Panic at the Discourse

A Flaysome Web: Weaving the Female Gothic into a Feminist Theory of the Virtual Text

Nyssa Komorowski

Biography | Notes

Keywords: Gothic, Book History, Feminism, HTML, Virtual Text

Introduction: “It was on a dreary night of November…”^[1]

“It is true, we shall be monsters, cut off from all the world; but on that account we shall be more attached to one another.”^[2]

— The Monster

“My vices are the children of a forced solitude that I abhor; and my virtues will necessarily arise when I live in communion with an equal. I shall feel the affections of a sensitive being, and become linked to the chain of existence and events, from which I am now excluded.”^[3]

— The Monster

The nineteenth-century Female Gothic genre began with domestically bound, middle-class English women writers who explored female social transgression and entrapment using themes of horror, terror, and science fiction.^[4] Women’s writing was expected to have a narrowly-defined conventional style and topical range, and male critics created boundaries that women writers came up against when publishing their stories.^[5] Men of the time denounced the cheap products of a mass press willing to publish women’s writing, and considered the products of these technologies weak and, in a prejudicial sense, feminine.^[6] The Female Gothic writers found ways around this gender-based stigma while also self-consciously exploring (or exceeding) the boundaries of their authorship as women.^[7] Women writers such as Emily Brontë, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and Mary Shelley used images of domestic environments and sensuous bodies in their writing to make a new and different kind of female authorship possible.

           The Female Gothic genre constitutes a philosophy of technology and textuality that can be adapted to inform a feminist theory describing twentieth- and twenty-first-century electronic texts and textual scholarship. At our present time, the virtual environment of the Internet has pushed the limits of the book’s physical form. However, akin to concerns about the mass press of the nineteenth century, electronic texts have become imbued with increasing distrust by users who are anxious about electronic texts’ authenticity and authority, and concern with the public’s increased ability to openly access, author, publish, and commentate in digital media.^[8] I argue that the house and female body are intrinsic, interrelated metaphoric themes that shaped Female Gothic authorship in the nineteenth century. These themes have been transposed into our most fundamental theories of technology, and can be harnessed using illogical methodologies to manifest creative possibilities for women’s textual scholarship in the virtual realm of digital media and electronic texts.

Virtuality in Computer-Generated Environments

Digital technologies have transformed our human experience of the book, from the familiar “publishing value chain” of physically bound paper and ink to the amorphous bodies of electronic texts.^[9] Along with the birth of digital media is the notion of virtual in the sense popularized by today’s Internet culture and the electronic world—texts that are “set over against the real world as an inadequate, sketchy version of it,” lacking possession of a body.^[10] This appeal to notions of real and virtual may invoke the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze, who popularly developed a philosophical concept of virtuality. Computer-generated virtual worlds or objects and Deleuzian virtual objects are similar in some ways but have important differences, which Małgorzata Czarnocka and Mariusz Mazurek describe:

Julia Flanders also discusses the meaning of virtual as it pertains to computer-generated worlds and objects, and compares these contexts to the physicality of electronic texts’ paper predecessors:

Evidently, virtual is a term that has multiple similar but distinct meanings, which coalesce into a web of gendered inferences about the authority, power, and importance of texts when discussing digital publishing. With the development of computer-generated virtual objects and worlds, the meaning of virtual text has become imbued with a distinctive quality of lack that has been historically described as feminine. Virtuality’s lack is determined according to a system of judgement that compares relative power as measured by a standard of virtues and authority typically defined as masculine and historically controlled by men. To say that a book is virtual is to imply that its qualities must be assessed in relation to the authority of a physical book, or by those traditionally in authority over books. It is only under this masculine scrutiny that the virtuality of the computer-generated electronic book is found lacking.

