45 pages • 1 hour read
Marge PiercyWoman on the Edge of Time
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1976A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 16-20Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 16 Summary
Connie feels deeply depressed in the ward and sees herself as an object rather than a person with feelings. She sits passively and watches things around her but is distanced from her own emotions. When she feels a great pain originating from Luciente, she is frightened but allows herself to pass into the future. There, everyone is grieving Jackrabbit, who was killed while on defense. They have brought Connie there so that she can attend his memorial since she is like family to them.
During the memorial, people speak of their memories of Jackrabbit. Connie is shocked that some of the memories are negative, but the others explain to her that they remember a person by talking about them as they really were, both good and bad. Jackrabbit could be flighty and changeable but also loving, kind, and full of life. After his burial, the council agrees that a new baby will share his exact genetics. Luciente explains that this is a rare honor and one she finds comforting.
Connie awakens in the ward and finds that the doctors have been trying to rouse her for over a day. They are panicked and worried that something has gone wrong with the experiment. Sybil is also worried, though Connie tries to reassure her.
Chapter 17 Summary
Connie struggles to contact Luciente again. She worries that the electrodes in her brain are affecting her ability to contact Mattapoisett, and when she reaches out, she sometimes feels that she is slipping into the other future. After many attempts to return to Mattapoisett, Connie finds herself fighting at the front with Luciente and Bee. Bee gives her advice and says that Connie is fighting her own war.
Connie alternates between the ward, where she has a high fever, and visions of fighting. In the ward, the doctors and nurses worry that the implant is causing problems. At the front, she is flying with Hawk and Luciente; she sees that the enemy crafts are piloted by the doctors and social workers who have put her in the institution. She also finds herself back in her apartment with Martín, with rioters and police outside.
Finally, the doctors remove the electrodes from her brain. She tells them that she feels better and tries to be a model patient, all the while telling herself that there is no more time for hope: She is at war.
Chapter 18 Summary
At the new ward in the hospital, Connie works to make herself a model patient. She and Sybil discuss the possibility of escape. Sybil tells her that a volunteer has been discussing witchcraft with her and brought her a newsletter from a Wiccan group. Connie calls her brother and convinces him to let her visit for Thanksgiving. He agrees so that she can help his wife get ready for a party.
At her brother’s house, his third wife, Adele, watches Connie closely and criticizes her as she cooks and cleans. They have a miserable dinner with Dolly and Luis’s other children. Luis spends the entire dinner bragging about his wealth and criticizing Dolly and Connie. Connie realizes that Adele is high on pills and barely notices what is going on; she theorizes that this is why she is still married to Luis.
Luis and Adele keep Connie locked in at night, so she has no chance to escape. However, they let her work in their greenhouse during the day. While there, she steals some poison and hides it in a shampoo bottle that she takes back to the ward with her.
Chapter 19 Summary
Back at the hospital, Connie tells Sybil to be ready to run on Wednesday, when there will be a distraction. Sybil is worried but cannot question Connie closely before they are separated.
Connie sees Luciente, and the two walk around Mattapoisett. It is winter, and children are playing in the snow. Luciente explains that Connie’s visions of the war must have been of another future because she does not remember them. Connie asks her if it is wrong to kill someone, and Luciente asks if that is what Connie is planning. Connie loses contact, but her last glimpse of Mattapoisett is a vision of Dawn with snowflakes falling on her nose. Connie imagines kissing Dawn’s face.
At the hospital, the doctors explain to Connie that she will have an operation to replace the brain device on Monday; her brother signed the permission form. She tries to protest, but they do not listen to her. She goes to the coffee station and quietly pours the poison in their coffee. She wishes she could reach Luciente again but knows that she is no longer receptive to contact; she is too hardened. However, she dedicates her act to the people of the future and to those she has loved and lost here: Skip, Claud, and Alice.
