“This is the oppressor's language / yet I need it to talk to you.” Speaking thus of the equivocal relationship between women and language, Adrienne Rich in the earliest days of the women's movement addressed the central question that female writers and feminist critics still seek to answer. Is the dominant discourse a male construct that women cannot use to represent their experience, or can women control or escape this discourse to speak of and for themselves? In Small Changes, more explicitly than in any of her other six novels so far published, Marge Piercy confronts this troubling question. The novel reflects at various levels a profound suspicion of “the oppressor's language,” but like Rich, Piercy finally wants to appropriate—with certain modifications—the dominant discourse. Her aim as a writer, she claims, is to communicate, and after all how else to do so: “I need it to talk to you.” Affirming that women must simultaneously mistrust and use language, Piercy goes on to explore in Small Changes, through its narrative structure, the possibilities and limitations of two different ways in which the female artist can use “the oppressor's” words, as well as his conventional narrative modes, to write—and perhaps even rewrite—female experience.

In Small Changes, a profound and pervasive suspicion of the dominant discourse is explicitly articulated by one of the two main characters, Beth Walker. Beth both recognizes and suspects the power of words. In the opening chapter, she tries to suppress her own discomfort and misgivings, as she stands at the altar with Jim, by invoking “magic words that made things happen or go away, recipes like I Love You, and I'm Sorry, and I Pledge Allegiance, and God Bless Mommy and Daddy, and Will You Marry Me, and Fine, Thank You, and I Do.” But she cannot hear these soothing formulas “over the roaring in her ears,” the sound of an apparently instinctive, inner pulse that prefigures the roars of an anger she gradually learns, in the course of the novel, to acknowledge and express. In the same scene we find that Beth, although untrained in Speech Act Theory, fully understands the performative power of “magic words,” as she hears what the clichés really say and demystifies those old recipes. So, for example, she translates her sister's description of her wedding dress, written for a newspaper that will never print it: “Nancy had written ‘the train comes away.’ That meant the thing that dragged could be taken off, with a little timely help.” Beth's debunking revision frankly emphasizes the oppression of women that the formulaic words conceal: the conventional train of the white wedding gown is in fact a useless burden, “the thing that dragged,” symbolizing not elegance—or pretensions to elegance—but woman's lack of power, her need for “a little timely help” to rid herself of obstacles to comfort and freedom of action. Beth's revisionist insight into the way words both reflect and hide the oppression of women continues throughout the novel: again, when Dorine laments her loneliness—“I feel sometimes as if I'll go through life and never belong to anyone”—Beth responds: “But you aren't a dog, why do you want to be owned?” On her wedding night, “going all the way” with Jim for the first time, she is left completely unsatisfied by his rapid defloration: “they had made love finally, but where was the love they had made?”

Beth's mistrust of magic words extends to the written word as well. Reflecting on her past, as she tries to find out what is going wrong in her marriage, she notes that she was once an avid reader, first consuming adventure stories for boys and later “a lot of Frank Yerby and Galsworthy,” and “all of Aldous Huxley and Iris Murdoch.” But she stopped reading as she began to feel the gap between “reality” and fiction: “The books had betrayed her, leading her to want what she could not approach.” She finds the diary she kept in high school and discovers that she, too, wrote words that misrepresented life, lying to herself in order to cover up painful experience with a story of “how it was all supposed to be.” Even “Jim,” she comes to believe, is “a character made up as she used to make over her daily life for her diary.” To escape her depressing marriage to the real Jim, she once again turns to books—to Hemingway and Colette, among others—and to daydreaming. Beth finds something “shameful,” however, about this retreat to a fantasy world, “something second rate about an imaginary life.” Later, after her first actual escape from Jim and Syracuse, at a point at which she no longer needs to imagine herself taking part in fictional adventures, she picks up some magazines from an old friend's coffee table. With clear sight she analyzes the way they prescribe and distort female life, but she can still feel their power: “The effect of reading them was to feel discontented and sad and vaguely stirred up, as if lacking, as if something were wrong with her. Quickly she put down the magazine.”

