Woman on the Edge of Time ( 1976)

 Plot Summary By Chapters

 Feminst Utopia as a Genre

 Women's Position in the Relations of Production and Reproduction

 Connie's Position on the "Edge"

 Encounters with: Those on the Edge / Luciente

 The Future Worlds (2173) : Mettapoisette / the World of Gildina

6) present ("privileges and disorder in G 2) --> M: naming ceremony; Jackrabbit's madness understood;
 7) M:work and study explained ; motherhood redefined;  Connie willing to give Angie to them.
8) present --> 147 M government; death; 
9) present --> 170 M holidays and pleasures and art;  --> Dolly does not come
10) turning point: Alice getting an electrode implanted in her brain--> explanation of their views of coffee, how their world is only one of the possible worlds (197); the 30-year war; --> exhibition of Alice --> M's worming and ways of 'healing' (e.g. the conflicts among Jackrabbit, Bolivar and Luciente)
11) Acker's persuading Connie; Dolly's visit (gets a bit of money from Dolly) ; Sybil's change --> Luciente tries to help her control her nerves --> Connie tries to escape;
12) Connie in escape, joined by Luciente and Dawn, finally returned to the hospital;
13) effects of electrode on Alice and on Skip --> Luciente tries to comfort Connie --> the holi --> debate over the role of artists in defense --> Skip
14) drifter Maclaw 273 and his interest in tribal knowledge; Luciente as a scientist proposing her reck; Connie about to get her brain surgery --the night before;
15) Gildina (Rapture, flacks, HG and sense-all)
16) Jackrabbit's death 309
17) Hard to get Luciente; Luciente putting her kenner back to foco; Connie encouraged by Bee to fight; Connie imagines fighting with Bee and Hawk on a floater --> remembers Martin's fight and being murdered--> The doctors get worried about Connie's loss of consciousness, so they remove the dialytrode.
18) Captain Cream and Tina get their surgery; Connie communicates with Sybil about Sybil's most meaningful talk with a college student about witchcraft. Connie asks Luis to let her visit him
19) Luciente winter games; Connie at war
20) Official history of Connie

TOP

1. "Centrally concerned with the clash between individual desire and societal demand, Dystopian fiction often focuses on sexuality and relations between the genders as elements of this conflict."  (e.g. We, The Brave New World, 1984.) (337)
2. Despite giving frequent lip service to equality of genders, literary dystopias (and utopias, for that matter) have typically been places where men are men and women are women, and in relatively conventional way.   (337)
3. "critical utopia": Feminist writers [e.g. Piercy, Ursula K Le Guin, Samuel Delany, and Joanna Russ] "produced works that re-energized the utopian genre as a whole and moving toward an open-endedness that sought to overcome the tendency toward monological stagnation that had long haunted conceptualizations of utopia.  Tom Moylan argues that such writers attempted to create in their works what he calls 'critical utopia,' retaining an "awareness of the limitations of the utopian tradition, so that these texts reject utopia as blueprint while preserving it as dream" (10).  Such uotpias are able to function effectively as critique of status quo, while maintaining a self-critical awareness that prevents them from descending into empty utopian cliche." (338-39)

TOP

motherhood and family; birthing 103/104; co-mothers, no genetic bonds with the child.
"Where Gilman's future family is one of overmothers, landmothers, mothers and daughters, Piercy's family is an extended one in which notions of motherliness replaced motherhood" (Bartkowski 72)
"'Parenting, not pair-bonding, is the basis of these families.  And 'coupling' refers to a sexuality no longer tied to reprodution."  

TOP

• Sybil -- pp. 82-83; discussing what sex means p. 85-86
• Joan and her word salad pp. 86-87
• Mrs. Martinez 82
• Glenda 110; 
• Alice 144-45;"You take the shit and you is shit, girl."
• Getting money from Skip to make a phone call to Dolly pp. 166-67.

II. Connie's meeting L and her responses to Luciente: 

• meeting L: 1) on the street after she is exhausted by work p. 36; 2) on the street; 3) after she feels very lonely (51-52); 4) when she is in seclusion cell in the hospital 63; 5) actively wants to get away and visit 113; has to turn off her memory 113;"Luciente, let me visit"
• responses: 
  • sex p. 37 "boys in her dreams" grow younger and more beardless. 
  • concerned with her own money: 41; 
  • "dyke" 57; 
  • the agricultural society: 67
  • touching and caressing: think of childhood 76;
  • re. sign language -- disbelief, self-defense (e.g. p. 98 --does not like to be denied by the cat)
• Connie's responses as a mother and a lover
  • hate them for their idea of motherhood; p. 105;
  • feels angry  p. 134; 182 (kisses Dawn); give Angie to them 141
  • be with Bee 
    -- Luciente reminds her of her mother's mother 225;
    -- dreams of being a comother p. 249-
    
