Alasdair Gray’s 1992 novel Poor Things tells the story of Victoria McCandless—or, rather, it tells several very different versions of her story.
Victoria is a fictional composite of nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century female pioneers and social reformers, from Florence Nightingale to Jane Addams. In the world of the book, she risks falling into historical obscurity, or worse. The book play-acts a tug-of-war over her legacy, “compiling” several different narratives about its subject, with each narrator contending over the most basic facts of her life. Behind the question of which version is true is a challenge to the reader: which “Victoria” matters most to you?
The way we answer this question matters deeply, for it will determine the legacy of the real-life inspirations behind Victoria McCandless. Just as the competing narrators of the book fight over the facts and significance of Victoria’s life, so do contemporary historians and storytellers fight over the lives and work of past feminists. Conservative antifeminists and liberal devotees of second- and third-wave feminism alike fall prey to the temptation to narrowly construe these women as mere forerunners to the sexual revolution, a “first wave” of feminism that only existed to prepare the way for the second. Poor Things suggests that they had a much broader vision—one that, in many cases, encompassed advocacy for the vulnerable within the workplace and on the international stage.
Gray’s multi-layered book draws attention to the ways in which we can be tempted to flatten out the stories of complex, real-life women in service of our own political agendas. Unfortunately, the 2023 film adaptation of Gray’s novel falls into exactly that trap. The director, Yorgos Lanthimos, decisively chooses one version of the story and uses it to advance a clear narrative: that feminism amounts to personal sexual liberation and that the cruelty of sexual sadism is more liberating than the compassion of turn-of-the-century social reformers.
Alasdair Gray’s Novel: A Complex Series of Competing Narratives
The book begins with a frame narrative, which is written by a fictionalized version of the author. “Gray” tells us that he has acquired the manuscript of an early twentieth-century memoir purporting to reveal Victoria McCandless’s true nature and origins. The memoir was written by Victoria’s husband, Archibald, and is accompanied by a postscript written by Victoria herself. The bulk of the novel is made up of these two “historical documents”: Archibald’s memoir and Victoria’s response to it.
Archibald’s version of the story is the longest—and the weirdest. In his telling, Victoria McCandless is actually Bella Baxter, the creation of a grotesquely deformed mad scientist, Godwin Baxter. Baxter, we’re told, made her by surgically inserting the living brain of a fetus into the dead body of a grown woman. After getting engaged to Archibald, the childlike Bella runs off with a philandering lawyer to have lots of sex and see the world. On her journey, she matures and develops both a conscience and radical political views, especially after witnessing the suffering of disabled children in British-occupied Egypt. After spending some time working in a Paris brothel, she eventually returns home, marries Archibald, adopts the name “Victoria,” becomes a doctor in Glasgow, and lives happily ever after.
The next section of the novel is Victoria’s response to Archibald’s memoir. According to Victoria, Archibald has the facts of her early life all wrong. Victoria tells the reader that she ran away from an abusive marriage early in her life and was taken in by Godwin Baxter. She and Godwin loved each other but could not marry, because he had been syphilitic from birth. To avoid scandal, she posed as his relative, “Bella,” for several years while training to be a doctor. Archibald was an annoying and insecure hanger-on of Baxter’s, but Victoria eventually married him out of convenience. Archibald, Victoria says, wrote the memoir to amuse himself, and she kept it because he left so little else behind upon his death. Victoria tells the reader that her political views and the inspiration for her life’s work as a physician came not from any foreign adventures, but from knowing working people in her home city of Glasgow.
At the end of the book, “Gray” (the character, as opposed to the author) adds a few “end notes” that supply additional biographical details about the end of Victoria’s life. He tells us that after Archibald’s death, Victoria became notorious for her antiwar activism. After all three of her sons died in the First World War, she wrote a much-maligned book, titled The Loving Economy—A Mother’s Recipe for the End of All National and Class Warfare. She spent the last years of her life running a natal clinic and soup kitchen for the Glasgow poor.
Confronted with Archibald’s memoir and Victoria’s response to it, “Gray” declares that Archibald’s version of the story—as absurd and full of cliches as it is—must be the true one. His stated evidence is so obviously circumstantial and trivial that the reader suspects there must be some other reason, which is left unstated. But why would someone choose to believe an outlandish story like Archibald’s? Perhaps because it comes with a conclusive ending: Bella Baxter fulfills the personal stakes of the modern quest for enlightenment. Victoria’s version of her story, by contrast, has no neat-and-tidy ending. It trails off into the historical record, and it suggests that her fight—the one against war and poverty and discrimination—did not end with one person’s life. Rather than simply encouraging the reader to pursue his or her own sexual fulfillment, it implicitly asks something of future generations: to continue the work she began.
