chp 5- 9

These four chapter was like the the institution chapter where we learned that some sort of experiment was going on in this place and Connie was chosen over Sybil who’s a friend that she met before and now they re meet again, while Connie is on drugs Sybil is dealing with some sort of shock treatment. Connie seems to be afraid and reaches out to Luciente where later ends up in her time in the moment of a ritual. We met Bee who’s some sort of co-mother of Innocente (innocent in Spanish) when once again Piercy uses Spanish to make a pretty strange message by naming a character innocent in a time of a ritual where she sent to the wild to survive and received a new named? which at this point I was as confused as Connie was.

Then we return to the institution where Connie ends up in other test this time joined by Sybil and Skips. She then calls for Luciente again to take her, this time they go visit the “gov’t” and then to deathbed of Sappho who just asked to be taken to where she can hear the river. So at this point it seems like Connie just calls Luciente where every she feels down or just wants to escaped her current situation and normally Luciente bring her into a situation where perhaps there some sort of lesson to be learned like Innocente ritual of survival and Sappho deathbed? who know’s?

chp 10-14

in the beginning of these few chapters we learned that Connie, Skip, Sybil and the others are moved to their new ward where they learn about the electrical nodules, once again afraid and desperate Connie reaches out for Luciente where this time they have a conversation about coffee and how coffee plays a role in the present time which was kinda of odd who knew coffee would be consider a ritualized making it “a certain crux in history … forces are in conflict. Technology is imbalanced … alternate futures are equally or almost equally probable … and that affects … the shape of time.” then she is told to continue fighting for freedom and enlightenment this is starting to sound like a DC comic kind of situation where she (connie) can go to the future and change the past. interesting quest so far, we start with a ghetto situation then we go to a institution where some weird experiments are going on that involve Connie, Sybil and other like Skip etc. and in between we visit Luciente and learn some interesting stuff about the future and past and some back story on Connie huh seems to be getting better.

Yes, I’m referring to Connie’s sex scenes *cringe*.

So as I predicted the book seems to be more about the human drama. That is not to say that technology isn’t mentioned or acknowledged. It just seems to not be much of a focal point of the story. The protagonists are definitely human, not machine, not artificial, not “other”.

Just to mention a few things that stand out in this bizarre future:

• People can communicate with animals using gestures, even domestic animals meant to be food (89). There is definitely a connection with nature that seems to lack in the “present” setting.
• The language used leaves out gender. His/her has become “Per”, He/She is just referred to as “Person”, Himself/Herself is now “P’self”.
• Following with this train of thought, children are not taught the present sex roles, toys are gender-neutral, men can become “mothers”, etc.
• Materials are not wasted, personal items used for pleasure are disposable and biodegradable, or otherwise meant to last and “rented” as one would borrow a book at a library. Personal possessions don’t seem to be a “thing” in the future.
• Kids are put out in the wilderness to fend for themselves Hunger Games-style as an initiation into adulthood.
• They seem to be fighting some kind of enemy (Aliens? Robots?). On page 93 Luciente mentions that they are fighting a battle against “robots or cybernauts”.
• Multicultural test tube babies!

Connie’s conflicts with this future:

• Women gave up the only remaining power they had, birth (97) and breastfeeding (126) to achieve equality.
• Connie believes the future society can’t truly love their test tube offspring like a real mother who gave birth would, she sees in them the family that adopted Angelina and resents them for that. However on page 125 Luciente assures her “You think because we do not bear live, we cannot love our children… but we do, with whole hearts”.
• Connie’s idea of what makes a “good” man is made clear on page 112, where she enumerates a series of qualities that fit the stereotypical “manly” attributes.

Connie finds a similarity with the people of the future having different names throughout their lives, since she herself has different names for her own different personas: Consuelo, the submissive Mexican woman; Connie, the hard-working woman who went to college and got decent jobs; and Conchita, the drunk, mean part of her that gets her through jail and the bughouse, and the one who hurt Angelina (114).

Regarding the future society, their notion of evil is explained by Magdalena as being based on greed and power, taking away from others their food, liberty, health, land, customs and pride (131).

The children are everyone’s future, so it becomes everyone’s social responsibility to nurture and take care of them. All children, even strangers (175).

I just hope things get more interesting and we have an actual plot twist or something, other than Barbarossa having bewbs.

Yes I know this late. Got distracted on my way home.

I kinda cheated and read though everyone’s posts before I started writing this and it seems the common consensus is still this is somewhat dull story. Flash backs that are all over the place. Dull characters that you really cant get behind. Even a future that completely perfect without a fault. But I think the problem is not with these, it lies more since this future is so perfect most major conflicts have been solved or nullified. So us as readers cant really get behind. Let me explain.

