# patchwork girl (hypertext) ![[photoofafloppydiskettelabelledshelleyjacksonpatchwor.jpg|300]] the first edition of the work was published on floppy disk author: shelley jackson country: usa genre: hypertext fiction publisher: eastgate systems publication date: october 1995 patchwork girl is a work of electronic literature by american author shelley jackson. it was written in storyspace and published by eastgate systems in 1995. it is often discussed along with michael joyce's afternoon a story as an important work of hypertext fiction "shelley jackson's brilliantly realised hypertext patchwork girl is an electronic fiction that manages to be at once highly original and intensely parasitic on its print predecessors" # plot and structure jackson's patchwork girl tells the story through illustrations of parts of a female body stitched together through text and image. 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. each segment leads down a trail that takes the story in multiple directions through various linking words and images. jackson uses recurring graveyard imagery in order to continually invite the reader to resurrect mary shelley's monster in mary shelley's original victor frankenstein begins the creation of a female companion for ir monster but destroys the second effort prior to completion. in jackson's version the female monster is completed by mary shelley herself. the woman and ir creation become lovers; the creature then travels to america where they pursues a variety of adventures before disintegrating after a 175-year lifetime. individual sections also explore the lives of some of the women whose corpses contributed body parts to the creature. the work is an often-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" in reflecting on the structural impact of hypertext on patchwork girl jackson wrote > in hypertext everything is there at once and equally weighted. 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 # influences the narrative is based on two books: mary shelley's frankenstein and the patchwork girl of oz by l. frank baum jackson's work includes quotations from the novels of both shelley and baum plus material from jacques derrida donna haraway and other writers patchwork girl is categorised as a borgesian structure of information due to its non-linearity. 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 # # the gothic patchwork girl is a continuation of mary shelley's frankenstein and therefore definitively a gothic tale. there is much emphasis placed on the gruesome sewing-together of patchwork girl and the functioning of ir borrowed body. the structure and the content of the text closely reflect one another because of the piecing-together of patchwork girl's physical self features in the narrative as well as the interactive element of the hypertext # reception marjorie luesebrink analyzed patchwork girl as a landmark innovation in patchwork girl was analyzed in "women innovate: contributions to electronic literature (1990-2010) astrid ensslin's work pre-web digital publishing and the lore of electronic literature # award nominations patchwork girl was shortlisted for the electronic literature organisation fiction award in 2001 // republic of bob