The Girl Who Was Plugged In

The story’s narrator is forceful and provocative, regularly interrupting the action to pass comment, question the reader, and inform us about the future world. We encounter this right at the start, where she addresses her readers in accusative terms, “Listen zombie” and goes on to call them “double knit dummies” (43). She pictures her readers as petty men, obsessed with their “growth stocks portfolio” and self-importance. She plans to challenge their perspective.

As readers, we don’t have to identify with the implied audience Tiptree creates, but the narrator’s constant jibes remind us of our own position as readers, as well as her role as a narrator. It’s one of several techniques Tiptree uses to disrupt the sense of realism and keep us as at a critical distance from the narrative. The narrator’s repeated interventions, flippant style and comments on her own story have a similar effect. For example, “you’re curious about the city? […] pass up the Sci-fi stuff for now” (44).

The narrator’s unusual diction and provocative tone also contribute to this distancing effect. She uses unfamiliar language that helps bring life to the future world she speaks to us from, but also renders it strange and difficult to decipher. Some of these are words for new technologies, like “databalls” (45) and “holocams” (43), while some are part of an idiosyncratic and quasi-futuristic idiom the narrator adopts: “three young-bloods, larking along loverly” (43).

The flippant tone the narrator adopts towards the reader, is also evident in the way she describes P. Burke. There’s little sympathy or insight into her emotional world in this section. The narrator emphasizes her unattractiveness in hyperbolic terms, with shades of callous humor: “No surgeon would touch her. When she smiles, her jaw—it’s half purple—almost bites her left eye out” (44). P. Burke is appear repulsive, almost monstrous: an assortment of ill-fitting limbs and features. Even in the moment attempts suicide, the narrator pulls us away to talk about other things. All this complicates emotional identification with the character. It may also encourage us to question the narrator resist her descriptions of P. Burke. While the narrator presents P as a pitiable victim, and her story as a lesson of sorts, she’s doing so through a perspective which is very much complicit with her objectification.

In stark contrast to the portrayal of P. Burke as a miserable grotesque, we have the presentation of the young starlets, or “gods” as the epitome of effortless beauty. Where P. Burke is crushed in the crowd, utterly unnoticed, the gods are set apart, loved and looked up to by all. Their description as superior beings—emphasizes the sense of unbreachable distance between P. Burke and them, as does P. Burke’s intense, almost religious, love of them. We already start to see something of the role they play in this society—it’s P. Burke’s love of them which serves as a temporary escape from herself and a reason to go on living.

The words chosen to describe the gods convey in their own way a subtle sense of assemblage: “See their great eyes swivel above their nose-filters” (43). We’re introduced to them metonymically—as a series of perfect features. And just as we see P. Burke completely objectified, so too are these gods presented purely as creatures to be seen, viewed adoringly by the crowd. P. Burke and her gods are two sides of the same coin in a society that’s obsessed with appearance.