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Plea for a Kinder, Gentler Century
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10898 |
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BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
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5 / 1993 |
653 Words |
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Douglas Burton
Douglas Burton is an associate senior editor for the Book
World section of The World & I. |
It is regrettable that the American edition of this perplexing and amusing novel omitted Alasdair Gray's tongue-in-cheek "blurb for the high-class hardcover," since therein is a major clue to the book's motivation: "Since 1979 the British Government has worked to restore Britain to its Victorian state, so Alasdair Gray has at last shrugged off his postmodernist label and written an up-to-date nineteenth-century novel." The author's mirthful reprise of some of the penurious ideas of the nineteenth century, especially assumptions about sex and gender, will incline some readers to wonder whether the moral blindnesses of our own period are similarly self-inflicted.
This obliges us to reflect upon the ironic title, Poor Things, and the lofty epigraph on its cover: "Work as if you live in the early days of a better nation" (attributed to poet Denis Leigh). What makes Godwin Baxter, Archibald McCandless, and Bella/Victoria--each in his or her way marvelously successful--poor things? Many readers will feel that the story ends (in either Archie's or Victoria's account) on a happy note. Godwin Baxter "created" the perfect woman (according to Archibald) or demonstrated moral perfection (according to Victoria McCandless). Archie rises from rural poverty to middle-class respectability and marries the "perfect woman." Bell/Victoria achieves fame as physician and pioneering feminist. And yet, their comic histories are laden with all too believable glimpses of the dark side of the Victorian century. The trio of heroes are seemingly all victims of parental abuse or neglect. Archie is a victim of paternal abandonment; Victoria suffers the depredations of a miserly father and a tyrannical husband (Sir Aubrey de la Pole Blessington). Godwin Baxter's childhood is the weirdest: According to Archie he was raised without benefit of a mother by his hyperrationalist father, of whom he speaks approvingly, yet in Victoria's account he loved and acknowledged his mother but cursed his father on his dying day. As Prof. Dillard has previously noted, even the unsympathetic characters, Duncan Wedderburn and Sir Aubrey, are seen to be victims of the hard-hearted child-rearing conventions of the period.
Readers cannot escape Gray's multiple ironies, the foremost of which is that the world's largest Christian empire headed symbolically by a woman invariably exploited the weak and downtrodden in general and women in particular. Poor things! Let us not look longingly at Victorianism as a repository of virtue that is sorely lacking in the present age, Gray seems to suggest. Let us work now (in the early days) for what we hope will be a better nation. The Victorian circumstances in which Archie and Bella/Victoria mature and find their careers is sorely
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