Most major conflicts are addressed in chapter 6. Each of them were fixed with this all powerful Deus ex machina. For those that don’t know a Deus ex machina is an all powerful item or person that is introduced abruptly to fix an impossible and unsolvable problem. In a matter of a few pages this incubator of some sorts, in one fell swoop, solved all of the worlds (all some of them) issues. Problems between races, no problem, lets just diversify them. Its print out black Asians like money.  Want to create gen equality, lets make everyone mothers. By the way i think its important to mention that with this process the need of carrying a baby in your womb for 9 months was eliminated, yet they still decided to refer the “parents” as mothers. But I digress.

You see a pattern here? With this one machine (get it machine/machina) they seem to fix most if not all social issues. I really hope this does not become a trope for this book. The only real conflict (if you want to call it that) stems from Connie unable to accept this is future. But even then those issues can be summed with “I like my past how it is, I don’t like change.” Its mostly just inner conflict with herself. Which brings me to my issue with this story.

Connie is probably just crazy, or the plot twist is the time travel was real. Both which are too predicable. The people she meets in the future somehow resemble people from her past. At first I was willing to for give it (But that took a bit with the pointless flashbacks and all). But the straw that broke the camels back was when she saw a child that looked like her “own” daughter. At this point the only thing that explains this is she created this perfect future where everything is perfect, all problems are solved and she is able to live with her daughter. All so she can escape from this depressing world. That or people from the future all came from the future just to mess with this one girl.

Either way I really hope the second half of this book starts to get interesting because I’m LITERATELY beginning to fall asleep reading this.

OK so in the chapters we have read so far we now are more into the future and we start to see what is “really” happening to Connie at the mad house. In the future, we learn they count on the machines do most of the work. Yet unlike the other passages, we have read they seem to be able to control the machines better. Even though they count of the machines for the most part they still have a value on doing certain things on their own. Which is what the future should be a well balance of machine and human labor. For me I believe that is one thing they have succeed in compared to the other stories. The idea of teaching children what they will do in once they get older in one way is good because if the child is interested then things will be done a lot better because all that work in that field is an expert. Going back to Connie in the mad house, I am really starting to believe she is just crazy and is imagining the whole thing. There are too many connections to her own life it’s like she is imaging all this to cope with what she has done and with bee and dawn she has seen her lost daughter and her late husband two people she has loved very much and is now seeing them in this new world. I also notice that Connie feels a lot more confident in the future then in her present. We notice this as she talks to people at the mad house her voice is described as weak and thin but in the future, her voice is thick. This is a show of confidence to say someone voice is thick is to say it stands out is takes place and she is heard clearly. In addition, the Fact that she was left alone and she can feel like no one loves her in the future she sees everyone is kind and “loves” her in a way. Which brings me back to the I think she is just crazy. I have had no reason to believe she is really seeing the future and if she is why her out of so many people in the world. Well if she is crazy I think I would like to be that type of crazy. Hey who wouldn’t like to say they have been to the future and if i died believing it  I would be happy. Yet if she is just that bored that she started to imagine  everything hey it seams to be working with her to allow her self to come to an understanding of certain things that have happened in her life.

Reading through this book so far I have come to realize that this story kind of reminds me of the movie Sucker Punch. A woman sent the mental ward and is going to another time, or as in the movie another dimension. If you have seen the movie you will know what I mean by this, if not then….go watch it. Connie has been through a tough life and hardened by her experiences, yet you can see the cracks in her character. Her “time traveling” seems to me to be a part of her mind’s need for some type of hope. A hope to escape the life she is actually living and to “time travel” to another time where she can forget about her problems but give her an eager hope to continue living. Or maybe she is actually time traveling and shes not crazy at all. Who knows, we’ll see. Hmm, now I’m starting to think about authenticity like the last novel we read. An authenticity of what’s real.

As the plot progresses, the reader is given more…. well…. plot. Piercy has absolutely nothing to say with the novel she has written. As I read I want to see something to analyze, I’ll take anything. Unfortunately the novel only provides story, the characters are just two dimensional, and serve no purpose. Any one of the characters could easily be replaced by a lamp and I wouldn’t notice. Additionally, the themes that the book covers also serve no purpose. There is just absolutely nothing to enjoy.