           The book as a physical form, especially the scholarly edition, secures “cultural authority in familiar terms,” and so, “the loss of that body can seem like the severing of the bonds between meaning and its foundation, the opening up of the doors of chaos.”^[13] The digital text in the virtual environment is seemingly absent of body altogether, and therefore is also absent of familiar authority. The new “publishing ecosystem” of virtuality requires a re-evaluation of Robert Darnton’s communications circuit and the ways scholars typically imagine the relationships between various agents in the production, distribution, and consumption of texts.^[14] The virtual publishing ecosystem conflates some roles, while making other roles redundant. Authors are now publishers and readers can now create content: the relationships of Darnton’s circuit have been remediated or circumnavigated altogether by virtuality.^[15] Wherever the virtual text achieves or threatens to achieve power, the event could mean a loss of power for those who benefit from the authority of the physical book. For those who benefit little from masculinist concepts of value in publishing, or whomsoever pushes the boundaries of bookish authority, the virtual environment of digital publishing offers freedom from familiar constraints, and new, imaginative groundwork on which to build texts. Computer-generated virtuality opens a space wherein text becomes an architecture for capacious experience; not just a physical body that occupies and forecloses the possibilities of space.

The House

Natural landscape was a favoured subject matter for Romanticists, which they used to thematically focus on the autonomous self and explore imaginative geographies both in the mind, and physically, through travel.^[16] Shane McCorristine describes the Romantic “concept of discovery” as an internalization of exploration and “a kind of self-discovery with little to do with the actualities of the worlds travelled through.”^[17] This could take the form of documenting one’s travels across land in a journal, reading the accounts of others’ journeys, or armchair travelling in place as “the practice of exploring by wandering around a room, going through material collections, or ruminating over memories.”^[18] The house and the book are each a media landscape that the reader-explorer uses to internally navigate spaces of imagination. To reinvestigate the legacy of the long-standing division between technology and environments in communications theory, John Durham Peters asks a series of questions:

This inquiry suggests a theoretical framework for thinking about virtual texts. It is from within the “textual space” of a technological environment that the reader “feels the representational power of the text, not as an assemblage of data but as a meaningful, coherent universe.”^[20] Texts of all kinds are thereby encountered as entanglements of technological-natural environments, which must be experienced by the sensuous, “dreaming body” of the reader-explorer to make meaning.^[21]

           The house is a space that negotiated the relationship between nineteenth-century women and the natural environment. Romantic masculine subjects left home to explore extra-domestic spaces in nature and pursue the discovery of themselves as men.^[22] The house is the environment where women must necessarily find their connection with nature—however limited, reliant, and contingent that connection may be. Windows allow glimpses of the outdoors and let moonlight and sunlight inside; the wind carries distant sounds and scents to confined senses; gardens offer synthetic samples of nature to sit amongst and lay beneath. Having innocuously slipped through closed exterior doors and locked garden gates, books and letters connect domestic with extra-domestic spaces and carry narratives of exploration and distant experiences of nature to women in their homes. In turn, paper, even just the marginal spaces of a printed book or the peelings of a wallpaper, ferries fugitive pieces of women’s writing out.

           Within women’s writings, the words chosen, spellings selected, the placement of punctuation, and how words and paragraphs are laid out on the page are architectural structures by which the writer (or her creative proxy in the form of editor or printer) physically shapes her textual space.^[23] To change these architectures is to change the potential meanings and force of ideological power in the text.^[24] The author constructs an environment that can both resonate a “projection of textual meaning” and connote shared cultural readings in the sculpted recesses of the text’s form.^[25] The structure of the narrative and choice of metaphors, themes, characters, settings, and plot devices are frameworks that extend the textual space into a shared cultural territory—a territory which influences the manifold possibilities of meanings a reader discerns.

