Woman on the Edge of Time by Marge Piercy

First published: 1976

Type of plot: Utopian realism

Time of work: The 1970’s and the year 2137

Locale: New York City and environs, and Mattapoisett, Massachusetts

Principal Characters:

• Consuelo (Connie) Ramos, a thirty-seven-year-old inmate of a mental institution
• Luciente, a plant geneticist and time traveler from the year 2137
• Dolly, Connie’s favorite niece, a prostitute
• Geraldo, Dolly’s pimp
• Luis, Connie’s brother, who operates a plant nursery in New Jersey
• Sybil, Connie’s friend and a fellow inmate
• Bee, Luciente’s friend, who becomes Connie’s lover during a trip to the future
• Jackrabbit, Luciente’s friend, an artist of the future

The Novel

Woman on the Edge of Time is a jeremiad, a lament for and a tirade against the plight of woman in the twentieth century. Connie Ramos is a thirty-seven-year-old Chicana, impoverished and without the support of friends or family, who is imprisoned in a mental institution for an alleged outburst of violent behavior. Trapped by a lifetime of deprivation and powerlessness, she is labeled mad, drugged, held captive, and stripped of all personal dignity. The specific degradations of her life in Bellevue Hospital, in Rockover State Psychiatric Institute, and finally in the New York Neuro-Psychiatric Institute are the culmination of and a metaphor for the harsh realities of the life of a middle-aged minority woman alone in contemporary urban society. The evils which plague her life are the evils which plague her society: cruelty, physical violence, the debasement of women, the abuse of children, private rage, and public indifference to human suffering. Connie’s story is a polemic about the hell that women endure in a world where biology is destiny.

The madhouse that is Connie’s personal prison and the madhouse that is her society are escaped only in her intermittent mind excursions into the future. Through the agency of Luciente, a time traveler from the year 2137, she leaves her confinement and enters the twenty-second century. In her first trip to the idyllic society of Mattapoisett, Massachusetts, she discovers that women are no longer responsible for childbearing and child rearing. Luciente explains that this is the result of what she calls women’s revolution: “As long as we were biologically enchained, we’d never be equal. And males never would be humanized to be loving and tender.” In Mattapoisett, embryos are grown in community brooders, and after delivery the care of each child is assumed by three people who together elect to parent that child until puberty.

Because in 2137 females have been released from biological motherhood, gender has become relatively insignificant. All may parent yet lead full personal, professional, political, and social lives. Each being is essentially androgynous, both male and female. This radical change in gender definition is reflected in language. The pronouns “he” and “she,” “him” and “her,” “his” and “hers” have been replaced by a common pronoun, “per.” Piercy quickly establishes a theme that is central to her politics and to her art—that freedom for women must entail freedom from childbirth. Yet this is only the most radical social transformation. Luciente thinks of the twentieth century as “The Age of Greed and Waste.” In per time, 2137, materialism has been eradicated; cultural riches are shared by everyone, and urban centers such as New York have been dismantled and replaced by small, self-sufficient, self-governing communities. The device of Connie’s time travel compels both her and the reader to look at two planes of existence juxtaposed: a present hell for women and a potential paradise for all.

Connie’s incarceration is interrupted often by subsequent visits to Mattapoisett, which introduce her to educational methods, work patterns, social customs, eating habits, sexual mores, governmental structures, and therapy techniques—all sharply contrasting with those in Connie’s world. The Utopian society of Mattapoisett is the novelist’s teaching device, intended to help Connie to “intersee,” to perceive the dynamics of her own world and conceive of other possibilities. Luciente’s world constitutes an implied critique of contemporary society and a vision of its potential for improvement directed at readers too. Connie’s brief explorations of futures other than Luciente’s offer oblique warnings of the disastrous results of persisting in current directions. Although rather mechanical in its exposition, the dialectic between Connie’s present and Luciente’s future is the central purpose of the novel.