On her own for the first time, in Boston and on the fringes of academe, Beth learns about another （ab）use of words. The educated men she now meets play a “verbal game,” while the women “sat on the sidelines and watched the words go by.” Talking for these men is “a kind of playing,” like Jim's car races and football games, but this game has serious consequences. Men have the power to name women: just as Jim called Beth “Little Girl,” the men in the apartment on Pearl Street call Dorine “Chlorine”; Beth is “Peter Rabbit” and Miriam is “Venus.” （Later male epithets for Miriam are even more offensive and destructive: Jackson identifies her with his ex-wife—“You're both cunts”—and Neil criticizes her for her failure to behave as “my wife”—even “a professor's wife”—should.） Dorine consoles Beth for her inability to play the verbal game by arguing that it is just a little harmless sport—“It's jaw exercise. It's Indian wrestling.” But Beth sees more: “I think it's their way of putting things in their place and people in their place and keeping them there. … They're making a pecking order.”

In her suspicion of words and the ways they are used to keep people, especially women, in their places, Beth explores alternative ways of understanding and expressing herself and of communicating with others. She turns first to music, where “sometimes it was people saying things sharper and cleaner than people ever talked to each other in her life … great charges of feeling, someone and then someone else talking to her with power.” Through music she joins “the heart of feeling” she cannot otherwise enter, and she hears the vague but powerful promise of “something, something” that “hung out there in music and birds, wheeling against the dusk and crickets chirping in the weeds.” She also thinks in images; she studies herself as a turtle in an attempt to understand what she feels and believes. Later she finds alternative outlets for her creativity, first in the children's story that she and the women of the commune collectively invent, and ultimately in the women's theater group. She also continues to talk and listen and write, but always with a marked effort to be honest, to say what she means, and to hear what other people are saying. She replaces magic words that distort, falsify, and oppress with the mottoes she writes on the walls of her room in Back Bay, sayings that use language itself, as Beth always does, to demystify, debunk, and deconstruct the dominant discourse and replace it with words that speak of and for women: “NOBODY LOVES A DOORMAT, THEY JUST WALK ON OVER. THE MIRROR IS THE FIRST DAILY TRAP. CHICK—small, fuzzy, helpless, stupid, cute, lays eggs and in the end gets eaten. CAT—predator, active, alert, tough, independent, mean, quick. The language says one is predator and the other is prey. LOVE IS WHAT WOMEN DO INSTEAD OF KNOWING OR FIGHTING OR MAKING OR INVENTING.”

Beth even writes a poem, a self-help piece that ends with a chant of defiance and self-affirmation—“Yes, Beth! Yes, Beth! / Yes”—whose chief virtue is that it makes her feel better. Miriam's perceptive analysis of Beth's surprisingly strong sense of her identity underscores Beth's escape from the dominant discourse that （mis）directs and （dis）figures most women's lives: “She seemed to have her own cry that she uttered through the confusions they all lived in.”

But Beth herself understands that “her own cry” is not enough for a woman, and despite her strong distrust of their uses of language, she wants to engage with men in the verbal game. She articulates to Dorine the reason for her apparently contradictory desire to play a game she hates and in which she has no confidence: “I want to be better with words. I want to be able to answer them back. But I don't believe that's how you do anything. I only want to use words as weapons because I'm tired of being beaten with them. Tired of being pushed around because I don't know how to push back.” When Beth says that words, as men use them, are inadequate to “do anything,” she is not denying the potency of words; she is voicing, rather, her political belief in action as opposed to a hollow rhetoric that is not useful to women, or to anyone else who wants to change the world. As she puts it later, explaining her distrust of Phil: “He talks too much. He turns everything into words and makes it change in words, but nothing changes.” Without relinquishing this insight into the insufficiency of words, she acknowledges their real power to oppress and wants access to that power, not to join in the dominant discourse, not to play the game as men play it, but to protect herself against oppression. In Small Changes Piercy expresses her mistrust of language but does not advocate or sentimentalize silence on the part of women. While women need to seek alternatives and to reject language and literature when they are used to keep women in their place, they cannot allow themselves to be muted; inarticulateness is not a useful weapon.

