This is a charmingly bizarre feminist version of Frankenstein which begins in Victorian Glasgow.
It’s Gothic metafiction
Gray delights to play with literary form.
For example, in his earlier novel Lanark, Book 3 comes at the start, and in the Epilogue, placed within Book 4, there is a discussion about the plot between the author and the protagonist, there are footnotes, and there is an 'Index of Plagiarisms' directing the reader's attention to the literary sources of the novel.
Poor Things starts with an Introduction by the author in which he defends the truth of the subsequent material with ‘Michael Donnelly’, who considers it fiction. The bulk of the book consists of a narrative by McCandless which incorporates source material such as Wedderburn’s confessions and Bella’s letters, followed by a testament by Victoria McCandless which contradicts the story by McCandless, followed by chapter notes and a critical evaluation by the author. As well as the main sections of the book, many of the details, such as Baxter’s physical appearance, are introduced to the reader in a piecemeal way. Thus any such story as the reader can find has been put together from sometimes contradictory parts, which seems to be a metaliterary version of the Frankenstein story.
It’s a modern, and feminist, version of Frankenstein
The bulk of the narrative, by McCandless, tells us that Bella has been created by super-surgeon Baxter from the body of a drowned woman and the brain of her unborn baby.
Dr Godwin Bysshe Baxter is known to Bella, his creation, as God. The Bysshe was part of Shelley's name and Shelley was the husband of Mary Shelley nee Wolstonecraft who wrote Frankenstein.
The twist is that Bella is beautiful (though Godwin is incredibly ugly) and that Bella has a strong lustful desire for a sexual partner (as Frankenstein's monster wanted a partner).
Bella emerges as an intelligent woman with a strong character. She has an almost insatiable desire for cuddles and sometimes for wedding (her name for sex) and this is interpreted by the men around her as nymphomania to the extent that one of them wants her to have a clitoridectomy. Apart from Bella, a housekeeper and the madam of a French brothel, almost all the people around her are men and, apart from God(win) who wants to empower her with free will, they all want to control her, usually by marrying her.
Bella is a young mind in a mature body, much like a typical adolescent, and her early adventures in the world involve enjoyment, often sexual. But an encounter with abject poverty makes her, like the Buddha, renounce her pleasure-seeking life and seek to serve people. Her later life, as Victoria, is as a socialist doctor and controversial pioneer of birth control.
It’s Gothic metafiction
Gray delights to play with literary form.
For example, in his earlier novel Lanark, Book 3 comes at the start, and in the Epilogue, placed within Book 4, there is a discussion about the plot between the author and the protagonist, there are footnotes, and there is an 'Index of Plagiarisms' directing the reader's attention to the literary sources of the novel.
Poor Things starts with an Introduction by the author in which he defends the truth of the subsequent material with ‘Michael Donnelly’, who considers it fiction. The bulk of the book consists of a narrative by McCandless which incorporates source material such as Wedderburn’s confessions and Bella’s letters, followed by a testament by Victoria McCandless which contradicts the story by McCandless, followed by chapter notes and a critical evaluation by the author. As well as the main sections of the book, many of the details, such as Baxter’s physical appearance, are introduced to the reader in a piecemeal way. Thus any such story as the reader can find has been put together from sometimes contradictory parts, which seems to be a metaliterary version of the Frankenstein story.
It’s a modern, and feminist, version of Frankenstein
The bulk of the narrative, by McCandless, tells us that Bella has been created by super-surgeon Baxter from the body of a drowned woman and the brain of her unborn baby.
Dr Godwin Bysshe Baxter is known to Bella, his creation, as God. The Bysshe was part of Shelley's name and Shelley was the husband of Mary Shelley nee Wolstonecraft who wrote Frankenstein.
The twist is that Bella is beautiful (though Godwin is incredibly ugly) and that Bella has a strong lustful desire for a sexual partner (as Frankenstein's monster wanted a partner).
Bella emerges as an intelligent woman with a strong character. She has an almost insatiable desire for cuddles and sometimes for wedding (her name for sex) and this is interpreted by the men around her as nymphomania to the extent that one of them wants her to have a clitoridectomy. Apart from Bella, a housekeeper and the madam of a French brothel, almost all the people around her are men and, apart from God(win) who wants to empower her with free will, they all want to control her, usually by marrying her.
