Woman on the Edge of Time

In this section, Piercy uses diction to develop both of her imagined future worlds. Previous chapters established Luciente’s way of speaking and the terminology of Mattapoisett—“per” for “he” or “she,” “holi” for “video,” etc. When encountering Gildina in the dystopian tower world, Connie encounters a new set of slang that differentiates Gildina’s society from both Connie’s and Luciente’s. Unlike Hawk (formerly Innocente), Jackrabbit, and Luciente, who have chosen their own names, Gildina is “Gildina 547-921-45-822-KBJ” (314)—one of many “contracties,” or trafficked women, identified by serial numbers. The nature of names as a symbol of self-determination in Mattapoisett contrasts with the dystopian capitalism of Gildina’s world, where everything is owned and controlled by corporations.

Despite the grimness of this vision of the future, the encounter is also humorous. Gildina’s name and towering hairdo are comic, as is her disgust at the thought of eating vegetables or meat, which Connie takes for granted. Like Connie and Luciente’s cross-cultural misunderstandings, such humor serves a serious purpose. The description of Gildina’s appearance is a good example: “[H]er body seemed a cartoon of femininity, with a tiny waist, enormous sharp breasts that stuck out like the brassieres Connie herself had worn in the fifties” (313). While Mattapoisett is Piercy’s attempt at Envisioning a Post-Gender Society, Gildina is incredibly gendered: She has been so modified that she can barely walk, taking the patriarchal restriction of women’s agency and the capitalist commodification of their bodies and sexuality to an extreme. This future represents the opposite of Mattapoisett’s gender-lessness, with Connie’s world occupying a kind of middle territory.

This experience finalizes Connie’s radicalization, which constitutes her main character arc. At the beginning of the novel, she was beaten down and exhausted, thinking of herself as a helpless person who just needed to get through the day. The encounters with Mattapoisett and Gildina have now made her see herself as a soldier: “So that [Gildina’s world] was the other world that might come to be. That was Luciente’s war, and she was enlisted in it” (328). This idea that she is fighting in a war foreshadows the violence she will enact at the end of the novel, when she kills some of the doctors and nurses who are experimenting on her.

Connie is also moved toward violence by Skip’s suicide, which she rightfully recognizes as a reaction to the dehumanizing experiments he has suffered at the hospital. When he leaves for home, Connie sees him as a “robot not expertly welded” (295), suggesting that the hospital has treated him like an object rather than a person. When she learns that he has died, she thinks bitterly, “Drs. Redding and Morgan were right thinking they had cured Skip […] They had cured him of fumbling, of indecision. They had taught him to act, they had taught him the value of a quick clean death” (312). Besides attributing Skip’s death directly to the doctors’ intervention, the passage shows how Connie’s repeated experiences with violence at the hands of the psychiatric institution move her toward violence in response. In an earlier chapter, she explains to Luciente that she has “three names inside [her]” and especially fears “Conchita, the low-down drunken mean part of [her] who gets by in jail, in the bughouse, who loves no good men, who hurt [her] daughter” (129). The sections of the novel set in the hospital emphasize that the treatment of patients becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. They treat Connie as if she were violent, and she eventually resorts to violence. This is not merely an instance of perception shaping reality but rather the inevitable result of Institutional Power and the Medicalization of Dissent: The injustice of the medical system provokes reaction, but because the system understands its own power as legitimate, all dissent becomes illegitimate.