Other characters and events in the novel support Beth's explicit stance on the troubled question of women and language. Miriam, for instance, who has had more formal education than Beth has had, is always talking and has less suspicion of the dominant discourse, perhaps because she is better at playing the verbal game herself. But while she is seldom at a loss for words, she is also the most oppressed woman in the novel, or at least the one who is most damaged by the epithets and plots assigned to her by men. She uses words to hide—chiefly from herself—the truth about her relationships with men. Her lovers and her husband repeatedly shut her out from their games and refuse to speak, while she tries in vain to understand and communicate: “Still she watched him for a sign, any sign.” Fittingly, like so many women, Miriam has a special facility for language, which is manifest in her interest as a computer scientist in the problems of artificial language. She begins work on a project that will facilitate communication between people and computers and between various incompatible computer languages, but when she marries the director of the project, she is transferred to work on a missile contract. Only Phil ever really talks with Miriam, but then Phil is an unusual man, the exception that proves the rule. A hustler with words—as are women—Phil is beaten down by the establishment, undergoes a conversion, and in the end recants his old phallogocentrism. He gives up writing poetry—whose eternal status he earlier celebrated—drops out of graduate school, and even distances himself from his friend Jackson because “being with him pushes me into my old way of using words.” He chooses to withdraw from the dominant discourse and becomes a carpenter: “I want to do simple useful things with my hands and keep my rotten fucked-up head out of it. I don't trust how I use words.”

The pervasive and fundamental suspicion of words that separates the sheep from the goats in Small Changes may also serve, self-reflexively, to explain and defend Piercy's own characteristic use of language. Critics have repeatedly faulted her novels for their stylistic lapses, their failure to display “the felicities of a decent prose style.” A reader might be reminded, however, when reading such criticism, of Virginia Woolf's self-mocking critique of Life's Adventure, the imaginary novel by Mary Carmichael analyzed in A Room of One's Own: “She had broken up Jane Austen's sentence,” Woolf complains, “and thus given me no chance of pluming myself upon my impeccable taste, my fastidious ear.” Piercy, in Small Changes, as did Mary Carmichael in Life's Adventure, insists that we question our standards of taste, our fastidious assumptions about stylistic decency, that we see the political indecency of “very very literary literature,” and that we recognize Piercy's effort to communicate with a “popular” audience, specifically one that includes men and women “who don't go into bookstores,” as she puts it. There are dangers, of course, in this insistence and this effort. There is a danger, for instance, that Piercy will go unread, or unappreciated, by people who do go into bookstores—people whom she also wants to reach, or so she says. And there is the more serious danger, perhaps, that Piercy's mistrust of language and literature can radically undercut the political message of the novel for any reader. If literature falsifies experience, why should anyone believe what Small Changes says about women's lives? If words change nothing, can a novel be “of use,” as Piercy wants hers to be?

Such are the questions raised in Small Changes, crucial questions for many women writers today, and to my mind they make this novel a particularly exciting document for both the feminist critic and the student of contemporary narrative. This is not the conventional novel or the “merely” popular work that so many critics have plumed themselves on criticizing. Whether it succeeds or fails in the attempt to set new standards and say new things, it raises questions that are on the cutting edge of feminist aesthetics and feminist theory, and it repays critical analysis. One type of analysis, to which some of Piercy's other novels—especially Woman on the Edge of Time—might more obviously give occasion, is examination of her narrative technique as a kind of literary manifesto for contemporary women writers. From this perspective, Small Changes suggests several by now almost commonplace strategies and principles, including the subversion of conventional narrative openings and closings; the intentionally didactic, oversimplified, even allegorical nature of the work and its characters; the use of what DuPlessis has called “multi-personed or cluster protagonists” to affirm the “feminine” values of “collectivity” and “interdependence”; the rich, even “exhaustive” and “obsessively observed”—details, often associated with stereotypically female interests such as the way space is arranged in various domiciles, or the way “life support” activities are managed.

Along these lines, I want to suggest that the narrative structure of Small Changes, built on the stories of two women, can be seen as an experiment, not in “the variety of lifestyles that women in our time are adopting,” but in two alternative ways in which the woman writer can write, can represent the experience of women while using the only language available and the traditional forms and myths available to any writer. I want to suggest, that is, that Piercy, wary like Beth of language, investigates the possibilities and the limitations of two prominent ways in which the woman writer can appropriate the dominant discourse: either by inverting the classic male plot, as in Beth's story; or by revitalizing and perhaps “legitimating” a conventional female form of narrative, as in “the ongoing soap opera” of Miriam's life. Small Changes is in this regard not an optimistic novel; it reveals in both modes the difficulties as well as the possibilities of appropriation, the price that women pay, the resistance of the dominant discourse—a system that is not user-friendly, as Miriam might put it, when the user is a woman writing for women and hoping to “do” something with words.

