Bella! Bella!

We at BooksfromScotland have been excited about the Poor Things film ever since we heard of its release, and it doesn’t disappoint. But, as ever, the novel from which it is adapted is a richer, warmer and braver experience. The fine folk at the Alasdair Gray Archive have put together a fantastic interactive guide to the novel on their website, which we urge you to visit. In the meantime, here’s an extract from this guide, written by Grace Richardson, taking a closer look at Bella Baxter.

Poor Things
By Alasdair Gray
Published by Bloomsbury
Extract by Grace Richardson

Bella Baxter: Gorgeous Monster Part One 

Poor Things is overflowing with political debate, ethical negotiations, and discussions of social issues, all of which are overarched by the novel’s focus on gender politics. One of the poor things who is most often affected by these concerns is Bella Baxter. The novel, a satire on the politics and social dynamics of the Victorian era, foregrounds male desire that is in contention with the social and sexual liberation of women in the 19th century. It is a conflict embodied in ‘the woman question’, a debate which scrutinised the changing political and economic status of Victorian women and responded to their increasing demand for social and sexual autonomy. The novel’s multiple narratives mean that there is no singular truth presented, instead it is more important the reader understands the world of Poor Things as being filled with discourses and ideas that all claim to be right. Once we understand this, the reader is offered a fascinating insight into how patriarchal power seeks to undermine female autonomy, as well as how one woman (Bella Baxter) works against this. What will become increasingly clear is that despite the various male characters’ attempts to control and confine Bella, she censors neither her behaviour nor her actions. 

One way to explore the gender politics that shape Bella’s experience is to focus on two key concepts of the novel –‘making’ and ‘scarring’ – which present themselves in different ways throughout the heroine’s narrative. Both concepts help us understand how Bella imprints herself on others and is, herself, imprinted on by those she encounters. 

Poor Things (1992), courtesy AGA 

Poor Things is a novel about making, more specifically, the making of a woman. In McCandless’ Episodes, we are introduced to the novel’s key protagonists through chapters entitled ‘Making Me’, ‘Making Godwin Baxter’ and ‘Making Bella Baxter’. And since we are taking a gendered look at the novel, a question arises: what does “Making Bella Baxter” look like in relation to the society of 19th century Britain? 

‘It seems that women who have not been wed by wedders like my Wedder all possess a slip of skin across the loving groove where Wedderburns poke their peninsula. The slip of a skin he never found on me. “And how do you explain the scar?” he asked, referring to a thin white line which starts among the curls above my loving groove and, like the Greenwich line of longitude, divides in two the belly of Solomon has somewhere likened to a heap of wheat. “Surely all women’s stomachs have that line.” “No, no!” says Wedder. “Only pregnant ones who’ve been cut open to let babies out”. “That must’ve been B.C.B.K”, I said, “the time Before they Cracked poor Bella’s Knob”. I let him feel that crack which rings my skull just underneath the hair’ (p107). 

Through reading the quote above, it becomes evident that ‘Making Bella Baxter’ is inextricably linked with constructing her female body. McCandless’ narrative presents Bella Baxter as a surgical creation of Godwin Baxter. As McCandless’ story goes, after pulling an unknown female body from the River Clyde, Baxter revives the woman from her death by suicide and implants the brain of her unborn foetus into her skull. In a gender-inversion of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Bella, the 25-year-old woman, is rebirthed through Baxter’s experiment. It becomes clear that ‘Making Bella Baxter’ into a proper Victorian woman was an impossibility as her bodily make up defies these norms. Bella is considered abnormal because despite her mental age, she is not a virgin, and her hymen is broken. She also makes childlike references in her letters to her hymen as ‘a slip of skin’ and her vulva as a ‘loving groove’, showing that although she has never been given the right vocabulary to describe her body, it has been unfairly treated and harmed at the hands of men. 

Bella’s head and stomach are literally scarred by her ‘re-birth’. Bella’s scarring is not just literal, however. If we take the word ‘scar’ to mean ‘a lasting impression’ as well as a ‘wound’ or ‘mark’, then we can begin to take a closer look at how Bella imprints her mark, that is to say, her influence, on others. 

