POOR THINGS

ALASDAIR GRAY
 ALASDAIR GRAY

• 1934-2019
• Iconic figure of Scottish revival
• Lanark
• Very conscious of his Scottish origins
• Working in the Scottish tradition
• Institutional figure →Remained an outsider
• Left-wing, educated, skilled-worker family
• Wrote scripts for BBC
LANARK

• Glasgow book
• BUT representing Glasgow differently
• Not a realist, working class representation
1. Realist story about a young boy
2. Disutopian fantasy novel
• Gothic
• Serious & playful
POOR THINGS - ILLUSTRATIONS

• Gray – a graphic artist

• Illustrative devices
• Summary: sg popular, old-hashioned style
• Suggesting a simple love story
• Playing with the status of the book
• Biographical information about Archibald McCandless
• Alasdair Gray appears as the editor → the cover
• Erratum – printed into the book
• Professor Jean Martin Charcot
• Count Robert de Montesquiou-Fezensac = decadent dandy
• Under the erratum: imagined criticism
• Newspapers: identifiable political style
• Private Eye → Private Nose (Chauvinism)
• Playful conceptualisation
• Reading framework (Dorian Gray, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde,
Frankenstein, Alice in Wonderland etc.)
• Repeated dedication to the wives (Gray & McCandless)
• If Gray had been content either to create a female Frankenstein or to give a
new zest to the legend of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde Poor things might have been
funny and original tale. … But he has loaded his novel with false historical
references and larded it with his own gruesome drawings. … These are the
ravings of second-rate characters in a second-rate novel? – Sunday Telegraph
• Not since Harry Garrison's The Channel Tunnel, Hurrah! has a work of light
fiction amused me as much as Alasdair Gray’s Poor Things. Gray, like
Harrison, uses science fiction to resurrect England’s Empire as its mose
pacious and gracious. Unlike Harrison he satirises those wealthy Victorian
eccentrics who, not knowing how lucky they were, invented The Emancipated
Women and, through her, The British Labour Party – a gang of weirdos who
kept hugging and dropping the woolly socialism of their founders until
Margaret Thatcher made them drop it for ever. The heroine of Poor Things is
an oversexed blend of Eleanor Marx, Annie Besant and Alice in Wonderland.
(…) – Private Nose
FACT - FICTION

• FICTIO-FACTUM ('made’)
• Book = material product
• Faximile 'make similar’ - fictio)
• Text = text + image
• A Double
• Representations = images in an image
GRAY – MICHAEL DONNELLY XII-XIII

• Fiction or history?
• Donelly – it is a masterpiece = art
• How seriously should we take it?
• Fragments – fake Holocaust memoir
• Does it matter?
• Our lives → fiction
• “Shut up Candle, you are too impressed by appearances. I have not read
Beauty and the Beast or Ruskin’s Stones of Venice or Dumas’ Hunchback of
Notre-Dame or is it Hugo’s in the Tauchnitz limp covered English
translation costing two shillings and sixpence from start to finish, but I
have been told enough about these mighty epics of our race to know most
folk think God and me a very gothic couple. They are wrong. At heart we
are ordinary farmers like Cathy and Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights by one
of those Brontës.” “I have not read it.” “You must because it is about us.
Heathcliff and Cathy belong to a farming family and he loves her because
they’ve been together and played together almost forever and she likes
him a lot but finds Edgar more lovable and marries him because he is
outside the family. Then Heathcliff goes daft. I hope Baxter won’t. There
he is, all alone, how very handy. I’m glad he sent the lads home.” (Gray 51)
• = Bella’s self-definition
• Fiction comes back as fact
• = “Russia didn’t have history before Puskin”
• Fiction = general
• Fact = happened once
• Which one is more serious?
• The difference is marginal
ILLUSTRATIONS

