By Sof Sears, directed by Dr. Whitney Trettien
                                                 


Sutures


Acknowledgments

I’d like to thank my thesis advisor, Dr. Whitney Trettien, for her guidance and immense support for this very weird and ambitious project. I’d also like to thank Professor Lesser and the fall 2022 English Honors Seminar group for their feedback, community, and encouragement. I’m grateful to all the English and GSWS professors who’ve pointed me in the right direction and recommended useful readings and texts to inform this essay. I’d also like to thank the wonderful and talented Irma Kiss who generously created the drawings used on the website. Lastly, this thesis would not have been possible without the (emotional and intellectual/creative) support of my friends, especially Adrianna Brusie and Nicole Daly, who listened to many a feverish soliloquy about Shirley Jackson and humored it all.

This thesis is dedicated to Shirley Jackson, Paula Jean Welden, and all the girl-monsters who’ve been misread and pathologized by patriarchy.

Works Cited

Bal, Mieke. Narratology: Introduction to the Theory of Narrative. United Kingdom: University of Toronto Press, 1997.
Behrens, Susan J. “The Essential Self of Natalie Waite in Hangsaman by Shirley Jackson.” Names: a Journal of Onomastics, Vol. 69,
    Issue 1, Winter 2021, pp. 2-9. https://ans-names.pitt.edu/ans/article/view/2244
Bonikowski, Wyatt. “‘Only One Antagonist’: The Demon Lover and the Feminine Experience in The Work of Shirley Jackson.” Gothic         Studies, Vol. 15, No. 2, November 2013, pp. 66-88.
Carazo, Carolina Sánchez-Palencia, and Manuel Almagro Jiménez. “Gathering the Limbs of the Text in Shelley Jackson’s “Patchwork
    Girl.” Atlantis, Vol. 28, No. 1, 2006, pp. 115-129. http://www.jstor.org/stable/41055233
Clark, Carlton. “Surely Teaching Hypertext in the Composition Classroom Qualifies as a Feminist Pedagogy?” Kairos 6.2, 2001.
    https://kairos.technorhetoric.net/6.2/coverweb/gender/clark/
Dobson, James E. “Knowing and Narration: Shirley Jackson and the Campus Novel.” Shirley Jackson, Influences and Confluences.
    Routledge, 2016.
Gedo, Paul M. “Narrative, Dialogue, and Dissociation.” Psychoanalytic Review, vol. 101, 2014, pp. 71-80.
Jackson, Shelley. Patchwork Girl by Mary/Shelley and herself. Watertown, MA, Eastgate Systems, 1995. Electronic.
Jackson, Shelley. “Stitch Bitch: the Patchwork Girl.” MIT Communications Forum, November 4, 1997.
    https://web.mit.edu/m-i-t/articles/jackson.html
Jackson, Shirley. Hangsaman. 1951. London, Penguin Books, 2013.
Jerome Cohen, Jeffrey. “Monster Culture (Seven Theses).” Classic Readings on Monster Theory: Demonstrare, Volume One, edited by
    Asa Simon Mittman and Marcus Hensel, Amsterdam: ARC, Amsterdam University Press, 2018, pp. 43-54.                
    https://doi.org/10.1515/9781942401209-008
Lanser, Susan S. “Towards a Feminist Narratology.” Style, vol. 20, no. 3, Narrative Poetics (1986): pp. 341-363.
    https://www.jstor.org/stable/42945612
Massé, Michelle A. “Gothic Repetition: Husbands, Horrors, and Things That Go Bump in the Night.” Signs, Vol. 15, No. 4, 1990, pp.
    679-709. https://www.jstor.org/stable/3174638
Peel, Ellen. “Unnatural Narratology and the Return of the Repressed Reader.” Narrative, Vol. 29, No. 1, 2021, pp. 71-90.
    https://muse.jhu.edu/article/778255

Screenshots of Shelley Jackson’s Patchwork Girl taken by Sofia Sears, 2023. All other images are linked to their sources.
Music: “Hard Times” (instrumental version) & “Televangelism” all by Ethel Cain.