"Making up for Lost Time": Scotland, Stories, and the Self in Alasdair Gray's "Poor Things"

Abstract

ike Alasdair Gray's more famous novel Lanark (1981), Poor Things (1992) presents a postmodern metanarrative that explores the notion of selfhood, though this time through the extraordinary life of Bella Baxter. Bella recovers from an attempted suicide by drowning, after having the brain of her fetal child placed inside her own skull by the bizarrely brilliant Godwin Baxter. She elopes with a Scottish scoundrel, Duncan Wedderburn, travels through Europe and the Levant, and returns to Scotland after a stint as a prostitute in the Hotel de Notre Dame, a Paris bordello. Bella finally marries Godwin's friend, Archibald McCandless, a Glasgow public health officer, who writes the story of his courtship of Bella. In this novel about the creation of a female Frankenstein, Gray grapples with philosophical notions of selfhood by literalizing the mind/body split. More importantly, for my purposes, Gray illuminates broader political issues on nationalism, particularly Scottish nationalism and identity. The connection between Bella and Scotland is made clear in a portrait of Bella inserted in chapter 7 and reproduced here. Commenting on this portrait, Stephen Bernstein states, Bella-as-Scotland or Bella-as-Glasgow are thus distinct possibilities in the book's multivalent dynamics (131). But after offering a few tantalizing suggestions on the link between Bella and Scotland, Bernstein explores