The Characters

Connie’s powerlessness equals the feminine condition in this world. She is an institutionalized woman, literally and figuratively. Piercy graphically depicts the horrors of Connie’s life in mental institutions. She shows the isolation; the sluggish nightmare world of strong tranquilizers; the neglect and disdain of the staff and doctors; the malign bureaucracy; the lack of hygiene, good food, clothing, privacy, and contact with the outside world. The horror increases when Connie is among the patients forced to participate in an experiment in which electrodes are to be surgically implanted in her brain to suppress violent behavior. Yet the ghastliness of her situation is felt far more intensely than the strength of her personality. The character of Connie is the central weakness of the novel: In both worlds, she is a spectator. As a character, she certainly arouses sympathy, but not strong identification and caring. Connie is the author’s self-conscious political construct, an emblem of victimization of all women more than a fully realized and engrossing fictional being.

Connie seems a puppet in a political allegory because this is a thesis novel. Thesis overpowers characterization. The thesis is simply summarized, though not simply realized in life. Woman must go to war with her society, battle the many forces that hold her captive, and win freedom, if not for herself, for future generations. This is not, however, the archetypal war of the sexes. This is a fiercer war, the war of the individual against all society. Woman wars alone. Men are pimps, abortionists, psychiatrists who callously declare patients paranoid schizophrenics and experiment on them with the same indifference used to dissect chimpanzees. Piercy’s male characters are a catalog of various forms of abuse of women. Only Connie’s first husband, Martin, and her blind black lover, Claud, are presented as human, but both are dead, fellow victims of societal blight.

Are the characters of the future more vital? Not really. Luciente is no messiah. Luciente resembles Connie, as if Connie’s alter ego were displaced in time. The guided tours of Mattapoisett are reminiscent of walking through a blissed-out commune of the 1960’s. All the androgynies of this future, including Luciente, are pacific and self-satisfied stick figures. Like most residents of more perfect fictional worlds, they are devoted to telling others smugly how they eradicated the ills of society and how happy they are. The author has endowed their constant holidaying and displays of affection for one another with little more life than the recreation room at Rockover.

Critical Context

Marge Piercy is one of America’s most political writers. The seriousness of her convictions and the intensity of her commitment to change in the lives of women are apparent in all of her works. Woman on the Edge of Time may be her most direct response to questions about what kinds of changes she seeks. In this novel, she both outlines the problems that she sees and explicates the transformations that she envisions. Frequently, reviewers have remarked that this is really two novels, a realistic fiction and a Utopian fantasy, and each might be more effective if presented separately. On the contrary, the dialectic between present and future is essential to her thesis, to her investigation of humanity’s potential for change.

The change in Connie appears startling. In the last chapter, she tells a fellow inmate, “I was not born and raised to fight battles, but to be modest and gentle and still.” Soon after making this statement, she addresses herself in the mirror and articulates her new perception of herself and of the world: “I murdered them dead. Because they are the violence-prone. Theirs is the money and the power, theirs the poisons that slow the mind and dull the heart. Theirs are the powers of life and death. I killed them. Because it is war.” Although Piercy devotes much energy to making Connie’s sanity convincing, the narrative continuum of her life experience, her time-travel experience, and her declaration of war at the conclusion may mislead some into believing that her story is indeed the raving of a madwoman. Such a reading of the character would undercut the entire novel, making it little more than a case study. The novel is propaganda for a visionary alternate social order, a potential Utopia. Believe Connie sane, and her violence is contained in her passivity as the future is contained in the present. In Piercy’s schema, present and future, like violence and passivity, are not contraries; they are a single vital process. Dialectic is seeing one truth in two ways.

Seeing the world for what it is and seeing its potential are not enough to produce change. In Piercy’s radical ideology, action must follow. Freedom can be won only by women fully at war with this world, martyring themselves so that their daughters might live lives of greater range and humanity than theirs. Yet seeing is the necessary first step, and seeing is what Piercy demands here.

Bibliography

Adams, Alice. “Out of the Womb: The Future of the Uterine Metaphor.” Feminist Studies 19 (Summer, 1993): 269-289. Adams explores the evolution of the uterine metaphor in relation to the debate among feminists concerning natural and artificial methods of childbirth. In her analysis of Piercy’s novel, Adams compares Piercy’s alternative family structure with real-life alternatives and addresses the concept of the womb as a separate entity from the mother.