The plot of Beth's story represents an example of the first possibility that is available to the feminist writer: the revolutionary use of a classic male narrative structure to portray a radical female experience. Beth's story is a version—and an inversion—of both the Bildungsroman （or even the Kunstlerroman, in which Beth is the artist as a young woman, unable to speak） and the melodrama. Endowed only with her seemingly innate feminist sensitivity—“She bruises easily,” her mother says—Beth miraculously escapes imprisonment in the perpetual childhood of the married woman. She begins to educate herself, is recaptured, escapes again, and finally after many adventures meets the perfect woman and finds her true identity, both sexual and social, as a lesbian feminist. This plot is clearly presented as a romantic journey from darkness to light, a narrative of revolution and rebirth into a new and higher state. Appropriately, the climax of the story comes when the hero explicitly breaks the law she has already transgressed in private and escapes as nearly as possible, not just from her personal patriarchs, but from the patriarchal state as a whole. At the end of the novel, Beth goes underground, literally creating a new identity and renaming herself and her family. The maleness of this plot, despite its feminist twist, is underscored by the characterization of Beth. The name Jackson gives her—Peter Rabbit—is shown to be apt; although she loves women and is abused by men, she has few traditionally feminine traits and tastes. She is cool and dry, flat-chested and narrow-hipped; she hates to cook, travels light, and refuses to be caught in the reproductive cycle: “I can't be mothered and I won't mother,” she tells Miriam. Tellingly—and with the homoerotic overtones characteristic of the central male-male and female-female relationships in the novel—Miriam likes Beth because she seems, like Phil or Neil, more an equal than other women. At the same time, however, Beth's feminine capacity to love and care for others—for Wanda and her sons, in particular, and for the hypothetical patients she will treat if she becomes, as she plans, a paramedic—is validated by the ending of her story. Piercy may be attempting to suggest here what Lee Edwards has recently argued: that the woman hero challenges stereotypical associations of sex and behavior. “Permitted, like others of her sex, to love and nurture, to comfort, to solace, and to please,” Edwards argues, “the heroic woman specifies these impulses as human, not just female, and endows them with a value that counters their usual debasement.”

Where Beth and her plot, like the classic male story of education and adventure upon which it is built, are basically “simple and contained,” Miriam and her story are “vast and yeasty,” hopelessly complicated and archetypally feminine. The characters themselves suggest to us the specific genre of Miriam's story: as she herself says and as Jackson later repeats, she is the heroine of a soap opera. Closer analysis confirms and clarifies the significance of this point, as we see how Piercy manipulates narrative structure, point of view, and thematic elements so that Miriam's story corresponds in critical respects to the shape and style of the soaps, and is in sharp contrast to the story of the woman hero. The novel begins, for instance, with “The Book of Beth,” in which we are introduced to the protagonist as she learns about herself, and thus we are given a sense, as in the typical Bildungsroman, of the freedom and capacity of the central character to grow, to make choices, and to take action. Miriam, by contrast, is first introduced in Beth's book as just one of a group of people with complex histories and relationships, a small but complete cast of characters whose lives are already—and only, and always—in progress when Beth tunes in. We later see Miriam and Phil but know no more than Beth does about their relationship at this point; in the penultimate chapter and narrative climax of “The Book of Beth,” set on the day of the Street Fair, Dorine and Lennie and Beth walk in on Miriam and Jackson, who are in bed.

In “The Book of Miriam,” which begins shortly thereafter, we are offered the testimony of Miriam's childhood, college days, and affairs with Phil and Jackson, in a lengthy reprisal that appears to introduce us to Miriam in the same way in which we were introduced to Beth. But when we have finally come again to that same point in narrative time where we were in Beth's Book—the day of the Street Fair—we already know what is going to happen. Our knowledge makes us perceive Miriam's experience much differently from the way we perceive Beth's: the soap-opera heroine is caught in predetermined circumstances, unable to choose or to act on her own. She is constrained by the narrative structure, and hence by the reader's foreknowledge, as much as by her own all too predictable desires.

