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Pif Magazine
ISSN: 1094-2726
Published by:
Pif, LLC
PMB 248
4820 Yelm Hwy SE
Suite B
Lacey, WA 98503-4903
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Patchwork Girl
Reviewed by Lisa Ciccarello
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Shelley Jackson's Patchwork Girl creates a complex web of relations between sexuality, female empowerment, sewing, writing, bodies, and postmodern literary theory that ultimately add up to little more than an extended character sketch. This overly elaborate collage offers little substance as it unravels. The title page alone is a mess of connections; the title comes from The Patchwork Girl of Oz, a book by L. Frank Baum; and the second title, A Modern Monster, is a nod to Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, which Jackson uses as the inspiration for her work. (It also refers to both the main character and the text, a literary monstrosity made possible by the hypertext form.) There are a number of authors listed – namely Mary/Shelley, Jackson's pun on the ties between Shelley's name and her own, and their similar positions as author and creator, herself, assumedly the monster, and Jackson. However, to what end these connections are made is unclear. Is this an attempt to gain legitimacy with the readers before they get a look at her text, or is the author hoping that, by connecting her work to previously published literature, some of the work of creating will be done for her? |
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Both possibilities seem equally supported by the quilt/crazyquilt section, a mishmash of story spaces that must each be accessed individually, created by combining quotes from different sources – ranging from Baum's book to feminist and literary criticism to hypertext manuals – into a coherent if not sensible narrative. The section does not support the narrative or give another angle to the story. It seems only to serve as proof of how "intuitively" the author can piece together different quotes from different authors. How this makes the piece more enjoyable for or valuable to the reader is uncertain.
The journal section is particularly frustrating. The journal is Mary Shelley's written account of her first encounter with her female creation and the time they spend together. This section almost reads straight from beginning to end, with each part linking to the next and little movement available in terms of plot variations. Since the journal most closely follows the constraints of regular text, the faults in the writing are most apparent. Because of the obvious discomfort she has working in (and keeping with) the language and mind-frame of eighteenth century women, Jackson's Shelley comes off as an unreal combination of Victorian and post-modern. There are few real insights into the character of Shelley, and what's worse, Shelley's view of her monster isn't particularly unique or beneficial to the reading of the text. A single sentence in the body of the story claiming that the monster remembers being Shelley and learned her most intimate self by reading her journal does not justify its inclusion. In fact, the best uses of the journal entries occur in the string of links during the monster’s story as parenthetical digression in which bits of journal are interspersed with asides and responses from the monster. Furthermore, the journal entries that appear in the story section were not written by Jackson but are doctored selections from Frankenstein, an act of literary appropriation that would seem to speak more of a facility with the copying of text than of adeptness as a writer.
The formulaic story spaces of the graveyard are certainly no help either. The graveyard consists of a list naming the different body parts and organs that went into the female monster's anatomy. Each section lists the same information in the same way, by naming the part, the donor, the life of the donor in as much as it concerns the body part, a little description of the body part itself, and the way in which the monsters daily existence is effected by the previous owners life. However, despite the information given about how the history of the body part affects her day-to-day life, this is the only place where this effect is ever mentioned. Although her "most conservative organ remembered, and brought with her an entire portmanteau of elegant, though slightly antiquated ladylike gestures," the owner of this part it is not found among those in the graveyard. Ultimately, it is not important where the pieces came from because although she occasionally refers to some of the people by name, she often quickly recounts what was particular about them, proving that any details necessary could have been included in the body of the story. The graveyard section could have been reduced to the single story space which gave a short message about piecemeal resurrection and a warning that the reader will have to sew the bits together to see the whole, which is more applicable to the text itself than to the anatomy of the monster.
