Patchworked Comments
Posted by admin on September 26, 2008, 4:46 pm
The floor is now open for comments addressing any aspect of Patchwork Girl that you think of as important.
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October 1st, 2008 at 11:45 pm
Patchwork Girl provides the reader with a novel and contemporary interpretation of Frankenstein that forces its audience to address their feelings of personal intrusion and violation arising from the demands the text imposes. It could be argued that out of the three Frankenstein films as well as the original novel by Mary Shelley, Patchwork Girl is perhaps most similar to the “Bride of Frankenstein” for a variety of reasons. One of the most obvious points of comparison between these two depictions is the fact that both feature a female Creature, which, given the exponential discourse on the sexuality and gender of the Creature in Shelley’s original Frankenstein certainly takes a new path worth discussing. Both Patchwork Girl and “Bride of Frankenstein” include strong elements of feminism and sexual tension, notable in the bedroom scene of Patchwork Girl in which Shelley and her Creature explore each others’ physical composition with sensitivity, uncertainty, and extreme underlying excitement, and in the birth scene of the Bride in the film, where the Bride takes on an uncanny resemblance to Nefertiti, a historical emblem of female strength and beauty. Another interesting point of comparison is the choice of both Jackson and Whale to make the Creature a direct reflection of Mary Shelley herself, whether in Whale’s choice to cast Elsa Lanchester as both Shelley and the Bride (Lanchester later said in her autobiography Elsa Lanchester, Herself, “”I think James Whale felt that if this beautiful and innocent Mary Shelley could write such a horror story as Frankenstein, then somewhere she must have had a fiend within, dominating part of her thoughts and her spirit–like ectoplasm flowing out of her to activate a monster. In this delicate little thing was an unexploded atom bomb. My playing both parts cemented that idea”, or in Jackson’s choice to have Shelley herself to physically create the monster as opposed to creating him indirectly through her conception of Victor Frankenstein in her words. The fact that in both cases, Mary Shelley, the author herself, was directly influential on the Creatures she created implies that the relationship between author and character is ultimately much more intimate and reflective than any between characters within the story. Perhaps Jackson and Whale state what Shelley did not: when creating a text, the author herself births a Creature, a painful excursion requiring flirtation with disaster and Dionysian elements, composed with admirable intentions, yet ultimately a force so intriguingly discomforting that as readers or viewers we cannot look away. The product demands introspection, and as the physical Creature does in both Patchwork Girl and “Bride”, the media itself takes a life of its own outside of its creator, for better or worse results, but most certainly results that yield a deeper understanding of the human self, as scary as that may be.