"Patchwork Girl": anatomia ipertestuale di un mostro a pezzi

This essay examines one of the most important works of first-generation electronic literature, i.e. the digital novel “Patchwork Girl; or a Modern Monster by Mary/Shelley, and Herself”. The novel was written by Shelley Jackson in 1995 using the Storyspace software platform. I re-read "Patchwork Girl" in the context of the current literary interest in hypertext writing and the new media. In the 1990s, such interest embraced the sudden transformation undergone by feminist writing, as it coped with issues of gender and attempted to overcome dualistic thought patterns by welcoming technological contaminations. Within the epistemic scope of postmodernity, the fragmented structure of "Patchwork Girl" is dynamic, fluid, and often markedly cannibalistic, exactly like the monstrous body of the protagonist which is made of pieces from different women. The story, largely based on Mary Shelley's "Frankenstein" and on L.Frank Baum's "Patchwork Girl of Oz", also includes a number of theoretical quotes from Haraway, Derrida, Deleuze and Guattari among others. 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.