Chapter 20 Summary
The final chapter consists of Connie’s medical notes. The history characterizes her as a belligerent and unpredictable woman of low intelligence and no sense of morality; it also praises Luis and Geraldo for helping her. The novel ends by saying that the 113 pages of this report “all follow[] Connie back to Rockover” (417).
Chapters 16-20 Analysis
The final chapters of Woman on the Edge of Time follow Connie’s descent into anger and violence, culminating in the novel’s tragic ending. A more typical sci-fi novel about a chosen one entrusted with saving humanity would end with good triumphing over evil. Instead, Connie murders several doctors and staff members to no apparent purpose and ends up confined to Rockdale for the rest of her life. This subversion of genre expectations emphasizes the systemic forces that render individual resistance to oppression largely futile.
Piercy chooses to close the novel with a change in narrative technique. After hundreds of pages confined to Connie’s limited third-person point of view, the final chapter takes the form of medical notes written by the doctors. This provides a new window into the dehumanization that is imposed on Connie in the hospital. Readers have been privy to Connie’s struggles against injustice as well as to her empathy and sensitivity. They have watched her fight against Geraldo’s violence and misogyny and grieve the loss of Claud and Angelina. The medical notes distort and flatten these struggles, saying that she has “delusions of persecution by niece’s fiancé and speaks of the State of New York as ‘murdering’ a Negro boyfriend” and “constantly complains about the child put out for adoption” (415). The notes also insist that she is of “average” intelligence and “has no consistent notions of right or wrong” (415). By allowing these notes to be the final word of the novel, Piercy accomplishes several things. First, she emphasizes the deep unfairness and frustration that Connie feels when realizing that no one is listening to or helping her. Second, she implies that these notes are the only record of Connie that will exist in her world. This says something about the mechanism of Institutional Power and the Medicalization of Dissent. Because those with power determine the narrative, Connie effectively becomes what they describe her to be.
The final chapters also bring up the question of whether Luciente’s and Connie’s visions are real. Piercy herself seems to suggest that they are since she imagines the novel as resting firmly in the sci-fi category. However, Chapter 17 offers a confusing blur of past, present, and future that is consistent with a reading of Connie as having a mental illness. Even if Connie’s visions are imaginary, however, this does not mitigate Piercy’s critique of the mental health field, nor of patriarchy, white supremacy, capitalism, etc. Either way, Connie is repeatedly dehumanized and experimented on. Most damningly of all, any “danger” she poses is the result of her time in the hospital—a place theoretically interested in helping individuals reintegrate into society.
At the end of the novel, Connie imagines herself as a combatant in a war: “War, she thought, I’m at war. No more fantasies, no more hopes. War” (368). Her visions of the future become increasingly violent, and they blur together with her oppressors at the hospital:
[S]he saw that [the planes] were piloted and manned by Judge Kerrigan, who had taken her daughter, by the social worker Miss Kronenberg, by Mrs. Polcari, by Acker and Miss Moynihan, by all the caseworkers and doctors and landlords and cops (366).
It is significant that Connie begins to visualize herself this way; for one, the merging of timelines suggests that Connie understands how the systemic forces that have marred her life also jeopardize the survival of Mattapoisett. Nevertheless, the citizens of Mattapoisett do not directly endorse Connie’s violence. Bee tells her, “There’s always a thing you can deny an oppressor, if only your allegiance. Your belief. Your co-oping. Often even with vastly unequal power, you can find or force an opening to fight back. In your time many without power found ways to fight” (357). Connie interprets this as license to poison the doctors, but the text is silent on the question of whether Luciente and Bee would condone this action. Instead, Piercy emphasizes that Connie becomes increasingly violent because she is trapped. She thinks that if she had “[o]nly one person to love. Just one little corner of loving of [her] own” (406), she would comply; having lost everyone she cares about, however, she feels that she must strike back. This reinforces the idea that violent systems beget violence even among people who were not prone to it to begin with.
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