42 pages • 1 hour read
James Tiptree Jr.The Girl Who Was Plugged In
Fiction | Novella | Adult | Published in 1973A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
Perceptions of the Female Body
This is a story of contrasting bodies. It asks questions about the perception of female bodies, their social status and value, their power and limitations. It also raises questions about the relationship between body and mind and what exactly it is that connects them.
In P. Burke, we have an overwhelmingly negative image of the female body. She’s described as a “girl brute,” a walking grotesque—misshapen, hulking, unattractive. In a world so focused on appearances, she experiences her body as a cage and impediment, and it’s central to her miserable and lonely condition at the start of the story. Though she sacrifices control of her own body to become Delphi, Burke’s body never goes away. It remains a stubborn fact of reality throughout the story—the thing that needs to be cared for, cleaned, and fed. It’s also Burke’s body that really feels. She suffers pain, experiences pleasure and sexual desire, she lives, changes, decays, and renews—all those less than picturesque things that bodies do. This real, feeling body is what’s run from, buried and repressed in the story—literally hidden away in an underground capsule, though it keeps reasserting itself and can never fully be escaped.
By contrast, we have Delphi’s fabricated body. She’s made to be an object of desire: a fantasy that sells products, primarily for a male gaze. She’s the stark opposite of Burke in almost every respect—perfect, slim, elegant, loved by all, and seemingly free of any mark of corruption or decay. Where P. Burke’s body was disempowering, Delphi’s is the key to happiness. Though it’s the same mind at work in each, Delphi is instantly admired and valued, and she effortlessly becomes the center of attention wherever she goes.
Delphi’s body is a body for show, a “nerveless little statue” (70) designed for others to view and use, and this brings its own new restraints for P. Burke. Burke ends up caught between her own desiring flesh in the capsule and the numb beauty of Delphi. Loving Paul becomes a kind of torture because she can never truly feel him.
Within this story is an implicit criticism of the way society views women in the author’s present. Within popular culture, the same dichotomy exists between an idealized beauty and the reality of bodies, which is often hidden, disguised, and repressed. Between the extremes of Delphi and P. Burke, there’s a massive spectrum, where most people’s ideas and feelings about their own bodies fluctuate; but our culture, like the culture of this imagined future world, sets up idealized bodies on a pedestal. They’re used to sell products and lifestyles, but also to drive aspirations and anxieties and encourage people to pursue an impossible ideal. Like Delphi, the photo-shopped celebrities on our screens aren’t quite real, but they have an effect (especially on young people) that is all too real. They encourage people to compare themselves negatively to these artificial and impossible ideals of beauty. P. Burke is a striking example of the psychological damage this can do.
Concepts of Mind
P. Burke’s experience also raises questions about the relationship between body and mind. At the heart of the text is a take on the sci-fi concept of the brain in the jar linked up to another body. It hypothesizes that technology could allow a separation of the biological unity of the human being in which body and mind coexist.
The narrator stresses that experientially, for all the complex technology involved, what Burke experiences is the lived immediacy of being Delphi. When Delphi takes a shower, Burke experiences the shower itself.
The narrator draws an illuminating analogy with the way all sensory experience works. It’s effectively a transference of information to the brain, a translation of firing neurons and electric impulses, that somehow creates the illusion of immediate experience. The same thing is happening for P. Burke, only those electrical impulses are now also being translated digitally and re-routed thousands of miles, a bit like a voice over a telephone, before being reassembled in her capsule-bound brain.
How real and truly immersive Burke’s experience is always remains open to question. The dimmed senses and distance lag, required breaks for rest, and even just the self-awareness of still being P. Burke all figure in and create a sense of distance that she fights to remove, but it also raises the question of how real any sensory experience is when it’s similarly a translation of impulses and signals into a world view.
Just as the illusion of Delphi’s life is part of a complex and hidden system, so too our experiences, thought processes and feelings, are part of a complex biological, neurological and socio-economic system, which we can’t fully grasp. This leans towards a materialistic view of consciousness—all the richness and intensity of thought and experience could be viewed as the epiphenomenon of a scientific, or even a technological process. But Tiptree balances this with a more open-ended view of the mind too. Consciousness may be grounded in biochemistry, but that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s entirely reducible to it. We see this in those mysterious flickers of life that Burke manages to impart to Delphi, even when she’s not in the capsule, and in the intensity of her hope and feelings. The contrast is made clear at the end between matter and mind, between the “dead pile on the table” and the ethereal “orchestra abandoned in mid-air” (78).
Technology and the Entertainment Industry
Tiptree’s imagined future shows in more exaggerated form some of the key cultural trends of our own world. Indeed, from her perspective in the early 70s, it’s impressive how well Tiptree has anticipated certain technological and cultural developments. The “carrier field,” for instance, that digitally transfers information in an instant, and can be used to grant access to all kinds of activities is quite close to the role the internet and mobile devices plays in our society. The holovision or 3Di that can project life-like visuals into people’s homes, is just a few fantastical steps away from contemporary 3D cinema, virtual reality gaming, and HD television.
Tiptree’s vision of the role celebrities play in her future world is disturbingly close to how celebrity culture has developed in our present. We may not have Remotes controlling celebrities from a capsule, but what we undoubtedly do have is a popular culture where celebrity lifestyles are valorized and aspired to. Where social media is used by celebs and influencers to share the tiniest details of their lives and promote products. The little holocamera that follows Delphi around constantly is not dissimilar to the endless selfies and videos that can be instantly recorded, posted and viewed by millions around the world.
Tiptree’s is a world where technological advances have been used to cement and preserve an existing corporate order. This is not the dystopian totalitarian world of Orwell’s 1984, but like Orwell’s imagined world, it has technology used to deepen control and penetrate into people’s lives and thoughts. The entertainment industry is a key part of this. Linked closely to the corporate world, it plays a role in creating desires and linking them to products. Its other role, as a theorist like Theodor Adorno would describe it, is to encourage conformity and escapism. This comes across in Tiptree’s portrayal of the showbusiness of the future—“the GTX holocam enclave in Chile” (60). Here, we find not a world of human creativity and expression, but one of endless schedules and technocratic and systematic production driven by data and an underlying commercial incentive: “The idea that art thrives on creative flamboyance has long been torpedoed by proof that what art needs is computers” (60). It’s a highly organized theatre of illusions.