The Film: A Failure of Historical Memory
As of 2023, we have a new story about Victoria McCandless. Taken in isolation, not considered in light of its source material, Poor Things (2023), directed by Yorgos Lanthimos and starring Emma Stone, is a fine movie. But if the novel reveals a failure of our collective historical memory when it comes to turn-of-the-century feminism, the film provides an example of that failure.
The movie only tells one story about Bella Baxter (played by Stone, who won the Academy Award for Best Actress for the role). That story most closely resembles Archibald’s (renamed Max and played by Ramy Youssef). The clearest point of resemblance is Godwin Baxter’s “creation” of Bella by placing a child’s brain in a grown woman’s body. From there, Bella runs off to see the world, discover sex, and grow (if only mentally) into womanhood.
Beyond those basic plot points, 2023’s Poor Things diverges significantly from the book. Perhaps the most extreme change Lanthimos makes is the setting. A kind of steampunk fantasy world takes the place of Belle Époque Europe and the late Victorian British Empire. In the book, Archibald tells us that Bella travels the real world, reads real-life political magazines, and has conversations and epiphanies about real-world events and social structures. In the movie, even her home city is inexplicably transposed from Glasgow to London. This change precludes her exposure to the industrial poor and misses the unique relationship of Glasgow to the broader British Empire, which are both major themes of the novel.
And it’s not just the setting that’s different. Innumerable character changes and added scenes hint at the kind of story the movie wants to tell about feminism. Godwin Baxter (Willem Dafoe) is rewritten as a domineering father figure from whom Bella escapes to see the world, a telling cliché that the book deftly avoids. He’s given lines, absent from the book, about how “all sexuality is basically immoral.” Bella, furthermore, is cruel. In the book, Bella is curious, verbose, playful, ready to see a friend in every new person. In the movie, she enjoys seeing and drawing blood, and does so multiple times in the first hour. Implicit here is a difference in how Gray and Lanthimos understand children—Bella has a child’s brain, after all, thanks to Godwin Baxter. In the world Lanthimos constructs, being childlike and being cruel go hand in hand.
Such changes all but guarantee that the political upshot of the movie will differ from that of the book. Because all the settings are liminal and otherworldly, the only “real” thing for Bella and the other characters to meaningfully discuss is their own interiority. The movie’s world has no industrialism, no empire, no social constructs around gender to develop ideas about. So Bella’s political awakening can only come from the quest for individual self-fulfillment.
In Archibald’s memoir, Bella’s political awakening comes when she visits Alexandria and witnesses the imperial upper class’s toleration for the suffering of disabled children. The film, by contrast, places Bella’s awakening not in Alexandria but in the Paris brothel sequence, which is greatly expanded from the book. After Bella requests better working conditions for her fellow prostitutes, such as a right to refuse overly forceful clients, her employer tells her: “We must experience everything, not just the good, but degradation, horror, sadness. This makes us whole, Bella; makes us people of substance, not flighty, untouched children. Then we can know the world, and when we know the world, the world is ours.” Bella accepts this line, which does not appear in the book, whole-heartedly. It launches her into adulthood and awakens her as a feminist (of a much later sort), self-confidently making money renting her body to clientele who are no less grotesque and violent than before.
“Degradation, Horror, Sadness”
Two notes on this line, before we discuss it in the context of Gray’s book: first, it explains a lot about Lanthimos’s filmography. Many of the director’s films feature violence in the context of romantic and familial relationships, which is presented not as abuse or exploitation but matter-of-factly, as an almost banal expression of how the world works. The point of this violence, in light of the “degradation, horror, sadness” line, isn’t that the family is inherently violent and as such should be abolished. It’s rather that there is no distinction between love and cruelty, because it all helps a person become who she is. Experiencing and doing terrible things is a way to learn about the world and thereby attain mastery over it. Indeed, the line also makes sense of Lanthimos’s characterization of Bella. If Bella (a stand-in for all children) is inherently violent and antisocial, only being herself subjected to violence could conceivably amount to an appropriate education.
