and redemptive process set against the detachment from nature produced by the railroad. Gilman too treats travel as a metaphoric inner journey, but is fascinated by the difference of view enabled specifically by air travel. Bridget Bennett points out (in her chapter in this volume) that the advent of the aeroplane profoundly affected concepts of ways of seeing, providing a model for a universal view. As Paul Virilo says: ‘By 1914 aviation was ceasing to be strictly a means of flying and breaking records … [I]t was becoming one way, or perhaps even the ultimate way of seeing.’³⁸ In the novel, John flies over the land and this provides him with an overview of the utopians' social structure. Constantly we see him scrutinizing the utopian landscape from above: ‘looking down at the lovely green fields and forests beneath’; ‘that quiet river garden which was so attractive from above’; ‘all the beauty spread below me’; ‘We kept our vehicle gliding slowly above it while Nellie pointed things out.’³⁹ Such a view functions as a metaphorical model for the transcendence of ideological boundaries Gilman portrays in Moving the Mountain as necessary to the achievement of utopian change. Later in the novel the message is made even more explicit. John says: ‘The airships did make a difference. To look down on the flowing, outspread miles beneath gave a sense of the unity and continuous beauty of our country, quite different from the streak views we used to get. An airship is a moving mountain-top.’⁴⁰ Thus to ‘see over’ the land is a literal enactment of, and metaphor for, the transcendence of dystopian ideology. Nellie says to John: ‘If you can … see over your own personal attitudes it will not be long before a real convincing sense of joy, of life, will follow the intellectual perception that things are better.’⁴¹ Thus Gilman legitimizes her utopian vision by constructing it as objective, as a transcendence of personal bias. Again we see the religious component of her thinking in the linking of utopianism and transcendence.

Yet of course, to ‘see over’ is also in some senses to oversee, to supervise and control, and also to overlook, to obscure. Gilman reveals the ideological basis of the dystopian present, with its ‘false theories of industry’, but she deliberately overlooks and obscures the ideological nature of her own utopian theories. Moving the Mountain engages resolutely in a ‘hermeneutics of supervision’ as William V. Spanos defines it:

By the hermeneutics of supervision, I mean the imposition of meaning from the normative/panoptic perspective on the subversive aporetic elements—the differential force—to make them conform to the larger (imperial) design.⁴²

Thus Gilman is happy to include in her utopia the kind of social policing and coercion that Michel Foucault has shown is achieved precisely through surveillance. In Discipline and Punish, Foucault examines how power is shown to take the forms of surveillance and assessment of individuals, realized in the practice of state institutions such as prisons, schools, the army and the workplace. These institutions discipline the body, mind and emotions, constituting them according to the needs of hierarchical forms of power such as gender and class. The utopia Gilman envisages in Moving the Mountain relies upon the very same panoptic mechanisms of social coercion and surveillance which constitute the gender identities she seeks to deconstruct. Individuals who do not socially conform are stigmatized, even pathologized. Owen describes the way that women who do not conform to current norms of sexual behaviour are seen as ‘cases for medical treatment, or perhaps surgical’.⁴³ Thus Gilman is not averse to legitimizing through naturalization the very same operations of power which reinforce the gender structures she seeks to dismantle. Owen says: ‘In visible material progress we have only followed simple lines, quite natural and obvious, and accomplished what was perfectly possible at any time.’⁴⁴ In this way, the naturalized absolutes of the present world are merely replaced by different naturalized absolutes; indeed, normativity is portrayed as the mechanism by which utopian change is achieved: ‘We have a standard of citizenship now—an idea of what people ought to be and how to make them so.’⁴⁵

By privileging the objective, transcendent eye, Moving the Mountain remains complicit with the monologic nature of much utopian thinking (i.e. not critical utopias), and shares with it the symptom of narrative stasis.⁴⁶ Mary Ann Caws argues that ‘the aim of free seeing would be a flexibility of function able to accommodate images both ordinary and askew, straight or with perceptual shifts, and to translate them liberally into nourishment for new ways of seeing’.⁴⁷ But Gilman's concept of utopian thinking as the collective ‘twinkling of an eye’ involves the suppression of errancy and the foreclosure of true dialogue. John functions as the errant exile finally brought ‘home’, through the gradual loss of his dystopian ideological baggage. His assimilation into the utopian consensus is achieved via a series of ‘dialogues’ which actually function as monologic statements of utopian ‘truth’. Thus Gilman's concept of utopian vision as unanimity has much in common with Richard Rorty's delineation of the repressive nature of visual metaphors. For Rorty, visual idioms are associated with a desire to indicate ‘accurate representation’ and ‘objective truth’, elements that foreclose rather than sustain genuine conversation, and function as obstacles rather than catalysts to creativity and freedom.⁴⁸

