Utopia: Marge Piercy as a Social Critic in Woman on the Edge of Time | Dohal | English Language and Literature Studies | CCSE

In her utopian novel Woman on the Edge of Time (1976), Marge Piercy critically addresses class, gender, and race as political and social issues in the contemporary society. These matters cause struggle and wars among social classes and individuals as well. People who suffer the effects of these problems struggle for survival and consider themselves in wars with their oppressors as Bee, one of Piercy’s characters in the novel, states, “We’re all at war” (Piercy, p. 328). Race, gender and class are related in sense that all of them bring suffering to people and are used by any social domineering authority to persecute and dominate those oppressed people. In the following pages, I will discuss the concepts of class, gender, and race, and how these issues are used in Piercy’s masterpiece Woman on the Edge of Time to set light on some atrocities of her contemporary world, and at the same time, to provide a utopian future alternative she intentionally urges her readers to think about and if possible to work for