Ward, Lynd. Prologue heading vignette. Frankenstein; or, a Modern Prometheus. Written by Mary Shelley, Illustrated by Lynd Ward. New York, Harrison Smith and Robert Haas, 1934. Access provided by UCLA Library Special Collections.
Last Updated March 17, 2024
Over two centuries after its initial publication, Frankenstein lives on in the cultural imagination. In writing about a creator who brought his creation to life, Mary Shelley imbued her own with an animacy that has outlived her. The 1818 novel’s afterlife is just as, if not more, culturally relevant than its original form. Take, for instance, the endless comedic invocations of the stumbling, moaning creature popularized in James Whale’s 1931 film or the steady stream of media that relies on Frankenstein’s framework to speak to a particular experience or a particular audience (e.g., the queer classic Rocky Horror Picture Show or 2024’s Lisa Frankenstein, a self-described “coming of RAGE” film seeking to entice lovers of the Tumblr “sad girl” and 1980s dark comedies like Heathers). Frankenstein has also galvanized the literary scene. In discussing the relationship between these newer works and their foundational text, it is useful to consider the term “hypertext,” which French literary theorist Gérard Genette classifies as a text that lends from and transforms the earlier text that it is “grafted” upon. In short, a hypertext is a new creation whose meaning is enhanced by its relationship with a foundational text, as opposed to the meaning created by other types of transtextual relationships, such as the relationship between a text and an inserted quotation or between chapter titles and the content that follows. As Frankenstein’s form explored structural innovation, with a narrative that unfolds in layers of epistolary and oral storytelling, it has also spurred hypertexts formally concerned with new narrative inventions. Two of these works are the wood engravings by Lynd Ward published in the 1934 illustrated edition of Frankenstein and Shelley Jackson’s hypertext novel Patchwork Girl published in 1995. (“Hypertext” here is not referencing Genette’s use of the word, but instead denotes a piece of hyperlink-filled electronic literature popular in the 1990s that challenged the formal and material aspects of the traditional novel.)
Ward, Lynd. Slipcase. Frankenstein; or, a Modern Prometheus. Written by Mary Shelley, Illustrated by Lynd Ward. New York, Harrison Smith and Robert Haas, 1934. Access provided by UCLA Library Special Collections.
In this paper, I will seek to prove that Ward’s work in Shelley’s Frankenstein is a hypertext, even though Genette’s definition does not include visual narrative as part of hypertextuality. In fact, Genette essentially relegates illustration as having as much impact on the reading experience as a blurb, epigraph, or cover. Patchwork Girl, then, becomes a key part of my argument, as the genre-breaking multimedia work serves as a stepping stone between traditional narrative and new forms that spur different interactions between the reader and the work. While Ward’s wood engravings are part of an illustrated edition, they are not simply ornamentation for a classic of the literary canon. They are subversive in their content and their form. Moving forward, I will use “reader” to denote one reading written language and “viewer” to denote one viewing an image for clarity’s sake, but it is crucial to remember Ward’s wood engravings can be read, and that the reading experience is vital to how these two texts eclipse conventional genres while also being in dialogue with literary tradition.
Illustrated editions are typically published as fodder for—or at least end up being consumed by—collectors and the literary elite. Issued by entities like the Limited Editions Club (which Ward also worked with for a 1959 illustrated edition of Joseph Conrad’s Lord Jim), reprints of literary classics featuring illustrations by big names from the fine arts world dripped with exclusivity, and their high price point was based entirely on limiting access to this union of two forms of “high art,” as typically only one to two thousand copies were printed. Ward’s wood engravings, though, talk back to this idea of readership and expectations. Frankenstein was not initially received as the literary masterpiece it is recognized as today, particularly because of how the figure of the creature evoked feelings of fear, horror, and disgust in the reader’s body. Similarly to how illustrations are seen as being in conversation with the novel that surrounds them, Ward’s engravings speak to returning Frankenstein readers by focusing on the creature’s body, gratifying the voyeuristic desire of the public (i.e., what launched the onslaught of filmic and theatrical versions of Frankenstein, as they provided what Shelley’s novel did not and could not: the visual, carnal satisfaction granted by displays of the creature’s physicality, often at the expense of the eloquence and existentialism on which Shelley focused). Ward’s engravings center sensuality, with the creature’s body elongated to best highlight the curves and musculature. With this depiction, as it moves beyond the grotesque, comes an undercurrent of the erotic, and the question of sexuality and homoeroticism arises.