Bella is a young mind in a mature body, much like a typical adolescent, and her early adventures in the world involve enjoyment, often sexual. But an encounter with abject poverty makes her, like the Buddha, renounce her pleasure-seeking life and seek to serve people. Her later life, as Victoria, is as a socialist doctor and controversial pioneer of birth control.
One of the delights of the book is the way it shows Bella maturing through her dialogue. Here is an example of her childish talk: “Sit on that bench, God. I am taking Candle for a walk saunter stroll dawdle trot canter short gallop and circum-ambu-lation. Poor old God. Without Bella you will grow glum glummer glummest until just when you think I am forever lost crash bang wallop, out I pop from behind that holly bush.” (Episodes 7)
The film
Poor Things has been turned into a film of the same name. Although some things had to be changed (we see Baxter all at once, for example) and the film delights in adding steam-punk settings in discordant technicolour after the initial, mostly black and white, part set in Glasgow, the fundamentals of the story are maintained. It isn’t metacinematic, though.
Selected Quotes:
March 2024, 317 pages
The film
Poor Things has been turned into a film of the same name. Although some things had to be changed (we see Baxter all at once, for example) and the film delights in adding steam-punk settings in discordant technicolour after the initial, mostly black and white, part set in Glasgow, the fundamentals of the story are maintained. It isn’t metacinematic, though.
Selected Quotes:
- “Morbid anatomy is essential to training and research, but leads many doctors into thinking that life is an agitation in something essentially dead. ... But a portrait painter does not learn his art by scraping layers of varnish from a Rembrandt, then slicing off the impasto, dissolving the ground and finally separating the fibres of the canvas.” (Episodes 2)
- “The big dogs lay somnolent on a hearth-rug, their chin's cushioned on each other's flanks. Three cats sat as far apart as possible on the backs of the highest chairs, each pretending not to see the rest but all twitching if one of them moved.” (Episodes 4)
- “Bed bugs too must have their unique visions of the world.” (Making a Conscience 14)
- “Punch says only lazy people are out of work so the very poorest must enjoy being poor. They also have the consolation of being comic.” (Episodes 15)
- “Natives ... are people who live on the soil where they were born, and do not want to leave it. Not many English can be regarded as natives because we have a romantic preference for other people's soils.” (Episodes 15)
- “Prosperous parents tell their children that nobody should lie, steal or kill, and that idleness and gambling are vices. They then send them to schools where they suffer if they do not disguise their thoughts and feelings and are taught to admire killers and stealers like Achilles and Ulysses, William the Conqueror and Henry the Eighth. This prepares them for life in a land where rich people use acts of parliament to deprive the poor of homes and livelihoods.” (Episodes 16)
- “He told me that a clean, unexpected flesh wound, however painful, was a flea bite to one who had been educated at Eton.” (Episodes 17)
- In Chapter 17 the madam of the Notre-Dame (a brothel) tells apprentice prostitute Bella: “This Wedderburn is obviously an oversucked orange. You will be a far better wife to your husband if you now enjoy some variety.” But in chapter eighteen, Bella contradicts this: “I will not be a better wife because of the variety enjoyed in the Notre-Dame, unless it pleases him to see me lying flat murmuring ‘Formidable’ in a variety of astonished tones.”
- “I hate military training, of course. The sight of young men marching in regular rows, each imitating the stiff movements of a clockwork doll while their movements are controlled by a single screaming sergeant - that sight sickens me even more than the sight of young women in a musical-hall chorus-row, kicking up their heels in unison.” (A Letter to Posterity) Not sure here about the repetitions of both ‘movements’ and ‘row’.
- She also hates “sham-gothic” structures such as St Pancras Station: because “Their useless over-ornamentation was paid for out of needlessly high profits: profits squeezed from the stunted lives of children, women and men working twelve hours a day, six days a week in needlessly filthy factories.” (A Letter to Posterity)
March 2024, 317 pages
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