  • "Why me" 196; 
• no transition (inviation/reception) 265; 
• difficulties in connection since 1) Jackrabbit's death and 2) the implant of electrode
• Connie's joining the war 301; 328

TOP

I. Mouth-of -Mattapoisett

1) language:

-- about human identities: "ownfed," person, per, intersee
--> "Person must not do what person cannot do." 101
-- about family: comother, sweet friends, mem, core, 
-- ceremonies: kidbinding, naming, 115; Thanksmaking 174
-- name: only one word for a name (no family name), can change names.  (e.g. Rose of Ithaca, Luciente and Bee and Jackrabbit ) pp. 76; choosing different names (different from Connie's sense of her names) 121-22; 
-- others (frequently nouns used as verbs): worming (struggle p.101), bottom, fasure, kenner, red, compost, Yif, suck patience (57), "Craze me"; trance, body one's feelings; 
-- suck patience 213

Identity
-- individualism 101; 136;
-- naming e.g. p. 121; Innocente p. 114
-- free self-expression of "I want" p. 123
-- personalities: each with different traits, e.g. Jackrabbit with artistic tendencies; weaknesses (Jackrabbit's 124; Dawn's shyness, Luciente's jealousy 176)
-- dialogic communication (negotiation) as mothering
worming 207 -- in order to discover and eliminate the sources of hostility between individuals.
Connie: "Don't you people have nothing to worry about besides personal stuff?" One of the community members then points out the connection between individual and national warfare:
Response:
[W]e believe many actions fail because of inner tensions. To get revenge against someone an individual thinks wronged per, individuals have offered up nations to conquest.

Note: Sara Ruddick on mothers and peace:
"Out of their faiture as well as successes, mothers develop a conception of relatinships that undermines the paranoid conception of individuality that fuel conquest. . .They not only modify aggression in the interest of connection but develop connections that limit aggression before it arises. The self who desires other selves to persist in their own lively being is a self at least capable of respecting the lives and life-connections of quite different others." (254)

3) Community Culture and Ecological Concerns

Sexual and family arrangement:

• family with individual private spaces;
• comothers and sweetfriends 74; man breastfeeding 134; 
• love and sex: love more than one per 133; "person never stales on anybody" 148 (e.g. Erzulia and Bee)flirting in public 123; 
• allowing children to experiment sex 138-39
• the brooder 101 - severs the connection between genes and racial culture

"Decisions were made forty years back to breed a high proportion of darker-skinned people and to mix the genes well through the population. At the same time, we decided to hold on to separate cultural identities. But we broke the bond between genes and culture, broke it forever. We want there to be no chance of racism again. But we don't want the melting pot where everybody ends up with thin gruel. We want diversity, for strangeness breeds richness." (96)

• examples: the ceremony of naming; children-- naming ritual and then they go away ("They body our sense of good." 117)
• Shaper vs. Mixer pp. 226
  
  Culture and Arts
  --pluralism 178, affirming different cultures
  -- preservation of racial cultures 100 ( hunting); 102; 103;104-06; Zuli follows voodoo; Sappho an Indian believer;  150; confirming the past e.g. J's art work 180-81; *other examples of holi(visionary artwork) pp. 180, 265
  
  Environmentalist/Ecological views of Nature
  -- use either solar energy or gas from decomposed waste
  --communication with animals 98-99; animals Tilla 98
  -- decompost or re-cycle things p. 55;
  -- use spinners to make fences.
  
  Few Private Properties
  Fooder --
  Pleasure and Luxuries --circulated or decomposed (flimsy p. 171); coffee 195; luxuries determined by credits or productivity 247-48;
  

* Their view of Connie's world (its need for love): 251; (car and loneliness) 245-46
-- work and study pp. 130 - 31
--pleasure in dresses 175-176
-- food -- everybody well-fed; p.173 (cook--a job to be rotated)
-- child's sex p.138

Problems and Death
--"Some problems you solve only if you cease being human." (125)
-- ritual of dying 156
-- children and older people on both ends of life p. 132

• rituals and holidays pp. 120, 173
• joining a base 123-24; 
• education 53; 
• madness:  "Our madhouses are places where people retreat when they want to go down into themselves -- to collapse, carry on, see visions, hear voices of prophecy, bang on the walls, relive infancy -- getting in touch with the buried self and the inner mind. We all lose parts of ourselves. We all make choices that go bad....... How can another person decide that it is time for me to disintegrate, to reintegrate myself?" (p.60)

• planning for the township 151; representative chosen by lot; decision made by voting; the winner treats the loser.
  * their law 208-209 (healing those committing assault or murder)
• garbage p. 55
• close to nature: 125

5. Healing and Medicine

Erzulia -- into voodoo and medicine

II. the World of Gildina
-- clues: "We are only one possible future," Luciente 177
chap 15: marriage as contract 290; life expectancy 291; use of drugs 292; levels 292; HG; no window, no view 294-95; SC (sharpened control); monitored by the Securicenter; multi;   

TOP