The narrative strategies of Moving the Mountain reproduce the concept of the utopian vision as an objective, universal one. Although we are frequently reminded that John Robertson is not a detached, objective observer, but comes with all his dystopian biases, ultimately his narrative is legitimized and authorized, particularly by the plot device which makes the novel into his written digest of all that he sees and is told. Thus he is an authoritative male voice speaking largely to other male voices, despite the novel's thematic insistence on the centrality of women. The utopians insist that literature must change in order to function efficiently as ‘nourishment’ for growing utopian subjects, yet John's method of narration remains static and unchanged even as his own attitudes are seen to gradually change. While thematically, the novel asserts the necessity to reconceptualize identity and reconfigure the subject (‘It dawned on us that life was not an individual affair’⁴⁹), formally the novel produces a conventional, monologic, individualistic reader whose function is to be assimilated into the utopian consensus. The blueprint-like quality of the fictional utopia comes partly from the utopian's insistence upon the reality of their world, its factual basis as opposed to the illusory quality of dystopian beliefs. Again the notion of objective perspective is called up to reinforce the factuality of the utopian world: ‘Don’t you remember what Lester Ward calls “the illusion of the near”—how the most familiar facts were precisely those we often failed to understand?’⁵⁰ In creating a fictional ‘realizable utopia’ which functions on a ‘literal’ basis, as a literalization of all Gilman's utopian ideas, Gilman must leave the tensions and contradictions of such a project unacknowledged. The ‘hermeneutic of supervision’ whose logic organizes the narrative of Moving the Mountain works instead to assimilate all aporetic elements into the overall design.

Gilman's next novel, Herland, develops similar ideas but employs a different textual practice. The fictional utopia functions not as a blueprint, but as a strategy for provoking questions in the reader. And the way metaphors of vision are employed in the novel implies that Gilman's concept of the utopian imagination had changed too. No longer is the view from the mountain the metaphor for the utopian perspective. Instead, the all-women utopia dubbed ‘Herland’ by one of its male visitors is enclosed by mountain ranges and has survived precisely because it has been shielded from the surveillance of the outside world. In its geography, Herland recalls Tibet, that land enclosed by mountain ranges which in the previous novel functioned to symbolize dystopian isolation. But now, the utopian space is conceived of not as a place of panoptic surveillance, but as a separated—and separatist—haven. Flight no longer symbolizes the transcendence of dystopian ideologies, but rather symbolizes precisely the colonialist and masculinist nature of pretensions to objectivity which Gilman had concealed in Moving the Mountain. The three male would-be explorers get into their biplane equipped with instruments designed to aid their desire to spectrally penetrate the female space of Herland: ‘So we got the big biplane and loaded it with our scientifically compressed baggage: the camera, of course; the glasses’ (H p. 10). Their plan is to ‘spy out the land’ (H p. 10) and map its borders, but Gilman reveals that the supposed objectivity of their airborne surveillance is coloured by male fantasies and projections, by gradually revealing the disparity between the conclusions they derive from their fly-over and the true nature of Herland. Far from being an objective perspective, to ‘see over’ is now overtly to overlook and to project subjective, patriarchal assumptions.

The specularity of male surveillance is contrasted with the methods of surveillance employed by the Herlanders, who merely observe the men as they try to escape, and sew up their biplane in a bag. Van explains:

… all they did was to call the inhabitants to keep an eye on our movements all along the edge of the forest between two points. It appeared that many of those nights we had been seen, by careful ladies sitting snugly in big trees by the riverbed. (H p. 44)

Rather than naturalize the utopian vision, Gilman reveals that ‘seeing’ always has an agenda, be it a utopian or dystopian one. Later in the novel Van comes to realize the effectiveness of the Herlanders' methods of observation, which ‘see through’ male specularity:

Little had we thought that our careful efforts at concealment had been so easily seen through, with never a word to show us that they saw. They had followed up words of ours on the science of optics, asked innocent questions about glasses and the like, and were aware of the defective eyesight so common amongst us. (H p. 144)

Gilman still uses the metaphor of the view from the mountain top, but crucially, she relativizes it by making visible the positionality of its originator. Van uses the image to describe Ellador's reaction to his love-making:

She trembled in my arms, as I held her close, kissing her hungrily. But there rose in her eyes that look I knew so well, that remote clear look as if she had gone far away even though I held her beautiful body so close, and was now on some snowy mountain regarding me from a distance. (H p. 138)

Thus whereas in Moving the Mountain the metaphor functions as a sign of absolute value, utopian envisioning, and is legitimized as such by the narrative, in Herland its value is shown to be a relative and subjective one: it tells us about Van's attitude toward Ellador's reaction. And like Van, the reader views Ellador's perspective ambivalently, despite the fact that she is a utopian: is she admirably detached and objective, or is she cold and unemotional? Utopian thinking is presented not as a blueprint for our own, but as a goad to questioning and critique. And the novel constructs a reader aware of the narrator's positionality, and therefore aware of the provisionality of his discourse.

In Herland, then, Gilman relativizes the process of utopian envisioning which she had conceived as an objective perspective in the previous novel. The reading position produced by the novel is one which necessarily involves awareness of the relativity of reading positions. And utopian change is depicted as taking place, not in ‘the twinkling of an eye’ but over many years of patient effort. If Moving the Mountain functions paternalistically as a kind of Father-Text which secretly coerces its readers into a utopian consensus, Herland functions as the kind of Over-mother it fictionally depicts, by gently and wittily encouraging its readers to grow through questioning and thought-experiment.

Does this then mean that Moving the Mountain is a failure, particularly in comparison with the critical utopia which is Herland? Such a conclusion would certainly, as we have seen, reproduce current thinking about utopian writing. Yet to stop there would be to ignore the importance of utopian content and Gilman's own aim to produce a ‘realizable’ utopia. Herland works less well if read on these terms, for its quasi-lesbian separatist community, kept safe by an impossible geographical isolation, does not represent any kind of realistic proposition for utopian living: but of course it does not aim to. Because of the element of fantasy, Gilman can portray a society which reproduces parthenogenetically and with the aid of a kind of natural eugenics (Herlanders can ‘will’ themselves not to fall pregnant). But Gilman's aim in writing Moving the Mountain was very different: to portray a pragmatopia, one which she saw as a realistic proposition or blueprint for future social change. On this level, the novel functions exceedingly well, portraying a society which, whilst not perfect, is certainly plausible and pleasant. Because Gilman presents the utopia as a blueprint, she is committed to a literary technique based on verisimilitude and realism, which creates the illusion of familiarity necessary to engender belief in the alternative, utopian world. As J. R. R. Tolkien said, ‘the moment disbelief arises, the spell is broken; the magic, or rather art, has failed’.⁵¹ Thus the inevitable contradictions (inevitable in any utopian vision) could not be resolved or concealed using fantasy elements, but rather had to be concealed by narrative form. Gilman always wrote for a purpose, and because her purposes were different when she wrote Moving the Mountain and Herland, she produced two very different kinds of novels. Our current critical privileging of Herland reflects current critical trends, and there is no doubt that it is a very good novel. But Moving the Mountain, with its convincing and inspirational portrayal of an America which—if not perfect—is certainly more pleasant for the majority than it was then or is now, reminds us of the power of ideas, however they are mediated, to take root and perhaps ‘grow’—if not as speedily as Gilman would have wished—in the human mind.

Notes

1. Tom Moylan, Demand the Impossible: Science Fiction and the Utopian Imagination (New York: Methuen, 1986), p. 39.

2. See Anne Cranny-Francis, Feminist Fiction: Feminist Uses of Generic Fiction (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1990); Laura E. Donaldson, ‘The Eve of De-struction: Charlotte Perkins Gilman and the Feminist Re-creation of Paradise’, Women's Studies, 16, 1989; Val Gough, ‘Lesbians and Virgins: The New Motherhood in Herland’, in David Seed, ed., Anticipations: Essays on Early Science Fiction and its Precursors (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1995), pp. 195-215.

