Poor Things

Archibald McCandless is a medical student, later a doctor, and Bella/Victoria’s husband. He is the main narrator of Poor Things. Like many of the characters, McCandless provides unreliable narration. He has a very specific agenda in telling this story.

McCandless portrays himself as a humble, sensitive, and hard-working gentleman who never hurts Bella, even though her actions make him uncomfortable. McCandless is attracted to Bella in large part because of her childlike perspective, even though he condemns Godwin for the same attraction. At the end of McCandless’s narrative, he portrays himself as Bella’s loving husband and as the only one able to truly accept her for who she is. McCandless sees himself as a success story: He overcame his humble origins and got the opportunity to marry the “ideal” woman as a reward for his social advancement and selfless acceptance of his wife’s affairs with other men.

In Victoria’s letter, McCandless is just as controlling and infantilizing as other men in the narrative. He carries a deep resentment for Victoria because of her upper-class origins, her sexual autonomy, and her successful career. In Victoria’s estimation, McCandless is an unambitious, weak-willed man; she marries him primarily out of convenience. McCandless’s social apathy is also in direct contrast with Victoria’s socialist sensibilities. To McCandless, the fact that he pulled himself out of poverty is enough; he makes no effort to better the lives of other working-class people. McCandless’s politics make him a foil for Victoria, who resists apathy at all costs and wants to improve the world.

McCandless’s hypocrisy is most starkly evident in the way that his version of events contradicts and interacts with Victoria’s. In his version, he is a kind of proto-feminist, willing to love Bella while accepting her autonomy. Victoria’s version is less kind, showing that McCandless never really examined his biases around female sexuality, instead choosing to depict his wife as a monstrous creation instead of a complex individual.

Godwin Baxter is Victoria/Bella’s friend, mentor, and, in McCandless’s narrative, her creator and guardian. McCandless describes Godwin as a tall, hideous man with such a disfigured face and body that he is effectively barred from practicing medicine as most patients are frightened of him. Instead, Godwin practices medicine in free clinics for the poor, in a veterinary clinic, and in his secret experiment: the reanimation of a human body.

Godwin confesses to creating Bella for selfish reasons. Like the Creature in Shelley’s Frankenstein, he yearns for a female companion who will revere, adore, and rely on him. Due to his appearance, no “real” woman will ever desire him. He hopes that Bella will fall in love with him, but she never shows any romantic or sexual interest in him because he treats her like a child. For McCandless, this is a source of some satisfaction. In his narrative, he wins Bella’s love, while Godwin dies a painful death because of his grotesque physiology. By presenting himself as an objective narrator, McCandless hides how satisfying this ending is for him and how it validates his ideas about himself.

The Godwin in Victoria’s version is dramatically different. Godwin is a tall, quiet, but ultimately ordinary man whose quiet wisdom puts those around him at ease. He is the only man she ever truly loves, though he continuously rejects her romantic advances. Godwin did not literally create Victoria, but he did provide her with a thorough education that helped her gain independence. Victoria observes that McCandless seems to be in great awe of Godwin, perhaps even a bit in love with him, but also notes that neither she nor Godwin much liked McCandless. Godwin never introduces McCandless to Mrs. Dinwiddie as his mother; in McCandless’s story, Mrs. Dinwiddie is Godwin’s housekeeper. Victoria clarifies that Godwin only introduces his mother to his true friends.

McCandless’s ignorance of Mrs. Dinwiddie’s true identity is interesting: He is also the son of a rich man and a domestic worker, but the fact that Godwin never introduced them suggests that Godwin did not trust McCandless enough with this information.

Duncan Wedderburn is a lawyer and the man Bella/Victoria elopes with before she marries McCandless. In his letter, related in McCandless’s narrative, Duncan is an unrepentant scoundrel, though McCandless does eventually come to pity him after learning of his nervous breakdown.

