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.