• Anathomical bodyparts
• Portraits
• Image of writing
• Text & illustration: the borders are blurred
• Historical illustrations = giving evidence
• General Victorian type of places - individuality
• Notes → no index numbers
• Quite grotesque
• They come as supplements
• Editor: they are needed → they are pointless
• The skull and the femme fatal image – Victorian kitsch
• Victorian books: published with plot illustrations
WHY DO WE HAVE ILLUSTRATIONS
HERE?
• Bella – Mona Lisa
• Reminding to the tradition of portrait
painting
• → always about subjectivity
• William Strang: graphic artist, book
illustrator
• Not the represented person BUT the
famous artist matters
• Like a family album → we expect photographic accuracy
• + Henry Gray’s Anatomy
• → All images = pictorial quotations
• Guest images (quoting style, etc.)
• Fiction: preceeding fact (Wedderburn, Faust)
• Illustration = to light, to illuminate, to bring light to
• + TO EXAMPLIFY (anatomy books)
• Bodyparts “Making me” – Spine
• Space filling devices
• Revealing things we don’t see
• Genitalia – only proper way to represent: anatomy
 FRONTISPIECE

• Portrait
• Text
• Bones
• What remained of his life
• “to she who makes my life
worth living”
• Aesthetic function
 Medicine

Nature Culture
General anatomic
Portraits
images
• Representing an ideal body
• Belonging to noone
• Not realistic
• Juan Valverde (1560)
• Renaissance – representation of the body
appeared
ANDREAS VESALIUS (1543)

• Detailed Renaissance background

• Melancholic skeleton
• Imagery images + strong allegorical
meaning
• 18th century
• Cut up bodyparts – unrealistic
• Morbid anatomy (on corpses)
• → Vivisection
• Death = normal state
• Life = sg abnormal
• Anatomy → bodies in vacuum
REMBRANDT - THE
ANATOMY LESSON OF
DR. NICOLAES TULP
(1632)
• The forgotten body
• The residue of the
body – the existential
body
• The body of
knowledge – object of
investigation /
discipline
• Exclusion: lived body returns to haunt Modernity
• Gothic, Homunculus, etc.
• Godwin: the only character who cannot forget for a minute that he
is embodied
• Maternity, sexuality, labour → how the repressed body returns
• Culture as the continuum of nature
• After Darwin: a threat
• Frankenstein’s Creature – Bella Baxter
• A surgical fabrication
• Journey plot → Godwin cannot get rid of her
• Naivite
• Monstrous
• Zeus – Pallas Athene, Milton: Satan- Sin
• Long tradition: creating withoug a female
• Adam & Eve: born as adults
• Fist Gospel: Jesus
• Godwin: inspired by an illustration of Ophelia
• “Must I say everything twice? I needed to admire a
woman who needed and admired me” (Gray 39)
• Needs a mother – Victor Frankenstein
• Problem of admiring a woman: split (mother)
• Affection / sexual desire
• Victoria: a mother & a child
• → fulfilling God’s desire for a mother
• BUT Bella has a child’s brain
• Baxter: sexual desire + spiritual connection
• A creature rises up from lack (the lack of a mother)
• Bella’s body hasn’t got childhood
• “And I have saved her from one crushing disadvantage I never had
myself: she has never been small so has never known fear.” (Gray
69)
• Charcot: Bella is the only sane English woman
• Price of her fare home: telling her story
• Pretending to be under hypnosis
• Going through childhood = going mad
• Abnormality as a necessary condition for humans
• →Bella
• Her story: symptomatic in psychiatric theatre
BELLA - SCOTLAND

