There is much emphasis placed on the gruesome sewing-together of Patchwork Girl and the functioning of her borrowed body. Patchwork Girl is a continuation of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, and therefore definitively a Gothic tale. The work reflects the hypertext labyrinth originally expressed in Borges' "Garden of Forking Paths", since the choices in the narrative allow multiple paths of experience. Patchwork Girl is categorized as a Borgesian structure of information, due to its non-linearity. Jackson's work includes quotations from the novels of both Shelley and Baum, plus material from Jacques Derrida, Donna Haraway, and other writers. The narrative is based on two books: Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and The Patchwork Girl of Oz by L. It is a body whose brain is dispersed throughout the cells, fraught with potential, fragile with indecision, or rather strong in foregoing decisions, the way a vine will bend but a tree can fall down. In hypertext, everything is there at once and equally weighted. In reflecting on the structural impact of hypertext on Patchwork Girl, Jackson wrote: The work is an oft-cited example of cyberfeminism -"If you want to see the whole," one passage reads, "you will have to piece me together yourself." Furthermore, Jackson's use of hypertext "enables us to recognize the degree to which the qualities of collage-particularly those of appropriation, assemblage, concatenation, and the blurring of limits, edges, and borders-characterize a good deal of the way we conceive of gender and identity." Individual sections also explore the lives of some of the women whose corpses contributed body parts to the creature. The woman and her creation become lovers the creature then travels to America, where she pursues a variety of adventures before disintegrating after a 175-year lifetime. In Jackson's version, the female monster is completed by Mary Shelley herself. In Mary Shelley's original, Victor Frankenstein begins the creation of a female companion for his monster, but destroys the second effort prior to completion. Jackson uses recurring graveyard imagery in order to continually invite the reader to resurrect Mary Shelley's monster. ![]() Each segment leads down a trail that takes the story in multiple directions through various linking words and images. The narrative of the story is divided into five segments, titled: "a Graveyard", "a Journal", "a Quilt", "a Story", and "& broken accents." The goal of the piece is to not only make the reader realize the structure of the Patchwork Girl as a whole but also realize all the pieces that must be "patched" together in order to create one unified structure. Jackson's Patchwork Girl tells the story through illustrations of parts of a female body that are stitched together through text and image.
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