Patchwork Girl

Births

Creation, birth and procreation


Mary Shelley has, by her own strange skills engendered this daughter


 

From: infant

She is exuberant, ferocious, loving, unhinged. She is an infant with the strength and wits of a more-than-adult. (9)

 

She is deeply attracted to this offspring and they become lovers. To cement their love and exchange something eternal between them Mary cuts a circle of skin from one leg of each of them and exchanges them, transplanting a little piece of her monster onto her own thigh.
  We do not know whether the Patchwork Girl has the full complement of internal organs but she does have the outward trappings of a woman, albeit that they come from different women.
Mary craves for her monster. The craving takes over all her thoughts.  

From: Crave

I crave her company; I crave even the danger. Do I yearn for the easement of my own company? Do I resent the fierce mad engine that is throbbing inside my serene life, staining my underclothes, creasing my brow, making me jump up restless from Percy's side to go to my writing desk, the window, the bookcase, the door, while he gazes at me in gentle reproach, or speaks to me as a tutor might of the inner peace I clearly lack? Yes, of course I do. You are taking me over, I long to cry, but does one punish the food for the pain in one's empty belly? (9)

 

 

Parts of the Patchwork girl belonged to women who were mothers, so she has woven into herself the idea of motherhood, a sense of having loved and lost children.

The process of actual motherhood is linked with the idea of literary creation.

This process of creation can be part of the Patchwork Girl's life because her fictional mother Mary Shelley made it so, she in turn is written by her author, Shelley Jackson.

'Patchwork Girl' is the process of that birth.

  

 

From: Left breast

Charlotte's nipple was pink and long, like a crayon. Charlotte nursed eight children, buried six, and felt each loss in her swollen breasts. She squirted the extra milk on her dying babies, rubbed it into their laboring chests. She visited the graveyard, squeezed her breasts over the small hummocks, so little white beads hung in the grass. She filled a quill-pen at her nipple and wrote invisible letters to the dead babies. Then she held a match under the page and watched her words come back. When I write my left breast sometimes dribbles the milk of invisible children. (9)