Conceal and reveal

Given the remarkable truth of James Tiptree, Jr.’s identity, I was naturally more inclined towards biographical readings of her work than usual. A good number of the stories, I found, rewarded such an approach on multiple levels, from the conceit to the narrative or prose style. Both “The Girl Who Was Plugged In” and “The Women Men Don’t See,” for example, have as their subjects female figures who are in some way seeking an exit from the constraints of their identity and social standing. Although the latter story concludes immediately after the revelation of this dilemma, it’s also relatively clear in both that this urge for gender transcendence can obtain fulfillment only in a tragic or destructive manner, with the brutal death of P. Burke in the former and the horror of “a woman [who] choose[s] to live among unknown monsters” in the latter—though we can hardly trust a narrator who refers to a woman as a “classic penetration target” (143, 133).

Of course, this longing is part of Alice B. Sheldon’s story—James Tiptree, Jr.’s is instead a story of incredible, nearly lifelong concealment. What I found especially interesting about these two stories is the way in which concealment and disclosure also feature prominently, seemingly as necessary correlatives to a successful transcendence of gender. The issue is less fundamental to “The Women Men Never See,” although it quietly pervades its conversations, which always appear hamstrung by the male gaze, to the point that deft concealment seems the only defensive tactic available to a woman. These are offered as imperatives or direct statements of fact, as if with them Tiptree addresses Sheldon: “Answer a question with a question.” “Competent, agreeable, impersonal.” (120, 128) And it dominates “The Girl Who Was Plugged In”: P. Burke can only “pass” as Delphi while her body is concealed deep within the GTX compound, “five thousand miles away . . . [as] the monster down in a dungeon smelling of electrode paste” (66). Worse yet, the ending’s tragedy follows logically from Paul’s naïve impulse to liberate the woman behind the woman. In so doing he disregards not only the technological and physiological limitations on their relationship—insofar as P. Burke appears to have atrophied to the point of being unable to survive outside of her chamber—but also, arguably, its social conditions. P. Burke’s death allows Tiptree to avoid answering what must, for her, have been the hardest question: whether one of the “gods” could ever have loved or respected a mere woman. Everything in—and behind—the story at this point indicates otherwise.

Dystopia and Depression

“The Girl Who Was Plugged In” left me, in a word, terrified; I was shocked at the violent reaction that I experienced in the aftermath of its reading. Science fiction dystopias are, of course, often horrifying and depressing. However, they often offer optimism, positing the universes they live in as warnings, rather than predictions, and utilizing their genre as a tool of revelation and subversion. The corporate wasteland described in Tiptree’s story is particularly depressing because it seems impossible to escape. Paul Isham III, a son of one of the media titans that controls the world’s information, describes it as such: “You can’t break in or out of it, you can’t get hold of it anywhere.”(88) Paul possesses a talent for producing media images that challenge the dominant paradigm put forward by the world’s corporations; the narrator describes his work as “bizarre techniques and unsettling distortions pregnant with social protest.”(65) However, his very own statements label his efforts as a futile endeavor; the strength of the corporate mega-state lies in its ability to assimilate its resisters and their messages into larger brand-images. In the end, Paul finds himself unable to tell the difference between a real human being and a robot ad-delivery device; he fails to evoke any real change in the structures of his society, but becomes the heir to his father’s empire. P. Burke and Delphi each die and are quickly forgotten, as the future rapidly buries the past.

So far, we’ve read science fiction as a source of insight. We’ve described sci-fi authors as anthropologists, philosophers and scientists. In “The Girl Who Was Plugged In”, Tiptree functions as all of these things; hovering over all of these roles, however, is the specter of the narrator as Cassandra. A repetition of the word “FUTURE” in all caps implies this dystopia’s inescapable horror. An implicit undermining of Paul’s subversive media techniques implies that the medium of the story itself is useless as a means of evoking change. If our fate is really this grim and unchanging, is it useful to wonder about it? Or is this portrayal of an unavoidably awful future a way of provoking readers to think more clearly about the role of science fiction and the trajectory of our society?

The other readings for this week offer some context for my initial reading; the introduction to the anthology notes that Tiptree/Sheldon suffered from chronic depression, a serious illness that almost certainly colored her ability to place hope in a better future. It’s possible that the pessimism that is a major theme of her short stories was the result of her personal psychological strife, does that mean that the themes of her works should be discarded with? The word that Sheldon paints seems too real in its horror to be the product of a serotonin imbalance. Perhaps that is a testimony to the power of depression, perhaps to the power of her writing. Literary analysts often discourage readers from explaining works in terms of biography; but the alternative, in this situation, means seriously engaging with the potential of an exquisitely crafted nightmare. “The Girl Who Was Plugged In” defies attempts to explain its philosophies; it stands as implacable oracle, offering a terrifying vision but few clues as to its probability or means of avoiding it.