In 1516, Sir Thomas More coined the term ‘utopia’ as a bit of superb word-play. In Greek, ou-topos translates to “no place” and eu-topos “good place.” Meant to convey the idea of an unattainable ideal society, the term connotes the impossibility of man-made heaven. Utopias, societies which answer all human needs, obliterating inequalities and suffering, are elusive in their perfection. There are queer utopias, feminist utopias, classless utopias, utopias that return society to the pre-industrial harmony of nature, and utopias that envision a technologically rich world of gleaming convenience and speed. Yet the concept of utopia, as of with heaven, is impactful for its unreachability. We cannot imagine utopias except as a reflection of the present’s flaws. Thus, the well-written utopia presents a compelling and complex future whose primary purpose is not to concretely manifest a

human heaven, but to interrogate the systemic subjugation of current society. The unsuccessful utopian novel attempts to do the same, but circumscribes its utopia by diametrically opposing it to a present whose multivalent intricacy is not meaningfully investigated nor paralleled. The future is reduced to a flimsy glamor, didactic as a parable; the utopia is an explanation, an “info dump,” rather than an exploration. Marge Piercy’s Woman on the Edge of Time cannot meaningfully interpret the utopian paradox; its gauzy, insubstantial future is a “no-place.” Because the novel cannot admit nor explore contradiction in its envisioned utopia, it evades its duty to supply characters with both choice and voice, even as it maintains the reclamation of agency as one of its central

themes. This is not an intentional sophistry, but an unwillingness to contend with the consequences of the invented future’s divergences, a negligent blindness that seems especially crude in a novel intended to reveal our societal ignorance — the abuse we turn our gaze from, the eyes we cannot meet.

 

Connie is a convenient main character. The novel frequently positions her as an representation of social injustice, rather than an agentic individual who can affect not only

her reality, but the utopia as well. Besieged by myriad abusers (doctors, pimps, her family), Connie’s experiences as a poor Hispanic woman — whose intersectional identities are

constantly disrespected and oppressed — contrast brutally with the myriad improvements of the utopia to which she time-travels. As the denizens of the utopia offer explanations,
Connie drifts mutely in their wake, never straying far from the direction of Luciente, her spiritual guide and guardian. Piercy is careful to articulate that Connie’s initial anger and distrust of the future are failures of imagination, reflections of our present society’s propagandized rigidity and insularity. After being shown artificially grown embryos, Connie reflects, “How could anyone know what being a mother means who has never carried a child nine months heavy under her heart, who has never borne a baby in blood and pain, who has never suckled a child. . . . What do they know of mother-
hood?” (Piercy 106). For the denizens of the utopia, decoupling the female body from motherhood generates freedom and equality; for Connie, the act is a horror, robbing women of the connection, strengthened and honored through sacrifice, pregnancy engenders between the child and the mother. Within the novel, the body acts a symbol of agency. When inflicted with suffering, the body is a receptacle of shame, withered and stunted, yet to choose pain in service of a loved one is sweet, an act of devotion and reverence. Whether Connie’s anger is justified or not, she believes the utopia, in its pursuit

of liberation, has lost something hallowed and pure. Yet Connie does not express these critiques and is later admonished for believing that “‘because we do not bear live, we cannot love our children’” (133). Connie is left voiceless, her anger rendered impotent and fruitless. Near the end of the novel, Connie hears a voice, perhaps Luciente’s, but perhaps her inner conscience: “‘Everyone raises the kids, haven’t you noticed? Romance, sex, birth, children — that’s what you fasten on. Yet that isn’t women’s business anymore. It’s everybody’s’” (251). Connie’s judgment is regarded as an unfortunate emphasis on individuality over the spiritual wealth and material sustainability of the collective — and Connie acquiesces to this rebuke despite its erasure of her particular desires.
 

