Several questions on the final examination concerned the relationship
between Patchwork Girl and earlier texts with which it shared
an element: the use of voice, or of collage, for example. These questions
attracted the more confident of the students, and therefore represent
primarily the work of the upper third of the class. Even these students
had found a comprehensive understanding of the relationship between
form and content elusive, much as I had also found the teaching of
that relationship difficult. Yet in working with Patchwork Girl,
the connections sprang from the students' fingertips.
Perhaps influenced by their readings of the Patchwork
Girl cluster at Brown several of the students saw two monsters in
their reading, the 'monster' of the hypertext, and the female 'monster'
speaking from Jackson's text blocks.
For example, MM wrote, "Jackson did a wonderful job
of having the story's main plot, the creation of the monster, match
the actual physical form of the work. Both the work and the monster
are being put together at the same time." More lyrically, S wrote,
"the structure of the story itself was similar to the structure of
its main character. It was as if the story itself were alive, being
stitched into being and taking on a shape all of its own."
The parallels between the experiential and textual
pushed some readers to a closer understanding of the multiple themes
of identity and knowledge thrust at the reader from the text. ED's
meditation on his understanding of the text, though long, is worth
reading in this context.
The main advantage of this narrative style [a chorus
of 'I's] is to create a collage effect for the story by using a
multitude of individual voices to speak in rapid succession so that
they blur together. This is especially effective in "Patchwork Girl"
as it symbolically represents the various body parts, taken from
different people, used to create the monstrous creatures that is
supposedly a sister to Mary Shelley's infamous Frankenstein monster.
In addition, another advantage gained by using the first person
narrative is that it gives the creature a sense of being alive and
sentient, since she and the various body parts use personal pronouns
to describe themselves…It soon becomes confusing as to who has finished
speaking and who has begun. However, for the purposes of this novel,
this may be the desired effect, as the final composition of all
these parts is unsure of who and what it is.
He moves from the 'story' to the form and back again,
willing to accept a readerly confusion as insight in experience to
the protagonist(s)' struggle to shape an identity.
And students also deepened both their understanding
of protagonist, and the question of just whose identity lay under
construction. JN wrote:
Does being an amalgam of different people make
it impossible to be one whole and separate individual? By giving
this individual voice to Patchwork Girl, Jackson creates a character
that is the echo of our own, for aren't we too made up genetically
of other people. What is specifically ours and not Great Aunt's…Most
of all, aren't we searching feverishly for who we are? This is how
Shelley Jackson subtly joins her voice, Patchwork Girl's voice and
our voices together as one.
The ascribing of dynamic life to the novel contrasts
with these students' responses to earlier works which, however sympathetically
and imaginatively embraced (for example, H. D.'s Eurydice), remained
dead artifacts of a past age. These responses represented some of
the most complex in the class and accompanied luminous tracers from
Patchwork Girl back to the writing of H. D., Eliot, Rukeyser,
and Hurston.
But the more general essays on hypertext also started
to seam retrospective connections from hypertext to other texts we
had read, suggesting, however episodically, the extent of Patchwork
Girl's evolution from tortuous encounter
to learning tool.