THE MONSTERS WE CREATE: WOMAN ON THE EDGE OF TIME AND FRANKENSTEIN
...ance of Shelley's creature. Ironically, however, as Connie is drugged into a shuffling walk and slurred speech and later has a plate implanted, affixed with "sharp metal pins" (281), shejcomes to resemble the creature's recurring representation in movies--with bolts, metal plates, and so on. In such passages, Piercy seems to emphasize Connie in the hands of the doctors as a created monster, but other passages suggest that previously she also was a "monster" or "misfit." Whereas Victor constructed the creature from the dead parts of other human beings, Connie has been "constructed" in constricting ways by her society, on the basis of gender, ethnicity, and class. She is female, abused by men from childhood: "From an early age she had been told that what she felt was unreal and didn't matter" (282). She is Chicana, in a world where college, a youthful appearance, and a clean job seem to be Anglo characteristics (35,47) and where a professor as employer will bed his "Chicana of the year." She is poor, in a world where that seems to be a crime (62). In fact, the creature is her predecessor in awareness of such constructions: [He] learned that the possessions most esteemed by your fellow creatures were high and unsullied descent united with riches. A man might be respected with only one of these advantages, but without either he was considered, except in very rare instances, as a vagabond and a slave, doomed to waste his powers for the profits of the chosen few! And what was I? (104-05) The creature is different from the dominant society and thus cannot "pass" no matter what he does. Connie, before and after her operation, feels different and unable to "pass" into the dominant society. Both are beings of great power but powerless within their world. Names by which we refer to them emphasize their misfit status. The creature has no name. Others do label him: in particular, Victor calls him "devil," "demon," "monster," language that Walton picks up. Connie sees that she has multiple identities, multitle names: She describes herself as Consuelo, the silent, suffering, enduring Mexican woman; Connie, who tried to learn and work within the mainstream society; and Conchita, a drunken, mean self (122). Geraldo calls her a bag; her second husband Eddie calls her a witch. Friends in Mattapoisett see other potentialities, calling her Salt-and-Pepper--suggesting not only her hair color but also vitality, spice. In that society, people choose their own names, changing them at will. The medical establishment, in the reports at the end of the novel, gives Connie no name, only a set of delimiting labels--a Mexican-American (or erroneously in another report, Puerto Rican; at least for sure an outsider), child abuser, schizophrenic. In this essay, for convenience, I use the novels' most frequent usages-"the creature" and "Connie," but with the awareness that these are not neutral pointers but rather ones that emphasize the protagonists' outsider status. Who are they? The reader is brought into the act of discernment as the characters themselves struggle with "Who am I?" They see how others answer that question for them but continue to long for different possibilities. What does the monster want? Most simply, not to be a monster; not to be deemed deviant from humanity; to be able to fulfill basic human needs. In each case, both learning and caring are central among their wants. Both the creature and Connie integrate the traditional dualism of head and heart. The creature in his hovel listens in on society with a hunger, a thirst for learning, but revelation of his monstrosity discontinues his lessons. In her "pursuit of knowledge and some better way to live" (47), Connie highly values her time at a community college, but in a sense she too is "listening in" from the outside. Her pregnancy forces her to discontinue her lessons, but she continues to wish for learning (e.g., 215). These "monsters" also want contact, connection, kindness, understanding, not just to be loved but to love and care for others. From the beginning, the creature is unloved: Victor, in his flight and subsequent ignoring of what he has done, seems to treat the creature as a nuisance that if ignored might simply go away, disappear. Connie's father beats her; she hungers for the mothering her brother Luis received but she did not, and Luis, it seems, by Americanizing his name, would like to forget that he has a sister, forget the link that binds them--the monstrosity of ethnicity and class. Both Connie and the creature continue to be rejected by those who should be family. Discussion of these two characters often emphasizes their quests of the heart. But we need to see that their quests are set within a broader search for a social role. Connie is perceptive enough to see that connection: "we often want love when we need something else, like a good job or a chance to go back to school" (86). That comment sheds light back onto the creature's quest. Yes, he wants love, but he also burns "to become an actor" in the busy scene of human affairs, with an "ardour for