Woman on the Edge of Time

“Casually the woman arrayed her fragile possessions on the counter and, with a gesture like emptying an ashtray, dropped them into an envelope and locked them away.”

Throughout her hospitalization, Connie is dehumanized and neglected. Connie owns little, and these “fragile possessions” are important to her, but the woman doing intake treats them with disgust and derision, as if they were the disposable contents of “an ashtray.”

“Geraldo was almost demure. He had a good manner with authority, as any proper pimp should, respectful but confident. Man to man, pimp and doctor discussed her condition, while Dolly sobbed.”

Throughout her experiences, Connie exhibits sardonic humor. She notes that Geraldo is good with authority figures and a “proper pimp”—a near oxymoron. While the novel frames Geraldo’s exploitation of women as anything but “proper,” he is able to disguise his true nature and lie to the doctor, as the narration wryly observes. Geraldo’s ability to address the doctor on equal footing also tacitly associates the medical profession with sex trafficking, developing the theme of Institutional Power and the Medicalization of Dissent. In contrast to this “man to man” discussion, Dolly is reduced to a sobbing and speechless woman—an accessory to the real happenings.

“As she was beckoned out with rough speed, she was surprised to see gulls wheeling above, far inland, as over other refuse grounds. Little was recycled here. She was human garbage carried to the dump.”

As Connie journeys to Rockdale, she thinks of it as a “dump” and herself as “human garbage.” Like a dump, Rockdale is not interested in recycling. Its goal is not to return its patients to the world but to serve as a place where they can be discarded and forgotten about.

“Strange that she had dreamed in English. Me llamo luciente: shining, brilliant, full of light. Strange that with someone obviously Mexican American she had not said Consuelo. Me llamo Consuelo.”

Connie straddles two worlds and two languages. Here, she interprets Luciente’s name as meaning “shining, brilliant, full of light,” but she does not translate her own, which means “comfort” or “solace.” While the Spanish names have meaning, she spoke to Luciente in English, reducing her own name to “Connie” in a way that shows how she has tried to cater to societal norms to survive.

“She too, she was spayed. They had taken out her womb at Metropolitan when she had come in bleeding after that abortion and the beating from Eddie. Unnecessarily they had done a complete hysterectomy because the residents wanted practice.”

Connie’s experiences in medical institutions have been uniformly dehumanizing and exploitative. She thinks about her forced sterilization as “spaying,” a word typically reserved for animals. This reflects the way the medical community treats her and others like her as less than human. The experience was all the more traumatic because Connie’s identity is so bound to her sense of herself as a mother.

“The anger of the weak never goes away, Professor, it just gets a little moldy. It molds like a beautiful blue cheese in the dark, growing stronger and more interesting. The poor and the weak die with all their anger intact and probably those angers go on growing in the dark of the grave like the hair and the nails.”

Connie thinks about her onetime lover, the professor, who exploited her. She imagines her rage as “mold”—something that goes “on growing in the dark” and even past death. With vivid and grotesque imagery, she describes the rage of the marginalized lingering even after death because it finds no resolution in life. This foreshadows the novel’s conclusion, which sees Connie relegated to a living death of permanent hospitalization, her anger still unsatisfied.

“Our madhouses are places where people retreat when they want to go down into themselves—to collapse, carry on, see visions, hear voices of prophecy, bang on the walls, relive infancy—getting in touch with the buried self and the inner mind. We all lose parts of ourselves. We all make choices that go bad…How can another person decide that it is time for me to disintegrate, to reintegrate myself?”

Luciente describes “madhouses” in her world as places of renewal and discovery where someone might “disintegrate” and “reintegrate” themselves. Mattapoisett sees this as a necessary part of life and not a source of shame or stigma, just as it would not attach stigma to healing a fever or a broken bone; indeed, her words suggest a connection between mental states conventionally viewed as “abnormal” and deep insight. She is particularly shocked by the idea that another person could commit someone to an institution, making decisions for them about their own life.

“The gray of the day soothed her. Strong colors would have burned her eyes. Every day was a lesson in how starved the eyes could grow for hue, for reds and golds.”