Have any of you see the movie Gattaca? Remember how well that movie handled the theme of selective/controlled breeding? All the dangers that come with the advancement of science? Great stuff, right? Well Piercy gives her readers this glimpse at the ultimate Utopia, but what is the purpose of it? Well guys, it’s to… well… ummmmmmm, to sound nice I guess? There are no consequences of the perfection of Piercy’s Utopia. It exacts simply because, the reader is given no idea of how it might have been a struggle to create such a perfect world or the drawbacks of a perfect world. That is just boring. It reminds me of the superman character: he is completely perfect with no reason for it. Maybe of Piercy would show us the back story of this utopia there would be something interesting to read, but she doesn’t. Imagine if Piercy had written the story so that every time Consuelo travels into the future she goes to a further away time. Each time showing the struggle of that society and the work being put into improving them, with Consuelo eventually seeing the result as a Utopia. That scenario saws something, it shows the difficulty of creating a Utopia, but makes the pay off worth it. In Piercy’s novel, since the reader is just teleported to a Utopia, it just makes the reader question why we haven’t done it if it’s that easy.

That obvious flaw aside another thing that pisses me off is that there is no questioning the reality of the Connie’s experience. I want to believe she is actually traveling to the future, but all the reader is shown is that the character is just a complete loon. Clearly such a perfect society could only be the product of the mental fantasies of a mentally challenged woman confined in a institution. There is nothing that makes me question whether these vision are real. Hell, she even runs into a girl that  looks exactly like Angelina. So, Piercy, is the reader just suppose to accept this as coincidence? Or is this suppose to hint to the reader that the utopia, and the characters that mirror people she knew, are just part of her delusion? Because to do that the reader would need reason to question her reality to begin with. Black swan is a great example, one moment the audience is grounded in reality convinced that the actions that have happened were real, the next you realize that it was all part of the characters delusion. Another great example is American Psycho.

All in all this book has not gotten any better and it is a complete drain to read it. I have to take a break from reading it about every five minutes. I’m not looking forward to talking about the book at all. Can we all talk about the overarching themes of the books we read before this one instead? Oh, also, in my previous post I mentioned how a character needs to be developed and interesting before diving into their back story; Piercy should take some notes from the Daredevil series.

So Woman on the edge of time is still not there a 100 percent. I will say that the story is some what intriguing, but im still not sold on this story yet and i feel like that since im this deep in the story that might not change. I guess we will just have to wait and see. Also after reading Chris’s blog i just now realized that people in the people are like people from Connie’s past which does have a clarity to the story now and how I understand it.

Chapter 5 was pretty short compared to the rest of the chapters in this section. We see Connie in the new ward in G 2, she is sitting on a porch enjoying the weather and just thinking. That peaceful time brings luciente to her and she goes with him to his time again. We learn here that cats in this time can talk and Connie talks to one which is kind of bizarre if i says so myself. However the only other big thing that happened was that we met Bee. Bee is a very strong man who used to be in the army and had just returned. However when Connie met him she was immediately reminded of Claud her former lover who had died. He was the only man she truly loved. However seeing him brought on thoughts of her daughter Angelina and the emotional connection with luciente was disconnected and she ended up back on the porch inn tears. This is the first real time we see someone from Connie’s past in this time, which makes me think is this future really there or not.

The next chapter we see what it is like in the new ward G 2. Though it is not that bad there were certain things that bothered Connie like she felt as if they were treating her like a child in school. Also she felt like the drugs they were giving her were making her feel drowsy and weak. We also get a better understanding of the love Connie had with Claud, we learn  how in love they were and how he went to jail and died. Still he was the love of her life. While drugged Connie finds her way to luciente again. She spends more time with her and Bee. Being with Bee made her love for Claud feel even stronger then ever. We also meet there child Innocente. We get a better understanding of this society when we learn that Innocente is getting ready to go and perform  the naming ceremony. This was explained that the child goes out to the woods and stays there for a couple of days fending for itself and surviving on its own. Then upon return they choose there name that they want. Connie was a little shocked to learn about this because she could not believe they were leaving a child out there by itself. Where if you think about it for a peaceful society that is kind of savage. Especially for the horrible things that could happen. We also learn that children here have three mothers and Connie says that is how she feels like she is three people in one. She looks at herself as Consuelo the Mexican servant woman, a woman who bears and endures pain and then there is Connie who had two years of college until Consuelo got pregnant and Connie had decent jobs and fought for welfare to support her daughter(Piercy 114). I find it really interesting how she looks at her self in that moment as three different women who seem to have three different objectives and even though they are part of the same person they are three different people all together. At the end of the chapter Connie gets disconnected from luciente all of a sudden and for a few moments ends up no where lost in time or maybe lost in her own mind.

