Poor Things

by Alasdair Gray

“I suppose you will tell them that my pity for poor people is caused by a displaced sense of motherhood.”

Semi title

“I suppose you will tell them that my pity for poor people is caused by a displaced sense of motherhood.”

How very Freudian & ancient Greek (the wandering womb)

pleasure-seeking somnambulist

Ignorance is bliss & Bell had a crash course in humanity

the university where Adam Smith devised his world-famous treatise on the Wealth of Nations and his universally neglected one on Social Sympathy.

“I am ignorant and confused but not a fool or a coward. Give me work which uses me utterly!”

Me lol

“I will be a doctor.”

“Baxter knows a lot more than I do,” I told her. “Yes,” said Baxter, “but I will never tell people all of it.”

Sophia Jex-Blake

Edinburgh Seven, 1869 studying medicine at Edinburgh University

manual work be the primary training for every British profession that we took a while getting him back to the point.

Experience vs lecturing

Bella said she was determined to teach all the women who came to her the most modern and effective contraceptive methods.

SSRH BABY

Prevention of disease was more important than cure.

Prevention not treatment! Ehat a comment on modern medicine & big pharma

I knew Bella was unknowingly seeing the father of her brain in the first husband of her body, the grandfather of her brain in the father of her body.

Dear god what a sentence

Candle would have died fighting for me but what use is a dead Candle to a kidnapped Bell?

I am as poor a thing as General Blessington. Prepare to despise both of us.”

Title: Baxter is a poor thing and so is General Blessington

Order of the Golden Fleece

Odysseus ; is this real?

Rizzio and Bothwell

Mary Queen of Scots murdered lover and ???

drives the fair sex round the twist poor things.

Title: women in general are poor things

“I like that man,” whispered Bella so intensely that I did not know if she understood him.

LOL

“Can’t say—not my department,” said the detective, shrugging his shoulders.

ANd he said, idk *shrug* not my problem *nails*

apart from ignorant nurses.

A depiction of not only the General's crew's character, but of the misogynistic and ignorant sentiment of the time.

Sir Colin was notorious for knowing more than he shared with his colleagues.”

Which Baxter inherited and said of what he would share with Bell and Candle on pg.197

This absurd story about drownins and morgues and loss of memory has been cooked up to hide the plain fact that for three years you have lived with a freak in order to glut your insane appetite for carnal intercourse, first with him, then with a lunatic libertine, and now with a low-bred ruffian.

Oh so he is a prude. Did she kill herself out of depression from lack of satisfaction in her marriage and most likely judgement for her desires?

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.

Just a tool, & a blunt one at that

“She had the soul of an innocent child within the form of a Circassian houri—irresistible.”

Isnt this how current Bell is described? Esp with the literal mind of a child - ch12 pp82

You are still an unstable woman. Prickett should have operated on you after our honeymoon.” “Operated? What for?”

“three people in this room are qualified medical men, and the only woman present is training to be a nurse. She has a right to know why you say she is an unstable woman with insane appetites who should have had a surgical operation after her honeymoon.”

“the Mahometans do it to their women soon after birth. It makes em the most docile wives in the world.”

Is he talking about the UN banned, human rights violation, VAWG, misogynistic genital mutilation

“Erotomania,”

“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.

*clutches pearls* IMAGINE, liberating women's sexuality

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.”

I'd have jumped too LOL

“The poor thing needed cuddling.”

Bella - né Victoria - was a poor thing

“that the touch of a female body arouses DIABOLICAL LUSTS in potent sensual males—lusts

Sir, what?!

“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 Return Natura Lucretius tells us that only debauched females wriggle their hips.” “That creed is both false to nature and false to most human experience,” said Baxter. “To most human experience? Why certainly!” cried Prickett. “I speak of refined women—respectable women—not those of the vulgar mass.”