Like McCandless, Duncan represents the sexual anxieties of Victorian men. He is unable to desire upper-class women sexually, even though he is only permitted to marry within his social class. Instead, Duncan is attracted to working-class women, believing that “only women who worked with their hands would not find [him] a disgusting creature” (130). When he meets Bella, she is antithetical to the way upper-class women are supposed to be. He desires her because to him, she is the best of both worlds: frank and open in the way working-class women are, but with the beauty, grace, and social status of upper-class women. Duncan is unashamed of his sexual desires, though he is deeply disturbed when Bella has desires of her own.

According to Bella’s narrative, Duncan was an irresponsible gambler that she had to take care of during their months-long journey together. Once he returns to Scotland and gets admitted to an asylum, he all but drops out of the narrative. In Victoria’s letter, she presents a more sympathetic view of Duncan. Instead of being a lecherous lawyer, he is one of Godwin’s friends who attends the theater with Victoria. She says little about their time together, except to note that Duncan wanted to marry her, while she only wanted to have an affair. As with most characters in the narrative, Victoria takes a more nuanced and realistic view than McCandless does; she strips away the melodramatic and gothic elements to present things as she experienced them.

Bella meets several people on her travels with Duncan who influence her worldview. Mr. Astley and Dr. Hooker introduce her to politics and philosophy, though they are open about their desire to make her think like they do. Hooker wants her to learn about the horrors of the world so that she can think like an adult and not a child. To him, this means that she should accept colonialism and suffering as necessary elements of progress. Astley, by contrast, wants Bella to believe that the world is a terrible place full of suffering, but that many people deserve their suffering. As a woman, she can only enact positive change by marrying him, raising his children, and convincing him to be nicer to his tenants. To both men, Bella’s education is not for her but rather leveraged to suit their own agendas. 

Bella also meets a Russian man who tries to help her curb Duncan’s gambling. He is a very minor character who does not understand the difference between Scotland and England, building on the motif of Scottish national identity (See: Symbols & Motifs). She also meets Madame Cronquebil, the manager of the brothel in Paris, who initially seems sympathetic to Bella’s experiences but ultimately takes advantage of her. Finally, Bella meets Toinette, a fellow sex worker at the brothel and a fellow socialist. None of these characters lingers long in the narrative, and Victoria does not mention any of them in her final letter.

Sir Aubrey de la Pole Blessington, or General Blessington, is Victoria’s first husband. He appears at the end of McCandless’s narrative to try to convince Bella to return to England with him. Victoria also describes their relationship in her final letter. She married him so that she could escape her father. While she was sexually attracted to him, he refused to sleep with her, making her feel miserable and frustrated. After Blessington got one of his servants pregnant, Victoria left him and either died by suicide (according to McCandless) or went to stay with Godwin (in her own account).

McCandless depicts Blessington as a bombastic, domineering man. He is an extreme example of Victorian men’s attitudes toward women. He abhors Victoria’s sexuality and thinks her disgusting and monstrous for expressing any kind of sexual desire. Like Duncan, he redirects his own sexual desire onto working-class women, including his young servant and the women at the Paris brothel. When his sexual proclivities are revealed, Blessington is so ashamed and shaken that he dies by suicide.

Victoria’s father, Mr. Hattersley, only sees his daughter as valuable insofar as she can secure an advantageous marriage, so he is not interested in educating her outside that goal. Like Blessington, Hattersley is disgusted by women, using dehumanizing language to describe his daughter’s pregnancy in McCandless’s narrative. In Victoria’s letter, she elaborates on Hattersley’s cruelty during her childhood: He withheld money from his family, keeping them poor for many years and physically abusing his daughter. In both versions of the story, Hattersley disappears from the story after he tries to persuade Bella/Victoria to return to her husband. In McCandless’s narrative, he is accompanied by Dr. Prickett (a physician), Mr. Grimes (a detective), and Mr. Harker (a solicitor) when he and Blessington confront Bella.