One of the most overtly homoerotic plates in the 1934 edition, a full-frontal view of the creature as he stands at the edge of Victor’s bed, is also a prime example of how Ward’s engravings transcend mere image and become hypertext through their framing. The plate frames the creature in a particular way—naked, towering—and so frames the creature’s body as imposing, since readers expect the creature to be a site of fear and awe. But framing is also at work in the sense of the literary framing device, as viewers are seemingly viewing the creature through Victor’s eyes. There is no visual evidence of Victor in the frame, though, and so viewers are left to contemplate what his absence means, especially in the face of their own desire for the creature’s body. This ambiguity of perspective is a particularly rich site for analyzing how Ward’s work speaks to readers’ voyeuristic expectations by creating a reading experience that makes readers aware of what they are reading. Moreover, the literal frame—the rough edge—of the plate calls attention to the book’s materiality, as readers are forced to consider the material dimension of the image they are consuming, further drawing attention to the realm of the physical and the world outside of Shelley’s novel.
Ward, Lynd. Plate opposite of p. 54. Frankenstein; or, a Modern Prometheus. Written by Mary Shelley, Illustrated by Lynd Ward. New York, Harrison Smith and Robert Haas, 1934. Access provided by Library Special Collections.
Patchwork Girl is similarly engaged with self-awareness and metacommentary on the form and content of the hypertext novel. Eun Kyung Min’s “Reframing Frankenstein: A Narratological Study of Shelley Jackson’s Patchwork Girl” is a key touchstone for my paper, as it opens up one angle into how Patchwork Girl functions. For those unfamiliar with Patchwork Girl, I recommend reading pages 62-68 of her article for a breakdown of the initial reading experience. The novel, written “by Mary/Shelley, & Herself,” is split into five parts: a graveyard, a journal, a quilt, a story, and broken accents. Each is accompanied by a preceding image. With one exception, these images are variations on the image paired with the title page: “her.” These “hercuts” show the body of her, the patchwork girl, in pieces, sliced and rearranged. She is also unclothed, and so her constant dis- and re-assembly challenges the traditional male gaze upon the female body—not to mention how the girl’s existence fundamentally challenges conceptions of biological sex. These images of “her” complicate our encounters with the patchwork girl’s body, just as the lesbian love affair that occurs between the girl and her creator, Mary Shelley, complicates the relationship between creator and creation. Mary Shelley and the patchwork girl’s encounters are a central part of Patchwork Girl’s narrative, but its form is also complicated in its interconnected webs and rabbit holes of hypertext. The two sections “journal” and “story” are narrated by Mary Shelley and the girl, respectively, and have dizzying points of intersection and divergence.
Jackson, Shelley. “her.” Patchwork Girl; or, a Modern Monster. Eastgate Systems, 1995.
To Min, Patchwork Girl uses framing devices, such as the various narrators and fragmented-yet-connected hypertext windows, as a reference to and movement beyond the framing devices Shelley uses in Frankenstein—making frames a key way Patchwork Girl is a hypertext, as it builds off of its hypotext to create something new. And Patchwork Girl is strikingly new, making its status as a hypertext feel more plausible than Ward’s engravings, which, as illustrations, fall more neatly in novelistic tradition. However, I would like to argue that they are both hypertexts in their own right, particularly in how they use framing devices to transform the hypotext and create innovative and reflective reading experiences, as evidenced in this essay by how they frame the relationships between creator (Ward’s Victor Frankenstein and Jackson’s Mary Shelley) and creation (the creature and the patchwork girl) as queer relationships fixated on ****the body of the creation.
