Marge Piercy’s Conception of a Feminist Utopia in Woman on the Edge of Time

SÜMBÜL Y.

DEED-Uluslararası Dil ve Edebiyat Eğitimi Dergisi, no.10, pp.174-183, 2014 (Peer-Reviewed Journal)

Abstract

 Published in 1976 as the author’s fourth novel, Marge Piercy’s Women on the Edge of Time is a utopian novel elaborating on the controversial issues within the feminist circles of the seventies such as women’s rights and social status in society, gender-related violence, sexism and patriarchal ideology. In the novel, Piercy comments on the humans’, especially women’s, evolution through centuries with examples from two distinct social atmospheres both in the present time and in a utopian future. Focusing on the protagonist’s abilities of time-travel, Piercy presents the reader with two incompatible social structures, depicting the present time as an anti-utopia and the future society as a sexless social environment.

While the novel emphasizes issues like patriarchal ideology and the question of sisterhood among working class women on the one hand, it offers a totally different, anti-separatist linguistic realm, in which gender roles are re-defined, on the other. It is clearly deducible from the novel that Piercy takes sides with the future society’s social norms and morals, and takes a very harsh critical stance towards the present times’ patriarchal culture. In this respect, this article argues that Piercy conceives this social satire as her proposition of a better social environment for women and a challenge to the operative, mainstream ideas dominating second-wave feminism.