Afnan, Elham. “Chaos and Utopia: Social Transformations in Woman on the Edge of Time.” Extrapolation 37 (Winter, 1996): 330-340. Perceiving Piercy’s novel as a classic work in feminist utopian writing, Afnan asserts that the chaos theory is a central theme in the novel, the concept of nonlinearity being its most significant aspect. Afnan also explores the process of social change through the selection of either utopia or dystopia.

Bartkowski, Frances. Feminist Utopias. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1989. Chapter 2, “The Kinship Web,” compares Piercy’s novel to Joanna Russ’s The Female Man, discussing utopian conventions and placing the novel in the context of feminist and Marxist critiques. Good on the use of language and the role of the artist.

Booker, M. Keith. “Woman on the Edge of a Genre: The Feminist Dystopias of Marge Piercy.” Science Fiction Studies 21 (November, 1994): 337-350. Booker explores the political commitment that informs Piercy’s Woman on the Edge of Time and He, She, It. He asserts that her feminist stance is rather unusual in a tradition that has been dominated by a masculine agenda and shows how both books reinforce their feminist political statements through literary techniques.

Gygax, Franziska. “Demur—You’re Straightway Dangerous: Woman on the Edge of Time.” In Ways of Knowing: Essays on Marge Piercy, edited by Sue Walker and Eugenie Hamner. Mobile, Ala.: Negative Capability, 1991. Emphasizes psychiatric critique, mentioning Piercy’s involvement with the Mental Patients Liberation Front and her familiarity with the work of Phyllis Chessler. A psychological analysis of androgyny in the novel compares it to works by Adrienne Rich and Doris Lessing.

Kessler, Carol Farley. “Woman on the Edge of Time: A Novel ‘To Be of Use.’ ” Extrapolation 28, no. 4 (Winter, 1987): 310-318. Stressing the didactic function of Piercy’s novel, examines communal, ecological, and spiritual values, arguing that the violent conclusion of the novel is a call for reader involvement.

Levitas, Ruth. “We: The Problem in Identity, Solidarity, and Difference.” History of the Human Sciences 8 (August, 1995): 89-105. Examines Y. Zamyatin’s We and Piercy’s Woman on the Edge of Time to show how the use of the word “we” is gendered and therefore reflective of society’s repression of women. Concludes that both utopian works show that language reflects social conditions, and that achieving equality, while taking into account differences, is dependent on social perceptions.

Pearson, Carol. “Coming Home: Four Feminist Utopias and Patriarchal Experience.” In Future Females, edited by Marleen S. Barr. Bowling Green, Ohio: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1981. A revision of “Women’s Fantasies and Feminist Utopias” in Frontiers 2, no. 3 (Fall, 1977): 50-61. The original article places Piercy’s Woman on the Edge of Time in the tradition of feminist utopias such as those by Joanna Russ, Ursula Le Guin, James Tiptree, Mary Bradley Lane, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Dorothy Bryant, and Mary Staton (only the last four are discussed in the revision), systematically discussing their similar treatments of women’s work, violence against women, sex roles, and the need to revolutionize economic structures, the nuclear family, and societal attitudes toward nature.

Rosinsky, Natalie. Feminist Futures: Contemporary Women’s Speculative Fiction. Ann Arbor, Mich.: UMI Research Press, 1984. Chapter 3, “Battle of the Sexes,” contrasts Piercy and Joanna Russ’s advocation of androgyny with Sally Gearheart’s separatism in The Wanderground. Noting the humorous, ironic elements of Piercy’s novel, Rosinsky analyzes the flexibility of Piercy’s feminist solutions.

Rudy, Cathy. “Ethics, Reproduction, Utopia: Gender and Childbearing in Woman on the Edge of Time and The Left Hand of Darkness.” NWSA Journal 9 (Spring, 1997): 22-38. Rudy focuses on the feminist debate concerning new reproductive technologies and their relationship to male power and control over the bodies of women. Rudy asserts that Piercy’s and Ursula Le Guin’s novels strengthen women’s position in their struggle to control their own reproductive rights.