           In the Female Gothic genre, architectural space is a meeting place between external bodies and internal spirits—exemplified by “the Gothic narrative that historic buildings exude the stories of owners past.”^[26] This is demonstrated in the third chapter of Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights (1847) when Mr. Lockwood encounters the ghostly personage of Catherine Linton while sleeping in her old bedroom, and in the way a strange woman creeps behind the wallpaper in Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper (1895). These houses “illuminate the author’s motives” and often have a “subtle secondary purpose” to the fictional narrative.^[27] The house or home is not traditionally considered to be an authoritative space, and certainly not a typical metaphor for notions of male authority. However, it is the physically and ideologically imposing environment where nineteenth-century middle-class English women struggled to construct a self-possessed authority over their own authorship, which necessitated new entanglements between women and technology.

           The architecture or built environment of a textual space influences not only the aesthetic experience of a text or book, its meaning, and the practical navigation of its content, but also influences distributions of social and cultural power. In 1951, Marshall McLuhan intuitively contemplated technology using the metaphor of Edgar Allan Poe’s sailor in a whirlpool, “locked in by the whirling walls and the numerous objects that floated in that environment.”^[28] By 1969, McLuhan came to see electronic technology as an “environmental matrix, which is in constant flux,” a “junkyard” which he had to dig through “to a comprehension of its contents and its lines of force.”^[29] More recently, according to Peters, “Digital devices invite us to think of media as environmental, as part of the habitat, and not just as semiotic inputs into people’s heads.”^[30] This environmental perception surely has consequences for how matrices of gendered consciousness are naturalized (or not) to virtual textual spaces. In her feminist essay “A Cyborg Manifesto,” Donna Haraway writes that collective forms of human identity can be made into a “self-consciously constructed space.”^[31] Also constructed, the cybernetic organism is “a creature of social reality… [that is], our most important political construction, a world-changing fiction.”^[32] Today, the Internet is an immersive and constantly expanding textual multiverse that substantially impacts physical and social realities, built and accessed by us from within the space of our own homes. Domestic architectures are therefore a unifying metaphor by which both the nineteenth-century Female Gothic genre and the twentieth-century virtual text may be theorized in terms of the environments, architectures, and spaces wherein our bodies meet.

The Female Body

At the end of the nineteenth century, William Morris and his cohort of Arts and Crafts utopians and masculinist printers advocated for a return of print to preindustrial processes. Megan Benton describes these bookish men as anxious about technology and industrial automation, believing that the machine had usurped the human male element of production.^[33] In Morris’s masculinist theory, inspired by John Ruskin, hand-crafted approaches to publishing were essential for men to express the “‘majesty of their souls’”; by contrast, the so-called feminine, mechanized forms of production were “spiritually sterile.”^[34] Without souls, women are made monstrous, and this meshes with nineteenth-century attitudes that othered women that regarded female writing and feminine printing as “aberrant.”^[35] The masculinists’ ideal book is therefore the body against which the comparison of both the mechanized press and virtual texts are determined to be corrupt and monstrous.

           Aesthetically, Morris and other masculinists advocated “for a return to darker, heavier, more ‘robust’ letterforms”; a reaction against the “imperceptible pressure” used by machines to create “a tapestry of fine threadlike lines laid upon rather than driven into [the paper].”^[36] Feeling distaste for this delicate web of feminine aesthetics, “Masculine printing often exaggerated the degree to which the letter press printing process drives type into paper,” suggesting a penetrative act that asserts an embodiment of male authority against the metaphorically female body of the book.^[37] The desire to return to a masculine aesthetic was also a desire to return to male control over production, circulation, and readership of texts, as “many men felt that they had lost control over books in another sense as well, as women authors and readers seemed to dominate what had once been a mostly masculine world.”^[38] The exaggerated pressure of the masculine press seems to have been used to reinscribe male control over both the publishing industry and women.

