Materials in response to Shelley Jackson's Patchwork Girl.  View our class-generated materials related to the novel.

Shelley Jackson’s Patchwork Girl (1995) is a work of electronic literature.  That is, it is a hypertext novel that runs in an environment called Storyspace.  Storyspace was developed in the late 1980s and early 1990s by some leading theorists  of hypertext and literature including Stuart Moulthrop and Jay David Bolter.  Storyspace is much more limited than today's web environments:  it does not allow much in terms of color or sound, much less video or same types of interactivity and breadcrumbs as Web 2.0 environments, such as this wiki, enable.

Yet Patchwork Girl is a revolutionary work.  Along with Stuart Moulthroop’s Victory Garden, Patchwork Girl is one of the most widely known and taught hypertextual novels.  It plays on the idea of Frankenstein’s monster being made not by the fictional Dr. Frankenstein, but by Mary Shelley herself.  The creature, who is female, is both the human being, stitched together with parts of various bodies, and the text--the novel--itself.  In Patchwork Girl, The creature and creator eventually fall in love and travel to America.  In addition to being indebted to Frankenstein, Patchwork Girl is also based on the novel by L. Frank Baum (from The Wizard of Oz fame), The Patchwork Girl of Oz.  You will notice the punning, of course, on the names of Shelley Jackson and Mary Shelley.

Here is what the website of Shelly Jackson’s publisher, Eastgate Systems, says about the novel:

What if Mary Shelley's Frankenstein were true?

What if Mary Shelley herself made the monster -- not the fictional Dr. Frankenstein?

And what if the monster was a woman, and fell in love with Mary Shelley, and travelled to America?

This is their story.

Novelist Robert Coover, who is a pioneer in the study, promotion, and theory of electronic literature, writes about this novel: "Perhaps the true paradigmatic work of the era, Shelley Jackson's elegantly designed, beautifully composed Patchwork Girl offers the patient reader, if there are any left in the world, just such an experience of losing oneself to a text, for as one plunges deeper and deeper into one's own personal exploration of the relations here of creator to created and of body to text, one never fails to be rewarded and so is drawn ever deeper, until clicking the mouse is as unconscious an act as turning a page, and much less constraining, more compelling."

The user interface for the novel will become apparaent once you open the CD-ROM.  Clicking on pieces of the monster’s body will help to resurrect the creature’s story and being.  The narrative has four portions:

• A Graveyard
• A Journal
• A Quilt
• A Story
• Broken Accents

Hyperlinks guide you through the story in infinite numbers of ways.