WOMAN ON THE EDGE OF TIME

An Analysis by Elisa Kay Sparks
 
 

Woman on the Edge of Time tells the story of Connie Ramos who, incarcerated in a mental institution, travels into a possible utopian future. Structurally, the novel alternates Connie's experiences on several mental wards with a series of visits to the future world of Mattapoisett Massachusetts in 2137. Moving from a false spring to a permanent winter, Connie enacts an ironic version of the hero's journey outlined by Joseph Campbell in The Hero with a Thousand Faces (1949). Luciente, Connie's guide figure, is the bright shadow of Connie's despair; her name in Spanish means "shining, brilliant, full of light" (36). She provides the call to adventure, contacting Connie just before she wallops her niece's pimp, an act which takes her across the threshold of Bellevue hospital, and into the "belly of the iron beast" to Rockover State (31).

During this time, Connie's trips to the future often mirror or compensate for aspects of her past or events on the ward. Her anguish at losing her daughter and her desire to once again live in a family are answered by her inclusion in Luciente's family and her contact with Luciente's daughter Dawn. When an old woman on the ward dies, Connie attends the honored death of Sappho, a storyteller in the future. When her niece Dolly fails to show up for a visit, Connie attends a festival, sees one of Jackrabbit's holis, and has sex with Bee, a large, gentle black man who reminds her of Claud.

At Rockover, Connie and her friends Sybil and Skip are selected for operations to experiment with chemical control of emotions; simultaneously, Connie learns that Luciente and her society are at war with the remnants of a multi-national powerbase whose use of "robots or cybernauts" (101) as fighters links them to Connie's doctors trying to master the technology of brain control. After seeing how the implants depersonalize another patient, Alice, Connie plans and executes an escape. Caught and returned to custody, Connie watches the surgery finally enable Skip to commit suicide. In the parallel universe of the future, Jackrabbit is killed while serving on defense.

Once Connie herself has the operation, her contacts with Luciente's world become increasingly muddled. An attempt to reach Mattapoisett catapults her into a negative version of the future, where she meets Gildina, the debased opposite of Luciente, who like Connie's niece Dolly, is a prostitute. After a visit to attend Jackrabbit's wake, Connie decides to enlist as a fighter in the war against the mechanistic future, at one point flying in what she thinks is a battle against the soldiers of the future and finally deciding to carry the war into her own time by poisoning the hospital staff with parathion she steals from her brother's greenhouse. The novel ends with a series of excerpts from Connie's official files, revealing that she was permanently incarcerated at Rockover; however, by killing her doctors, she may have helped Luciente's future come into existence.

 An extended, feminist revision of Ken Kesey's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1962), Woman on the Edge of Time combines a counter-cultural critique of authoritarian institutions with one of the first and most fully realized feminist utopias. Connie's visits to Luciente's world map out humane alternatives to the abuses of power she suffers as a middle-aged, poor, Chicana single mother. These fall into three interrelated categories of concern shared by all of Piercy's work: 1) a Marxist/ anarchist critique of economically based power hierarchies; 2) a feminist critique of sex roles, gender inequities, and child-rearing practices; 3) a humanist critique of scientific ignorance of and technological disregard for the ecological unity of the human mind and the natural environment. As one of Luciente's family members explains,

Luciente's future lacks not only classes but also gender hierarchies. Sex roles as Connie knows and suffers under them are non-existent -- eliminated along with motherhood. Children are no longer born by women; instead they are incubated in a "brooder." Each child has three genetically unrelated "comothers," at least two of whom, regardless of sex, take hormone treatments which allow them to nurse. Initially repulsed by the sexual arrangements of the future, Connie reacts to the brooder with hatred, seeing the whole process as mechanistic reduction of children to animals (106). But despite her rage at the sight of a man breast-feeding (134), she finally comes to the conclusion that this future fulfills her fantasy of "a better world for the children" (73), wishing passionately that her daughter Angelina could grow up as strong, proud, and unafraid as Luciente's children.

