Poor Things

by Alasdair Gray

poor silly creature I used to be.

Title

You cannot help being one still.

Dr. Prickett is a poor thing

Fuck off, you poor daft silly queer rotten old fucker hahahahaha! Fuck off!”

You tell him Bell!

Mother had taught me to be a working man’s domestic slave; the nuns taught me to be a rich man’s domestic toy.

That night I discovered why “Thunderbolt” Blessington was called “The Arctic Pole” by his fellow officers, yet thought the fault was mine. Six months later I had my third hysterical pregnancy and was begging for a clitoridectomy.

God was a big sad-looking man, but so careful and alert and unforcing in all his movements that animals, small people, hurt and lonely people, all women (I repeat and emphasize it) ALL WOMEN AT FIRST SIGHT felt safe and at peace with him.

“My dear, you have been badly treated all your life by selfish, greedy, silly men. Yet they are not to blame. They too were horribly educated.

Patriarchy is a prison for all

Mrs. Dinwiddie sat (she must then have been forty-five years old, for he was thirty) and said, “Mother, this badly treated lady has come to us for a rest, and will stay here until she can afford a home of her own. Treat her as my sister.”

Mrs. Dinwiddie is his mother??!

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.”

“Please do not fall in love with me, Bella,” he said. “I am not a man, you see, I am a big intelligent dog who is shaped like a man. Apart from that I have only one undoggy trait. I want no master—and no mistress.”

HAHHAA

McCandless had spied out the routes by which God took his dogs for their Sunday walk, and kept joining him on these. God was unable to be unkind to anybody, but once, when McCandless not only accompanied him home but had the insolence to force his way inside,

McCandless or Victoria is an unreliable narrator

“No, I mean your OTHER husband—Leviathan Pit-Bottomless Baxter de Babylon, surgical king of the damned material universe.” “Dead also Wedder,” I said with a heartfelt sigh. “Teehee! That one will never die,” he giggled. How I wish he had never died.

Promise to look after my dogs for me, my poor poor lonely leaderless dogs. Poor dogs. Poor dogs.”

Dogs are poor things

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.

His good fortune in later life never stopped him being at heart just “a poor bastard bairn”.

McCandless was a poor thing