The Girl Who Was Plugged In By James Tiptree

1155 Words3 Pages

In the short story, "The Girl Who Was Plugged In", James Tiptree creates a society where there is no official advertising. The only form of advertisement is the use of celebrities or "remotes", who are forced to use specific products, to entice the general public into purchasing them. The story focuses on on a single character, known as Philadelphia Burke, who is transformed from her natural rancid state, as described by the narrator, into a goddess like figure that Tiptree's society holds as the epitome of beauty. P. Burke, having been a wretched being for seventeen years of her life, is given the chance to become a remote and through a new body live the life that she has always dreamed of. Using the character P. Burke, Tiptree highlights …show more content…

Burke not only must gain a new body, but she is forced to learn new habits as well. The story reads, “…training takes place in her suite, and is exactly what you’d call a charm course. How to walk, sit, eat, speak, blow her nose, how to stumble, to urinate, to hiccup—DELICIOUSLY.... But P. Burke proves apt. Somewhere in that horrible body is a gazelle, a houri who would have been buried forever without this crazy chance. See the ugly duckling go!” (5). These lines display just how large of a factor beauty is when considering femininity. By all accounts, P. Burke is the one committing these actions, although using a different body from her own, the actions are still of her psyche. She is perfectly capable of doing these things, eve possibly from her old body, but it didn’t matter. At the end of the day her appearance would overshadow any feminine behaviors that she could have done in her old …show more content…

In the end, P. Burke dies at the age of seventeen by the hands of the corporation, as they attempt to stop her from doing as she pleases with Delphi’s body. Her death by the hands of the corporations, direct or indirect, is a brilliant metaphor for the effect that the male patriarchy can have on women within our society. Femininity in much of society is largely based on beauty, what men characterize as beautiful. Feminine beauty is culmination of sever non-innate behaviors and even more so, a woman’s ability to be controlled by the male figure in her life and in society at large. To be female is to beautiful and to be beautiful is to be submissive. These implications in Tiptree’s exaggerated, futuristic story provide a valuable analysis and critique of our treatment of women in in modern day

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