"What her soul could imagine": envisioning human flourishing in Marge Piercy's Woman on the Edge of Time

This paper examines the feminist utopian community of Mattapoisett in Marge Piercy's Woman on the Edge of Time . Employing Martha Nussbaum's concepts of the "judicious reader" and the role that literary imagination can play in public life, I explore the success of this community in terms of the human capabilities outlined in Nussbaum's Women and Human Development . I review these capabilities, emphasizing the key distinction this approach makes between human being as means to an end and human being as end in herself. I then ask: Has this fictional society achieved the conditions necessary for human flourishing? I argue that the opposition of a dystopian and utopian world in this novel asks the reader to imagine first a diminishing and then a flourishing of her own human capabilities and that, in this imagining, she gains essential insight in order to participate in debates surrounding social justice.