56 pages • 1 hour read
Alasdair GrayPoor Things
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1992A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
Women’s Roles in Victorian Society
Content Warning: This section discusses colonial violence and non-consensual medical experimentation.
Poor Things is a story about the roles that white women were expected to fulfill in Victorian Britain. Those roles were different for lower-class and upper-class white women. Upper-class women like Victoria were expected to be relatively uneducated and wholly dependent on their fathers and husbands. They were not expected to have sexual desires of their own, and they needed to remain virgins until marriage, after which point they were meant to remain perpetually sexually available to their husbands and to no one else. They were expected to bear children, but also to keep the more visceral details of pregnancy secret from men. Lower-class women, on the other hand, were likewise expected to be uneducated, but were seen as useful outlets for men’s sexual desires. Because of their lack of social power, lower-class women were not typically able to refuse sexual advances, and men were at liberty to disregard those women and any unwanted children that resulted from sexual encounters with them.
Ultimately, as Victoria explains, these two roles were not actually all that different. All women, regardless of class, were meant to be subservient to and sexually available to men, without regard for their own desires and needs. None were generally able to become independent, fully autonomous adults. McCandless’s narrative about Bella Baxter takes these expectations to an extreme. When women were not well-educated, they grew up to be sheltered, naïve adults. By depicting Bella as having the literal brain of a child, McCandless heightens (and eroticizes) the pre-existing power differential between Victorian men and women. McCandless’s depiction of Godwin blurs the lines between a father figure and a husband, which replicates Victorian sensibilities about marriage being effectively a transfer of property: Prior to marriage, a woman belonged to her father; after marriage, when her name changed, she belonged to her husband.
McCandless’s narrative does not suggest that radical change is needed in Victorian gender politics. While Bella does gain her own understanding of the world and does have a career, she is still happy to marry McCandless, who then gets to possess her. Victoria, on the other hand, presents herself as having chosen to marry McCandless for her own convenience, making a decision based on her nuanced understanding of social norms. She argues that education, independence, and solidarity among women are all needed if the world is to improve, and she puts those ideals into practice. Although Poor Things is set in the Victorian era, it was written in the early 1990s, and many of the points it makes about gender dynamics are still relevant in the modern world.
Medical Progress and Politics
The 19th century was a time of major change in the medical field. There were rapid advances in germ theory, vaccination, contraception, and anesthesia. It was also a time when people started to imagine the possibilities that the future of medicine might hold: Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (See: Background) was inspired in part by experiments using electricity to stimulate muscle contractions in dead animals. These advances in medicine were heavily politicized in Victorian society, just as medicine remains political today. Some medical progress was linked to women’s rights, especially gynecology, contraception, abortion, and obstetrics. Medicine was also connected to class differences: As Godwin argued, many medical issues in Victorian Britain were exacerbated by unsafe housing and poor living conditions for the working class.
Poor Things is a deeply political book that explores several political perspectives. Some characters, including Hooker, Astley, and to a lesser extent McCandless, are invested in upholding the status quo. They live comfortable lives that are predicated on the suffering of both the lower classes in Britain and America, and the exploitation of colonized people across the British Empire and beyond. Astley in particular believes that any attempt to change the status quo or to improve life for the oppressed people of the world is not just pointless and naïve, but actively bad: Imperialism and colonialism are good because they “civilize” everyone who is not part of what Astley considers the “Anglo-Saxon” race. Despite Astley and Hooker’s attempts to persuade Bella of their political perspectives, she rejects them and becomes a socialist instead.
Bella has a strong desire to improve the world because of her political beliefs. She decides that the best way for her to reach that goal is through medicine. She recognizes the political potential in the medical field, particularly for women. Medicine and socialism are intricately intertwined in Poor Things. They are both ways for all oppressed people to improve their lives and to stand in solidarity with one another. When Victoria writes controversial pamphlets advocating for socialism and medical progress, reviewers weaponize misogyny against her. The fictional Gray does the same thing by providing critical reviews of her work while omitting her actual arguments.
Like the gender roles explored in Poor Things, medical progress and politics are still crucial and interconnected phenomena in the modern day. Access to medical care, especially reproductive healthcare, is still a major feminist issue around the world. It remains true that improving people’s living conditions is a good way to alleviate suffering and to reduce the need for medical interventions.
The Problems of Narrative and Perspective
As a postmodern novel, Poor Things eschews a traditional narrative structure. Instead of telling a story from beginning to end, the book employs multiple narrators and frame stories that muddy the waters of what is true and what is false. The entire text is presented by the fictionalized Gray. Though he claims not to have edited the wording of the text, that claim is dubious as he says the original manuscript has been lost. Donnelly’s objections are noted, but his perspective is never offered directly. Within Gray’s framing, McCandless offers his version of events. Within McCandless’s telling, Duncan and Bella both describe their own experiences, but their thoughts are mediated through Godwin’s narration, McCandless’s transcription, and Gray’s editing, consistently raising and exploring the problems of narrative and perspective.
At the end of the book, Victoria’s letter offers her alternative version of events, though Gray’s influence is felt even in this supposedly more objective and plausible narrative. His footnotes sometimes contradict Victoria’s assertions about her own life. Each character who attempts to control the narrative has their own bias and agenda in the story. Part of the project of postmodern literature is that readers have to take a more active role in interpreting the events of the story. There is never a definitive answer about which narrative is the true one; the ambiguity in the text is part of the point of the work. Each character has a unique social and political perspective that informs both their understanding of what really happened and their motivation for talking about the story’s events.
According to McCandless’s own assertions, his motivation is to tell a true and extraordinary story about a medical marvel. Per Victoria’s interpretation, McCandless wanted to console himself and assuage his feelings of inferiority in light of her independence and more successful career. Similarly, Donnelly is a historian who wants to be clear on the difference between fact and fiction, while Gray is a writer who is inspired by the extraordinary events McCandless describes, wanting to present them as truth.
These attempts at control tie into gendered and class-based power differentials among the characters. None of the male characters in the story (including Gray) is comfortable with Victoria being open about her own life; all of them want control over the narrative, and they employ various narrative and editorial strategies to maintain that control, which in turn emphasizes the fact that there can be many different versions and interpretations of the same story.
