Poor Things Shows Us How Far We've Come- And How Far We Need To Go
“Physically, she is perfect, but her mind is still forming, yes her mind has wonderful discoveries to make. (Gray 27)”
I decided to read the book Poor Things this week, that the movie was based off from, and it was a lot different, but also very similar to each other and followed the movie in similar ways. It follows the woman, Bella Baxter, as told by her love interest, Mr. McCandless, the poor farmhand turned doctor.
Her “father”, Godwin “God” Baxter wants to marry her in the book, which is a separation from the movie, but she is more keen on Candles, which later sends him to his grave. The book, due to the nature of Bella being a mixture of her child and herself, and the nature of Baxter’s work, reads, at times, like a retelling, or a story adjacent story, of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.
“I was required to exchange chimeras of boundless grandeur for realities of little worth. (Shelley 17)”
The only thing is that unlike Frankenstein’s monster, Bella is quite appealing to the male sex, and more of a modern woman in certain respects, or what men consider the “ideal” woman at the time: a childlike mind, but also mature and aged, which is, as a woman, horrific and weird in itself.
“I want fun, not babies. I only do more with women, if I like the look of them, but a lot of women are shy. (Gray 48-49)”
Though she is quite independent and eventually sets characters like Count Wedderburn on their way, discarding them as cads who simply want sex and money and little else, she obliges for a time, because it feels good, and she’s trying to gain experiences quickly in the world. In the book, she talks about how he has a terrible gambling addiction and how she has to hide money away in order to make sure they still have enough for travel because he keeps bankrupting himself, and running to bankrupt his family and clients back home.
“Though looking into the garden, she appeared to me in profile, and in her expression and pose I saw what had never been there before: contentment and serenity tinged with melancholy of some thought of past or future. She was no longer violently, vividly in the present. I felt like a small boy spying on a mature woman, and coughed to attract her attention. (Gray 59-60)”
To me, I went back and forth with the character, that I related to her at times, but at times, I felt completely alienated from what made her exist because she was an anomaly. Her morbid curiosity about things sometimes felt like it stretched to levels that felt indecent in stretches, and she didn’t care about people’s feelings at all, there was no sense of fawning that women usually do, though, she was expected to go along with Wedderburn for quite a while on their journeys, and she did say “yes dear” quite a bit for a while and “sleep while awake” which seemed to bore her.
The thing I related to her most was that she treated everything around her as an experiment, a fancy that she was digging into, and that is how I live my life when it comes to adventure. I’m a person who tends to do things simply for the testing of the waters of experience, of trying something new to see if it works, or doesn’t, and I relate it to my worldview depending on the outcome of the experiment in the end.
“She gazed upon me with a smile of such peculiar meaning that I shuddered with awe, dread, and intense desire. Her naked shoulders were white against the disheveled black cloak of her hair, her softly heaving… (Gray 84)”
I have learned a great deal from these little experiments; they usually teach me to be unafraid of my circumstances, such as when I moved out west, I found myself able to settle into seasonal work quite handily, but it required that I live like a minimalist, which has changed the way that I see my life, that it requires very little things in the long run, and that holding onto a lot of things is probably entirely unnecessary except for what you love.
What was interesting about the book is that it gets so many things factually wrong, because it’s supposedly written in 1911, so the ignorance that it displays about the cosmos, about science, and about politics shows itself at various times, and it shows where we’ve come in 113 years.
“The second law of thermodynamics proves the universe will end by turning into cold porridge, but nobody knows how it began, or if it began. (Gray 100).”
The fact is that I was listening to a Crash Course podcast on the Universe and physicist Dr. Katie Mack and John Green have already spent two episodes going into detail about the origins of the universe made me laugh when I read this line, and we know, due to modern science, a lot about the origins of the universe. I read a lot about cosmology, and I find it fascinating just how much we know about our universe all the time, and how much we’re learning every single day. Listen to the podcast here:
The treatment of Bella, especially after she was seen merely as a mistress of Wedderburn, and then later trying to make her assume the role of wife, instead of allowing her to become a doctor, as a free spirit, was an interesting venture, because she wasn’t interested in children, she wanted only to be held, to be touched, and, after a while, was unconcerned with sex after having worked in a brothel in Paris, which had her differ from the movie.
“Women of leisure-Napoleon regarded women as the relaxation of the warrior. In England, wives are treated as public ornaments and private pleasure parks of wealthy landowners, industrialists, and professional men. (Gray 154)”
Bella became more of a person who wasn’t about sexual appetites at the end of the novel, though she certainly, like a modern woman, was inclined towards sex for pleasure and not merely procreation, she wanted intimacy more than anything, which was something that seemed to have been denied to her from Colonial Blessington, who was a cold man. That was why she liked Candles is that he held her at night cuddled her with sheets between them, not a sexual act.
It was worth a read, as a juxtaposition to the movie, because I would say it’s less graphic than the movie in matters of sex, and it has a lot more to say, in my opinion, about intimacy and relationships, about the nature of consciousness and being alive. I enjoyed it thoroughly.
Anyway, thanks for reading.