Response to Shelley Jackson’s “Stitch Bitch”

Body Not Whole

In this section, it is Jackson’s objective to continue the thought she introduced in her preface, when she claims she’s (not) the author of a text about “the patchwork girl.” In a way that seems to introduce the fragmented form of the complete text, Body Not Whole aims to describe the oddity of the body, separate from the mind, as a “patchwork” (adapting the word from her preface and self-proclaimed title). Later in the section, she discovers that the “project of writing” lies in “unhinging” the mind as it tries to solidify its own hold on reality by “[substituting] an effigy for that complicated machine for inclusion and effusion that is the self.”

Gaps, Leaps

This section, which occurs later in the sequence, is a comparison between modern literature (the novel) and “hypertext.” As Jackson begins: “a conventional novel is a safe ride,” implying that the literary structure of novels, entangled with their existence in a physical form, has dictated their linear form. But as Jackson continues, it is seen that the physical form of a novel affects readers in more ways than one. Describing the novel as ”the mechanism of the chute,” Jackson criticizes it by asserting that its too quick, equating it to a ”slalom.” Hypertext, on the other hand, is random, formless, and dependent on the reader’s moods, attitudes, or other constraints. It’s existence without physical form and traditional scaffolding, Jackson implies, makes it attractive to “piratical readers, plagiarists and opportunists.”