on the basis of their response to an unjust and harshly stratified class-, race-, and gender-ridden society, future dwellers experience enormous personal freedom and train one another in self-control and ways of producing win-win results in all social situations. In contrast to the contemporary 1970s setting in an abusive mental institution where patients are labelled "violent," "incapable," "irrational," etc. Environmental pollution, patriarchy, homelessness, homophobia, racism, ethnocentrism, phallogocentrism, sexism, class-subordination, food injustice, consumerism, imperialism, and totalitarianism have been effectively dealt with in this world, which is governmentally decentralized in a loose version of anarchism. Luciente is time-traveling from a future (the date is given as 2137), in which a number of goals of the political and social agenda of the late sixties' and early seventies' radical movements have been fulfilled. Connie retains her visions and her connection, which become more and more real, even while heavily drugged in the mental hospital in New York, based loosely on Bellevue and other mental institutions from that period. As a result, before being committed, Connie had for some time begun to communicate with ("receive" from) a figure from the future: an androgynous young woman named Luciente. One of Connie's chief abilities is her perceptiveness and empathy. Dolly had sought Connie's protection because she was being forced by the pimp into having an (illegal) abortion. She is after the first scene recommitted involuntarily by her niece's pimp on grounds of violent behavior, after she strikes him in the course of protecting her niece, Dolly (Dolores), from him. Connie is caught within the government welfare and child custody labyrinth of 1970s New York City. She had been recently released from a previous voluntary commitment in a mental institution after an episode of drug-related child neglect, which led her also to lose custody of her daughter. In the 1970s, an impoverished and intelligent thirty-seven-year-old Mexican-American woman Consuelo (Connie) Ramos, a resident of Spanish Harlem, is unfairly incarcerated in a New York mental hospital due to her supposed violent criminal tendencies. Piercy even compares Woman on the Edge of Time and another one of her utopian novels He, She, and It when discussing the themes and inspirations behind Woman on the Edge of Time. Piercy describes the novel as, "if only.". One of Piercy's main inspirations for her utopian novels is Plato's Republic. Piercy draws on several inspirations to write this novel such as utopian studies, technoscience, socialization, and female fantasies. The novel was originally published by Alfred A. It is considered a classic of utopian "speculative" science fiction as well as a feminist classic. Woman on the Edge of Time is a 1976 novel by Marge Piercy.
0 kommentar(er)
