Woman on the Edge of Time
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Marge Piercy's novel Woman on the Edge of Time (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1976) is a utopian fantasy set in a framework that contrasts present-day (1970s) New York City with the village of Mattapoisett in 2137.
[edit] Plot summary
Thirty-seven-year-old Latina Consuelo (Connie) Ramos is committed to the psychiatric ward in Bellevue Hospital after another episode in a series of violent family crises. It is there that Connie, diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia, starts envisioning Luciente, a woman from the future. She travels to Luciente's time, in which virtually the entire political and social agenda of the late sixties and early seventies radical movements has been fulfilled. Environmental pollution, homophobia, racism, phallogocentrism, class-subordination, consumerism, imperialism, and totalitarianism no longer exist in the rural community of Mattapoisett. The death penalty, however, continues to exist ("We don't think it's right to kill (...). Only convenient."), as does war. Connie's visions of the Utopia that is Mattapoisett clash with her visits to an alternate future in which a wealthy elite living on space platforms subdues the majority of the population with drugs and harvests these earth-bound humans' organs. The technocrats controlling this horrific future attempt to influence the past--Connie's present--to ensure the existence of their future.
The novel gives little indication as to whether or not Connie's visions are by-products of a mental disease or are meant to be taken literally, but ultimately, Connie's confrontation with the future incites her to a violent action which will ensure her indefinite detention at the Rockover Psychiatric Institution. She will undoubtedly be treated with electroconvulsive therapy and be "filed away among the living cancers of the chronic wards." Though her actions do not ensure the existence of the Mattapoiset future, Connie nevertheless sees her act as a victory: "I'm a dead woman now too. (...) But I did fight them. (...) I tried. (...) For Skip, for Alice, for Tina, for Captain Cream and Orville, for Claud, for you who will be born from my best hopes, to you I dedicate my act of war. At least once I fought and won."
[edit] Bibliography
- Piercy, Marge [1976] (1985). Woman on the Edge of Time. New York: Fawcett. ISBN 0-449-21082-0.
- Piercy, Marge [1976] (2000). Woman on the Edge of Time. London: The Women's Press. ISBN 0-7043-4656-7.
- Lefanu, Sarah (1988). In the Chinks of the World Machine: Feminism and Science Fiction. London: The Women's Press. ISBN 0-7043-4092-5.
- Lefanu, Sarah (1989). Feminism and Science Fiction. Bloomington, IN: Indiana Univ Press. ISBN 0-253-23100-0.