There are other uncomfortable, unconscious parallels in which the utopia robs Connie of agency just as the present does. The utopian society is horrified when Connie, imprisoned in a mental institution, becomes an unwilling subject of experimentation. Yet the utopia also conducts an experiment — a ‘time travel project’ — summoning Connie to the future without explanation or consent. Her initial fear and revulsion are brushed away. Within the utopia itself, Connie is a pupil, passive and receptive, seemingly with nothing to offer or teach. This is an unsettling contradiction, as the utopia has ostensibly cured the oppressions of the past by honoring and incorporating the knowledge of subjugated peoples — women, indigenous and queer communities, enslaved people — into their systems of belief and governance. Yet the future society has no interest in Connie’s testimony, refusing to participate in or observe her world. The confused representation of Connie’s agency inhibits Piercy’s polemic; individuality is posed in opposition to collectivity, and pain in opposition to liberation. There is no dialogue between these facets, only contrast. There is no complexity, only binaries.
 

Piercy’s attempts to juxtapose the vibrant, dynamic utopia against Connie’s withered present, but instead colors the future with a plastic sheen, flattening both its impression on the reader and the book’s anti-materialist themes. The readers should marvel at the utopia’s joie de vivre, but instead, the utopia unfurls like a glossy brochure. Piercy describes multitudes of physical objects — brightly-colored buildings, impressive new technology, rich food, and compostable clothing — yet skimps on sensory details, rendering the utopia sterile and unnatural. In comparison, Connie’s present seems rich and alive. She describes her life as “crammed overflowing with aromas of coffee, of dope smoke in hallways, of refried cooking oil . . . the fragrance of fresh-cut grass and new buds in central park. Sidewalk vendors. Cuchifritos. The spring rhythm of conga drums through the streets” (28-29). The present bursts and teems with a complexity of aromas and sounds, and the sentence itself seems to flow along with the stream of Connie’s associated memories, underlining the present’s dynamism and fluidity. Since the reader is familiar with these sensations and memories, the description takes on a comforting, nostalgic appeal. We are intimately connected to Connie’s present but unmoored within the utopia, which does not have enough emotional association to render it dear or even beautiful. A holiday party in the utopia — “People were playing . . . games with things, like soft collapsible swords, pillows that spilled light bubbles when they broke. People were gliding on big wings off the hill by the river” (175 ) — takes on the glassy glitter of a snow globe. Piercy’s portrait of the utopia also works at cross purposes to her argument against materialism. In the future, luxury goods are collectively shared, and characters sometimes remonstrate with Connie for her attachment to worldly possessions. Yet Piercy’s attention is lavished on the utopia’s materiality to connote its wonder and vibrancy. Despite Piercy’s attempts to engender a sense of fluidity and harmony, the utopia acts as a museum intended to showcase the achievements of the future, arranged in relation to the past rather than a living, breathing organism in its own right. Her depiction focuses heavily on the fanciful new inventions of the future, imbuing the utopia with a harsh fluorescent brightness, while the present retains a sense of natural liveliness and change.
 

The utopia’s politics, particularly its portrayal of war, similarly take on a static, reductive nature. A long war of attrition against dissenters who seek to restore the hierarchies and privileges of the past is reduced to an archetypal battle between good and evil. Luciente explains: “‘Now they have the power to exterminate us and we to exterminate them. They have such a limited base — the moon, Antarctica, the space platforms — for a population mostly of androids, robots, cybernauts, partially automated humans, that the war is one of attrition and small actions in the disputed areas, raids almost anyplace. We live with it. It’s the tag end’” (267). The novel refuses to grapple with the blood and brutality of battle, or the contradictions of revolution — peace that requires war, freedom that requires imprisonment. Huddled in the remote, barren reaches of the universe, the dissenters are faceless and removed from sight, a tumorous mass of evil rather than a society of living people. Piercy chooses not to contend with the question of captives, of people living in disputed territories, of possible children or innocents residing within this adversarial group. The utopian war suggests merely the specter of oppression rather than its brutal actuality. Luciente’s use of the word “exterminate” is callous, conflating the resolution of the war with the complete elimination of their foes. Yet the gravity of the line, which points towards the terrible necessity of violence, is diluted by Piercy’s unwillingness to explore the complexity of realistic conflict. Aside from a single death, the utopian villages appear insulated against the consequences of war, and battles between the utopia and its opponents are unreal and fanciful, almost farcical. Operating a machine of war and surrounded by enemies, Luciente tells Connie, “‘Relax. Just enjoy the ride! Whee!’” (333). Again, Piercy utilizes the symbol of the body — these would-be usurpers are mostly “androids, robots, cybernauts, partially automated humans,” soulless and machinated, in stark contrast to the utopia’s living diversity of bodies and celebration of nakedness and sensuality. Piercy suggests that these husks of humanity have forgotten or disavowed the grace and power of flesh, the pleasures of the human form. Yet this symbol is confused by its parallels with Connie’s institutionalization, where devices are inserted into patients’ brains to regulate and control their emotions. The institution is compared to a “factory” where patients get sent “for repairs” (285). In this light, the mechanized humans of the utopia seem sorrowful and plaintive rather than pure evil. Perhaps this is Piercy’s intent, but if so, it taints Luciente’s words with cruelty, a denial of the dissenters’ humanity. Piercy fallaciously parallels the utopian conflict with Connie’s resistance against the doctors who imprison and abuse her, suggesting the necessity of violence to both maintain harmony and resist oppression. However, in refusing to engage seriously with the bitter fruits of conflict, she does an injustice to both Connie’s plight and real revolutionary movements throughout history.

