Poor Things

“You make that sound like murder, Baxter, but the bodies in our dissecting-rooms have died by accident or natural disease. If you can use their undamaged organs and limbs to mend the bodies of others you will be a greater saviour than Pasteur and Lister—surgeons everywhere will turn a morbid science into immediate, living art!”

McCandless is frustrated by Godwin’s reluctance to use his extraordinary medical knowledge to heal patients who need new organs or limbs. In McCandless’s view, Godwin should use this knowledge not solely to save lives, but to gain fame and academic success. Here, Godwin and McCandless demonstrate very different ideas about the role of Medical Progress and Politics in society.

“So until we lose our worldwide market British medicine will be employed to keep a charitable mask on the face of a heartless plutocracy.”

To Godwin, charity is a facade that obscures the heartless and uncaring nature of British society. Medical Progress and Politics are inextricably linked: The cause of most diseases are known, but to prevent illness, the government would need to enact socialist policies that feed, house, and care for all its citizens. This would cause a loss in profit for capitalists, so the government does little to prevent illness and disease in the first place.

“A bad case of brain damage, Baxter. Only idiots and infants talk like that, are capable of such radiant happiness, such frank glee and friendship on meeting someone new.”

McCandless describes his first impression of Bella as being ultimately validated after he learns how Godwin made her, making himself sound more credible to readers. This is an attempt at disguising The Problems of Narrative and Perspective while also emphasizing his cynicism about how people connect to each other.

“You are the first adult male she has met apart from me, and I saw her sense it through the finger tips. Her response showed that her body was recalling carnal sensations from its earlier life, and the sensations excited her brain into new thoughts and word forms.”

Godwin suggests that Bella’s body retains some of its knowledge about sex and intimacy, even if her brain does not. By including this claim, McCandless seeks to excuse his sexual fantasies about Bella (who is an infant in the body of an adult) while simultaneously condemning Godwin for the same desires.

“You think you are about to possess what men have hopelessly yearned for throughout the ages: the soul of an innocent, trusting, dependent child inside the opulent body of a radiantly lovely woman. I will not allow it, Baxter.”

McCandless is jealous of Godwin, who he feels does not deserve what he believes is a perfect, sufficiently childlike, but still sexual woman. Bella is a product of Women’s Roles in Victorian Society: She was created to be childishly dependent on Godwin while still being an object of sexual desire. McCandless wants such a woman, but he is aware that his desire is perverse, so he gets caught in a limbo of condemning Godwin for the same desires he feels.

“But the patients never see me, so that was no way to win the admiring smile of an Ophelia. But I have nothing to complain about now. Bella’s smile is happier than Ophelia’s was, and makes me happy too.”

No woman can love Godwin because of his frightening appearance. His reference to Ophelia from Shakespeare’s Hamlet suggests that he wants to be loved by a woman he can control, as Ophelia is controlled by the men in her life.

“That is why I must not use force. If I hurt someone she loves her liking for me will turn to fear and distrust and my life will have no purpose.”

Though Godwin has influenced and guided Bella’s life since he remade her, he is cognizant that she is still an independent person with her own desires and wants. If he forbids her from doing something or hurts Duncan, she will not trust him anymore. Even in this telling of events, Godwin has more progressive gender politics than McCandless does.

“By recasting its brain in the mother’s body I shortened her life as deliberately as if I stabbed her to death at the age of forty or fifty, but I took the years off the start, not the ending of her life—a much more vicious thing to do. And I did it for the reason that elderly lechers purchase children from bawds.”

Godwin grapples with the consequences of his decision to save Bella by reanimating her with her infant’s brain. He is haunted by how his greed influenced this decision, reflecting his earlier claim that scientific progress is hampered by the greed and self-interest of doctors and scientists.

“Nature gives children great emotional resilience to help them survive the oppressions of being small, but these oppressions still make them into slightly insane adults, either mad to seize all the power they once lacked or (more usually) mad to avoid it.”

This passage suggests that Godwin has reconciled his guilt over creating Bella. He believes that by combining a baby’s brain with the body of an adult, he has given Bella a unique opportunity to explore the world anew. As Bella has the body of an adult, she can combine her agency and resilience to have her own adventures.

“It is wonderful for a creator to see the offspring live, feel and act independently. I read Genesis three years ago and could not understand God’s displeasure when Eve and Adam chose to know good and evil—chose to be Godlike. That should have been his proudest hour.”

The reference to the story of Genesis sheds light on how Godwin sees his act of creation. In creating Bella, he has become God, though he sees himself as more benevolent than the Christian God because he is able to celebrate his creation’s personal growth. Even if Bella’s choices are not ones he wants her to make, he values her independence and autonomy.

“‘People who care nothing for their country’s stories and songs,’ he said, ‘are like people without a past—without a memory—they are half people.’”

Bella feels like half a person because she cannot remember her own past, so she continually tries to create and understand herself in the present. In this way, Bella is connected to Scottish national identity (See: Symbols & Motifs), which must be understood both through examining what remains of the past and by continually creating identity in the present.

“My guardian looks after sick dogs and cats without being paid so a lost little girl is bound to be safe. What bitter truth were you talking about, Mr. Astley?

Since Bella has learned everything from Godwin, who is kind to her, she does not understand how the world can contain suffering or pain. The moment when she learns the truth about suffering in the world is a major turning point for her character; as Hooker says, it is learning about the world that makes Bella an adult.

“[I]f we do not provide the information she craves it will remain the mind of a precocious infant. You English may prefer to keep your women in that state, but in the American West we want our women to be equal partners.”

