Understanding Marge Piercy by Donna M. Bickford

Author:Donna M. Bickford
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of South Carolina Press
Published: 2019-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 4

Imagining the Future

Woman on the Edge of Time and He, She and It

Piercy has written two utopian/dystopian novels, Woman on the Edge of Time (1976) and He, She and It (1991). These novels are particularly significant since, as utopian or speculative fiction, they represent a departure from Piercy’s realist novels (although her 1970 Dance the Eagle to Sleep foreshadows Piercy’s move into the utopian genre). Woman is probably the most well-known of Piercy’s novels; it appears on course syllabi in women’s studies and in science-fiction classes, often alongside Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale (1986). It alternates between the contemporary moment of the novel and the utopic/dystopic possible futures that might be produced as a result of decisions made in that moment. The doubling of characters in the “now” of the book and in the future helps readers trace these points of connection. He, She and It, winner of the Arthur C. Clarke Award for Best Science Fiction in the United Kingdom, is set in the middle of the 21st century. Although Vida and Woman both attend to the military/industrial complex and its use of technology, He, She and It is Piercy’s most concentrated engagement with science and technology yet. This novel’s exploration of what it means to be human and what it means to be a machine is particularly evocative—can Yod, the cyborg, feel emotion? Can Shira, fully human, love a machine? What does this mean for the community in which they live and where Yod was built?

Everything Piercy has written has engaged intentionally with feminist thought/praxis, but Woman and He, She and It perhaps most overtly operationalize the feminist theories being developed at the times of their writing. For Woman, this means the inclusion of radical feminist thought, ecocriticism, feminist perspectives on welfare rights, and the ways in which psychiatric and mental health institutions are used to police and control women and poor people. He, She and It is attuned to both cyborg feminism and feminist postmodernism.

Piercy has described Woman as “dealing both with the Utopian genre, going back to Plato’s Republic, and the more recent tradition of feminist utopias” (“Telling Stories” 1). It therefore seems important to articulate some of the ways in which utopian literature functions as a genre in order to have a clear understanding of what Piercy accomplishes with these novels. In her discussion of feminist separatist utopias, Dana Shugar described one function of utopian fiction as “the ways it attempts to envision a better world and advocates action toward the achievement of that world” (xii). Utopian societies are created in literature as alternatives. They develop out of an author’s own community/present moment. According to Piercy: “Feminist utopias were created out of a hunger for what we didn’t have, at a time when change felt not only possible but probable. Utopias came from the desire to imagine a better society when we dared to do so” (“Woman”).

The utopia Piercy has created comes out of her own environment and is intended as an alternative to that society’s status quo.

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