Woman on the Edge of Time
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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"I want to do something very important. Like fly into the past and make it come out right." -- Marge Piercy, Woman on the Edge of Time |
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Woman on the Edge of Time (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1976) is a novel by Marge Piercy. It is considered a classic of utopian "speculative" science fiction as well as a feminist classic.
Plot summary
In the 1970s, an impoverished but intelligent thirty-seven-year-old Mexican-American woman Consuelo (Connie) Ramos, a resident of Spanish Harlem, is unfairly incarcerated in a New York mental hospital due to her supposed violent criminal tendencies. She had been recently released from a previous governmentally forced detention in a mental institution after an episode of drug-related child neglect which led her also to lose custody of her daughter. Connie is caught within the government welfare and child custody labyrinth of 1970s New York City. She is after the first scene recommitted involuntarily by her niece's pimp, on grounds of violent behavior, after she strikes him in the course of protecting her niece, Dolly (Dolores), from him. Dolly had sought protection from Connie because she was being forced by the pimp into having an (illegal) abortion.
One of Connie's chief abilities is her perceptiveness and empathy. As a result, before being committed, Connie had for some time begun to communicate with ("receive" from) a figure from the future: an androgynous young woman named Luciente. Connie retains her visions and her connection, which become more and more real, even while heavily drugged in the mental hospital in New York, based loosely on Bellevue and other mental institutions of that period. Luciente is time-traveling from a future (the date is given as 2137) in which a number of goals of the political and social agenda of the late sixties and early seventies radical movements have been fulfilled. Environmental pollution, patriarchy, homelessness, homophobia, racism, ethnocentrism, phallogocentrism, sexism, class-subordination, food injustice, consumerism, imperialism, and totalitarianism have been effectively dealt with in this world, which is governmentally decentralized in a loose version of anarchism.
In contrast to the contemporary 1970s setting in an abusive mental institution where patients are labelled "violent," "incapable," "irrational," etc. on the basis of their response to an unjust and harshly stratified class-, race-, and gender-ridden society, future dwellers experience enormous personal freedom and train one another in self-control and ways of producing win-win results in all social situations. In particular, the subjects of volition and free will, mental institutionalization, and interference in others' willed actions are key to the vision of the utopian future. Connie is introduced by Luciente to the agrarian, communal community of Mattapoisett, where children grow up in a culture where they are encouraged to know themselves and their own minds and emotions thoroughly through practicing a type of meditation from an early age ("in-knowing"), in the service of social harmony and the ability to communicate with others without domination or subservience.
This classless, gender-neutral (non-gendered pronouns are used, notably "per" or "person" for "he/she/him/her"), racial-difference-affirming society is sketched in detail, including meeting and discussion structures that eliminate power differentials as much as possible, the extensive use of technology only for social goods, the replacement of business and corporate agendas with general planning for social justice and respect for all human beings' individuality. Disputes between towns and regions are settled peacefully through discussion and merit-based competition of ideas, with the winning parties being obliged to "throw a big party for" or otherwise conciliate the losers in each case, in order to maintain friendly relations.
A 70s emphasis on individual freedom can be seen at times: each person lives in a private tent or one-room home, and children develop outside the womb of an individual and are adopted by three "mothers" (of any gender) who guard and teach them only until puberty; every person chooses their own name, and can also choose their field of study and work, as well as when to disengage from their community, or join a new one; total freedom also applies to one's mental and emotional choices—in this future world one can check oneself into and out of the equivalent of a sanitorium at will, go into or out of various kinds of therapy, or take a mental break in some other way, and no other person has the right to choose this on one's behalf. One's field of work is self-chosen, and dicta apply to both one's life path and one's mental or emotional desires, needs, and capacities: "Per must not do what per cannot do" and "Per must do what per needs to do" are applied to both personal/emotional and professional life choices insofar as possible. There are limits to this utopia, which threaten always at the margins: the death penalty is imposed on occasion, and war is in the background, but both are considered extreme and unusual measures.
Connie learns tools of emotional and physical survival from Luciente and the future population of Mattapoisett, and comes to feel that she is living at an important time in history, and that she herself is in a pivotal position; her actions and decisions will determine the course of history. In particular, it is slowly revealed that Luciente's utopia is only one possible future; alternate futures are a possibility, and the novel shows us one example— a future consumerist, hyper-capitalist, environmentally sick and strictly classist, racist, and gender-stratified society in which a wealthy elite live on space platforms, sustaining themselves by dominating and exploiting the majority of the population through total control of knowledge and technology, personal control extending to physical "farming" of bodies (harvesting organs regularly) and the surgical control of moods through the use of psychotropic drugs. Women in this intensely violent, misogynistic and homophobic world are valued and "grown" solely for appearance and sexuality, and plastic surgery that gives women grotesquely exaggerated sexual features is commonplace.
The novel critiques mental institutions and hospitalization of its time extensively, and brings the problem of free will to the forefront as well as suggesting alternative routes to mental wellness and social reform. It does not decide for the reader whether Connie's visions are by-products of her mental instability or are literal time-travel, but ultimately, Connie's confrontation with the future inspires her to violent revolt against her institutional captors. She uses her limited means, despite her very restricted situation, in a desperate and apparently heroic way to prevent the dissemination of the mind-control technology that makes the future dystopia possible, putting an end to the mind-control experiments and prevents the lobotomy operation that had been planned for her and hundreds of other imprisoned patients. Connie acts in the tradition of revolts by oppressed or subaltern classes to put a wrench into the system of oppression within which she is caught. Though her revolutionary action ensures her own permanent incarceration and possible death sentence, and may not ensure the existence of the Mattapoisett future, Connie nevertheless sees her act as a victory, and perhaps the reader is encouraged to agree: "I'm a dead woman now too. ... But I did fight them. ... I tried."<ref>p. 375 of the Women's Press editions of 1979 and 1987.</ref>
