Frankenstein in the Digital Age: Shelley Jackson’s Patchwork Girl and Dave Morris’ Frankenstein Interactive

Abstract

In the age of digital art, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley’s Frankenstein has undergone a surprising transformation. This article analyses two hypermedia literary spinoffs of the novel: Shelley Jackson’s Patchwork Girl (1995) and Dave Morris’s interactive application for Mac iOS Frankenstein (2012-2017). How do these forms of digital art revolutionize more traditional forms of adaptation or illustration? Can the novel survive the transformation or does digital art overwrite the nineteenth-century traditional genre of the Gothic novel? This contribution will try to explore whether the new media enhance readers’ understanding of Mary Shelley’s novel or whether they rewrite it as a new digital palimpsest that can be considered a “digital translation” of the original text.