Madness and Woman: A Feminist Interpretation of Madwomen in Woman on the Edge of Time
Abstract
American feminist writer Marge Piercy has, in her novel Woman on the Edge of Time, depicted the unique experience of the “madwoman” Connie, who shuttles between the present and the future. Instead of focusing on the result of madness, Piercy highlights the process in which Connie is driven mad, and reconstructs the relationship between madness and woman through the depiction of Jackrabbit, another “madwoman” in the imagined utopian society of Mattapoisett. Through the sharp contrast between Connie and Jackrabbit, this paper questions and challenges the dominant rational social power. At the same time, it arouses people’s rethinking of madness and more attention to woman.
Keywords
Full Text:
PDFReferences
Balint, A. (1965). Love for the mother and the mother-love. In M. Balint (Ed.), Primary love and psycho-analytic technique. New York: Liveright Publishing.
Beauvoir, S. D. (1965). The second sex (H. M. Parshley, Trans.). New York: Bantam.
Bridgewater, P. D. (1997). Connectedness and closeted questions: The use of history in developing feminist legal theory. Wisconsin Women’s Law Journal, (11), 351-366.
Brown-Guillory, E. (Ed.). (1996). Women of color: Mother-daughter relationship in 20th century literature. Austin: University of Texas Press.
Butler, J. (1993). Bodies that matter: On the discussion limits of sex. London: Routledge.
Chodorow, N. J. (1978). The production of mothering: Psychoanalysis and the sociology of gender. California: University of California Press.
Foucault, M. (1961). Madness and civilization: A history of insanity in the age of reason (R. Howard, Trans.). New York: Random House, Inc.
Liang, T. T. (2008). To subvert or to respect? —A study of the female roles and gender relations in margy piercy’s woman on the edge of time (Master’s thesis). Guangdong University of Foreign Studies.
Liu, Y. (2004). Studies on motherhood in western modern dramas. Beijing: China Book Press.
Macpherson, H. S. (2007). Women and the Law in Twentieth-Century Literature. Ohio: The University of Akron Press.
Ma, X. G. (2002). A history of western literary theory. Beijing: Higher Education Press.
Piercy, M. (1976). Woman on the edge of time. Greenwich: Fawcett Publications.
Sim, S. (1995). The A-Z guide to modern literary and cultural theorists. Hempstead: Prentice Hall.
DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.3968/n
Refbacks
- There are currently no refbacks.
Copyright (c) 2016 Yan YU
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Share us to: 
Reminder
- How to do online submission to another Journal?
- If you have already registered in Journal A, then how can you submit another article to Journal B? It takes two steps to make it happen:
1. Register yourself in Journal B as an Author
- Find the journal you want to submit to in CATEGORIES, click on “VIEW JOURNAL”, “Online Submissions”, “GO TO LOGIN” and “Edit My Profile”. Check “Author” on the “Edit Profile” page, then “Save”.
2. Submission
- Go to “User Home”, and click on “Author” under the name of Journal B. You may start a New Submission by clicking on “CLICK HERE”.
We only use three mailboxes as follows to deal with issues about paper acceptance, payment and submission of electronic versions of our journals to databases:
caooc@hotmail.com; hess@cscanada.net; hess@cscanada.org
Articles published in Higher Education of Social Science are licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 (CC-BY).
HIGHER EDUCATION OF SOCIAL SCIENCE Editorial Office
Address: 1055 Rue Lucien-L'Allier, Unit #772, Montreal, QC H3G 3C4, Canada.
Telephone: 1-514-558 6138
Website: Http://www.cscanada.net Http://www.cscanada.org
E-mail: caooc@hotmail.com; office@cscanada.net
Copyright © 2010 Canadian Research & Development Center of Sciences and Cultures 
