A review by poisonenvy
Moving the Mountain by Charlotte Perkins Gilman
2.0
Moving the Mountain is some early feminist literature, where Charlotte Perkins Gilman imagines a utopia, not far from her present day, one where the world changes in thirty years: "Moving the Mountain is a short distance Utopia, a baby Utopia, a little one that can grow. It involves the mere awakening if people, especially the women, to existing possibilities. It indicates what people might do, real people, now living, in thirty years -- if they would. One man, truly aroused and redirecting his energies, can change his whole life in thirty years. So can the world."
Thirty years ago, John, then twenty-five, walked off a mountainside and fell into a remote Tibetian village with no memory of his life, but when his sister Nellie finds him, he's reawakened to his old life with no memory at all of the last twenty years.
What follows is Nellie and her family trying to get John acquainted with the new world, a Utopia, where people only work 2 - 4 hours a day, where there's very little crime and no poverty, where fruit trees grow along the road. In the tradition of utopic novels, it's less a narrative and more a lecture: this is the world now, this is how we changed it, this is how the old world didn't work.
It is, overall, pretty idyllic. Except for some excruciatingly jarring moments that set my teeth in edge. I try very hard not to judge old novels (this one written in 1911) by modern standards.
For instance, I know a lot of left-leaning socialists back in the day believed in eugenics, right up until WWII when they saw it in action, and then most decent thinking people were like "oh wait, nevermind, that's horrible." Even still, it was jarring go see it so happily touted as a solution to some of the world's problems, as if there was nothing whatsoever wrong with it, or with killing anyone who was considered a hopeless degenerate.
The racism and white supremacy of the novella was the insidious kind that you almost can't see, except that it makes you feel like your skin is crawling, and the discussing of people as though they're cattle made me cringe.
The discussion of just wiping out dangerous predators so everywhere in the world can be safe for people to live, and the deliberate extinction of several "pest" insects, as if humans are above basic ecology, didn't sit right either.
There are a lot of good ideas in this book. Unfortunately, they're overshadowed by the bad ones.
Thirty years ago, John, then twenty-five, walked off a mountainside and fell into a remote Tibetian village with no memory of his life, but when his sister Nellie finds him, he's reawakened to his old life with no memory at all of the last twenty years.
What follows is Nellie and her family trying to get John acquainted with the new world, a Utopia, where people only work 2 - 4 hours a day, where there's very little crime and no poverty, where fruit trees grow along the road. In the tradition of utopic novels, it's less a narrative and more a lecture: this is the world now, this is how we changed it, this is how the old world didn't work.
It is, overall, pretty idyllic. Except for some excruciatingly jarring moments that set my teeth in edge. I try very hard not to judge old novels (this one written in 1911) by modern standards.
For instance, I know a lot of left-leaning socialists back in the day believed in eugenics, right up until WWII when they saw it in action, and then most decent thinking people were like "oh wait, nevermind, that's horrible." Even still, it was jarring go see it so happily touted as a solution to some of the world's problems, as if there was nothing whatsoever wrong with it, or with killing anyone who was considered a hopeless degenerate.
The racism and white supremacy of the novella was the insidious kind that you almost can't see, except that it makes you feel like your skin is crawling, and the discussing of people as though they're cattle made me cringe.
The discussion of just wiping out dangerous predators so everywhere in the world can be safe for people to live, and the deliberate extinction of several "pest" insects, as if humans are above basic ecology, didn't sit right either.
There are a lot of good ideas in this book. Unfortunately, they're overshadowed by the bad ones.