3. Tom Moylan, Demand the Impossible, pp. 26-7.

4. Carol Farley Kessler, Charlotte Perkins Gilman: Her Progress Toward Utopia with Selected Writings (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1995), p. 9.

5. Ibid., p. 63.

6. Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Moving the Mountain (New York: Charlton, 1911), p. 6.

7. See Carol Farley Kessler, Her Progress, p. 7.

8. This term is taken from Kessler, Her Progress, p. 8, but I use it to support a very different argument from hers.

9. Tom Moylan, Demand the Impossible, p. 28.

10. Quoted in Larry Ceplair, ed., Charlotte Perkins Gilman: A Non-Fiction Reader (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), p. 273.

11. Ibid., pp. 273-4.

12. Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Moving the Mountain, p. 5.

13. Ibid., p. 243.

14. Quoted in Carol Farley Kessler, ed., Daring to Dream: Utopian Stories by United States Women: 1836-1919 (Boston, MA.: Pandora-Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1984), p. 19 (2nd edition, subtitled Utopian Fiction by United States Women before 1950 [New York: Syracuse University Press, 1995]). Several analyses of utopias by women consider them to be intrinsically spiritual, including Lee Cullen Khanna, ‘Women's Worlds: New Directions in Utopian Fiction’, Alternative Futures, 4 (2-3) 1981; and Carol Pearson and Katherine Pope, The Female Hero in British and American Fiction (New York, 1981)

15. Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Moving the Mountain, p. 6.

16. Sally Miller Gearhart, The Wanderground (London: Women's Press, 1979), p. 147.

17. Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Moving the Mountain, p. 131.

18. Ibid., p. 6.

19. Ibid., p. 199.

20. Ibid., p. 123.

21. Quoted in Larry Ceplair, Non-Fiction Reader, p. 28; Carol Farley Kessler, Her Progress, p. 58.

22. Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Moving the Mountain, p. 22.

23. Ibid., p. 224 and p. 225.

24. Ibid., pp. 68-9.

25. François René de Chateaubriand, Travels in America, trans. Richard Switzer (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1969), p. 14.

26. Ibid., p. 15.

27. Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Moving the Mountain, p. 66.

28. Ibid., p. 220.

29. Ibid., p. 222.

30. Ibid., p. 202.

31. Ibid., p. 281.

32. Ibid., p. 43.

33. As early as 1847, the travel writer D. F. Sarmiento was observing that ‘… everyone travels, [and] there is no impossible or unprofitable enterprise in the field of transportation … The great number of travellers makes for cheap rates, and cheap rates in turn tempt those who have no precise object in mind to go somewhere’; Steven Kagel, ed., America: Exploration and Travel (Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green State University Press, 1979), pp. 58-59.

34. Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Moving the Mountain, p. 145.

35. Ibid., p. 144.

36. Ibid., p. 179.

37. Steven Kagel, America, p. 127.

38. Bill Brown, ‘Science Fiction, the World's Fair, and the Prosthetics of Empire, 1900-1915’, in Amy Kaplan and Donald Pease, eds, Cultures of United States Imperialism (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1993), p. 145.

39. Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Moving the Mountain, p. 150; p. 96; p. 151; p. 151.

40. Ibid., p. 192.

41. Ibid., p. 125.

42. William V. Spanos, The Errant Art of Moby Dick: The Canon, the Cold War and the Struggle for American Studies (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995), p. 11.

43. Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Moving the Mountain, p. 185.

44. Ibid., p. 130.

45. Ibid., p. 55.

46. Northrop Frye says: ‘considered as a final or definitive social ideal, the utopia is a static society; and most utopias have built-in safeguards against radical alteration of the structure’; Northrop Frye, ‘Varieties of Literary Utopias', in Frank E. Manuel, ed., Utopias and Utopian Thought (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1966), p. 31.

47. Mary Ann Caws, The Art of Interference: Stressed Readings in Verbal and Visual Communication (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989), p. 15.

48. See Victor Luftig, Seeing Together: Friendship Between the Sexes in English Writing, from Mill to Woolf (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993), p. 225.

49. Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Moving the Mountain, p. 171.

50. Ibid., pp. 188-89.

51. Quoted in Lynette Hunter, Rhetorical Stance in Modern Literature: Allegories of Love and Death (London: Macmillan, 1984), p. 62.