"Stitch Bitch"

After my initial read of "Stitch Bitch" I didn't know what to make of it. I was confused to say the least. But after class today I think I'm finally beginning to grasp what Shelley Jackson is writing about. When I originally read "Stitch Bitch" I missed the whole reference to Frankenstein. And now that I know that crucial allusion, the rest of what Shelley Jackson writes is much clearer. This may not be the point Jackson is intending to make, but this is what I interpreted from it. The title "Stitch Bitch" is referring to the making of Frankenstein. That's an obvious one. Frankenstein was sewn together out of different body parts. But that metaphor of the body is a reoccurring metaphor in Jackson's piece. She compares the human body to writing, to hypertext. "But hypertext provides a body, a vaporous sort of insufficiently tactile body but a body, for our experience of the beauty of relationships." Frankenstein was made up of body parts from other people all sewn together to create this monster. Writing is a sewn together body in a way, each limb representing an influence from someone else. Plagiarism. The works of one writer influences another, and this is done so much more now that we are writing in the digital age, in hypertext. The writer didn't produce their works from only their own thoughts, it's impossible. The writings were produced from a sewn together body, a stitched bitch perhaps? But Shelley Jackson doesn't mean "bitch" in a negative way. It's simply a literal meaning. She intends to say that it is a good thing to be a sewn together body, composed of other writers' works. Frankenstein was a monster, but Shelley Jackson ultimately concludes by writing:
"A beaker of imaginal secretions makes us all desire's monsters, which is what we ought to be."