45 pages • 1 hour read
Marge PiercyWoman on the Edge of Time
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1976A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
Envisioning a Post-Gender Society
Content Warning: This section discusses racism, wrongful commitment to and medical abuse of patients in a psychiatric hospital, ableism, anti-gay bias, and suicide.
Like many utopian novels of the 1970s, Woman on the Edge of Time attempts to envision what a society with different gender norms might look like. Because many feminists of Piercy’s time located women’s oppression in patriarchal gender norms, Piercy imagines Mattapoisett as a culture where gender is irrelevant, though sex remains.
Connie’s world of 1970s New York has very marked gender roles that tend to privilege men. Femininity is associated with beauty, subservience, and feeling. Masculinity is associated with power, violence, dominance, and rationality. The novel shows this gendering of traits to be inherently linked to the victimization of women. In some cases—e.g., Geraldo’s treatment of Dolly—the victimization is explicitly misogynistic. However, misogyny also underpins Connie’s experiences at the psychiatric hospital, where the patients are mostly women or societally coded as feminine (e.g., Skip, a gay man). Connie imagines the male doctors attempting to cut feelings out of her brain “like a rotten appendix”: “Cold, calculating, ambitious, believing themselves rational and superior, they chased the crouching female animal through the brain with a scalpel” (307). The extent to which gender saturates Connie’s world is evident in its language; pronouns in Spanish and English clearly designate people as either male or female, with the assumption that this correlates with gender and gender norms.
Mattapoisett has a very different relationship with gender, which is why Connie initially mistakes Luciente for male. When she realizes her mistake, she is shocked, but so is Luciente, implying that citizens of Mattapoisett find the patriarchal structure of Connie’s society as baffling as she finds their own genderless world. Later, Connie thinks, “Luciente’s face and voice and body now seemed female if not at all feminine; too confident, too unself-conscious, too aggressive and sure and graceful in the wrong kind of totally coordinated way to be a woman: yet a woman” (103). This illustrates that Connie’s assessment of Luciente as male was derived from her own misogynistic assumptions about female behavior. While Luciente is comfortable with her sex, her culture (aided by technology that eliminates physiological pregnancy) does not consider sex an especially relevant category for thinking about people. They use the gender-neutral pronoun “per,” short for “person,” to refer to all people, and people of any gender can occupy any job or social role. Though they do use the word “mother” to refer to parenting, mothers can be male or female. Luciente explains this as part of the journey to equality: “Cause as long as we were biologically enchained, we’d never be equal. And males never would be humanized to be loving and tender. So we all became mothers” (110). Traits like courage and tenderness are decoupled from sex, becoming attributes that anyone can develop.
The Intersectional Nature of Feminist Struggle
Important in Piercy’s life and work is the idea that feminists should advocate not just for an end to patriarchy but also for an end to oppression based on race, class, orientation, etc. By deliberately choosing a heroine who is Chicana, impoverished, and without a college degree, Piercy emphasizes this intersectional struggle, while her depiction of Mattapoisett represents the goal: a society that is egalitarian with regard to not only gender but also race, class, etc.
It would be overly simplistic to say that Connie’s hardships stem simply from her gender. For example, while the hospital environment is intensely patriarchal, there are women in the hospital system, such as nurses and social workers, who are relatively privileged and who discriminate against Connie because of her race and socioeconomic status. The resulting treatment is at times profoundly dehumanizing. Connie remembers hearing a social worker speaking about Puerto Rican clients in a derogatory way, saying that “‘they’ got old fast and died young” (33), which reminds Connie of her brother’s attitude toward his pet fish: “Oh, they die easily, those neon tetras, you just buy more when your tank runs out” (33). Other characters’ struggles are similarly multilayered. Skip, for example, is a white man from a wealthy family. However, his parents consider him in need of “fixing” because he is gay, and their bias and rejection eventually lead to his suicide. Skip’s class, gender, and race do not shield him from prejudice. Moreover, the novel shows that characters who are marginalized in one or more ways can themselves perpetuate inequality. Though Connie is kind to Skip, she has dismissive and anti-gay thoughts about Luciente when she believes that Luciente is a man. Such details underscore that oppression is multifaceted and requires an equally multifaceted solution.
In Mattapoisett, Piercy therefore ties a utopian future to shared power among people. In addition to abolishing gender roles, Mattapoisett promotes racial diversity and shares its resources equally. While Connie is puzzled that she has been chosen to save Mattapoisett since she is not a scientist or politician, the people of the future believe that someone like her is uniquely positioned to understand and help them. As a citizen of Mattapoisett tells her, “The powerful don’t make revolutions […] It’s the people who worked out the labor-and-land intensive farming we do. It’s all the people who changed how people bought food, raised children, went to school” (213). The remark suggests that progressive change originates with the most marginalized, framing intersectionality as not only moral but also a practical necessity to feminism.
Institutional Power and the Medicalization of Dissent
Woman on the Edge of Time suggests that the idea of “madness” is a social construction; mental illness may exist, but institutional power shapes who is considered rational and who is not. The novel responds to a long history of Western medicine stigmatizing femaleness and associating it with irrationality—for example, the 19th-century idea of “hysteria” that feminist writers like Charlotte Perkins Gilman critiqued in their fiction. It is not simply that doctors are more likely to perceive women as mentally ill; rather, such a framing pathologizes everything associated with femaleness or femininity while maintaining its own objectivity. Piercy alludes to this by describing the doctors treating Connie as “[c]old, calculating, ambitious, believing themselves rational and superior” (307). These doctors see emotions as “a disease, something to be cut out like a rotten appendix” (307).
The intertwining of patriarchy and the medical establishment means that resistance itself becomes a sign of “disease.” Any emotional outburst—even and especially in response to her own dehumanization—“proves” that Connie is ill or irrational. This culminates in the novel’s final chapter, which contains Connie’s medical record. Juxtaposed against an entire narrative devoted to Connie’s life and experience, the medical record, which characterizes her behavior as “bizarre” and describes her as “hostile, uncooperative, and threatening” (414-15), itself seems detached from reality. She is ultimately diagnosed as “a socially maladjusted individual subject to periodic dysphorias accompanied by fear, leading to violent episodes and aggressions” (415)—a diagnosis that underscores that the “problem” is the way she does or does not fit into society. The medicalization of difference is even clearer in the cases of patients such as Sybil and Skip. Sybil actively resists patriarchal power, while Skip is gay and gender nonconforming.
Mattapoisett views mental health very differently than Connie’s world, and its residents are puzzled by the treatment Connie receives. Luciente initially thinks that Rockdale is a prison or concentration camp and explains that in her world, “madhouses” are “open to the air and pleasant” (65). The word choice here is significant; “madhouse” is a loaded term, but for Luciente, there is no stigma. Not only differences in gender, orientation, etc. but also differences in mental state are considered a normal part of life. Luciente describes her lover Diana undergoing times when she “goes mad […] Has visions. Per earthquakes. Goes down. Emerges and sets to work again with harnessed passion” (307). Luciente also distinguishes Diana’s experiences from Connie’s; she thinks that Connie is “not mad” but “tired, unable to cope for a while? Sometimes, among us, this happens” (307). This passage contextualizes Connie’s mental state as situational while underscoring that it too would be a matter of course in Mattapoisett.
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