In the ward, Connie has been “starved” of food but also of color and life. She longs for the outside world and is thrilled to sit on the porch even though it is a rainy day. The idea that she would not have been able to handle a colorful or vibrant day after the ward’s dreariness represents the way residents of Rockdale are deprived of even the most basic of freedoms and beauty.

“Perhaps it was the lighter clothing, perhaps it was a matter of expectations—anyhow, Luciente now looked like a woman. Luciente’s face and voice and body now seemed female if not at all feminine; too confident, too unself-conscious, too aggressive and sure and graceful in the wrong kind of totally coordinated way to be a woman: yet a woman.”

Nothing about Luciente herself has changed, but Connie previously assumed that Luciente was male because she did not meet Connie’s ideas of femininity. Instead, Luciente is “aggressive and sure and graceful”—traits Connie associates with masculinity. The depiction of Luciente as totally unconstrained by gender norms is at the heart of Envisioning a Post-Gender Society.

“Connie gaped, her stomach also turning slowly upside down. All in a sluggish row, babies bobbed. Mother the machine. Like fish in the aquarium at Coney Island.”

The brooder is one aspect of the future that Connie finds totally disgusting. She sees the embryos being nurtured not by a human mother but by “mother the machine” and compares them to fish in an aquarium, implying that she sees this new way of birthing as dehumanizing and horrific.

“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.”

In contrast to the brooder, Connie conceptualizes motherhood as biological. For her, motherhood means pregnancy, the “blood and pain” of labor, and breastfeeding. This idea of motherhood is what she draws her own identity from, so the idea of other kinds of parenting frightens her. However, given that Connie can no longer bear children due to forced sterilization, Mattapoisett’s conception of motherhood offers her an alternate way to understand herself.

“She hated them, the bland bottleborn monsters of the future, born without pain, multicolored like a litter of puppies without the stigmata of race and sex.”

Connie angrily imagines that the people of Mattapoisett are “monsters” and calls them “bland” because their birth, like their lives, lacks pain. In contrast, she conceptualizes her own experience of “race and sex” as “stigmata”—wounds that mark suffering but also connote holiness. The imagery reveals that she is both repulsed by and envious of this kind of future.

“Only sometimes she felt as if the name Ramos was a heavy load, a great dead bough she lugged on her shoulders. Its thickness was the body of a thin but bony man, the roughness of skin closed against her.”

Connie’s second husband and Angelina’s father was Eddie Ramos, who abandoned them. She could not afford to divorce him, so his name becomes “a heavy load, a great dead bough” that she cannot escape. This points to the text’s critique of gender roles, as the convention of wives taking their husbands’ last names at marriage is rooted in patriarchal ideas about women belonging to men.

“These women thought they had won, but they had abandoned to men the last refuge of women. What was special about being a woman here? They had given it all up, they had let men steal from them the last remnants of ancient power, those sealed in blood and in milk.”

Connie continues to find Mattapoisett’s way of birthing and raising children strange and problematic. She is focused on the bodily aspects of being female and thinks of motherhood as a power “sealed in blood and milk”—quasi-religious language that exults femaleness as sacred. Because she is so focused on biology, she is unable to see any benefits to their form of parenting.

“Yes, you can have my child, you can keep my child. Even with your obscenities and your talking cats. She will be strong there, well fed, well housed, well taught, she will grow up much better and stronger and smarter than I. I assent, I give you my battered body as recompense and my rotten heart.”

After witnessing a child playing who looks like she imagines Angelina might, Connie has an epiphany that the future might be preferable, even with its “obscenities.” She thinks that she would do anything to secure her child’s safety and happiness—even give up her own “battered body” and “rotten heart.” The word choice also reveals Connie’s idea of herself as someone used up and unworthy, though Luciente and the others do not see her that way.

“My parents thought I didn’t work right, so they sent me to be fixed. You know, you send the riding mower back to the factory to be fixed if you get a lemon. Why not a son?”