 

Connie’s lack of agency in the utopia is furthered by enlisting her in its war. Luciente tells her, “‘We fear [our opponents], but we’ve prevailed so far and we believe we’ll win . . . if history is not reversed. That is, the past is a disputed area’” (267). The utopian future may at any time be erased by decisions in the past, and Connie has an active role to play in determining what future materializes. Yet Piercy endows the future with a sense of destiny, positioning the utopia as authoritative, the pinnacle of progress, the end of oppression and victimization. The self-aggrandizement of the utopia’s denizens contributes to a strangely paternal feel; they regard themselves almost as shepherds urging the past towards a destined and glorified conclusion. This narrative robs Connie, and indeed society’s victimized and abused, of the ability to choose their future, shaped around their desires. The utopia delineates a single path and any other possibilities are precluded.

 

The concept of the utopia itself is a paradox, so perhaps it is not surprising that Woman on the Edge of Time cannot contend with its inherent contradictions. The possibilities of the future are always curtailed by the insularity of the present, and the utopia must always hinge on its expression of the present’s defects. Literary critic Fredric Jameson elucidates,
“Most characteristic SF does not seriously attempt to imagine the ‘real’ future of our social system. Rather, its multiple mock futures serve the quite different function of transforming our own present into the determinate part of something yet to come”  (Jameson 7). The present, however, is always becoming the past, and the future is always becoming the present. The cycle of constantly renewing dreams and hopes whose possibilities are endless precisely because we cannot imagine them. Critique of the utopia as both a concept and within specific works is not oppositional to the genre, but an integral part of this process. The failures of an imagined utopia are the soil on which new utopias are built. Yet Woman on the Edge of Time hollows its utopia by presenting it as a perfect society Connie cannot criticize, affect, or change. Connie is a repository for instruction, conveying Piercy’s vision of the future to the reader, rather than an active participant in constructing that future.
 

Woman on the Edge of Time fails partly because utopias are required to fail, but moreover because Piercy attempts to rationalize and explain the contradictions of her utopia instead of letting them draw blood. The problem of Connie’s agency could’ve been managed if the character herself had interrogated the constraints the utopia imposes on her — if Connie had utilized the failures of one utopia to imagine another. There is a less-technical synonym of utopia, ‘paradise,’ whose etymology traces back to the meaning “walled

enclosure.” It is this contradiction the novel most clearly depicts in its portrayal of a utopia intended to be liberated and harmonious, and is instead sterile and sometimes cruel. Piercy’s vision of a futuristic society may be initially pleasing, materially full of bright,
joyful contrasts with the present’s social issues. But Piercy’s attempt to constantly extol the utopia’s society and belief system unravels the necessary complexity of utopian stories, and thus the novel’s themes of social equality and individual agency. Connie’s memories of eating sugar cane best describe the utopia: “hollow, flimsy, for a moment sweet in the mouth” (Piercy 14).