MLA Convention 2020: Documenting a Graduate Course in Electronic Literature with Scalar

Section II: "Patchwork Girl" by Shelley Jackson

Shelley Jackson’s work of hypertext fiction, Patchwork Girl, was likely begun in the mid-late 1990’s and was influenced by her reading of Mary Shelley’s novel Frankenstein, assigned by a professor while she was a student at Stanford.  The piece’s structural and thematic complexity has been discussed and praised by scholars for its interrogation of a wide variety of notions, including: identity, femininity, monstrosity, and the body.  And the body of the work is divided into 5 different sections: The reading experience begins with two main voices and two central metaphors. 

These primary voices are Mary Shelley’s – both literally drawn from her novel and fictionally imagined by Jackson – and the voice of the female monster, created by Dr. Frankenstein to appease his original monster’s loneliness.  The monster in Jackson’s imagination, interjects and intercedes on her own behalf.  Not given a voice in Shelley’s iconic text, the monster – the piece’s “patchwork girl – describes her lack of agency in the decision of her creation.  And she importantly refers to herself as an “authoress” of a kind. 

The parallel paths that undergird the conversation between creator and created are metaphors of the body: the body as a written, by text or social ideal, and the body as sewn or stitched, in this case by a work of gruesome and invasive alchemy. 

The section of the narrative that most appealed to this author was the graveyard.  In this portion of the story, the reader is presented with a map of the patchwork girl’s sewn-together body, and invited to click on the individual body parts used to patch her together.  When you click on the tongue, for example, you see a separate image of the girl’s mouth and read about the woman from whom this organ came, known to spread “folly, gossip, heresy and the news.”  The eyes come from Tituba and other parts from equally witchy and troublesome women. 

Jackson seems to implicate Shelley, along with the reader, in a longer history of the subjugation and forced writing of the female body.  Descriptions of these body parts call to mind moments from the Salem Witch Trials, elements of religious doctrine, and periods in art history.  Indeed, her re-presentation of the body parts and their origins in this way seems to suggest a subversion of the male gaze.  Though they are described as the “perfect” body parts, they satirically represent an anti-ideal; these women are not the idealized subjects of odalisque paintings or the wilting and submissive figures of the Victorian novel.  Through the death and patchy rebirth of these women and their offending limbs in this monstrously beautiful patchwork woman, we are presented with a distortion of the typically male-constructed woman.   They are dead, they are offending, they are misplaced, but they are likewise lively and vibrant and conscious.   
 

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