Though Jackson’s work is a hypertext novel in the electronic sense, it is also, according to French literary theorist Gérard Genette, a hypertext interacting with its hypotext, Frankenstein. To Genette, hypertextuality is “any relationship uniting a text B (which I shall call the hypertext) to an earlier text A (I shall, of course, call it the hypotext), upon which it is grafted in a manner that is not that of commentary” (Genette 5, emphasis original). “Commentary,” here, indicates a lack of transformation; commentary adds onto the existing conversation, whereas a hypertext transforms the hypotext into something new and distinct. He dissects his ideas on hypertextuality in his 1982 book fittingly titled Palimpsests: Literature in the Second Degree.
Hypertextuality is Genette’s fifth, most complex, and most cumulative relationship under the umbrella of transtextuality, which he defines as “the textual transcendence of text” or “‘all that sets the text in a relationship, whether obvious or concealed, with other texts’” (Palimpsests 1). As Genette considers illustration as the second type (i.e., the second least complicated) of transtextual relationship, paratext, my inclusion of Ward’s illustrations push my use of these terms beyond Genette’s original definitions.
He says paratexts—including titles, subtitles, prefaces, forewards, epigraphs, marginal notes, blurbs, book covers, dust jackets, and more—“provide the text with a (variable) setting and sometimes a commentary, official or not, which even the purists among readers, those least inclined to external erudition, cannot always disregard as easily as they would like and as they claim to do” (Palimpsests 3). In a later book devoted to paratext, called Paratext, Genette confesses to not devoting any of Paratexts’ pages to discussing three types of paratexts, including “the immense continent” of illustration. He acknowledges its long history and “its value as commentary”—commentary being defined by Genette as metatextuality, the third level of transtextual relationship (Palimpsests 4)—concluding that analyzing illustration’s role in transtextuality “exceeds the means of a plain ‘literary person’” (Paratexts 406). While writing about illustration at the same level as Genette would require an intense historical and practical fine arts background, such limiting language on readership further promotes the idea that illustrated editions are for the upper echelons of literate society, even though illustration, as a visual medium, initially provides more access than the written word considering its transcendence of language. One does not have to know English or be familiar with Shelley’s early nineteenth century literary style in order to read Ward’s illustrations. Moreover, Ward built his career as a creator of wordless novels, and so his work contains a narrative dimension that can stand alone from written language. His visual language invites readers of all backgrounds to engage critically with his work, regardless of status or background.
Ward, Lynd. Cover. Frankenstein; or, a Modern Prometheus. Written by Mary Shelley, Illustrated by Lynd Ward. New York, Harrison Smith and Robert Haas, 1934. Access provided by UCLA Library Special Collections.
The “Hypertext” Novel
In terms of the hypertext novel, the term “hypertext” refers to “a way of joining a word or image to another page, document, etc. on the internet or in another computer program so that you can move from one to the other easily” (Merriam Webster). This navigation occurs primarily through clicking hyperlinks, or web addresses attached to words and images. This is a fairly simple concept for our technological modern world, and we are accustomed to seeing hyperlinks in our emails, Instagram stories, and online news articles. But back in 1987, with the launch of Massachusetts developer Eastgate Systems’ new software, Storyspace, hypertext was revolutionizing the novel (Barnet).
This is how Jackson’s Patchwork Girl, created in Storyspace, works. One navigates the novel primarily by clicking. The right side of the screen resembles a page. These hypertext “pages” are referred to as lexia, and can display text or visuals. One can click anywhere in that lexia’s space or on the occasional text highlighted in blue (the hue invoking the popular way to display hyperlinked text) to move through the novel. On the left side of the screen is a visual map of how these lexia are connected. It appears in flowchart form, with clicks within a lexia typically corresponding to the path of arrows drawn on the left side of the screen. Often, though, this flow is disrupted when, inevitably, clicking on a lexia opens up an entirely new flowchart and many new lexia to be explored. It is incredibly disorienting, as the reader has no sense of where they are in the text. “How much of the narrative is left?,” the reader wonders. “Will I get to open all the sections of this flowchart, or will I be redirected away completely, having to retrace my steps after the seemingly arbitrary moment the text boots me back to the “outline” screen?”