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469 pages, Hardcover
First published August 8, 2006
Besides, a competition with a parent is doomed from the start: you're a loser if you fail, a traitor if you win.—and—
—p.42
It took Alice most of a lifetime to find a way out from under the shadow of their good intentions.I found the above observations quite illuminating—for, after all,
—later on p.42
Your family is in the best position to betray you.Holzer also, by the way, observed that "abuse of power comes as no surprise"—and see also: "Holzerisms: 50 Aphorisms for the 21st Century", by Julian Hanna and Yanina Spizzirri.
—which is one of mine, actually, although it strongly echoes Jenny Holzer's Truism, "even your family can betray you"
Alice never had an affair with a woman; she was always drawn to girls and women who didn't return her love. She loved men, slept with them, married them, depended on them, sought their interest and attention. But loving women is one of her stories, a submerged plot within the public plot of her two marriages, another secret identity.This duality helps explain how the original founders of the Tiptree Award (which is, as of October 2019, known as the Otherwise Award) could choose the name of a fictional male for the honor. (Those founders, by the way, are two other writers whose work I admire greatly: Pat Murphy and Karen Joy Fowler.)
—p.61
"Anyone who shoots a real gun at you when drunk and angry is simply not husband material, regardless of his taste in literature."
—p.78
She went out of her way to sleep with black men, partly out of political solidarity, possibly as a way of replaying her parents' African adventures: "My contact with negroes {...} has refreshed all my early African memories."
—p.98 (from Sheldon's Journal, 5/21/1941, as cited on p.418).
"I am convinced that we are born with desires which it is impossible to satisfy, and only by a violent effort in the direction of artificiality and paradox can life be enjoyed at all."But then, if Alli had been able to just be herself, we would never have gotten Tiptree. More about that later.
—p.98
You know that I want your loving
Then Mr. Logic,
Mr. Logic tells me it ain't never gonna happen
And then my defenses say, well, I didn't want it anyway
But you know sometimes I'm a liar
—"Promise" (1983)
I was with a girl,But I digress... again.
But it felt like I was with a boy.
I can't even remember
If we were lovers
Or if I just wanted to...
—"I Held Her In My Arms" (1986)
Anyway, her editor wouldn't let her take reviewing seriously. She later described him as a classic drunken newspaperman who kept a pair of shears next to his scotch bottle and, when she handed him a new column, "eyed it in silence with the reds of his eyes shining over the bags and then took up the shears and cut off the last third, which was where the point was." She started to have fun.
—p.105
For a while Alice hoped to become a pilot. A few American women were already ferrying planes in Britain, while others were calling for an American women's corps. In the spring of 1942 she began taking flying lessons, despite the high cost, $10 an hour. But her eyesight wasn't good enough. She got through the eye exams by memorizing the answers of the person ahead of her, but after "landing the plane 20 feet above or below the ground several times" she washed out of flight school.
—pp.105-106
She gave Major, the red macaw, to the Brookfield Zoo, where he was inspired to lay an egg, and so turned out to have gender troubles of his own.
—p.108
Incredible how the top dog always announces with such an air of discovery that the underdog is childish, stupid, emotional, irresponsible, uninterested in serious matters, incapable of learning—but for god's sake don't teach him anything!—and both cowardly and ferocious. {...} The oppressed is also treacherous, incapable of fighting fair, full of dark magics, prone to do nasty things like fighting back when attacked, and contented with his place in life unless stirred up by outside agitators. {...} Once I learned the tune I stopped believing the words—about anybody.This insight seems to me to lie at the heart of Alli's story—and it also seems to go together with this quote, from substantially later:
—As Tiptree, on p.147
"{...}which side I was on. The bottom side. When the jackboots kick in the door, it's me they're coming for. My fantasies are of escape, not of wearing the jackboots."
—p.303, in a letter to Joanna Russ
Liking rats, Alli became even more disgusted with the kind of experimental psychology that involved cruelty to animals.
—p.205
Science fiction is inclusive. It is read by boys with faces full of acne and brains full of cyberspace, girls with stringy hair and fierce imaginations, awkward people, brilliant people in search of like minds.
