Patchwork Questions
Posted by admin on September 26, 2008, 4:57 pm
Here are some ideas for a post about Patchwork Girl:
1. What is the meaning and significance of monstrosity in Patchwork Girl?
2. What does Patchwork Girl have to say about identity?
3. Elsewhere, Shelley Jackson has written: “Hypertext . . . is what literature has edited out: the feminine. (That is not to say that only women can produce it. Women have no more natural gift for the feminine than men do.)” What position does Patchwork Girl take about writing and about hypertext as a technology of writing?
4. How would you position Patchwork Girl in relation to the other versions of Frankenstein that we have discussed? Which is it closest to, and why? Which is it furthest from? Can it help us see the novel in a new light?
October 2nd, 2008 at 3:07 pm
Ian Brecher
ENGL479W
Professor Friastat
October 2, 2008
Since I have grown more familiar with navigating through Shelly Jackson’s Patchwork Girl over the past two weeks, I find the text to appear exponentially remarkable. While I still intend to play around with my modes of navigation, the section of the story that has most recently inspired me is “The Graveyard”. This section has truly spurred my thinking in regards to identity. In the section where each organ is described, Jackson offers the reader a peak through the window of six very different lives, all of which share company inside the body of the girl. Despite the carnal creepiness of six transplanted organs sharing one body, Jackson composes each organ’s story with such beautiful and powerful language that it incites an inspiring social statement about human composition.
Specifically, the story about Bella’s stomach is a truly remarkable tale, which suggests that new life is connected to another’s death: “Bella in the ground germinated a garden. An apple, an orange, a pear and a fig tree grew intertwined from the mound. I belch the sweet smell of an orchard in the summer” (Jackson). Here, Jackson breaks down the circle of life in the context of the monster. It is suggested here that Bella’s life helped provide new life for the garden, as well as a stomach for the monster. The monster’s ability to “…belch the sweet smell of an orchard…” suggests that the garden, which Bella’s body germinated, is a part of the monster. This implies that we are all made up of each others recycled elements, or in the monster’s case, organs.
In addition to the Bella’s stomach story, I also found the heart’s to be quite intriguing; Jackson simply states, “My heart belonged to Agatha” (Jackson). While we could take this phrase at face value, understanding that her heart literally belonged to Agatha, perhaps Jackson means to inspire a metaphorical interpretation for this phrase, suggesting that we are made up of all that we love. This section of Patchwork Girl, truly speaks wonders to the interconnectedness of everything.
October 4th, 2008 at 4:44 pm
Raven Adams
ENGL479W
Professor Fraistat
October 4th, 2008
The topic of the “monster” is peppered throughout the Patchwork Girl work. The story seems to beg the question “What is a ‘monster’?”
In the section Kristeva and Abjection in “Frankenstein’s Dream: An Introduction”, Jerrold Hogle cites Julia Kristeva when attempting to define “monstrosity.” Kristeva asserts that the grotesque, or monstrous, are really the creation of man’s psychological attempt to abject that which is unpleasant and contradictory within the self. According to Hogle, the literal definition of “abject” means “both to ‘throw off’ and ‘throw under’” (Hogle). According to Hogle and Kristeva, the anomalies man wants to “throw off” the most are states of duality within the self; being “half- inside/half-outside the mother”, “self and other all at once”, “half-dead and half-alive”. We throw these anomalies “under” in a show of dominance in order to separate ourselves from this state of being “’in-between…ambiguous…composite’”. The abjection becomes the “repository of that violence and…the means for staking out a supposed identity over against it”. The “monstrous ‘other’…exposes and conceals [the abjection] by being both highly compelling and highly repugnant at the same time” (Hogle).
The idea of the “monster” being a representation of the“composite” creature is explored in Patchwork Girl. The creature calls herself a “mosaic”, a “chimera”, and a “hybrid” throughout the work. In the section “why hideous?” she says, “I am a monster-because I am multiple, because I am mixed, mestizo, mongrel.” (Patchwork Girl). She is a collection of other people’s body parts that contain a small aspect of personality; when one steps back and examines the whole, they create the entirety of who the Patchwork Girl is. Therein lies the problem. The work suggests that identity and the self are nothing more than a mixture of others transmitted through experiences with them. Where and when does other end and the self begin? Where is that part of identity that is wholly your own? Man puts so much store in being different than other people. The idea that we are simply parts of others made into a whole is frightening and abhorrent to our sense of “identity”. Thus the Patchwork Girl is a representative of what we most want to deny in ourselves and she becomes the “repository of that violence and…the means for staking out a supposed identity over against it” (Hogle).