Furthermore, as is that of any character in a good soap opera, Miriam's story is interrupted by other characters in a way that Beth's is not. In “The Book of Miriam,” two chapters are in fact written from Phil's point of view; Miriam, who sometimes feels as if she is Phil's product—or his poodle—relinquishes control to him even in her titular story. In the third and longest section of the novel, “Both in Turn,” the reader is farther from Miriam, especially in crucial scenes such as the party she gives, where we see her first through Beth's eyes, just as, in the last chapter, we see her through Helen's. The effect is that in general we see with Beth, where we often merely see Miriam.

Like a soap opera, and unlike Beth's evolutionary plot, Miriam's story is also one of continual and unfulfilled anticipation, obsessive and ungratified desire, and formless repetition. Miriam repeatedly thinks her dreams have at last come true—first when she meets Phil, then when she succumbs to Jackson, then when she marries Neil—but we soon see how blind she is and how little progress she makes. Again, the narrative structure highlights her self-deception: when Beth returns to Boston, finds Miriam married to Neil, and asks how it happened, Miriam clearly represses the all-important meeting in Washington with Wilhelm Graben; only later does she reveal to us how much this episode influences her decision to marry Neil and to have a baby. Her life is presented as a series of defeats, as her story moves relentlessly from one predictable scene to the next. Phil gets stoned and lets Miriam down, but makes Miriam feel that she has let him down; Jackson wins the chess game; Tom Ryan—or Wilhelm Graban, or Phil, or Neil—has sex with her while she is drunk, or unable to object, or too sleepy to use her diaphragm; Neil humiliates her for smoking marijuana when she is carrying “his” child, or for talking to the wrong people, or for spilling her drink, or for spoiling or neglecting Ariane. Occasionally Miriam even sees the predictability and shapelessness of her narrative. With Jackson, she feels unable to “shatter the web of myth,” and toward the end of the novel, comments on the ironic exchange of roles that she and Dorine have undergone: “It's strange, Beth. As if our lives had no inner shape.”

Contrast the exhausting, repetitious, shapeless series of defeats that Miriam experiences with the functional repetition in Beth's plot. When, for example, Jim's detective takes Beth back to Syracuse, and she has to escape from him all over again, what might look like a frustration, even a regression, of her development serves to demonstrate how Beth has in fact grown in moral stature and in heroic resolve. Juxtaposed in this way, the two escapes reveal Beth's development from passive resistance—before, she simply lied and evaded confrontation—to active, even aggressive self-defense, as she now takes up the bread knife and gets herself a lawyer. Whereas she simply boards a plane to Boston the first time she runs away—“She thought she would be less frightened to get on a plane and be in Boston in an hour and a half”—after her second escape she hitchhikes to California and back, exercising her new self-reliance and earning her stripes （she has her first lesbian affair on the way） before returning to the women's house. Literally as well as figuratively the heroine covers much more space—“what a distance she had traveled beyond what she has been raised to”—than does the soap-opera heroine, who stays in the same small world—within easy range of Route 128—for the central part of the action.

And as in the soap operas, the predominant concern within Miriam's small world is the life of the emotions. She earns a Ph.D. in computer science from M.I.T. and speaks of the joys of work, but when “she understood that she was in love” with Jackson, she forgets everything else, “plans and projects and curiosities and relationships and speculations.” She is not really committed to her career even in the beginning; she dreams of saving half her first year's salary, then taking a leave of absence or quitting to travel with Phil. By the time her second child is born—only three years after her “leave of absence” from Logical Systems Development—she feels totally unmarketable. Rationalizing her professional failure, Miriam might speak for all soap opera characters when she says “People are the most important thing to me.” Again and again, in long stretches of dialogue or interior monologue, we hear of her obsessive desire to be loved, and we also hear the simple Freudian psychologizing that guides her—and most of the characters—in her thinking about love and sex.