• Scotland = powerful
• “Adult”, mature industry
• BUT no experience of past / youth
• No story, spiritual maturity
• An adult body & infantile mind
A POSTMODERN HISTORICAL NOVEL
• Neo-Victorian novel
• Dickensian motif: child-bride
• Victoria: considered to be an erotomaniac
• → the husband had an affair with the servant
• Victoria as Blessington’s wife – upper class
• Victoria’s father: Victorian self-made man: working class→
middle class
• + Lausanne: being transformed into a toy of upper-class men
But you are a woman and know nothing of business. Ten years later I had an Earl on my board of
directors, was putting men into Parliament and employing half the skilled work-force of
Manchester and Birmingham. Then one day you turned seventeen, Vicky, and I suddenly saw you
were a beauty. I had been too busy to look at you before that or think of getting you groomed for
the marriage market. So I dragged you straight to a Swiss convent where the daughters of
millionaires are scraped clean and polished along with daughters of marquises and foreign
princes. ‘Make a lady of her,’ I told the mother superior. ‘You will not find it easy. She is
headstrong, like her ma once was—the sort of donkey who needs more kicks than carrots to
drive her in the right direction. I do not care how long you take or how much it costs, but make
her fit to marry the highest in the land.’ It took them seven years. Your ma was dead (feeble
action of the liver) when you got home, and for your sake I was glad. Though a good wife for a
poor man she was no use to a wealthy one. Her plain ways would have ruined your chances. Ee
the nuns had turned you into a lovely thing—you spoke French like a real Mamselle, though your
English still sounded Manchester. But the General did not mind— did you, Sir Aubrey?” “No.
Even her quaint dialect entertained me. She was the purest creature and prettiest thing I had
ever met,” said the General broodingly. “She had the soul of an innocent child within the form of
a Circassian houri—irresistible.” “Did I love you?” said Bella staring at him. He nodded heavily.
“You adored him—worshipped him,” cried her father, “you had to love him! He was a national
hero and cousin of the Earl of Harewood. Besides, you were twenty-four years old and he was
the only man apart from me you had been allowed to meet. You were the happiest woman in the
world on your wedding-day. (Gray 215)
• Class shift in her life
• →problematic
• Being an upperclass wife
• Framing her → Split of femininity
• Angel of the House →dangerous femininity
• General Blessington, Wedderburn
• Bella = a symptom of the age
• Her mind: purity
• Her body: desired by men
“Erotomania,” muttered his doctor.
“What is that?” asked Bell.
“It means the General thinks you loved him too much,” said Baxter.
“It means,” said Dr. Prickett hastily, “that you wished to sleep in his bedroom—share his bed—lie
with him (I am forced to be blunt) every night of the week. Gentlemen!”—he turned from Bella
and appealed to the rest of us—“gentlemen, the General is a kind man who would cut off his
right arm rather than disappoint a woman! On the day before his wedding he asked me for an
exact description —from the scientific, hygienic standpoint—of a married man’s duties. I told him
what every doctor knows—that sexual intercourse enfeebles brain and body if over-indulged, but
in rational doses does nothing but good. I told him he should allow his lady wife to lie with him
half an hour a night during the honeymoon period, and once or twice a week afterwards, though
all amorous dalliance should cease as soon as pregnancy was detected. Alas, Lady Blessington
was so deranged even in her eighth month she wished to lie with Sir Aubrey all night long. She
sobbed and wailed when not allowed to do so.”
Tears streamed down Bella’s cheeks. She said, “The poor thing needed cuddling.”
“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.” (Gray 217-8)
“I know everyone here is telling what they think is the truth,” said Bella,
drying her eyes, “but it sounds daft. Sir Aubrey talks as if he was liable
to tear women apart, but honestly, if he cut up rough with me I think I
could break him over my knee like a stick.”
“Ha!” cried the General scornfully and his doctor began talking very
fast, perhaps annoyed by Bella’s words and the equally sceptical
glances Baxter and I had exchanged during his account of the case. His
voice was almost as shrill as the General’s as he said, “No normal
healthy woman—no good or sane woman wants or expects to enjoy
sexual contact, except as a duty. Even pagan philosophers knew that
men are energetic planters and good women are peaceful fields. In De
Rerum Natura Lucretius tells us that only debauched females wriggle
their hips.” (Gray 218)
“You queer sad old General,” said Bella mournfully, “did you honestly
think your wife a maniac because she wanted warmed by you more than
an hour a week, while you regularly hugged a young girl for four?” “I
never hugged Dolly Perkins,” said the General through tightly clenched
teeth. “For God’s sake tell her about MEN, Prickett. She has learned
nothin about em in this place.” “I believe Sir Aubrey wiwiwishes me to
say,” said his doctor faintly, “that the strong 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.” (Gray 229)
NATURE - CULTURE

