SOURCE: “‘In the Twinkling of an Eye’: Gilman's Utopian Imagination,” in A Very Different Story: Studies on the Fiction of Charlotte Perkins Gilman, edited by Val Gough and Jill Rudd, Liverpool University Press, 1998, pp. 129-43.

In the following essay, Gough analyzes the utopian vision and technique of Gilman's novel Moving the Mountain, and contrasts this work with her later Herland.

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...