           Like the masculinists who attempted to inscribe authority over books by exaggerating bookish qualities, the electronic text has a history of being dressed up in “artificial assurances” that re-establish appearances of “a relationship between the electronic text and the conventional book, supplying the missing physical referent by symbolically invoking it.”^[39] Amid scholars’ fears of the electronic text are concerns over accuracy, the distinguishment of authority, and unwitting use of “corrupted text.”^[40] The female body has long been a sexual metaphor for the physical book, and McLuhan developed his theory of communications media based on sexualized images of female bodies found in print advertisements from mid-twentieth-century mass media. McLuhan’s suggestion that “Frankenstein fantasies” represent sub-human feelings in response to new technology reiterates Morris’s belief in the soullessness of mechanization, emphasizing “the horror of a synthetic robot running amok in revenge for its lack of a ‘soul.’”^[41] The limbs become for themselves, “self-conscious.”^[42] While drawing inspiration from women’s bodies, McLuhan also labels technologies as “extensions of man’s consciousness” and persistently uses male pronouns to describe “mankind”.^[43] Likewise, Mark McCutcheon has interpreted McLuhan’s vision of technology as a specifically “rebellious, male artificial intelligence, whose inherently rebellious tendency should be violently pre-empted; technology is a menace that needs to be subordinated—mastered—to be useful.” ^[44] Explicitly this states that technology is only useful as a conduit to an external, dominating male intelligence.

           As his theory evolved, McLuhan thought technology and “man” to be mutually constitutive, wherein “all media, from the phonetic alphabet to the computer, are extensions of man that cause deep and lasting changes in him and transform his environment.”^[45] This “continuous modification of man by his own technology stimulates him to find continuous means of modifying it; man thus becomes the sex organs of the machine world […] permitting it to reproduce and constantly evolve to higher forms.”^[46] This sexual metaphor introduces themes of birth and reproduction, stating, “new technology breeds new man” and “the agony of our age is the labor pain of rebirth.”^[47] For McLuhan, electric technology smacks of a flaysome female body, despite the presence of an impregnating male intelligence. Notwithstanding his own attempts to view electric technology as “total and inclusive” he still views so-called mankind and technology in a dialectical opposition illustrated by metaphors of gender and heterosexual marriage.^[48] Flanders also perceives these gendered power dynamics:

In this line of thought, the reproductive machine of technology would necessarily become a monstrous subject when it gains independence and self-consciousness; that is, when the female body is mastered by its own female intelligence.

           The problem with labelling intelligent textual discourse as essentially and universally male is that women’s divergences from masculinized norms will then always be interpreted as pathological and weak. However, female authors may choose to depart from masculine logic and conventions and take up different intellectual stakes and gestures. Anne K. Mellor criticizes James Rieger, the editor of a definitive scholarly edition of the 1818 version of Frankenstein (1982), for his theory that Percy Shelley corrected Mary Shelley’s grammatical mistakes, spelling, and “awkward phrasing” himself ignoring “that Mary’s grammatical errors or misspellings [in her manuscript] were infrequent, while her phrasings were often more graceful than her husband’s edited versions.”^[50] Rieger’s argument pathologizes Mary’s writerly style and disregards her agency to commission and selectively implement editorial direction from others, while broaching the theory that Percy is the true author or co-collaborator of Frankenstein.^[51] Evidently, where conflation, remediation or hybridization of traditionally solitary roles of authorship work to assert male intellectual dominance over a woman’s writing, the same fears of monstrosity that also work to delegitimize electronic texts vanish.

           The foundational understanding of media technology as a sexualized hybridization and power relation between male intellect and female reproductivity has contributed to the technological philosophy critically taken up by Haraway. She characterizes cyborgs “as a fictional mapping of our social and bodily reality and as an imaginative resource suggesting some very fruitful couplings,” and notes that cyborgs have a mode of “replication… uncoupled from organic reproduction.”^[52] The cyborg is the “illegitimate offspring” of Western cultural politics and economics, “an ultimate self untied at last from all dependency” on the natural world; a being who undermines “the certainty of what counts as nature.”^[53] This resembles what McLuhan terms “the final phase of the extensions of man—the technological simulation of consciousness.”^[54] If the relationship between organic consciousness and technology is indeed the “border war” Haraway describes, with stakes in “territories of production, reproduction, and imagination,” women and men have historically authored the action on the battlefield, each choosing different kinds of machines as champions.^[55] Men and women have battled on this ground, but in different ways, places, times, configurations of dependence, and hybridity with others. For Haraway, her scenario allows the cyborg to challenge several “troubling dualisms” including male/female.^[56] She thus declares it “a creature in a postgender world,” and a challenge to gender as a “global identity.”^[57] As electronic texts in computer-generated virtual environments become increasingly common, how long will the gendered body persist as a metaphor to understand the book or electronic text?

