1. Quotations are taken from the Fawcett Crest edition of Marge Piercy, Woman on the Edge of Time (New York: Ballantine Books, 1983).

2. Although in general it might be argued, as I suggest later, that Piercy valorizes the imaginative power of the mother's position in a way comparable to that of the French feminists, in this regard I take Piercy's view as antithetical to Julia Kristeva's position that the maternal is a site of constitutive splitting and radical otherness. For this view, see especially "Herethique de la'amour," Tel Quel 74 (winter 1977): 30-49; reprinted in Histoires d'amour (Paris: Denoel, 1983).

3. The fact that Connie is Chicana is interesting in light of my findings in chapters 2 and 3 about other racial and ethnic minority women, but I think the representation of the Chicana is not Piercy's main concern, so I do not discuss it extensively here.

4. Note that this is an act Connie has just imagined doing—when Geraldo breaks in, her hatred "gave her a flush in the nerves like speed coming on," and she imagines destroying his elegance in creative ways that foreshadow her visionary capacity: "She dreamed of peeling off a slickly polished antiqued lizard high-heeled boot and pounding it down his lying throat" (13).

5. Later, in utopian Mattapoisett at the end-of-mothering ritual, we learn tellingly that "aunts" (chosen, not biological) play an important role after naming, when the adolescent no longer goes to her mothers for advice, but to the aunts she selects as advisers for the next few years (116). Contrast Margaret Atwood's characterization of "the Aunts" in The Handmaid's Tale, an elite female gestapo who brutally train and police other women and serve the interests of the antifeminist state.

6. Not only does Dolly have the abortion, at Geraldo's insistence, but in the few brief visits Connie has with her niece we learn that Dolly, working harder than ever as a prostitute, is growing further and further estranged from her own daughter Nita, who is cared for by her grandmother.

7. Alice Adams, "Out of the Womb: The Future of the Uterine Metaphor," Feminist Studies 19, no. 2 (summer 1993): 275. See also Adams's discussion of Woman on the Edge of Time in Reproducing the Womb: Images of Childbirth in Science, Feminist Theory, and Literature (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994).

8. Piercy's vision in the novel is often taken to idealize androgyny, and she has sometimes been criticized for letting men into her utopia. See for example Peter Fitting, "For Men Only: A Guide to Reading Single-Sex Worlds," Women's Studies 14 (1987): 101-18.

9. Evelyn Nakano Glenn, "Social Constructions of Mothering: A Thematic Overview," in Mothering: Ideology, Experience, and Agency, ed. Evelyn Nakano Glenn, Grace Chang, and Linda Rennie Forcey (New York: Routledge, 1994), p. 7. For elaboration, see Sau-ling C. Wong, "Diverted Mothering: Representations of Caregivers of Color in the Age of 'Multiculturalism'" in Glenn, Chang, and Forcey, Mothering: Ideology, Experience, and Agency, pp. 67-91. See also Evelyn Nakano Glenn, "From Servitude to Service Work: Historical Continuities in the Racial Division of Women's Work," Signs 18, no. 1 (fall 1992): 1-43.

10. Quotations are from the Fawcett Crest edition of Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid's Tale (New York: Ballantine Books, 1987).

11. For discussion of this interpretation, see Amin Malak, "Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale and the Dystopian Tradition," Canadian Literature 112 (spring 1987): 9-16.

12. Helen Yglesias, "Odd Woman Out," calls this the "the Atwood woman," in The Women's Review of Books 6, no. 10-11 (July 1989): 3.

13. To cite just one more example: when she finally understands what has been obvious to the reader for some time, that there is an underground resistance and that her walking partner is a member, she is given a chance to join their efforts. Her partner urges her to use her nightly secret meetings to find out something about the Commander; "'Find out what?' I say" (289).

14. In this passage she criticizes her lack of sympathy for another Handmaid, who has gone mad: "I look after her. Easy out, is what I think. I don't even feel sorry for her, although I should. I feel angry. I'm not proud of myself for this, or for any of it. But then, that's the point" (361). This leaves her readers to ask: The point of what? What's the point?

15. For a discussion of Atwood's relation to "postfeminism" in the novel preceding The Handmaid's Tale that has implications I cannot explore here, see my earlier essay, "(Post)Feminism in Atwood's Bodily Harm," Novel 19 (1985): 5-21.

16. Aunt Lydia expresses just this reasoning when she explains why the promiscuity of the past was a mistake: "A thing is valued, she says, only if it is rare and hard to get. We want you to be valued, girls." The Handmaid's reflection, as the passage continues, highlights the tyranny and corruption of this ideology: "We sitting in our rows, eyes down, we make her salivate morally. We are hers to define, we must suffer her adjectives" (145).

17. It could even be argued that the Handmaid retrospectively highlights Connie's perhaps equally unsettling inability to give up the myth of individual and utter responsibility. Whereas the women of Mattapoisett have apparently relinquished the myth and share the work of mothering with a whole community (and do so only until the child reaches adolescence), Connie still embodies in her fairly standard brand of individual heroism another very ancient, long-lived, and romantic myth about good mothers: their willing and utter and lonely self-sacrifice.

18. Susan Rubin Suleiman, "On Maternal Splitting: A Propos of Mary Gordon's Men and Angels, " Signs 14, no. 1 (autumn 1988): 25-41.

19. Adrienne Rich, Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution, tenth anniversary edition (New York: W. W. Norton, 1986), p. 240.

20. In "Balancing Acts," an interview of Kathi Aguero and Marea Gordett conducted by Ruth Perry, Women's Review of Books 5, no. 10-11 (July 1988), one contemporary mother and writer has publicly said that her fiction is useful in exorcising her fears about her children. Gordett observes, "Well, when I was pregnant I was somewhat obsessed with the fear of having a child who had some handicap, and I wrote a story about it and it helped me tremendously" (29).

21. Perry, "Balancing Acts," p. 30.

22. Domna C. Stanton, "Difference on Trial: A Critique of the Maternal Metaphor in Cixous, Irigaray, and Kristeva," in The Poetics of Gender, ed. Nancy K. Miller (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), pp. 156-82, quotation on p. 174.

23. bell hooks, Talking Back: Thinking Feminist, Thinking Black (Boston: South End Press, 1989), p. 37.

24. Tillie Olsen's "As I Stand Here Ironing" was first published in 1956; quotations are taken from Olsen, Tell Me a Riddle (New York: Dell, 1976).