—p.233
Commenting on Robert A. Heinlein's attempt to write from a woman's point of view in I Will Fear No Evil, Tiptree noted, "Maybe having the macho to do such a horrible bad taste disaster is the mark of a real writer. {...} The good taste that holds your tongue from making the little unlikable lapses is also the castrating inhibition that keeps you from really saying anything."This is in contrast to the work of Sheldon's lifelong correspondent, Ursula K. Le Guin, whose books (like the sociofictional tour de force—not a novel, which is why it has been so widely misunderstood—that is Always Coming Home) appeared under her own feminine name. In another letter to Joanna Russ, Tiptree said that Le Guin
—p.258
"radiates something {...} maybe it appeals to my Victorian background, in which crises were handled in the third person. Some kind of invincible non-immediacy."
—p.270
"I suppose there are some who resent being put on, but it would take an extrordinarily small soul to resent so immense, so funny, so effective and fantastic and ETHICAL a put-on."
—p.359
"those 8 years in sf was the first time I could be really real"
-Alice B. Sheldon (367)
"I love you so damn much it hurts," she wrote [to her parents in 1957], and her parents' friends were impressed by her loyalty. She did love them, but it did hurt. (191)
Despite all Alli's worrying at the biological foundations of male and female, her performance reminds us that gender is a social construct, one made by writers and readers both. (373)
One of the ironies of Allie's career as Tiptree is that she insisted most on the biological, essential nature of gender at the moment she seemed to be proving that it was all an act, that gender was what you said it was after all. (294)
As soon as Mary heard the news she wrote her friend Lila, and former Mrs. Henry Luce, and asked her for the New York lowdown on her prospective son-in-law. Sources at Time could find nothing terrible on Ting in their files.(134)
My original ref to Tiptree in this thread is indeed from Julie Philips’ biography on her. I picked it up after reading Tiptree’s short story collection Her Smoke Rose Up Forever. Reading the biography after, for me, confirms and lays out the sources of the numerous running themes throughout her work: intense disdain/helplessness towards the power/gaze of men, deep-seated internalized misogyny and alienation towards women (while desiring them at the same time), depression that the world races towards destruction (at the hands of male sexual aggression), a strangely cloaked sense of gender dysphoria, etc. The biography thoroughly lays out how Tiptree/Alli had an incredibly isolated life, a potentially sexually coercive/abusive relationship with her mom (a high society Victorian safari/travel writer), deep-seated rage at the institutionalized power of men and lack of power of women, and allllllll this homo desire that had No Way Out. Alli concludes on her own that women are an oppressed class, then constantly has issues viewing herself as a woman and repeatedly attempts to classify what a woman is. She constructs this theory for herself that there are two sexed genders, Men and Mothers (she is neither?)…and all of it’s riding on these old essentialist biological terms looking at primate behavior (Donna Haraway style), and it’s sad. She has a letter writing friendship (as Tiptree) with Joanna Russ who wrote The Female Man, and Russ constantly is like TIPTREE I LOVE U BUT UR SEXIST, CHECK URSELF, and Tiptree is like o fuck wat is this feminism??? Alli is basically 60 years old before she starts questioning who the fuck she is, why she feels the way she does, why she bifurcated her personality into this male persona (Tiptree the writer), and if she can reconcile it back into herself without the overwhelming desire to kill herself winning out first. It’s some deep shit, to say the least.
To grow up as a “girl” is to be nearly fatally spoiled, deformed, confused, and terrified; to be responded to with falsities, to be reacted to as nothing or as a thing—and nearly to become that thing. -Alice Sheldon
Reading a report about child sexual abuse, she [Tiptree/Sheldon] found herself aroused, and was upset. She wrote in her journal on February 2
The distasteful proof that my sexuality is bound up with masochistic fantasies of helplessness […] depressed me profoundly. I am not a man, I am not the do-er, the penetrator. And Tiptree was “magical” manhood, his pen my prick. I had through him all the power and prestige of masculinity, I was––though an aging intellectual––of those who own the world. How I loathe being a woman. Wanting to be done to […]
Tiptree’s “death” has made me face––what I never really went into with Bob [Harper]––my self-hate as a woman. And my view of the world as structured by raw power. […] I want power, I want to be listened to. […] And I’ll never have it. I’m stuck with this perverse, second-rate body; my life.
A little later she wrote, “No doubt about it, I do not ‘match’ my exterior. I live in my body and my social presence as in an alien artifact. It commits me to a way of life that is not mine; could I somehow bring the inside out, fuse it? Not so much sweetness and cordiality; not so much desire to be admired and loved.”
— Chapter 38: “I Live In My Body As In An Alien Artifact” (1977)