Woman on the Edge of Time by Marge Piercy Essay -- Dystopia Utopia

Woman on the Edge of Time by Marge Piercy As a child, one of my favorite cartoon shows was The Jetsons. This was a show about an average American family who lived out in space, with a dog, and a robot named Rosie as the household maid. I recall that in one episode Rosie, the robot, overheard the family holding a conversation pertaining to how the family could get by just fine without her. The point of this episode is that the robot's feelings were hurt and she decided to run away. After Rosie's departure, the family learned that she was in fact a valuable member of the family, and they searched all over space to find Rosie the robot. Could it be, a robot with feelings? In The Jetsons technology was an important aspect in life in space. Each family owned a space ship, instead of an automobile. And traffic existed in the sky, instead of the highways that we have today. I believe that Marge Piercy, the writer of Woman on the Edge of Time may have had similar expectations of the future. Piercy's novel depicts the life of a diagn osed schizophrenic patient by the name of Connie that lives in a mental institution. Connie is able to time travel into two different futures, in order to escape the fearful reality of her world. This novel was published in 1976, and yet the writer's interpretation of a dystopian future is not too far off from what we might watch on television today. I will be exploring the life of Connie, the main character, as Piercy portrays her throughout the story, as well as supporting characters that play a role in Connie's utopian and dystopian futuristic societies. The reader is able to clearly discern which society Connie recognizes to be her Utopia. Consuelo Camacho Ramos, who will be referred to as Connie, is... ... Piecy published her novel. Perhaps, Piercy would rather that we focus our energy to making the world where we currently live in a better place, and value the small things that we take for granted, like in the village Mattapoisett. Instead of placing more value on technology and focusing on how what we can come up with next. Oppositely, I think technology is not to be feared, and has not dehumanized us, at least not yet. The fact that our mind can take us into places so much further advanced than we are actually able to achieve at the present time proves just how extraordinary the mind is. It must be this sense of "living on the edge" creativity that drives humans to develop such astronomical technological mechanisms. Works Cited Barbera, Hanna. The Jetsons. Cartoon Network. 1998 Piercy, Marge. Woman on the Edge of Time. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1976.