It is only fitting that since Patchwork Girl is made up of random body parts, the story itself will be interwoven and non-linear. Clicking one word may bring up one story path, but clicking another will bring up a different one. Putting together these pieces is not as difficult as the reader experiences the piece. However, while this is the most confusing aspect of Patchwork Girl, there is one other pre-caution I must give.
Patchwork Girl can be an extremely confusing experience, especially if the reader has had minimal contact with Frankenstein since the entirety of the hypertextual piece is an allusion to the novel. Jackson creates Mary Shelley, the author of Frankenstein as the character who creates Patchwork Girl. At first, this might not seem too confusing, however, once the reader comes to various parts of Patchwork Girl, particularly the journal section, the boundaries between the two literary works become rather blurred. In the lexia beauty patches, Jackson's character, Mary comments on the beauty of Patchwork Girl, but at first, the reader is unsure of whether it is Jackson commenting on her creativity or if it is Mary. Sánchez-Palencia and Almagro discuss in their 2006 article “Gathering the Limbs of the Text in Shelley Jackson’s Patchwork Girl,” that there are many excerpts taken directly from Frankenstein. For example, in one lexia called plea, Jackson incorporates the passage in which Victor’s monster asks him to create a female companion (plea), yet in the prelude to the story section, Jackson modifies this same passage from Frankenstein and instead changes Victor’s response so that he agrees to create a female companion:
Here begins the story of Patchwork Girl. Throughout the text, Patchwork Girl does make references to Mary, however I found it rather easy to see that Jackson meant for the reader to understand that Mary as Patchwork Girl’s creator in the story.
Throughout the entire hypertext, Patchwork Girl is on a search for her own identity. Even before she leaves for America, Patchwork Girl and Mary take patches of skin from one another’s bodies and sew them onto themselves in an effort to unite; Mary is part of Patchwork Girl, and now Patchwork Girl is now only a part of Mary. I think that this event further skews Patchwork Girl’s perception of herself, because not only is she composed of random limbs, each having a story of their own, she now has a piece of her creator within her. The lexia Am I Mary further illustrates her identity confusion:
As the reader can tell, Patchwork Girl cannot tell if these writings are purely organic from her own thoughts or if her creativity was derived from Mary. Even after she leaves for America, these thoughts invade Patchwork Girl’s mind. She went to America to find her identity as a creature separate from Mary, however she soon finds that doing so is more difficult than she first thought.
While in America, Patchwork Girl finds support from various individuals in her community. Interestingly enough, most of these people are very strange, whether it is in appearance (Chancy) or spiritual abilities (Madame Q). As the reader finds out, during her stay in Madame Q’s living quarters, she discovers that Chancy is a woman; in my experience with the story, the two girls revel in their mutual secrets:
Here, we can see that while Patchwork Girl and Chancy develop an extremely intimate relationship with one another, she is very reluctant to tell her that she does not have an individual past, but rather a collective past that she cannot call her own. Chancy continues to probe her past, however Patchwork Girl reacts badly and runs away from Chancy. This is when she beings to fall apart at the seams. In a lexia called she goes on, Madame Q says something interesting that is relevant to the subsequent events: “We are ourselves ghostly. Our whole life is a kind of haunting, the present is thronged by the figured of the past… And we are haunted, by these ghosts of the living, these invisible strangers who are ourselves” (she goes on). It seems as if the phantom pasts of all of her limbs have waged a war against Patchwork Girl, competing against each other for a spot in her collective past.
This particular screenshot features multiple instances of various body parts falling off, which terrifies Patchwork Girl. In one lexia, she literally rips a foot off of a man and sews it onto her leg in an act of terrifying desperation to pick up the pieces. It is interesting that in her mind, in order to become whole again she needs to have each limb sewn back onto her body; she cannot live with a stump for a leg, even when someone else witnesses it falling off.
Later in the hypertext, Patchwork Girl begins to think that maybe her body parts are revolting because she does not have a past and therefore seeks one out. It is clear that Madame Q’s story about phantom limbs influenced her need for a past of her own that is not comprised of multiple individuals’:
This concept must have quite been terrifying to Patchwork Girl and may have even influenced the nightmares she reported having. Since she is made up of parts, her past must be phantom limbs of all of the individuals she is comprised of. However, she misunderstood Madame Q’s point; what she meant was that everyone’s pasts are all intertwined as a collective unit: there is no individual past. But Patchwork Girl is so convinced that she needs to understand who she is as an individual that this literally tears her apart. This is where I believe the entire concept of the hypertext piece comes into play.
Just as a hypertext is a mosaic, I think that the entire theme of Patchwork Girl is that we are ourselves a mosaic but are so intent on identifying ourselves as individuals that we forget how intertwined all of our lives truly are:
Identities themselves are not contradictory. It is what and how humans show as their identity that is contradictory. As an American culture, we are so intently set upon showcasing our individuality whether it is through fashion, music, politics, what have you, but what people fail to integrate into our lives is the fact that we take bits and pieces of our friends and family members and turn them into ourselves. I have faith in humanity, like my friend Ellie, not like my friend Stephanie; I am outspoken like my friend Stephanie, but not in the way that James is; I am kind and supportive like my mother, but not in the ways some of my other friends are. The point is we are an accumulation of the individuals around us, and so is Patchwork Girl but in a more direct way. She is physically comprised of bits and pieces of the deceased, and therefore their pasts pervade her existence at every second, even while she sleeps. However, she does not have an individual past that is from one person, which I think is what drives her to buy Elsie’s past.
Much like the experience of reading Patchwork Girl and trying to piece together all of the lexia to form a collective linear story, in the end, Patchwork Girl must forget that all of her parts come from different places and need to be viewed as a whole, collective existence. As Sánchez-Palencia and Almagro (2006) also say, in order to fully understand the hypertext, the reader must piece together and interpret each lexia so that they combine to form a collective plot instead of simply being individual lexia or events that, when viewed separately from each other do not fit cohesively.
Happy Reading,
Alicia Mangiafico
(Works cited)
Sánchez-Palencia, Carolina, Almagro, Manuel. “Gathering the Limbs of the Text in Shelley Jackson’s Patchwork Girl.” Atlantis 28.1 (2006): 115-129. PDF.
Jackson, Shelley. Patchwork Girl. Watertown, MA: Eastgate Systems, 1995. CD-Rom.
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