Sunday, October 5, 2014

Primary Text: Woman on the Edge of Time, by Marge Piercy

Woman on the Edge of Time, by Marge Piercy (1976)

From Marge Piercy's own website:


With [protagonist Connie Ramos] we experience the New York where Latinos live today without money or hope of it; where food, cleanliness, order, and peacefulness are Sunday luxuries; where life-force translates as violence. And with her we experience the mental hospital where, held against her will, she is faceless, invisible to the attendants, social workers, doctors…where whatever she says and does is received and recorded as “aggression,” as “bad patient behavior,” until suddenly she is valued at last as a potential subject for a frightening neuro-electric experiment on which hundreds of monkeys have already been “used up.”

Woman on the Edge of Time is at once a heightening of the novel of realism and a brilliant prophetic fable. It is Marge Piercy’s triumph to take us so wholly into the very being of a stranger that we come to perceive her fate as inseparable from our own.

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