Second, the line largely validates a major point of criticism the movie received: namely, that the enthusiasm with which it presents its sex scenes sidesteps the question of whether Bella, as a prostitute and as someone whose brain is still maturing, can meaningfully consent to sex. It’s not just that the movie does not ask this question. More than that, it ups the ante, using as its thesis statement one character telling another that, bluntly, it’s okay to be raped and one should not expect better than “degradation, horror, [and] sadness” from sex.
Lanthimos’s view of the world most closely resembles that of a character who was cut entirely from the movie: Doctor Hooker. In the book, Bella meets Hooker on a ship bound for Alexandria. A retired missionary on his way home from China, Hooker believes that Anglo-Saxons like himself are destined to civilize the world’s inferior peoples. Bella meets him alongside Harry Astley, a self-professed Malthusian who sees the suffering of subjugated peoples as tragic but inevitable. Together, Hooker and Astley represent the dual self-justifications of Victorian-era imperialism: the giddy chauvinist and the tragic “realist.” Much of the book’s political content comes via Bella’s conversations with this duo.
Hooker believes in the educative power of violence toward people he deems childlike. Civilized Anglo-Saxons like himself “are like teachers in a playground of children who do not want to know that school exists,” he tells Bella. “The bullying rulers of the inferior races hate to see us replace them, so to teach them sense we first of all have to thrash them.” From Hooker’s point of view, Bella’s compassion for the victims of empire is naïve. Social and personal improvement, he believes, is possible only through those very acts of “degradation, horror, sadness” that the childlike peoples are already experiencing. Compassion is, to borrow the name of Lanthimos’s most recent film, only one “kind of kindness.” Cruelty is another, indeed a nobler one.
The movie replaces Hooker with a kindly, spunky old lady who gives Bella books to read and keeps Astley in name only, rendering the character an aloof “cynic” whose views it carefully depoliticizes. Yet, if Lanthimos’s take on Poor Things is any indication, the imperial ideologies expressed by Hooker and Astley in the book have not gone away. They simply play out on a different stage. The grand geopolitical scale they once commanded is now inaccessible. So instead, the proponents of these ideologies seek conquest in the personal, through sex or moneymaking. When confronted with statistics about the number of children in poverty, or on the streets, in this or that war, they stifle whatever instinctive compassion these sights may stir up. All they can do is accept—even embrace—these casual, systemic cruelties as an inevitable fact of life.
Early Feminists Fought for Something Other Than Self-Actualization
Victoria McCandless, and the real-life women she represents, offer an antidote to this view of the world. In Gray’s telling, Victoria expends her life and reputation treating patients, denouncing war, and organizing in pursuit of a better economic system. This combination follows the pattern of many actual turn-of-the-century feminist pioneers, whose aims were far wider-reaching than the sexual and psychological self-actualization that Lanthimos promises in his film. In addition to pursuing voting and other civic rights, many also challenged the industrial working conditions that impoverished and injured countless women and children, and demanded an end to the constant warfare between imperial powers. Their broad vision is what Gray conveys so well and what Lanthimos neglects.
The real-life Victoria McCandlesses insisted that the suffering embodied in our economic and military institutions is neither good nor inevitable. They were not fooled by the promises that subjecting people to the degradations of labor exploitation, imperial violence, or sex-based subordination actually constituted charity or education. Jane Addams toured the country delivering lectures on pacifism and the possibility for international cooperation. Florence Kelley, as Erika Bachiochi writes, “believed the ‘entering wedge’ of woman-protective legislation would facilitate protective legislation for all workers.” Virginia Woolf, in Three Guineas, combines the prevention of war and women’s education into a single issue.
The problem these women confronted—the Hooker and Astley ideologies—cut across social, economic, and even global issues. Today, to (mis)remember these women as sexual experimenters seeking only personal liberation, reducing Victoria McCandless to Bella Baxter as Lanthimos does, only narrows our own political horizons until there’s nothing left but the personal to fight for. Between the bewildering new conditions of the social media age and returning nationalisms dredging up old ambitions for imperial expansionism, today’s world may appear as inscrutable as Lanthimos’s unaccountable steampunk fantasies. But that’s no excuse not to demand that compassion prevail over cruelty in the public square, any more than the bewildering new conditions of industrialism and nineteenth-century imperial competition were for women more than a century ago.
Alasdair Gray knew the stakes of historical memory: not only the risk that someone would be forgotten, but that the forces that they opposed in their own time could persist, causing them to be misrepresented in ours. But accurate remembrance of the real-life Victorias is only the first step. Poor Things reminds us there is still work to do.
