8/25/99 

Patchwork Girl: A Review
Jackson, Shelley. Patchwork Girl, or a Modern Monster. Watertown, MA: Eastgate Systems, 1995. $19.95 US. Software for IBM and Macintosh. http://www.eastgate.com/

Certainly ranking among the most provocative of hypertexts published so far, Shelley Jackson's Patchwork Girl is a delicious feminist romp around the edges of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. Intrinsically concerned with issues of monstrosity and femaleness, Jackson's electronic novel animates Mary Shelley's monster's unborn female mate and allows her to narrate her own tale. This was the companion that Victor Frankenstein refused to bring to life for fear she might prove to be more monstrous than his first attempt. But Jackson puts a spin on even the act of invention and interweaves the original Shelley in this novel as a player and a creator--of text and of monsters. Patchwork Girl is a text that resonates with sheer exuberant excess.

The narrative is stitched together by this compendium of body parts and organs--a wickedly funny woman narrator--out of forgotten stories and a chorus of other discourses and voices, including her 'mother's' in the form of Mary Shelley's 'journal' and literary theorists' like Jacques Derrida.

The graveyard that was the Patchwork Girl's cradle functions not only as her point of origin, but as her community and her family. Haunted by the memories of her original owners and her origin(s) (conceived by Mary as a 'proper woman,' she is nearly aborted by Percy's editorial pen, for instance), the possibility is raised that the monster may have survived only in Mary's papers, stitched together in language as a fiction rather than in the flesh in life. Now, in the 175th year after her conception, she tells us that her

birth takes place more than once. In the plea of a bygone monster; from a muddy hole by corpse-light; under the needle and under the pen. Or it took place not at all. But if I hope to tell a good story, I must leapfrog out of the muddle of my several births to the day I parted for the last time with the author of my being, and set out to write my own destiny.

Perpetually wrestling for control, her life is a constant state of alien inhabitation as she tries to adjust to her willful body's dictates from its mind of its own. In fact, she suffers from the vocal tics of Tourette's Syndrome, from parts that refuse to stay glued on and from her limbs' and organs' hauntings by past lives.

As a technologically simple but structurally complex electronic novel, Patchwork Girl does not aspire to state-of-the-art multimedia forms (like video, music or sound), but it does animate the monster's unruly parts and gives a reader the choice of entering the monster's story through five doors: the graveyard; Mary's journal; a quilt (composed of newly re-quilted versions of numerous other texts including L. Frank Baum's Patchwork Girl of Oz and snippets of feminist theory); the monster's story, and "broken accents," metatextual reflections on writing lives and fictions. All of these doorways require the reader to pass through the monster's body in various shuffled states of dislocation as her parts rearrange themselves. The broken accents entrance is through a phrenological diagram of the monster's head. The graveyard's doorway is modelled on a headstone that reads:

Each body part above is a mouse-driven link that gives access to the stories of the original owners and the temperament of their pieces. Through these parts we learn the tales occupying individual graves where the monster's donors live on geographically adjacent to one another underground, just as they are in her form, but functioning as uneasy neighbours in both locations. This site map of body part lenders tells the unrecorded stories of women of the era--forgotten, faceless, unknown souls who each have their own histories, afflictions and 'monstrous' natures. Their memories jostle together just like their parts, and from the friction the creature's story is born.

One of the most important things for Mary's female monster is her desire for a community and companionship. Seeking out the New World as a place that might be more hospitable for a creature with "the smell of death" about her, she disguises herself in widow's weeds and sets sail. Unlike her "botched brother," fitting in for her is less difficult than might be expected and she hobnobs with mystics, circus freaks and lesbians, exploring her place in the world as a woman and a lover of women. Like the webbed interconnections of the fragments of this hypertext, her concerns are always with the links between people and things. A walking paradox, metaphor and "double agent," she is a collaborative work with collective memory. Just as birth and death are linked in her, so her flexible frame is mirrored in the linked hypertext structure of this text. Forming a circulatory system of words, her text is born of the wounds of her writing: "my real skeleton is made of scars: a web that traverses me in three-dimensions. I am most myself in the gap between my parts... The links can stretch very far before they break."

As much intertext as author, her birth is retold in a bizarre interweaving of Frankenstein with Patchwork Girl of Oz where science and magic are given equal weight and where Mary's authorial voice--and skin--mingles with her creation's. The monster's drive to make connections between times, lives and fictions, results in her preoccupation with her own writing, with "the tiny black letters blurred into stitches" that authored her. But for all of the parody of other texts and times, Jackson's hypertext does not celebrate disembodied disconnection. It is instead a homage to the difficulties of healing from the cruel incisions of life and the pain of loss. Woven together of a network of scar tissue, the monster notes that "scars not only mark a cut but commemorate a joining. Scar tissue is new growth and tougher than skin innocent of the blade." Seeking to remake herself in an acceptable image to herself, she purchases an identity and celebrates her difference as she is revisioned and reconstructed in her lovers' eyes. Allowing us to follow the scar trails and hear the voices of women's histories, Jackson weaves an intertextual body of female community and narrative. This is a community based on connection rather than on bloodlines, a women's community stitched from friendship and love rather than family. Toying with the open-ended conventions of the Gothic form, Mary's monster breaks out into the American world of popular culture, footnotes, marginalia, autobiography and dialogue. Working in linguistic space, Jackson incorporates a clanging cataclysm of different discourses- like literary theory, or the 'author's' metatextual reflections on her own writing of hypertext: how she stitches together her narrative fragments like Mary Shelley stitched together her monster. Through the interjection of theory, other voices and intertexts, Jackson pieces together the humanity of a monstrous woman who must always exist as an outsider.

Disinterring memoriesinto a fractured whole, the Patchwork Girl is unrestrained within a single graveyard plot or identity. As the temporal distance from her inception increases, her body and her language become increasingly unruly. Jackson has a keen ear for voices and dialogue, and writes prose that embodies all the richness of poetry. A virtuoso performance in the art of hypertext, Jackson's intertextual novel is chilling, funny and unforgettable.

Buy Patchwork Girl from Eastgate

Graphics & book cover from Patchwork Girl by Shelley Jackson (c) Copyright 1996-9 by Eastgate Systems Inc. All Rights Reserved. Reproduced with permission.

Review previously published in Other Voices. (Edmonton, Canada: Vol. 12, No. 1, Spring 1999, pp 85-89).

Carolyn Guertin, Department of English, University of Alberta
E-Mail: cguertin@gpu.srv.ualberta.ca;
Website: <http://www.ualberta.ca/~cguertin/Guertin.htm>