• Mopsy & Flopsy: artifice

• Sexuality: shared with animals
• Humans: make it difficult (culture)
• Alexandria + Bella’s education on the ship
• Dr. Hooker: Anglo-Saxons are superior (bigger brain)
• Verified by nature
• Nature = pre-civilised, evil
• Mr Astley – Alexandria as the allegory of civilisation
• Bella: pain
• Hooker’s body politics: “God arranged it by giving us bigger brains
than anyone else, so we find it easier to control our evil animal
instincts. (Gray 139)
• Nature for Hooker:
1. Sg before culture – need to be cultivated
2. Place where timeless rules exist
• “Anglo-Saxon nature” – total confusion
• Class is more important here than biology
• →overwrites sexuality
• Wedderburn: desiring only working class women
ARCHIBALD - BAXTER

• Outcasts
• Archibald: social outcast
• Baxter: biological outcast
• Godwin’s vision about parents
• Culture = artificial help to survive
• Medicine = hinge bw. Things originally separated
• The modern Taygetus – which bodies should be allowed to
live
• Limbo = the medical profession
• Midden heap – social / political motivation: to recycle
waste
GODWIN BAXTER’S VOICE
• Huge body
• His voice has never broken
• One of his part remains a child ( Wedderburn)
• Changed: realising that he will lose Bella
• Bella: having a Yorkshire accent
• Cultural phenomenon → natural phenomenon
• Cover: big host + 2 little parasites
• Hamlet story: interpreted as
infection of madness (Godwin)
• Mr Asthley – Malthusianism
• Natural resources won’t be enough
• Humans: applying social / cultural cheques
• BUT only working class people
• Social Darwinism – influenced by Malthus
• The Survival of the fittest
• Culture →natural description
WHY IS MOTHERHOOD SO IMPORTANT?
• “Poor Things” –bodies of pregnant women
• The erasure of the mother
• “Twelve years passed before I could afford a proper monument,
and by then nobody remembered the position of the grave.”
(Gray 9)
• The position of the grave is forgotten
• Upper-classes: body is repressed
• Motherhood: body cannot be denied
• The mothers’ bodies – unwelcomed reminder
• Dirty
• Tension between mothers and servants
• Mrs Dinwiddie
• Wedderburn
• Victoria’s mother
• Sex, physical work, motherhood
• Reminders of the body
• Not for upper class women
• Servants’ place: basement & attick
• Spaces of the unconscious & coldest places
• They need human warmth
• Servants = physicality
• Upper-class women: no bodies
• Wedderburn – wed or burn (Paul)
VICTORIA & ARCHIBALD

• “ Reader, she married me and I have little more to tell.”

(Gray 240)
• “Reader, I married him.”
• Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre
• Bella is the Byronic hero
• McCandless = weak – Bella = strong - Jane Eyre?
• Victoria’s letter to her eldest surviving descendant
• Re-framing her story
• Re-framing Godwin Baxter
• Followed by the Critical notes of Alasdair Gray (Writer / editor)
• No justification →
• Destabilizing McCandless’ narrative
If you ignore what contradicts common sense and this letter you will
find that this book records some actual events during a dismal era. As I
said before, to my nostrils the book stinks of Victorianism. It is as sham-
gothic as the Scott Monument, Glasgow University, St. Pancras Station
and the Houses of Parliament. I hate such structures. Their useless
over-ornamentation was paid for out of needlessly high profits: profits
squeezed from the stunted lives of children, women and men working
more than twelve hours a day, six days a week in NEEDLESSLY filthy
factories […] To me this book stinks as the interior of a poor woman’s
crinoline must have stunk after a cheap weekend railway excursion to
the Crystal Palace. I realize I am taking it too seriously, but I am thankful
to have survived into the twentieth century (Gray 275)
• Pacifists & Socialists
• 2 of their sons die in war + 1 in an accident
• Victoria: absolutely anti-establishment
• 3 sons: establishment figures (Statistician, Engineer, Civil
Servant)