Children in Luciente's world are allowed to explore the full range of their human potential. Nurturing mind in body, the culture aims to educate "the senses, the imagination, the social being, the muscles, the nervous system, the intuition, the sense of beauty -- as well as memory and intellect" (140). Jackrabbit lists their priorities: they have tried to learn from "cultures that dealt well with handling conflict, promoting cooperation, coming of age, growing a sense of community, getting sick, aging, going mad, dying" (125). Educational practices and initiation and healing rituals to deal with each of these life tasks are drawn with rich pragmatic detail during Connie's visits.

The future's holistic attitude towards the individual parallels their sense of connection to the natural world. Following the heritage of the American Indians, they "put a lot of work into feeding everybody without destroying the soil" (129). Although they can automate whole factories, they use technology mainly for inhumanly mindless tasks. An Earth Advocate and an Animal Advocate sit on all planning councils, making sure human needs are ecologically balanced with those of the biosphere.

Life in Mattapoisett is thus a point-by-point refutation of the power structure of Connie's world where "the whole social-pigeonholing establishment" (26) has the power to reduce the individual to a category of disease, subjecting them to the absolute whim of doctors who try to manipulate the human mind while knowing almost nothing about it. Instead, Piercy crafts a culture which can accept idiosyncracy and conflict, a place where individual differences and emotions are understood and honored, where the care and nurturing of children is the central task of families supported by a unified community, and where everyone lives in a balance of useful work and creative play. Even if Connie's trips to the future are all in her mind, the reality she imagines is saner than the world under her doctors' control.
 
 

Written after Piercy's two most explicitly feminist works, Small Changes and To Be of Use (both 1973), Woman on the Edge of Time details many of the same women's issues: the trauma of illegal abortion and rape, the self-abasement required by conventional gender roles, the pain and anger of mother-daughter relationships, the need to extend the nuclear family, the difficult loyalties of female friendships, the humane recognition of alternatives to heterosexuality. But its most important contributions to feminism lie in its status as a heterosexual feminist utopia, its invention of a richly non-sexist language for describing human emotions, and its imaginative participation in the feminist discussion of motherhood.

Piercy's theoretical foundation in Marxist philosophy and practical experience in community activism makes hers one of the most realistic and thoroughly conceived of all feminist utopias. Luciente's wry acknowledgement that governing by consensus means spending endless time in meetings, as well as the finely dramatized details of the "worming" process by which the community helps her resolve her conflicts with one of Jackrabbit's other lovers, are authentic renditions of the daily politics of consciousness-raising groups. Another index of the novel's realism is its genial inclusion of men. Most of the works to which the novel is usually compared -- Charlotte Perkins Gilman's Herland (1915), Joanna Russ's The Female Man (1975), Suzy Charnas's Motherlines (1978), and Sally Gearheart's The Wanderground (1979) -- posit separatist worlds in which men have ceased to exist, are outlawed, and/or put up with occasionally for necessities of breeding or mixing gene pools.

Piercy's ear and eye as a poet also enrich feminist dimensions of the novel. While the invention of the gender-neutral pronoun "per" is one obvious answer to linguistic sexism, a more subtle corrective is supplied by the metaphorical richness of Luciente's language, particularly its strong, kinetic verbs such as "inknow," (to sense subjective connections between body and mind), "graze" (to make mental contact), "paint the bones" (to use euphemisms), "bottom" (to feel depressed), "grasp" (to understand), and "sling" (to criticize).

The most revolutionary of Piercy's innovations is, however, the elimination of motherhood, a literal extrapolation of Shulamith Firestone's call in The Dialectic of Sex (1970) for women to socialize the technologies of biological reproduction so that they will no longer be physically or psychologically responsible for child care. Also incorporating Juliet Mitchell's emphasis in Woman's Estate (1971) on the need for corollary revolutions in women's work, sexual freedom, and child care practices, Piercy confronts the dilemmas of mothering contemporaneously outlined in Adrienne Rich's Of Woman Born (1976) and Dorothy Dinnerstein's The Mermaid and the Minotaur (1977). The solution of Luciente's world -- "So we all became mothers" -- anticipates Nancy Chodorow's The Reproduction of Mothering (1978) in suggesting that we will not achieve sexual equality until men are "humanized to be loving and tender" by fully participating in child rearing.