I am buried here

 

 

 

 

Patchwork Girl

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

No Dead Author


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.