Poor Things | Alasdair Gray

Individuals are shaped by the society around them in a process sociologists call "socialization." An individual internalizes ideas and learns behaviours from the society. These are rarely explicitly taught but rather soaked up by osmosis. However, the process and its results differ from person to person. The way an individual internalizes the implicit "lessons" is one factor. The different people every individual comes into contact with are another. Yet another factor that hugely influences socialization is the dimensions of an individual's identity, like their age, class, gender, ability, or race.

The complex interplay of these identities and socialization is practically impossible to disentangle and trace. But some patterns reveal themselves in edge cases. A person who finds themselves transitioning between identities might discover their learned behaviours to be ineffective or inappropriate, or their beliefs to be incompatible with their new peers. Think of how much awkwardness many people experience in their teenage years, when they transition from being children to being adults, unable to fulfill their own expectations of "adult behaviour." Or you might recall how, in Pretty Woman (1990), the sex worker Vivian crosses class boundaries and suddenly finds herself dining in fancy restaurants and enjoying the opera. Her socialization has prepared her to fend for herself and to speak her mind, but not for polite conversation or for identifying the salad fork.

Socialization is also what Simone de Beauvoir was talking about when she wrote, "One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman," in 1949. She goes on to explain that children are born without any conception of sex or gender and that the divide is instilled in them through socialization. She observes that the process of "becoming a woman" is unending but identifies that the quality of gender socialization changes through life and builds upon a foundation laid in childhood.

We might ask ourselves: what if we skip this childhood—what kind of person would an adult woman become without early socialization? Bella Baxter, the main character of Poor Things, is such a woman. She is the Gothic creation of Doctor Godwin Baxter, who, at the end of the 19th century, has taken the brain of an unborn child and transplanted it into the body of a 26-year-old woman. We follow Bella on her—at times literal—journey of becoming a woman. Other characters, mostly men, are often confused or angry with her behaviour because she has not internalized their view of womanhood. Her naïve questioning and often blunt refusal to adopt their ideology make for an amusing read, and a modern-day feminist will find themselves nodding along easily.

This isn't to say that following Bella's journey is overall easy or comfortable, though. Reading how she develops her own ideas not only on womanhood but also on childhood, sexuality, morality, ethics, and politics naturally raises questions in the reader: when did I grow out of these ideas, and what gave me the right to become so jaded and cynical? Bella's analysis of one man offers an avenue to explore:

The novel is epistolary, wrapping the main story in layers of commentary that are regrettably absent from the 2023 film adaptation by Yorgos Lanthimos. These different perspectives call into question, among other things, what kind of woman Bella becomes and how abnormal or impossible her childhood actually is. In doing so, they elevate the already smart and gripping tale into a postmodern masterpiece.

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