This chapter with Connie being found by luciente and ends up back in his time. Connie is a little startled by being lost but is comforted by jackrabbit and she is shown around more and taught more about there society. However the biggest part of this chapter is the end where Connie sees a child who looks exactly like Angelina. This makes Connie very emotional because she had not seen her daughter for a couple of years since she had been taken away form her. This emotional outburst causes the connection with luciente to be broken and she starts to fade, but as she is leaving she is telling them that she wants her daughter to stay with them in that time because that is the perfect world to her, that is the world she imagined for her daughter. This is another reason that makes me believe that this world is all in her head because all of these people who she is seeing is becoming to much of a coincidence.

The next chapter we are in the present a lot. We learn that one of Connie’s friends Sybil has been getting some type of shock therapy. Connie is very shocked by this news. We get  feel of G 2 a little more and they type of nurses that are working there. Some of them are nice but some a just really nasty. While sitting and waiting Connie fades out to luciente. When she arrives we learn that it was government day and luciente takes her to see how there government works. We learn it is a big meeting of different representatives and they all talk an discuss with the people of that area. We learn that they all discuss until a an agreement is made in the middle that satisfy s everyone. In the meeting they are talking about a bridge and what to do with it and how fix it. They mention that it has been around for 300 years which means it was around in Connie’s time as well and i was trying to think of which bridge it might have been. Towards the end of the chapter the disconnecting between Connie and luciente is different this time because Connie is woken up by one of the nurses. The nurse mentions that Connie looked like she had with drawled and that she was out of it. This adds to my reason that show that this could all possibly all be in her head.

This chapter starts with Connie finding out that she is being moved with a couple of other people who were also observed by the new doctor. We also hear about dolly since she left Connie in there. We learn that she left Geraldo and is with a new man who takes care of her and her daughter Nita. She tells Connie that she would come visit that weekend. This made me think t why did Dolly just leave Connie there especially since she left Geraldo. Connie also goes back to luciente and finds out he is having a party of some kind. We learn more about how this society is kind of united as one and how they all give back to each other. For example Sappho one of the elders dies and that’s her way of giving back. Connie has a moment with Dawn who looks like Angelina and Connie feels great to be with her in that moment. Connie also ends up having sex with Bee and she says that it made her feel free in those moments and she says how that word means so much, that freedom is the best thing someone could get. The chapter ends with her back at the asylum and Dolly never comes to visit.

This book is very interesting but im still struggling to find something that catches me and holds my attention. Other then that i also have to say that i believe to that none of this is real and that the future she is visiting is just in her head and its all part of her fantasy for a perfect world.

As the story progresses the reader learns more about the world of the future. A beautiful world is painted, one without the problems and pains of Connie’s world, very much like a Utopian society, only without the false perfections. Everyone is unique and accepted for being so. As a person from this time, a lot of what they do seems odd, but trying to understand it and reading about the issues it does away with, it becomes easy to accept it all. Except for Connie.

In chapter 5 Connie visits the place where the children of the future are born, in a lab being incubated outside of a woman’s womb. Their reasoning is that it allows them to breed diversity and do away with racism while still maintaining racial diversity. Another reason is that in an effort to achieve equality among the human population, both male and females had to be equal, and the only way to do that was to do away with biological differences. One of those differences being a woman’s ability to give birth. Connie also learns about the three mother system with which the children of this place are raised. All of this is alien to Connie and she does not agree with it.

For every explanation that the people of the future give, Connie argues against. Connie continues to think in the way of someone from the present who cannot see any other way to live their life. As a disclaimer, I am also someone from the present, so some of what will be written here may be biased. on the last page of the chapter (Piercy 98) Connie begins to think about her daughter as well as expressing her thoughts on the futures way of living. She cannot understand how it is that those people can be mothers when they have never raised a child from their wombs, “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.” She begins to hate them for living their life without the pain and suffering that Connie went through her entire life, for being happier than her. Connie does not see that this world is a better world to live in even if some things are sacrificed to achieve it.

Later on Connie witnesses the name day of one of the children of the future. There she learns the risk that the child will go through in order to become an adult. The society of the future has learned that this is the best way for the development of a person, to go from child to adult and have accepted it as a rite of passage. Connie continues to view this event as barbaric. To her, a child should not be allowed to risk their life for independence, but to them, it must be done.

In the rest of the chapters, Connie is always questioning these things with a sense of disdain, Thinking of these people as mad. Its not until she sees her daughter Angelina (Piercy 133) that her mood changes. Connie was jealous, angry that these people have a better life than her and none of her worries, but when she sees her “daughter” she accepts it, “For the first time her heart assented to Luciente, to Bee, to Magdalena”. Here her “daughter” can live happily and better than she ever would have in the world she was born.