Title: Patchwork Girl

Author: Shelley Jackson

Date of First Publication: 1995

Place of Publication: Eastgate Systems

Type: Novel

Keywords: ANDROID; MAD SCIENTIST/MONSTER; WOMEN WRITING MONSTERS; SYMPATHETIC MONSTER; QUEER FRANKENSTEIN; POSTHUMAN

Critical Summary: Jackson’s story is an early hypertext written in relation to and out of Shelley’s original (and the Patchwork Girl of the Oz books) using Storyspace. Writing becomes like sewing stitches to build a body: a controlling metaphor that allows the reader to follow links back and sideways through slits of text or over to quotes from Shelley’s original, broken with new commentary. At first, on a title page, we come to five paths: graveyard, a journal, a quilt, a story, & broken accents. But quickly, the story bifurcates over and over to seemingly innumerable ways to piece together a reading experience. A birth scene, for example, has a number of links, one out to Mary Shelley’s writings on the female monster that Victor destroyed that is the original of the Creature in Jackson’s book. In excerpts from the original Frankenstein, parenthetical remarks from the new Creature slip in and claim a new life beyond the text. The new Creature becomes Mary Shelley’s lover, and travels on to America, attending séances and having further adventures; at the end, we find her looking back on her story from the present day, living alone in Death Valley.

Administrative Notes: Dr. David Sandner, CSUF