Patchwork Girl: Birthing...
The various means of "coming to life" that Jackson alludes to in PATCHWORK GIRL all seem to be the products of human agency, either directly or indirectly. Following "Broken Accents," "phrenology,""this writing" links brings you to a creation scene in which the narrator is "assembling these patched words" and bringing to life the story.
In another interesting bit of metafiction, reached by clicking on "," "hercut 2," "my walk," "sight," "sewn" we hear the narrator comparing herself as a creator of the Patchwork Girl to an author:
"...I began to feel that I was writing, that this creature I was assembling was a brash attempt to achieve by artificial means the unity of a life-form--a unity perhaps more rightfully given, not made; continuous not interrupted; and subject to divine truth, not the will to expression of its prideful author.
AUTHORESS, I amend, smiling."
Following "a quilt," "her cut," and "scrap bag" brings you to what I take to be a masculine voice planning the incredibly difficult task of physically creating a female. The items that have been collected in preparation include "cartographic surveys," "peep show boxes," and "engineering machines of all sorts." (I believe this to be a male voice because I can't imagine a female character needing to do so much research, and on such odd items, before constructing a fellow female. I could be wrong...)
A fourth approach to birth, reached through the "graveyard" allows the reader to construct a person out of the fragments of other people.
Unfortunately, I have never been able to get through more than the first couple chapters of THE MODERN PROMETHEUS, so I'm not really qualified to compare the two tales. (I've seen the James Whale film a few times, but I've heard that they're not very similar.) An uneducated guess would be that the grotesqueness of the original story came from the idea that dead was dead. God was the only being with the RIGHT to give life, so Dr. Frankenstein's creature was an example of why dead should remain dead. In PATCHWORK GIRL, however, I see the idea that these characters, who might represent lost stories, are not DEAD dead, but only forgotten and that Jackson, by unearthing them and giving them new LIFE isn't doing something abominable at all, but is in fact REANIMATING something that never should have been buried in the first place. Keeping the stories alive is a heroic act. (I think that answers both the second and third parts of your question, doesn't it? The ugly was to show the sacrelige of constructing the creature in the original. The bodies in PATCHWORK GIRL are stories.)
In another interesting bit of metafiction, reached by clicking on "," "hercut 2," "my walk," "sight," "sewn" we hear the narrator comparing herself as a creator of the Patchwork Girl to an author:
"...I began to feel that I was writing, that this creature I was assembling was a brash attempt to achieve by artificial means the unity of a life-form--a unity perhaps more rightfully given, not made; continuous not interrupted; and subject to divine truth, not the will to expression of its prideful author.
AUTHORESS, I amend, smiling."
Following "a quilt," "her cut," and "scrap bag" brings you to what I take to be a masculine voice planning the incredibly difficult task of physically creating a female. The items that have been collected in preparation include "cartographic surveys," "peep show boxes," and "engineering machines of all sorts." (I believe this to be a male voice because I can't imagine a female character needing to do so much research, and on such odd items, before constructing a fellow female. I could be wrong...)
A fourth approach to birth, reached through the "graveyard" allows the reader to construct a person out of the fragments of other people.
Unfortunately, I have never been able to get through more than the first couple chapters of THE MODERN PROMETHEUS, so I'm not really qualified to compare the two tales. (I've seen the James Whale film a few times, but I've heard that they're not very similar.) An uneducated guess would be that the grotesqueness of the original story came from the idea that dead was dead. God was the only being with the RIGHT to give life, so Dr. Frankenstein's creature was an example of why dead should remain dead. In PATCHWORK GIRL, however, I see the idea that these characters, who might represent lost stories, are not DEAD dead, but only forgotten and that Jackson, by unearthing them and giving them new LIFE isn't doing something abominable at all, but is in fact REANIMATING something that never should have been buried in the first place. Keeping the stories alive is a heroic act. (I think that answers both the second and third parts of your question, doesn't it? The ugly was to show the sacrelige of constructing the creature in the original. The bodies in PATCHWORK GIRL are stories.)
posted by Brave Raideen at 3:03 PM
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