The final and most emphatic similarity between Miriam's narrative and the genre of soap opera is its open-endedness. We do not know exactly what will become of Beth and Wanda, but the effect of the final two-page narrative of “Cindy” and “Marie,” and their sons, and their dog Dean, is to seal off Beth's story. Our brief glimpse of this happy family sitting down to a meal of potato soup and discussing Cindy and Marie's plan to train as paramedics is as idealized and romantic as the happy ending of the most conventional novel. In our last view of Miriam, on the other hand, we witness yet another fight with Neil, who is already having an affair— soon to be revealed to us, unbeknown to Miriam—with his secretary. He leaves Miriam, and she sits alone in the dark house, thinking about her dreams, her love, her children, and her connections with Beth, Wanda, Dorine, Phil, Sally—the principal players in the cast. Although we know Miriam is still deceiving herself in her hope that she can regain Neil's love, we are—at least momentarily—invited to believe that the strength of her connections will enable her to survive, to recover her energy, and perhaps even to break the cycle of repeated defeat, not as Beth does in one fell revolutionary swoop, but through “the slow undramatic refounding, single thought by small decision by petty act, of a life: her life.” This all-but-final vision of Miriam crouched in the dark, looking out at the streetlights, could encourage the reader to invent a future that takes the character out of a world of endless repetition without insisting that she become a heroine, a superwoman, or a lesbian separatist.

But Small Changes does not end with this plausible if limited optimism: instead, underscoring its affinities with the constitutionally endless soap operas, the last brief chapter of the novel—“Another Desperate Soprano （Helen）”—introduces a new heroine, mentioned in passing by Neil in the preceding chapter, and a new point of view. The story, however, is depressingly familiar: Helen is on the verge of taking Miriam's place in the plot, repeating her error, and fleeing gratefully from a hard, lonely life into the deceptive protection of Neil Stone's petrifying embrace. The final word in Small Changes implies that for every woman who manages to escape even a little, as Miriam might, there is another soprano waiting in the wings, doomed to reenact a plot that offers no relief from oppression, no freedom from endless anticipation and frustration of desire.

Piercy thus uses the double narrative in Small Changes to explore both the possibilities and the limitations of two available narrative structures, one male and one female, for speaking the unspoken and perhaps unspeakable story of women's lives. The feminist Bildungsroman, built on a culturally male model, facilitates the representation of a certain kind of revolutionary change, of individual growth and development in a woman's life; the soap opera more accurately presents and records ordinary women's experience. Each genre, as used in Small Changes, can be deployed to expose the oppression of women and to write stories that diminish the gap, for women, between reality and fiction, stories that do not betray the woman reader as Beth was betrayed by the fiction she once devoured, and stories that enable women to play the verbal game without turning into the oppressors. But neither mode is yet adequate to communicate a truly satisfactory vision of the as yet unrealized future in which no one is oppressed. Small Changes does not ask us to trust language and its present forms fully, but to remain wary of the ways in which literary conventions, like the world that produces and is shaped by them, “push women around”; and so from a late-twentieth-century feminist point of view each of the two characters and her story serves as a critique of the other.

Beth's story, the classic male narrative, works for women only if it is inverted to show the radical feminist's escape from rather than reintegration into society; in this way it may also reprivilege individual over collective values and cannot easily accommodate heterosexual relationships. At the same time that Beth's narrative thematically supports female bonding, Beth's individual heroism of necessity implies a rejection of traditional women's culture and, most problematical, of motherhood. Wanda breaks the law in order to keep her children; but if Beth had children, could she sacrifice them to her love for Wanda? Again, only because Beth will not be a mother is she free to act in a heroic plot. Miriam takes as much of a risk as she can to help Wanda because both are mothers—“Suppose they were my children? Of course she has to get them back.” But she cannot go underground with her friends. She articulates precisely the limitations of Beth's career, the elitism that radical feminism can seem to perpetuate: “Come on, you call it the women's movement, but what do you have for an ordinary woman? … What have you got for me? I love my kids and I don't burn banks down or run around the streets with picket signs.”

In response to Miriam's indictment, Beth has no easy answer, but her thoughtful advice in turn exposes the inadequacies of soap opera from a feminist perspective. Above all Beth blames the isolation of woman that is the result of an excessively private life, a total investment of self in the male object of desire, and a mistaken belief that she is solely responsible for, and hence chained to, her children. The soap opera, as others have argued, could be said to affirm the collective character, the community, that the male narrative subordinates to the individual hero, but such a possibility is unrealized as long as the love of a man is the primary source of narrative action, and hence of meaning, in women's lives. Soap operas give narrative space to the experience of women in a way that the male plot cannot, but by replicating the web of myth they also serve to deny an ordinary woman the chance to escape its constraints.