Moving The Mountain (novel) - Genre

Genre

In a brief Preface, Gilman plainly identifies her novel with the established utopian literature; she cites The Republic of Plato and the original Utopia of Sir Thomas More, along with Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward (1888) and H. G. Wells's In the Days of the Comet (1906).

Gilman pointedly calls her book "a short-distance Utopia, a baby Utopia, a little one that can grow." Gilman casts her protagonist into a reformed future, but without the "element of extreme remoteness" found in other books. Bellamy had thrust his hero Julian West 113 years ahead, from 1887 to 2000; his predecessor John Macnie hurled his narrator a full 7700 years into the future in The Diothas (1883). Gilman, in contrast, moves her character John Robertson only three decades ahead, from roughly 1910 to around 1940. (Bellamy was the most famous author of his era to employ this trick, and his many imitators and opponents used it in their sequels and responses. Yet the tactic of moving a character forward in time can be found in American literature as far back as Mary Griffith's 1836 story Three Hundred Years Hence.) Perkins's strategy had previously been employed by Bradford Peck, who propelled his hero 25 years forward in The World a Department Store (1900).

Perkins sends a man forward in time to a better world, but gives him deep difficulties in adjusting to it. Here again she was not the first author to try the tactic: W. H. Hudson's A Crystal Age (1887) and Elizabeth Corbett's New Amazonia (1889) take the same general approach.