Hooker and Astley debate Women’s Roles in Victorian Society. Although Hooker claims that women should be equal to men, he still patronizes Bella. He says that women should be educated, but implicit in that belief is that women’s education should be dictated by men who know better and who can control the flow of information accessible to women.

“This prepares them for life in a land where rich people use acts of parliament to deprive the poor of homes and livelihoods, where unearned incomes are increased by stock-exchange gambling, where those who own most property work least and amuse themselves by hunting, horse-racing and leading their country into battle.”

Astley reveals to Bella how the world works and teaches her that rich people gain wealth through exploitation of the poor. Astley does not, however, view this as a bad thing; it is childish to believe that all people in the world could or should enjoy a good standard of living. The bloody, imperialist status quo of the Victorian era, in Astley’s view, is good and acceptable; Bella decides that she disagrees.

“And while they spoke I clenched my teeth and fists to stop them biting and scratching these clever men who want no care for the helpless sick small, who use religions and politics to stay comfortably superior to all that pain: who make religions and politics, excuses to spread misery with fire and sword and how could I stop all this? I did not know what to do.”

Bella is disturbed by Hooker and Astley’s apathy toward suffering. This passage is one of many socialist critiques in Poor Things. As she develops her understanding of the world, Bella refuses to accept the suffering of others, even though she is not yet sure how or if she can possibly make a difference in people’s lives.

“‘You could never face the fact,’ said the General through clenched teeth, ‘that the touch of a female body arouses DIABOLICAL LUSTS in potent sensual males—lusts we can hardly restrain. Cuddlin! The word is disgustin and unmanly. It soils your lips, Victoria.’”

Blessington demonstrates men’s ideas about Women’s Roles in Victorian Society. He is disgusted by Bella’s display of any kind of sexual desire—or even a desire for non-sexual closeness. Many Victorian women were infantilized and treated like children in adult bodies: They were expected to be sexually available to their husbands, but were not expected to have desires or needs of their own.

“‘[S]trong men who lead and defend the BuBuBritish people must cucultivate their strength by satisfying the animal part of their natures by rererevelling with sluts, while maintaining the pupupurity of the mumumarriage bed and sanctity of the home where their sons and daughters are engendered. And that is why pupupupoor pupoor pupoor—’ (here the General’s doctor pulled out a handkerchief and dabbed his face) ‘—that is why poor Dolly had to be treated in that tutututerrible way.’”

This admission by Dr. Prickett reveals the infantilization and de-sexualization of upper-class women in Victorian society, while male sexual desire (and sexual violence) was shifted onto lower-class women who had less power to refuse sexual advances. Poor women provide an opportunity for men to “satisfy their urges” without upsetting the balance of upper-class society.

“He would have been a decent general practitioner had he not used Baxter’s money to buy the idleness he mistook for freedom. Having fulfilled his mother’s ambition by joining the middle class he had no wish to reform it from inside, no wish to help the labouring class reform us (and themselves) from outside.”

McCandless’s lack of concern for the working class once he has joined the middle class feeds into Victoria’s socialist critique of society, raising the issue of Medical Progress and Politics. McCandless chooses comfort, complacency, and individualism, while Victoria chooses collective action and solidarity.

“Mother had taught me to be a working man’s domestic slave; the nuns taught me to be a rich man’s domestic toy. When they sent me back Mother was dead and I could speak French, dance, play the piano, move like a lady and discuss events as Conservative newspapers reported them, for the nuns thought husbands might prefer wives who knew some things about the world.”

Though Victoria is not an amnesiac or a medical experiment, she nevertheless had a childish understanding of the world because of her limited education. As a child and as a young woman, her education was dependent on how useful it would make her to her future husband, reflecting Women’s Roles in Victorian Society.

“‘Tell me, Bella, what the scullery-maid and the master’s daughter have in common, apart from their similar ages and bodies and this house.’

‘Both are used by other people,’ I said. ‘They are allowed to decide nothing for themselves.’”

Victoria recognizes that women of all social classes have the same struggle against patriarchal violence. Neither rich nor poor Victorian women typically received a liberatory education that could have made them independent adults; for that reason, solidarity among all women is an important socialist and feminist objective.

“Small, awkward McCandless fell as passionately in love with God as I had done. He loved me too, of course, but only because he saw me as God’s female part—the part he could embrace and enter.”

McCandless does not see Victoria as a complete person, instead defining her by her relationship to Godwin. Since McCandless cannot act on his love and admiration for Godwin, he directs his affections toward Victoria, seeing her as an extension of Godwin instead of an individual. He defines Victoria purely through her relationship to men without regard for her individuality and personhood.

“My second husband’s story positively stinks of all that was morbid in that most morbid of centuries, the nineteenth. He has made a sufficiently strange story stranger still by stirring into it episodes and phrases to be found in Hogg’s Suicide’s Grave with additional ghouleries from the works of Mary Shelley and Edgar Allan Poe.

Victoria points out all the literary influences of McCandless’s story, demonstrating that his goal of controlling the narrative was hampered by his lack of imagination and skill. Insecure in his marriage, he wrote a story that attempted to justify her identity as a sexually-liberated woman with a career, reflecting The Problems of Narrative and Perspective. By injecting macabre influences from Gothic novels, he reveals that he found Victoria’s independence disturbing, like something out of Shelley or Poe.

“His good fortune in later life never stopped him being at heart just ‘a poor bastard bairn.’ The envy the poor and exploited feel toward the wealthy is a good thing if it works toward reforming this unfairly ordered nation.”

McCandless was never able to overcome the shame of being born poor. He envied people like Godwin and Victoria, but instead of using that envy to better the world, he let it consume him to the point where he had to portray them both as monstrous creations to cope with his own mediocrity.