Review: Woman on the Edge of Time

Woman on the Edge of Time by Marge Piercy
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

After reading Charlotte Perkins Gilman's "Herland," I had an itch for more feminist utopias. "Woman on the Edge of Time" was exactly what I wanted. Thematically, it reads almost like a combination of "Herland" and Gilman's more famous "The Yellow Wallpaper," since WotEoT focuses on a woman forced into an asylum by her family, and then starts communicating with people from the future. It's left unclear whether what Connie sees in the future is 'real' or not, but that's not the point - the point is the exploration of the failings of today's world and how it would change if we truly valued both individuals and the world's resources.

Some interesting parallels with "Herland" include a focus on restructuring the family unit and a huge emphasis on children and education. People are life-long learners in WotEoT's utopia, and while they are also life-long workers, there's very little resembling either our current education system or career structure. Children are raised by three people who agree to co-parent together. If at any point during child-rearing either a parent or child decides that the arrangement doesn't work for them, the unsatisfactory parent leaves and someone from the community volunteers to take their place (this usually happens rather amicably). Children choose their own names and what they learn, which usually becomes what they do later in their lives, but as they're always learning people tend to play different roles over the course of their lives.

Commerce also no longer exists as we'd imagine it. There's a basic barter system between towns, and a lot of resource-sharing within towns. Very few things are privately owned - even luxuries are usually owned by the library/community and loaned out to those who wish to wear them.

I loved their funerals. When someone in the community dies, they gather and speak everything they remember about the person, both good and bad, and they all share in the ritual. Work stops for the evening or the day while people tell stories, drink, eat, smoke, and grieve.

My biggest criticism of the utopia might be that it assumes no "bad" people. Maybe this assumption is based on the idea that bad people come from bad environments, which might be true, but there's almost no discussion of crime or dissidents, aside from the mysterious war that they are constantly fighting against another civilization that holds very different values. Everyone who is within the society functions well within it, except for a very small number of people who are tolerated, but rarely integrate into a community.

The real plot, though, takes place in Connie's real life, where she is pulled from her normal asylum ward to become part of an experiment for "violent" patients. The treatments make her fellow patients disassociated or essentially nonresponsive. Connie makes several escape attempts and tries to convince her family to check her out, but finds it's much more difficult to get out than she thought. Her desperation and fear that she might actually be going insane were beautifully communicated; asylums are pretty dang scary, and some sections had me in tears.

Overall - excellently written, engaging story, great sci-fi/utopian material with a really strong message of equality.

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