Research Paper on Marge Piercy
These events in Pierce’s life initiated her sudden interest with literature. (Unmans, 2011) Napkins (2004) stated that Marge Pierce was raised in a middle-class family during the Great Depression in the 1 9305. She seemed to struggle as an outsider of the Jewish race, as she was raised by her Jewish mother and non-practicing Presbyterian father. Moreover, the influence of Marge’s grandmother on her upbringing initiated her sudden interest to literature. She remembers her grandmother as a storyteller and as a voracious reader who encouraged observation of the world around her.
Marge Pierce’s grandmother endowed her hunger for literature even as a little girl that established her love for literature. Educational Background Despite the social conflicts that arose from Marge Pierce’s childhood, she as able to attend college by earning a scholarship to the university of Michigan on 1957. She was the first in her family to attend college and pursue a degree. Throughout her stay at the university, she won several Hoped awards, a prestigious award for prose writing. These achievements provided her monetary sustenance to finish college.
Nonetheless, she continued her master degree at the Northwestern university where she met Michel Shift, a French Jewish exchange student in physics. Her encounter with Shift led to her first marriage which enabled her to encounter Chiefs family that survived he Holocaust and informed them of her novel entitled Gone to Soldiers about World War II. (Horopito, 2003) Hazel (2010) stated that throughout her college life, Marge Pierce did not fit into what women were supposed to be like. She was immediately judged and it made college very hard and very painful for her.
Despite the horrible experience, she used such experiences to become a stronger writer and poet. She infused these events into her writings into bigger ideas, emerging her feminist beliefs. She supported the idea that society could be anything and that accepting people who look different could be feasible. Her college experiences sparked the idea of women oppression, as shown in one of her strongest poems, Barbie Doll. Period the Author Belongs According to Unmans (2011), Marge Pierce was born in Detroit into a family deeply affected by the Great Depression.
As she grew up, she faced issues with her identity, since her dad was not of Jewish descent. It set her apart from the society, which resulted to bullying even at an early age. While growing up to adulthood, she did not seem to fit the image of what a woman during her time supposed to be like. Consequently, she belongs to the period f Great Depression until the modern era wherein inequality was strongly evident in the society. She also participated into women movements and rational societies to attain gender and social equality in America through the efforts of feminists like herself.
Coloratura, Political and Economical background Horopito (2003) wrote that even though Marge Pierce is not anymore a student, she was active in the radical Students for a Democratic Society (SD) in the late asses. However after a decade, she started to show disappointment with the devaluation of women, fauvism and Zionism, and f creative writing by the New Left. This led her to shorten her own Jewish practice. She then decided to leave the SD and became actively involved in women’s movement, a commitment which seems to continue fuelling and validating her artistic works.
In 1 981, her mother died on Chunk that initiated the renewal of her creative interest in Jewish practice. She opts to focus in the female lunar side of Judaism, trying to live as a full Jew again with her entire being, her entire intelligence and knowledge. She then began to compose liturgical poems and rituals as a contribution to the Reconstructions Movement’s prayer book, Shades Yammering: A Kiddush for Shabby and Festivals. She also contributes to Jewish journals such as Aitkin, serving as a poetry editor from 1 988 to 1996.
Lastly, in 1999, she published a collection of poems on Jewish life entitled The Art of Blessing the Day: Poems with a Jewish Theme, which won the Paterson Poetry Prize on the same year. According to Delaney (1997), Marge Pierce struggled as she left her first husband and lived in Chicago, trying to search for herself into what kind of poetry and of fiction she imagined but could not yet produce. She supported ere with a lot of part-time jobs, while being involved in the civil rights movement.
Throughout her stay in Chicago, she felt a failure to the society, being a divorcee at a young age, poor, sustaining herself with part-time work and being an invisible writer. It was not from 1965 up to 1969, that her health started to collapse. With such, her main focus was political. She decided to prioritize political organizing rather than writing at that time. It was this time that she wrote a novel entitled Dance the Eagle to Sleep. In 1967, she became an organizer with the SD regional office in New York, where in that time the event was split in varying factions and the war which was opposed by the movement was on going.
She involved herself in women’s movement, trying to write articles and organizing groups to raise consciousness about the movement. Since that time, Marge Pierce dedicates her time in feminist movements and socialist movements that enable her to slowly help in seeking gender and racial equality in America. Up until now, Pierce dedicates her works to the readers to share her feminist beliefs. Contributions to Literature Martins (2003) explains Marge Pierces perspective of coefficients, rising from cyberpunk, which explores machine and human interface that focus on the questing of what it means to be human.
Also, feminist science fiction explore such interface, often involves careful consideration of the underlying intersections between gender and technology. Two of Marge Pierce’s novels, namely Woman on the Edge of Time and He, She and It conforms the foundation of a discussion that tackles a variety of feminist perspectives on technology. The first book, Woman on the Edge of Time, was published in 1976, and referred as an coefficients utopian novel while He, She ND It, first published in 1991 , introduced the readers a shift of Pierce’s perspective of gender relationships.
