Guide
Welcome to “Unseamly Girlhoods.” This is my English Honors Thesis (2023, University of Pennsylvania) and what I hope will be an engaging, disorienting, fruitful experience. This structure is meant to be an homage to, and in honor of, Shelley Jackson’s Patchwork Girl, and intends to extend the reach of Jackson’s work into 2023, via a collaged, disjointed digital “body” of my own. My thesis is focused on the ways in which authorship, form, fragmentation and focalization function to produce a monstrous—in ways both liberatory and discordant, even frustrating—narratology, and, further, a vision of girlhood that ruptures what conventional narrative assigns to its structure and representation. This essay is best read in this format because I am hoping to embody the elements of this “monstrous,” disarticulated narrative structure and enable readers to interact with the text rather than simply absorb it—this interaction is, I argue, part of what makes both Jacksons’ work so potent and so misunderstood. The small amount of scholarship on Shirley Jackson’s Hangsaman has, in my view, so far largely flattened and reduced the narratological inventiveness and subversion elemental to the novel, and I hope to push readers to excavate, unbury, and, yes, “restitch” outside of the bounds of traditional academic form. This format also is my way of invoking a feminist set of principles at the heart of my analysis, which to me are not supplemental or secondary but central to my argument and in fact my intended methodology; I am heavily influenced by my GSWS (second) major here.
As Susan Lanser writes in “Towards a Feminist Narratology,” “This means, first of all, that the narratives which have provided the foundation for narratology have been either men’s texts or texts treated as men’s texts” (343). I’d amend this argument slightly to say that most of these texts “foundational” to narratology have been constructed and read through a patriarchal, deeply gendered lens, assigning “hysteria” and “unnaturalness” to narratological modes that challenge, disrupt, or undermine normative conceptions of gender and self. Carlton Clark has coined the term “wreader,” a conjoining of “reader” and “writer,” to describe the experience and potential of reading and creating hypertext, and I’d like to enable this type of “wreadership,” engaged and agitated rather than passive or acquiescing. This digital form allows a visible exploration of the monstrosity and fragmentation I discuss and, I hope, resists the overdone narrow-sightedness of reading Hangsaman through a patriarchal lens. In addition, here is the link to my creative/writing project, under the supervision of the GSWS department and Ricardo Bracho, which functions as a sort of conjoined limb with this critical thesis, and offers what I hope is a new form of a monstrous girl-myth, reclaiming Hangsaman in a multimedia way.
Below are some tips on how to navigate the site.
Click on the different icons/images on the homepage (burial ground) to access different parts of this essay, of which there are 9. The tiny stitches in the right hand bottom corner of every page will lead you back to the homepage. You can navigate this website in any order you choose, but if you begin by clicking on the wound (incision point), you’ll be able to follow the more linear path. You must click on the gifs & images below each section in order to move to the next one, as only a handful of the pages are accessible directly from the homepage; this is meant to mimic an investigation, excavation, unburial. There is also an audio player in the top right corner that I recommend you use for a multimedia, more sensory experience as you read; the music is the instrumental version of “Hard Times” by Ethel Cain and speaks to the atmospheric and narrative uncanniness I discuss in both of these texts.
For the sake of accessibility, I’m also including a downloadable PDF version of the essay here, but its structure does not translate as well to that format, so I highly suggest using the website.
— Sofia (Sof) Sears
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