Stitching the Body and Self: Shelley Jackson’s Half Life

Abstract

The paper analyzes the quest for identity – sexual, minority, human in general –through the study of the grotesque versus the normative body in the dystopic state of a probable ground zero. Shelley Jackson’s novel Half Life concocts a world in which ‘twofers’ – conjoined or “Siamese” twins – are a politicized minority. Her vision of the future, which despite being firmly grounded in naturalistic description, represents a surreal post-apocalyptic one, is written on and through the body, as always in her print and cybertexts. By exploring both sympathetically and sarcastically various minority cultures as the women’s movement, the gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender movements, Jackson creates a postmodern parable of the quest for identity, where the body is an unmanageable amorphous text, seeking for a ‘cohesive device’ to help define it and hold it together. The multiplicity and disunity of self and body is both metaphorically and literally represented in the book through the strange world of dolls, freaks, automata, prosthetic body parts. The monstrous and deformed is used to challenge the understanding of normativity, of the fluid boundary between ‘us’ and ‘them’.