virtue" (112-13). Connie sees that in Mattapoisett, unlike in her world, she could be useful (214) and would have the respect and self-respect she lacks. Luciente of Mattapoisett has scope to act, whereas her dystopian counterpart Gildina contributes only sex. Like the creature, Connie reaches out again and again but each time is slammed back into isolation. The reaching out may entail trying to help someone in danger. The creature tries to save a drowning girl, for which he is shot. In the striking opening scene of Woman on the Edge of Time Connie tries to help Dolly escape beatings and a forced abortion, for which Connie herself is beaten and institutionalized. Both helpers are "misdiagnosed" as violent beings. The creature tries to explain himself to the common man--the senior De Lacey--but the son drives him out of the cottage. The scientist momentarily listens but ultimately disregards the creature's feelings and needs. Connie tries to explain herself to her niece and her brother, but to no avail. The hospital employees and the doctors either ignore or disregard her: "No one had heard a word she said"; "it was as if she spoke another language" (17,19). Only the external is visible: a giant, ugly man; a poor Chicana with a record. The voices of the outsiders are silenced. The creature and Connie modify their dreams. The creature finally hopes to go away with just one other being, to live in seclusion and mutual caring. Connie was "at fifteen full of plans and fire" (47); despite her rejections then of the dream of domesticity, she later fantasizes about living as a family with Dolly and Dolly's children (46,14). Realizations of even such dreams are for others, not for them. There is no bride of Frankenstein, no family for Connie (except her fellow mental patients, who have no power to elect an ongoing bond). Connie, "lying in enforced contemplation" (19) but longing for connection, is in the line of the creature. For both, this drive remains "unsatisfied, yet unquenched" (F 205). When Connie visits the future, she sees one possibility where citizens are alone when they choose, or as part of a rite of passage, and another where Gildina is so accustomed to solitude that she does not know what she is missing (Friends? "'What for?'" [291-92]). Connie, like the creature, has "too little of what her soul could imagine" (280). Anger rises up in both of them, and they finally resort to violence, but only as a last resort, after realizing that any further efforts will meet with the same kinds of results as before. In terms reminiscent of the creature's, Connie says late in Woman on the Edge, "If only they had left me something! [. . .] Only one person to love. [. . .] For that love I'd have borne it all and I'd never have fought back. [. . .] But I have nothing. Why shouldn't I strike back?" (371-72). Revenge seems all that is left. In similar and stark terms, the creature turns to "war against the species" (121), and Connie says, "it is war" (375). The creature vows to destroy the scientist who has created him. Connie vows to destroy the doctors who have created her as a mental patient and are creating her as an experiment. Does the protagonist "go over to the Dark Side," believe in violence, the movement with which we have become so familiar through our contemporary myth of Star Wars? Hardly--except in various movie versions of Frankenstein. To the end, the creature says, "still I desired love and fellowship" (204); and Connie wishes for "just one little corner of loving of my own" (372). The violence destroys both the perpetrator and its targets. The creature brings down the scientist, but all that is left for him is to go off and destroy himself as well. Connie poisons four people, but nothing is left for her but final subjection to the mental institutions. Many critics have seen the violence at the end of Woman on the Edge of Time as a liberation, repeatedly describing it in glowing terms.(n4) "Connie's action in poisoning her doctors is clearly an achievement of the self. [. . .] Piercy asks us to see Connie's action as part of a pattern of empowerment" (Jones 125). Connie is "our hero and avenger" (Gardiner 75); she plays a "Messianic role" (Adams 49); she "takes independent action, and [. . .] conquers her society heroically" (Cramer 232-33). "Piercy interprets [Connie's murders] as justifiable defense against an essentially violent system" (Drake 117). Pearson (132), in milder terms, also justifies Connie's action. Such commentaries offer no questioning of the violence. Death to the oppressors! Are we to have bought into the perspective of Connie to such an extent that we cheer murder? Or do we ask, "Wait a minute. Why did it have to be this way?" Granted, Piercy herself has said that the novel portrays "how a woman stops hating herself and becomes able to love herself enough to fight for her own survival" (Parti 100). But alongside that comment we should note her response to a query about whether her characters speak for her--or, we might add, act for her: Directly, seldom. [. . . T]o me the truth of the novel isn't in what any character says, but rather in the whole of the fiction. As a known feminist I find critics often naively imagine I am putting my politics directly into the mouth of my protagonist. That I could not possibly be amused, ironic, interested in the consonances and dissonances. (Parti 148-49) The echoes of Frankenstein in Woman on the Edge of Time remind us that Connie's acts are monstrous. And society has created its monsters.