shut

silence
	sii-lence
			silence

Everyone’s always talking about the silence that women have been forced to endure – they also say that it’s getting better, but somehow that sounds like something my freshmen would say, attempting to make the world today seem all good.
So the silence remains.
perhaps, perhaps, perhaps		Is silence simply nothing, simply empty space? Void? Hole or Whole? Nothing is being spoken, so perhaps nothing is there . . . a frozen tundra of Victor Frankenstein where life and movement and speech do not exist? Or perhaps its emptiness is only an optical illusion?
This silence represents what patriarchal society would necessarily prohibit "getting around" as it were. These women-mothers, the silent substratum that Irigaray speaks of definitely seem to be silent – "Their properties are our exile. Their enclosures, the death of our love. Their words the gag upon our lips" (This Sex 212) . Yet, Lefebvre notes that the conception of space must include notions of "production and the act of producing" so that empty space does not exist before it is full – emptiness has some sort of volume for being marked as empty (15).			a black (w)hole (from www.corbis.com)
whose steps are they?			Silence therefore has speech, has writing, within it – waiting for listeners:
			For the listener, who listens in the snow And, nothing himself, beholds Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is. (Stevens 13-15)
Jackson’s Patchwork Girl requires her reader to listen to that silence and pay attention to the gaps by making the very nature of gaps and silences the thematic subject and central protagonist of the hypertext novel. Upon entering Patchwork Girl, the structure of the novel shocks the traditional book reader with its silence. The novel is not simply a typical book put on computer, but a new sort of writing that disturbs the normality of reading as based on books. Empty space on the screen becomes not merely the way the publisher made the margins and spacing, but Jackson’s conscious decision to use both the space inside the box and the empty space outside. When reading textboxes like "now" in the "body of text" section, the reader cannot ignore the silence, the lack of text, in boxes that move across the screen and contain only one sentence and then two words:			"her" from Shelley Jackson's Patchwork Girl

		both text boxes from Shelley Jackson's Patchwork Girl
fall into the gap from www.gap.com		Not only is the actual content of the textboxes important as with a print novel’s text, but the placement of the boxes within the space of the computer screen moves the reader’s eye across the screen and draws attention to the diminishing "full" space and increasing "empty" space. In the textual environment of Patchwork, silence becomes as much a part of the text as the words themselves. The work of patching together the pieces of text leaves its traces both in the stitches that link those pieces and the gaps that always exist between the stitches. These silences as the thematic subject of the novel through the gap-ness of the text’s form plays on (quite literally, materially of course) the fragmentary form of Patchwork Girl, the hypertext novel, and Patchwork Girl, the main voice of the novel. As Barbara Page notes regarding much women’s hypertextual writing:
the introduction of silence, partly as a memorial to the historical silencing of women’s voices, but also as means of establishing a textual space for women’s voices, but also as establishing a textual space for the entrance of those "others" chronically excluded from the closed texts of dogmatists and power interests. (113)
"hercut" from the "crazy quilt" section of Shelley Jackson's Patchwork Girl			This silence is full of the Other that a unitary self must remain separate from in order to maintain its dignified integrity. Thus the maintenance of textual silence’s emptiness reinforces the originality and distinctness of the text. However, for Jackson, to pretend that silence is empty is an attempt to deny that "texts are like bodies, but bodies are like texts, too. They aren’t simple, self-evident things, they’re composed" ("Stitch Bitch: The Hypertext Author"). Hence the patchwork girl titles her attempt at single body, a single subjectivity, "misconception":

Now, I believed as one should in the principle of identity, of noncontradiction, of unity. All the people I caught myself being instead of me, my unnameables, my monsters, my hybrids, I exhorted them to silence. But the ‘stubborn matter of the Foetus’ assumed the literal shape of concealed passions . . . A hideous monster with calf's head and hooves, or that other dreadful person—the girl who is all patches—emerge from unsuitable sights and mixed fantasies.
title page from Frank L. Baum's The Patchwork Girl of Oz			Attempting to create an identity that is only the true self requires the silencing of the self’s multiple nature and, for this scrap girl in particular, the body. And because Jackson closely aligns the body of the patchwork girl with the body of the text, then the text must also silence its other selves, its relationship to texts that have come before and texts that will come after. Yet, the silence that the patchwork girl attempts to create is always full – full of mouths shut, but with cheeks full of words that are waiting to burst out. Silence is always pregnant, always waiting to give birth to a foetus of "concealed passions" (PG "misconception"). Here, there is space for the writer to shed to role of God of the text and enjoy that "I was not one person and there is more than one way to write this. I wish there were a way to show that every latest word I write has space for anything after it. Everything could have been different and already is" (PG "a life").
Works Cited for shut