Poor Things (1992), courtesy AGA 

One way of achieving this is by examining Bella’s sexuality. Bella’s sexual autonomy leads the men of the novel to harbour emotive reactions toward her. If we are to believe McCandless’ version of events, her sexual needs and obsession with ‘wedding’ (sexual intercourse) in her past-life as Lady Victoria Blessington led her husband General Aubrey Blessington De La Pole to have her institutionalised. In an inversion of this plot point, the man she elopes with, Duncan Wedderburn, is committed to a Glasgow mental asylum after realising Bella views him chiefly as a sexual object. Although this is exactly how he has treated Bella and prior conquests in the past, Wedderburn is shocked that a woman has the capacity to dehumanize men in the pursuit of sexual pleasure: ‘I had never before heard of a man-loving middle class woman in her twenties who did NOT want marriage, especially to the man she eloped with’ (p81). The unorthodox sexual outlook of Bella (previously Victoria Blessington nee Hattersley) equally unsettles Blessington. For the General, the abuse of socially non-resistant women like his mistress, Dolly Perkins (whom he abandons pregnant), is a social norm. In contrast to Dolly, Bella is an example of the ‘New Woman’ (Buzwell, 2014). The 19th century term for an economically independent and spirited woman who exercises control over her life was popularised by Henry James (among others) in novels Daisy Miller (1978) and Portrait of a Lady (1881). 

The portrait Gray paints of his leading lady in Poor Things is conflicting. Bella’s scar, for example, creates multiple different explanations. McCandless states that it is a result of the incision Godwin made while switching Bella’s brain, whilst Victoria states in her letter to posterity that it is the result of a beating by her father which left her unconscious at the age of five. Wedderburn labels it a “witch mark” or “the female equivalent of the mark of Cain, branding its owner as a lemur, vampire, succubus and thing unclean” (2002, p.89). For Wedderburn, Bella’s scar makes her a monster, marking her as a threat and something to be feared. It was not uncommon for witch hunts to take place in Scotland throughout the 16th and 17th centuries. Under the supervision of James VI’s royal commissions, at least 400 people were put on trial for witchcraft and diabolism during a 6 month campaign later known as The Great Scottish Witch Hunt of 1597. Of all the individuals accused of witchcraft in Scotland’s history, 85% were women (Toil and Trouble: Witchcraft in Scotland, The University of Aberdeen). To accuse Bella of having a ‘witch mark’ Wedderburn is stating his belief that Bella is a threat to the order of the state and needs to be persecuted. After all, as evidenced by The University of Aberdeen data, a witch hunt is essentially a women hunt; a means for the powerful to persecute the powerless. 

Corruption is the Roman Whore (1965), courtesy AGA 

Another form of gendered persecution evident in Poor Things can be explored through the male characters’ various attempts to assert their dominance over Bella. Near the beginning of the novel when Baxter and McCandless quarrel over the matter. McCandless states: ‘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’ (p36). The sexualisation of Bella’s female body constitutes another form of persecution. McCandless admits that throughout time men have sought women for their bodies, even admitting that men would prefer a less developed child’s brain, rather than a fully developed adult’s brain. Although not admitted explicitly by either McCandless or Baxter, we can assume this preference is owing to the man’s greater ability to manipulate such women into fulfilling their sexual needs without question. This implication somewhat sullies Gray-the-Editor’s account of Baxter (explored in the ‘Godwin Baxter’ section of this guide) as an ‘astonishingly good, stout, intelligent, eccentric man’. 

Despite the male characters’ attempts to control and censor Bella, her resistance to gendered persecution is shown in her refusal to conform to their demands. This often results in accusations of madness and female ‘monstrosity’, where Bella is defined as a ‘monster’ or ‘aberration’ (p89) for her refusal to abide by societal rules. To be a monstrous woman does not always mean that the woman is literally a monster or a creature. Nor does it necessarily correlate with physical unattractiveness. Bella’s appearance is presented in a wholly positive light. To McCandless, she is a ‘glorious dream’ who ‘shone before’ him ‘solid, tall, elegant’, like ‘a rainbow’s end’ (p44). Though a ‘monster’ to Wedderburn, she is still ‘gorgeous’ in his eyes (p91). Bella’s monstrosity denotes her transgressive, deviant nature as it appears to men through her behaviour. To be considered monstrous, the female must refuse or be unable to conform to the prescribed social conventions of her given time and culture. Her behaviour will thus be perceived as monstrous or unnatural (a condition Kirsten Stirling explores in Bella Caledonia: Scotland Deformed). By rejecting what is considered ‘normal’ and ‘natural’, the female monster questions the ideological and patriarchal constructions of what the female body and feminine behaviour should look like, whilst also revealing the underlying anxieties of a given society or historical period.  

Poor Things by Alasdair Gray is published by Bloomsbury, priced £9.99.

This extract was written by Grace Richardson. Visit the Poor Things Guide at the Alasdair Gray Archive here.