Creative Praxis in Virtual Environments

Virtual texts instigate a complex set of fears and uncertainties. Although layers of encoded text could work to prevent the destruction of the “historical body of the text,” the physical body of the text is lost, and there are attendant concerns about derivation, accuracy, methods of cataloguing and citation, and multiplicity/authority.^[58] Coding hybridizes different scholarly treatments of historical texts that have occurred over time and allows readers to toggle between these editorialized approaches and the original texts. When the scholarly editor takes on the task of encoding a text into a form that makes multiple layers of information available in the computer-generated virtual environment, the editor can become hybridized with the role of archivist.^[59] These two kinds of textual engagement are normally in critical tension: “the archive as a failure to provide an editorial synthesis; the edition as a failure to provide access to all the evidence.”^[60] The surrender of conceptual limitations harboured by the physical gendered body of the book and perpetuated by traditional intellectual methodologies would open new possibilities for both the form and making of meaning of virtual texts.^[61] For instance, architextures chosen by female authors may have been read at one time as errors that must be corrected—and thereby subordinated—by the editor.^[62] It is with these concerns that Flanders has worked with virtual projects involving complex textual encoding and database structures. Projects such as the “Women Writers Project” present readers with an ability to navigate between different versions and editions of a text quickly and easily, preserving historical letterforms, spellings, and multiple variants in code.^[63] Mellor’s work, which compares Mary Shelley’s manuscript to the changes Percy made for revised print versions of Frankenstein, is the kind of scholarship that would benefit from textual encoding to create a uniquely variable experience for readers. The encoded text becomes, like Haraway’s cyborg, “a kind of disassembled and reassembled, postmodern collective and personal self.”^[64] If allowed to resurface, the original strange spellings, phrases, and narrative structures women sometimes used may reveal the house where within, a body of nineteenth-century female authorship has taken refuge.

           Throughout the writing of this paper, I undertook a creative HTML writing project called daygloturtle.^[65] With open-ended experiments using HTML text in my virtual environment, I investigated creative ways that encoding texts could be useful in a scholarly pursuit, utilizing quotes from sources that have been used and contemplated throughout the writing of this essay as content, and the process of research as a structuring narrative. The creative HTML environment remixes, recategorizes, and reorders the texts involved in my research, drawing out unexpectedly productive juxtapositions and alternative narratives. The Internet has a massive capacity to store information that is hypothetically infinite. This environment is fertile ground for what Flanders describes as a “logic of abundance,” under which “electronic editions have tended to be conceived on a grandly inclusive scale.”^[66] Ample space to store information and encode possibilities that can quickly and usefully flip between different variants allows researchers to challenge tensions that occur between dualized types like male/female and edition/archive. The coder blurs together the roles of the archivist and the editor and raises the possibility that these roles have never been so distinct as we might have once assumed.

           According to Jen Hill, “the excess of the novel [Frankenstein], its careening narrative shot through with the Gothic—so often ‘blamed’ on Mary Shelley’s lack of writerly control—seems in itself a critique of male narratives.”^[67] She suggests that the “excess” in this case lends an opposing feminine quality or connotation in comparison to so-called masculine writing, but it is the “careening” quality that is most applicable in comparison to texts like Shelley Jackson’s Patchwork Girl (1995) and to my own creative research efforts in daygloturtle. Abundance is not the only logic we might turn to in a deconstruction of the scholarly edition’s authority. The work done by Flanders is useful and important, but archival work is not the only way to use code to depart from the traditional methodologies of the edition. Other approaches to the text could be artfully undertaken using HTML structures, JavaScript events, Cascading Style Sheets, and user participation and volition. Jackson’s novel, as a maze of narrowly selected quotes and commentaries rather than a work of abundance, offers a critical artistic alternative that leans in another scholarly direction: that of creative constraint: that of the close reading: that of the fragment: that of the patchwork.