Skip has been in and out of mental hospitals his whole life due to his attraction to other men, which his parents regard as a defect. He bitterly points out that they see him as a possession or tool that needs fixing, pointing to the dehumanization inherent in such treatment.

“Something beautiful and quick was burned out. It hurt her to watch him. Because he was too beautiful and tempted them, they had fixed him. He moved differently: clumsily. It was as if he had finally agreed to imitate the doctors’ coarse, clumsy masculinity for a time, but it was mastery with them and humility with him. He moved like a robot not expertly welded.”

After the surgery, Skip has become angry and is no longer himself. Connie thinks sadly that “clumsy masculinity” has replaced his prior beauty and compares him to a robot copying human behavior; he is pretending to be someone he is not. Notably, Connie accuses the (male) doctors of performing surgery on Skip in part to deny their own attraction to him. This speaks to the novel’s critique of heteronormativity. In Mattapoisett, where there is no stigma attached to being gay, orientation is much more fluid; most of the residents of Mattapoisett seem to have lovers of more than one sex.

“Who could ever pay for the pain of bringing a child into dirt and pain? Never enough. Nothing you wanted to give her you ever could give her, including yourself, what you wanted to be with her and for her. Nothing you wanted for her could come true.”

Connie thinks of her own life, limited by racism and poverty, as a world of “dirt and pain.” She believes that having a child in this world is a kind of sin that she pays for endlessly by watching her child suffer. Much of her addiction and despair derives from these beliefs and her feeling that she cannot escape the cycle she is in.

“Suddenly she thought that these men believed feeling itself a disease, something to be cut out like a rotten appendix. Cold, calculating, ambitious, believing themselves rational and superior, they chased the crouching female animal through the brain with a scalpel.”

This passage’s imagery evokes the repeated treatment of patients as subhuman and the relationship of that treatment to misogyny. Connie imagines the surgeons chasing a “female animal” through the brain and using violence to “cut out” any emotion, feeling, or sensitivity. These traditionally “feminine” traits are supposedly inferior to the doctors’ rationality, which is socially coded as masculine.

“Somehow talking with Gildina was a little like talking with Dolly on speed, and a little like conversation with a poodle.”

By illustrating a possible world even more patriarchal than Connie’s, the episode with Gildina raises the narrative stakes. Though humorous, this description of Gildina is telling; talking to her is like talking to a “poodle” not only because of her highly stylized appearance but also because she is so dehumanized. The comparison to Dolly, meanwhile, underscores the latter’s extreme femininity and its relationship to her oppression.

“Flakes rested lightly on her black dome of hair, the hood of the parka cast back. One flake sat for a moment on the end of her delicate, sensuously curved nose, snow on her beautiful Mayan nose where Connie imagined that she pressed a quick kiss.”

The last sight Connie sees in Mattapoisett is Dawn, happy and in the snow. Connie describes her “Mayan” features as “beautiful”—a contrast to the racism Connie is subjected to for her own features. Just as the snow rests only for a moment on Dawn, Connie’s kiss is fleeting: It is unclear whether Mattapoisett itself survives in the novel.

“I would have agreed that I’m sick, that I’m sick to be poor and sick to be sick and sick to be hungry and sick to be lonely and sick to be robbed and used. But you were so greedy, so cruel! One of them, just one, you could have left me! But I have nothing. Why shouldn’t I strike back?”

Connie finally gives in to her rage and decides to poison the doctors who have tortured her. She thinks that, had they left her any shred of love or dignity, she would have complied with her own oppression. However, they have forced her into a corner like an animal, and now she will resort to violence.

“Mr. Camacho is a well-dressed man (gray business suit) who appears to be in his 40’s. He operates a wholesale-retail nursery and has a confident, expansive manner. I would consider him to be a reliable informant who expresses genuine concern for his sister.”

In contrast with the medical report’s descriptions of Connie, it describes Luis as “well-dressed,” “confident,” and “reliable.” It is not only his money and gender that confer societal respectability, but he has also adopted what Connie calls “Anglo” mannerisms, pronouncing his name as Louis rather than Luis. In doing so, he fits the doctors’ biased ideas of what a “reliable” person is like.