Woman on the Edge of Time, by Marge Piercy
Woman on the Edge of Time
by Marge Piercy
“Woman on the Edge of Time” was written in 1976. It is the fascinating story of Connie Ramos, a Chicana woman in her mid-thirties, living in New York and labeled insane, committed to a mental institution.
But the truth is that Connie is overwhelmingly sane, heroically sane, and tuned in to the future.
Connie is able to communicate with the year 2137. Two totally different ways of life are competing. One is beautiful – communal, nonsexist, environmentally pure, open to ritual and magic. The other is a horror – totalitarian, exploitative, rigidly technological.
In Connie’s struggle to keep the institution’s doctors from forcing her into a brain control operation, we find the timeless struggle between beauty and terror, between good and evil….with an astonishing outcome.
Being told Connie’s life story, we are shown a bleak and very realistic picture of how our society has institutionalised oppression of the weak. But Connie decides to fight back, with a recognition that she is fighting a war on behalf of others as well as herself…
The way M.Piercy describes the life in the psychiatric institution is shocking and painful and brings a lot of important issues to the point.
The “social utopia world”, taking place in the year 2137 that Connie is able to enter is the more beautiful… full of great alternative ideas of how people might be able to live together in peaceful, respectful ways, open for spirituality, caring for each other and for the environment…