           Consider a logic of limitation, analogous to the Female Gothic environment of the house. Information trickles in, filtering through windowpanes and slipping through the locked garden gate. This logic of limitation arose in the /yellow_wallpaper section of daygloturtle, which I designed to be a close reading of specific themes in The Yellow Wallpaper (1892) by Charlotte Perkins Gilman.^[68] I organized distinctive themes as sets of quotes placed in illustrative, visually dynamic structures that can be combined and recombined to draw out new understandings of the text. An orderly plot of green text discusses the almost-too-sweet garden in the daytime, but a beam of moonlight on the window at night-time reveals the nocturnal creepy-crawlies of the trapped woman. The wallpaper pattern obscures the plot, but the user can scroll down the path to reveal a key thrown down from the window. The plot, featuring reports of John and Jennie’s disapproval over Jane’s writing practice and Jane’s increasing fascination with the wallpaper, is reduced by the HTML text to a contemplative circular narrative imitating the smudge that runs along the bottom of the yellow wallpaper. In a hypertextual, encoded environment these themes can be selectively explored by a user who is able to toggle between multiple elements in different linear or nonlinear configurations within a creatively constrained container of space and time. The layout and navigational puzzles utilized in my HTML workspace encourage the user/reader to make illogical connections, reading in circles around and around the room, like Jane crawling in circles around the room at the end of the novella.

To Slip Through the Locked Garden Gate

Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and Shelley Jackson’s Patchwork Girl use the processes of writing to contemplate authorship itself and use authorship as a mode of travel across landscapes both imagined and existent. Historical instances of travel undertaken through acts of authorship and readership can be found in published explorers’ travelogues, letters sent by post, and the tracing of a famous explorer’s routes across a map. Drawing upon this shared textual world held in common with their readers, along with the use of creative story architectures like Shelley’s boxed narrative, are two methods that form the backbone of the women’s writings I have analysed in the Female Gothic genre. These narrative frameworks built by women writers allow for the horrors of their literary worlds to erupt outside the boundaries of the novel and into the reader’s darkened bedroom.^[69] The house is a theme that gives these stories a certain structure; like the house which receives letters slipped through the garden gate, these written domestic spaces intersect intimately with the genre of travel writing and enable the reader to contemplate the authoring body of the writer as a travelling spectre of their own readership.

Frankenstein (1818 and 1831) by Mary Shelley

Mary Shelley gave Frankenstein a nested, or boxed, narrative structure. Letters written by the travelling explorer Robert Walton to his sister Margaret Saville back in England set the stage for Robert’s Arctic voyage. In turn, this becomes the stage for Victor Frankenstein’s story, which also contains the Monster’s tale as an episodic bubble in Frankenstein’s dire narrative. The story is both bracketed and pierced through by female characters: Mrs. Saville as the recipient of her brother’s synthesized narrative is on the margins of the beginning and end, and Elizabeth Lavenza, Victor’s intended wife whose final moments form the climax of the story. Together the women are two focal points that the story is woven between. In volume III chapter 6 (also referred to as chapter 23 in some editions), the story hits this climatic peak and Victor recounts the shock of hearing Elizabeth’s final moments in his account to Robert:

The layered architecture of the story creates an illogical connection between Elizabeth and Margaret’s experiences, made visceral in the way the house echoes Elizabeth’s scream.^[71] Elizabeth’s voice echoes through the house and reverberates through the structure of the narrative, which is told by multiple witnesses. That scream… it travels over the mountainous wilds, across the Arctic seas, and home again in a letter that would terrify Margaret and pierce the heart of the reader of the novel herself with an icy sliver of dread. Afterall, Shelley’s “primary audience is those who, like Mrs. Saville, are left behind by brothers, husbands, and sons.”^[72] Shelley’s introduction to the third edition (1831) adds another layer to the structure. In this new introduction she brackets the story within another tale about the circumstances that inspired the story: her dream about the monster standing in her bedroom while she slept, which mirrors the experience of the fictional Elizabeth.^[73] According to this introductory narrative, Shelley first began writing the story with the scene that animates the mad scientist Frankenstein’s creation: “on a dreary night of November.”^[74] Elizabeth’s scream reverberates straight back to Shelley’s inspired nightmare image: “What terrified me will terrify others; and I need only describe the spectre which had haunted my midnight pillow.”^[75] Through the process of writing, Shelley structured her narrative space in a way that links the female characters together and implicitly involves herself and the reader as characters, too.

Patchwork Girl; or, A Modern Monster (1995) by Shelley Jackson

The structure of Shelley Jackson’s virtual novel plays with the conventions of the traditional book by opening the electronic text with what Jackson calls a “splash page,” analogous to the frontispiece of the printed book.^[76] The next page is a title page along with a hyperlinked navigational menu that resembles the stylistic conventions of a nineteenth-century title page and table of contents. While this imitates those aesthetic conventions of bookishness that Flanders has criticized of virtual texts, Jackson’s reference to the physical book comes across as a critical self-reflexivity, not an anxiety about authority. Jackson describes the experience she anticipated for the reader who navigates this text:

Beginning with the link labeled “a story,” the reader can access a chunk of text titled “birth.” From this piece of the story, the reader must use links to navigate to “many different places from here,” making this text “already, another branch in the road.”^[78] Jackson explains the choices made available to the participating reader:

Jackson’s novel moves back and forth between her own voice and the voice of Mary Shelley, and the reader is tipped off to the change in authorial voice with the use of font, which stylistically encodes layers of different authorial voices into the text. This produces a kind of hybrid authorship of the kind commonly feared about computer-generated electronic text in virtual worlds, by those who have textual authority in the physical realm of books. Jackson reveals this hybridity through her use of font style: she speaks in sans-serif, while Shelley speaks in serif. The contrast in font styles suggests a relationship between the stylistic options available in this 1995-era digital media platform, and the choices between masculine and feminine fonts of the nineteenth-century mass press. Jackson’s writing interrupts Shelley’s to articulate the perspective of her female monster:

A “web” also describes the underlying architecture of Jackson’s hypertextual electronic novel. She constructed the story using a visual map of “moveable pieces,” rather like a floe chart.^[81] The structure of the map overview helps Jackson visualize

For the reader, this metaphor of sewing is made visual and tactile in the form of moveable pop-up windows illustrated with images of Jackson’s female monster, which can be visually stitched together by the reader.^[83] The theme of sewing connects Jackson’s text with the handmade processes of bookmaking, and the domestic realm traditionally occupied by women like Mary Shelley, Elizabeth Lavenza, and Margaret Saville. It also recalls the sewing metaphors used to stigmatize commercial printing as aesthetically unfit and too feminine, with the threadbare pressure of the mass press imagined to be akin to the act of weaving fabric.^[84]

           The conversational structure of the work is reminiscent of the narrative structures Shelley utilized—the written correspondence between siblings, the sit-down dynamic between storyteller and listener, and Elizabeth’s scream echoing through the house to Victor’s frantic ears. Jackson’s suggestion of a “web” built of its “own monstrous chain,” forged of its “own links,” rephrases the monster’s own words in Shelley’s original story. The words harken back to fears masculinist printers felt about the commercial press, and to McLuhan’s anxieties about technological landscapes, while also prefiguring common metaphors that would be used to describe the hypertextuality of the Internet after McLuhan’s technological era. The web of connection craved by the monster entangles these metaphors and harkens back to Haraway’s vision of a “spiral dance” that “suggests a way out of the maze of dualisms in which we have explained our bodies and our tools to ourselves.”^[85] By the process of coding, Jackson has built a narrative structure that links herself and Shelley together. She also involves the reader as a willful component of the monstrous author, who builds the narrative for herself out of self-mapped, illogical progressions throughout the architecture of the virtual novel.