(n5) Things could have been otherwise. The murderers could have been nurturers. They wanted desperately to be; as the creature reemphasizes at the very end, "My heart was fashioned to be susceptible of love and sympathy [. . .]" (202). The creature feels great regret, unlike Connie, but both cast a critical look outward at the society. The creature says, Am I to be thought the only criminal when all humankind sinned against me? Why do you not hate Felix. [. . .] Why do you not execrate the rustic who sought to destroy the saviour of his child? Nay, these are virtuous and immaculate beings! I, the miserable and the abandoned, am an abortion, to be spurned at, and kicked, and trampled on. Even now my blood boils at the recollection of this injustice. (204) As Connie puts it, "I murdered them dead. Because they are the violence-prone. Theirs is the money and the power, theirs the poisons that slow the mind and dull the heart. Theirs are the powers of life and death" (375). Some critics (e.g., DuPlessis 3-4) who do question the violence at the end of Woman on the Edge of Time object to it on the grounds that others will perceive the murders as an individual, "crazy" act, further evidence of Connie's supposed violent tendencies, rather than a political act, because she left no trail to indicate her motivation. Here, too, Frankenstein is something of a predecessor: the public will not understand the creature's acts. Yet the listener to his story, Walton; the reader in the text, his sister; and we the external readers-listeners have the opportunity to sense something of the broader implications. Connie's act is indeed individual, unlikely to help toward bringing the utopian future into being. Following the murders, she can no longer make contact with Mattapoisett; she had "annealed her mind" (375), even as the creature had hardened himself. But the jolt of the shift of point of view to the "official" view of Connie in Piercy's last chapter brings readers face to face with the larger context, with the issues that the novel clearly invites them to engage. In a much-quoted passage, Luciente had told Connie that nothing is inevitable: "We are only one possible future. [. . .] Yours is a crux-time. Alternate universes co-exist. Probabilities clash and possibilities wink out forever" (177). In different ways--Shelley with her closing pages that bring together the novel's multiple points of view and pull the reader in multiple directions, and Piercy with her last chapter that forces the reader to confront the inadequacy and often downright falsity of an "objective" view of Connie--both writers break the reader out of a passive reading stance.(n6) Thus the reader reflects on the complex realities in juxtaposition with the definitions of the creature and Connie. These characters have become the "monstrous" beings they were defined to be. Because these definitions so severely circumscribe their choices, the definitions--monolithic, inhumane, and incorrect--have become part of their reality. Who set them? The more powerful; and because the protagonists are so low in the social hierarchy, includes multiple layers. As the creature makes clear, one layer is the common person. Even here there is a hierarchy, with males on top. Felix beats the creature off from the senior De Lacey; a male rustic shoots him after he saves a drowning girl; William invokes the patriarchal authority of his father. (Note that Justine, without status of birth, wealth, or gender, is also defined as a "monster" and a "wretch" [71].) Geraldo, a common pimp, beats Connie away from Dolly (who submits to his institutionalizing Connie) and then has more credibility than Connie at the hospital; Connie's brother Luis--male, well-dressed, and thus considered a "reliable informant" (381)--reinforces the definition. The utopian and dystopian futures Connie visits take this issue of definition in opposite directions: Mattapoisett embraces differences of all kinds; the dystopia rigidly categorizes all people within an oppressive hierarchy. The scientists in each novel, of course, have great power to define and to act. In each text the scientist is both target and cause of the violence. Shelley's novel launched science fiction, which "above all else [. . .] has used its special vision and its unique knowledge to face the history of human power over nature and to ask how that power ought to function" (Scholes and Rabkin 191). The scientists in Woman on the Edge of Time are pioneering experimenters, as is Dr. Frankenstein, but updated to our century they are not isolated geniuses but collaborators with concerns about funding. Shelley gives Victor the dignity of a mythic model: he is a Modern Prometheus (the subtitle of the novel), an overreacher. And for multiple reasons, i...