The idea of coefficients is present to both novels. However, in the book He, She and It, the idea is less noticeable for readers often astray from the anti-technological stance which really connotes a stance about coefficients. As lifted from poets. Org, Marge Pierce dedicates herself in exploring the interstices of ideology and aesthetics by way of Marxist, feminist and environmentalist strains of thought. She emphasized that there are endless excuses of human speech and sessions which cannot be owned or even known in the small words to describe naming characters in her literary works.
She edited the poetry anthology Early Ripening: American Women Poets Now and became a poetry editor of Aitkin. She also collaborated with artists like Neil Blaine to feature both her poetry and Beeline’s artwork. It only shows the profound distinction Marge Pierce earned for the past years in American Literature, especially through her poetry. Breton (2008) mentioned Marge Pierce’s commentary of how Walt Whitman, one of the most influential poets who ever lived, inspired her in free verse poetry. It was indicated that Walt Whitman became the reason of her founding herself in poetry since she was highlights.
Pierce started producing poems that mirrored a little of Whitman when she was fifteen. However, people around her said that if you write out of who you are, if you deal genuinely with your own experiences, if you go into yourself honestly, then you can write something worth reading. With Whitman, she realized that as long as you write genuinely, no matter how queer or how fringe society sees you, it will naturally be valuable if you write well. Lastly, Whitman urged Pierce to know who she was and where she was, specifically to know that she is American and to think that her life, place and time are worth of poetry.
Meyers (2009) averred that Marge Pierce challenges sexism, heterosexual, racism and economic injustice that exist in America, as seen in her 13 books of poetry and 14 books of prose. She forges imaginative communities focused in the awareness that human capacity cannot be separated from specific circumstances and in day-to-day mature relationships. In the 1 sass and asses, she plunged her interest to the lunar side of Judaism, finding ways to tooth embrace her Judaism and her feminism.
During that period, Marge Pierce was able to produce literary works that earned recognition under her name, especially poems such as The Moon is Always Female and The Art of Blessing the Day and the novel entitled Woman on the Edge of Time, not only considered as a utopian classic but also a feminist classic in American Literature. Famous Works As lifted from pentameter. Com, Marge Pierce is an author of 17 volume of poems, among them are The Moon is Always Female (1980) and The Art of Blessing the Day (1999), as well as 15 novels, one play, one collection of says, one nonfiction book and one memoir.
Her novels and poetry mainly focus on feminist or social concerns. Some of her famous works include a science fiction novel entitled Body of Glass that won the Arthur C. Clarke award; Woman on the Edge of Time, a considered classic of utopian speculative science fiction as well as a feminist classic; poems entitled A Work of Artifice, Belly Good, Attack of the Squash People, The Woman in the Ordinary and the like. These works slowly established Marge Pierce as a renowned writer who focuses on feminist or social concerns.
Evans (2012) depicts Marge Pierces Woman in the Edge of Time as an unlikely way of showing utopia to the readers, where no one bears children and only males produce milk. Every child has three co-mothers until they turn 13 and pick their own name, elaborating on political and scientific experiments made by Pierce. Woman on the Edge of Time shows the parallel stories of 1 sass New York and the year 2137. The utopia in the story is being brought by the dreams and hallucinations of Consult Ramose, a poor Hispanic woman locked up in a New York hospital mental health ward.
Consult and her ward-mates fight against the doctors’ abusive scientific experiments as the people of utopia Onomatopoeia hold off the intrusion of the corporations’ attack at the frontiers of their enclosure. Counsel’s reaction to Pierce’s utopia lets loose the potential disgust in the reader which shows itself to be highly-organized, technologically developed community that Consult grows to trust and to be nurtured by. The utopia is used as a tool to critique social crises of the present.
As expected, Pierce did not have a tidy neat denouement; being practical herself for life rarely offers easily resolved ending and so did her works. The work conveys the characters in political by exploring the body as a site Of resistance. Pierce is also renowned for well- crafted narrative that leads to likeable flawed characters, wherein this novel paves way to women’s experiences and relationships. Gosh (2011) analyses one of Pierce’s poems, Barbie Doll, which focused on feminist cultures and social activities that women face.
The poem clearly describes of how a woman is being seen in America. It focuses on a girl that prioritize one’s physical beauty that her mental and internal beauty. It composed of four stanzas, which each stanza describes the birth of a girl hill, her growth, adolescence and final moments of her life. The first stanza contains of how much happiness a girl child has at her very young age, being exposed to toys and to dolls. Pierce even specified brand names to show how conscious and how perfectionists Americans are when it comes to beauty.
Then came the second stanza where Pierce expounds that the girl is talented, intelligent, great sex appeal and healthy. However, she Starts to notice her fat nose and thick legs, slowly realizing that a woman is being judged by her physical perfect looks only. In the third stanza, the girl opts to get rid of the hick legs and fat nose while being suggested to do exercises and diets. Due to depression, she decides to cut off and to sacrifice her life to please other people. And in the last stanza, she ended her life and was at funeral with those extra makeup, which the public recognizes her beauty.