& pushing herself off she was carried away by the waves and I soon lost sight of her in the darkness and distance.^[86]

The Female Gothic was denied the label of ‘feminine’ throughout the nineteenth century because the genre was seen as too far a departure from established and accepted feminine genres, which were romantic in tone but lacked the disturbance of monsters and horror. Mary Shelley, the Mother of the Monster, was rumored to have a “masculine mind,” a statement that prefigures McLuhan’s theoretical extensions of man, which locates the male intellectual quality of technology in an implicitly female body.^[87] For similar reasons, under her masculine pen name Ellis Bell, Emily Brontë was characterized by her contemporaries as a “brutal” man of “uncommon talents,” but after her identity became known, she was seen as androgynous and off-putting.^[88] The masculine qualities perceived in Frankenstein and in Mary Shelley herself have been an area of critical and scholarly attention for as long as the book has been in print. In her time, Shelley was often asked, “How I, then a young girl, came to think of, and dilate upon, so very hideous an idea?”^[89] Criticism of the Female Gothic genre’s unfemininity runs so deep that it digs out space for an entire body of Frankensteinian conspiracy: that Percy Bysshe Shelley is the true author, a notion which Mellor calls “explicitly sexist, since it implies that Mary Shelley could not have created her story alone.”^[90] Women were meant to occupy a textual landscape that was without the possibility of rebellion or critique; women were meant to defer to the authority of men, not possess qualities deemed masculine for themselves.

           To characterize a nineteenth-century woman writer’s Gothic story as female or feminine challenges limiting notions of femininity that still find nourishment in the cultural medium of English literature today. To deride a woman’s writing as too masculine or too feminine makes her strange and other, and forecloses possibilities. On the other hand, for a woman writer to explore her own strangeness and the aesthetics of sex for herself, and share those experiences with the world, opens new possibilities and spaces of textual discovery. Jackson’s novel exemplifies this challenge to convention and shift in possibilities by directly conversing with Shelley’s Frankenstein and playing with the sex of the Monster through apparitions of both Jackson’s and Shelley’s authorship. These spectres of authorship interact with each other from within the architectural apparatus of the house and the metaphor of the female body.

           My feminist philosophy of the virtual text avoids essentializing and stereotyping females or femininity, and instead expounds upon women’s individual and collective thoughts and experiences. I have cast the web as a metaphor for both virtual environments and female authorship, analyzed historically rooted themes of the house and the female body in English literature written by women, explored how those themes take shape in textual and technological theories, and traced how these themes manifest in women’s writing today. The house has historically confined the female subject to a highly mediated connection with the world, but today, the house is home to the World Wide Web and its virtual texts, a vast and readily available social and discursive space at our fingertips.^[91] The web is not just a metaphor for the Internet, but also reappropriates a historical metaphor intended to denigrate the relationship between women and technology—a metaphor that emerged from fundamentally male-centric anxieties about power and control. As a set of creative constraints for thinking about specific texts, this flaysome web analyzes the history of power dynamics between men and women who occupy technological spaces, while proposing an uncoupling of power from the binary quality of gendered metaphors that continue to haunt the book. As the world becomes increasingly engaged with computer-generated virtuality, new possibilities for hybridity and exchange between author, editor, archivist, and reader are opened, and the flow of power between physical and virtual environments is reprogrammed to allow “monstrous and illegitimate” cyborg dreams to arise.^[92] Women may choose to be linked together by this great chain of events or refuse to be bound by it, forging instead their own web of creative multiverses.

Notes

Biography