Remediating, Rescripting and Regendering the Monster: from Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein to Shelley Jackson’s Patchwork Girl

The digital novel “Patchwork Girl; or a Modern Monster by Mary/Shelley, and Herself”, written by Shelley Jackson in 1995 using the Storyspace software platform, is generally considered one of the most important works of first-generation electronic literature. The story is largely based on Mary Shelley's "Frankenstein" and partly on L.Frank Baum's "Patchwork Girl of Oz", reread, rescripted and remediated in a phase of unprecedented literary interest in hypertext writing and the new media. In the 1990s, such interest also embraced the sudden transformation undergone by feminist writing, as it attempted to overcome dualistic thought patterns by welcoming technological contaminations. Within the epistemic scope of postmodernity dichotomies are constantly questioned and boundaries collapse, enacting unorthodox hybridizations between organic and inorganic, theory and practice, intangible conceptual discourse and tangible bodily experience. The fragmented structure of "Patchwork Girl" is likewise marked by liminality, dynamism, fluidity, and discordant incorporations, exactly like the body of the protagonist, the female companion of Frankenstein’s monster who had been aborted in Mary Shelley’s novel and is here revived. Just like that monstrous body, which is made of pieces from different women, the hypertext contains a number of quotes, including references to theoretical works by Haraway, Derrida, Deleuze and Guattari. It comprises 326 reading units (lexias) featuring the alternation of text and images, as well as 462 hypertextual links. The fact that such units may be read quite independently of each other allows each fragment – of text or identity – to be interpreted without being subject to symbolic hierarchies of power. Nonetheless, the political potential of this hypertext does not lie so much in the attempt to transcend the logic of patriarchy; rather it rests with the ironic and self-conscious appropriation of various ideologically-bound cultural fragments, leading to an incongruous overlapping much in line with the praxis of remediation.