An ecofeminist creation : how Poor Things rewrites and re-animates Frankenstein
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Alasdair Gray was one of the preeminent Scottish writers in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. His 1992 novel, Poor Things, represents a culmination of his carefully curated and craftily charged textual maneuvers as well as a rewrite of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1831). His creation of a rewritten, adapted text endows his novel with further significance as it belongs to a genre that seeks to critique and contrast our current realities with those that existed before. Continually, by choosing such a canonized and popular piece as his pre-text, Gray's work belongs within a lineage of adaptations that have reimagined the Frankenstein myth across time and space. However, Gray's novel is no traditional spinoff, rather he has collaged a variety of narratives to create a historiographic metafictional text that subverts historical myth with fictional fact (or literary certainties, such as Victor Frankenstein producing the Creature). Poor Things' continual disruption of notions of truth and reality constitutes a postmodern novel that questions any concrete conclusions and problematizes the notion of history itself. Specifically, Gray has inserted intimate details related to Shelley's life within his novel while simultaneously rewriting her infamous monster story. This thesis uncovers the extensive, deliberate connections Poor Things has to its pre-text and the life of its author as well as the notable diversions it makes. By examining these choices through an ecofeminist lens, it becomes clear how Gray is participating in a sustainable and radical literary practice--rewriting--by highlighting the abundance of content that art can be created from. Gray has re-animated the environmental and ethical questions integral to Shelley's text and personal context; Poor Things continues the legacy of her work by reimagining and recycling these myths to show their perennial value. Much like Victor Frankenstein, Gray has manipulated a variety of disparate parts and given them new life within Poor Things.
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M.A.