Its giving Yellow Wallpaper

first recorded by Athenian homosexuals who thought women only existed to produce men. It was then adopted by celibate Christian priests who thought sexual delight was the origin of every sin, and women were the source of it. I do not know why the idea is now popular in Britain. Maybe an increase in the size and number of boys’ boarding-schools has bred up a professional class who are strangers to female reality. But tell me this, Dr. Prickett. Did Lady Blessington agree to a clitoridectomy?”

Baxter is the GOAT: settin g the facts straight & ensuring Vicky was consenting

loathed her pathetic desire for contact with her husband,

!!!!!!!!!!

“Mr. Baxter would be a stone statue if he felt no pain,” I told them. “You have used this wise, kind, self-sacrificing man’s hospitality to call him a freak and a liar. In the hearing of the patient whose life he saved you have accused him of viciously assaulting her. You know nothing of the terrible crack which rings her cranium—had he not tended her like a mother and educated her like a father it would have caused worse than total amnesia: she would be an imbecile. His tour with her was no amorous excursion, but the best way of reintroducing her to a world she had forgotten. He did not connive at her elopement with Wedderburn—he tried to dissuade her, begged me to dissuade her, and when we both failed he gave her means to return to us when she tired of the escapade. No roué discarding a mistress would have done that! You have also had the insolence to call me—his best friend! Archibald McCandless M.D. of Glasgow Royal Infirmary!—you have dared to call me a low-born ruffian and weak-minded parasite. No wonder that vagal nerve discharge has induced reverse peristalsis and that excess pancreatic juice has irritated the oesophagus causing severe heartburn! And you say his pain at such vilification is a sign of GUILT!!!??? Think black black shame of yourselves, gentlemen. You have almost persuaded me that you are not gentlemen at all.”

GO OFF KING

lycanthropy,

HAAAAA SHES NOT A WEREWOLF

1880-81,

Time period

poverty of sensory reminiscence.

Loss of memory

Why drag her backward into a marriage which made herself and her husband miserable? If McCandless is my parasite, Harker and Prickett and Grimes are yours.

Bluebeard Blessington too.

all for you and me. Me! The grand-dad of a baronet! You owe me that, Vicky, because I gave you life. So be a sensible donkey.

Just a tool / pawn

Nobody will believe that, of course, so the greedy bitch tried to blackmail me into givin her money to give birth to the bastard, sayin she would tell me wife I had sired it if I refused. So I told the slut to go to hell and left her without a shillin.”

Dear god i hate him

poor Dolly

Dolly is, well and truly, a poor thing

It took me three hours to collect Prickett and another doctor who would certify her, and find an insane asylum which would accept a pregnant lunatic, and was prepared to send along a padded ambulance with three stout nurses to manage her transport. When I got back she had flown the coop.”

I feel legitimately ill at the thought of women being abused and manhandled like this, and when making a decision of their own accord that digresses from their husbands' wishes, being locked up and nonconsenually medicatfed, operated on, etc. Gilded Cage

Her flesh had shrunk so close to the bones that her figure was now angular, but the horriblest change was in her face. The white sharp nose, hollow cheeks and sunken eye-sockets showed the skull all too clearly, yet within the sockets each black pupil had expanded to fill the whole eye, leaving just a tiny wee triangle of white in the corners. Her dark curling mass of hairs had also expanded, for the first inch of each one stood straight out from the head “like quills upon the fretful porcupine”. I did not doubt that before me stood the emaciated form of Lady Victoria Blessington, exactly as she had emerged from the coal-cellar. But her voice, though sad, was distinctly Bella’s.

So animalistic how her whole being, esp her hair, changes so drastically with her emotions

poor thing

Again, Victoria is referred to as a poor thing

a deal which would have benefited you as well as me.

Again this grub is only thinking aboit himself

I HATE women near me when they are whelping, hate the blood, screams and stinking mess they make, ugh, the thought of it makes me want to retch.

I'm raging at these men

so I charged off in case you pupped on the platform.

JESUS CRIST