The Case History of Miss Bella B.
Helen Charman
Who’s afraid of psychoanalysis? Yorgos Lanthimos. Or, at least, that’s the prevailing impression from Poor Things. Lanthimos’s adaptation of Alasdair Gray’s 1992 novel is a certified hit, nominated for illustrious awards and pitched as a feminist black comedy, with Emma Stone winning the Best Actress Oscar for her portrayal of its protagonist Bella Baxter, a composite infant-woman made from the body of a twenty-five-year-old and the brain of her own preterm baby. The film has far eclipsed its source material, transposing the setting from Victorian Glasgow and the “daringly experimental history of Scottish medicine” to an indefinite, blurry London, and it’s this perceived erasure of Gray—perhaps the most specifically and vehemently Glaswegian of authors—that has drawn the most attention from those who wish to compare the book and its new celluloid incarnation. I expected, as I entered the cinema, Bella-Baxter-themed-cocktail-in-hand, to be angry about this—I lived in Glasgow, a city I still consider home, for many years—and I was. What I wasn’t expecting—especially given how Lanthimos’s earlier filmography is full of folklore, ghosts, Attic tragedy, incest, and sadomasochistic sex—was for his Poor Things to have also discarded the explicitly psychoanalytic structure of its source text.
Poor Things the novel is comprised of two competing case histories: the first is the story of Bella’s brain and its accelerated rampage through the stages of infant development, and the second, revealed later, is the story of the former life of her body, which belonged to the hysteric and “erotomaniac” Victoria Blessington, who threw herself off a bridge, a bag of stones strapped to her wrist, rather than face the prescribed “cure” of a clitoridectomy. The story that the film lifts out of the novel—the screenwriter, Tony McNamara, cowrote Lanthimos’s previous collaboration with Emma Stone, The Favourite (2018)—is only the central thread of a tapestry. Though a better metaphor, perhaps, is that of burial, or enclosure: the story of Bella’s life, narrated by her husband Archie McCandless, is held within a series of fictitious historical documents, introduced by their “editor,” Alasdair Gray in 1992, and followed with a postscript, “A letter to posterity,” written by Bella (now going by the name Victoria McCandless) in 1946, refuting the fantastical account of her origin—the story of the film—as the raving of a weak and jealous man.
The tripled timeline of the novel allows for a multiply analytic framing: it’s both Freudian—or rather, immediately pre-Freudian—in its central plot, and decidedly Winnicottian in its frame narrative, in which Bella, tasked with becoming a good-enough mother to herself, finds, finally, a way to “feel real” through a socialist political awakening that positions her subjectivity in relation to others. Tongue almost too firmly in its cheek, it restages analytic debates within the body of Bella Baxter/Victoria McCandless herself: in the nineteenth-century part of the story, Bella is taken to see “Charcot of Paris, Golgi of Pavia, Kraepelin of Würzburg, Breuer of Vienna and Korsakoff of Moscow” and their reports on her are compiled in the winter of 1880-81, the period during which Josef Breuer was analyzing Anna O and Jean-Martin Charcot was well into his work with hysterics at La Salpêtrière. Gray’s novel dramatizes feminist critiques of Freud and Breuer’s Studies in Hysteria (Archie is initially hired to write a case study of Bella’s development before he falls in love with her), engaging fully with the complexities of this character both medically and literarily created by a male practitioner. It also stages the recovery of her own voice, which is by necessity the development of a new one.
In the postscript, Victoria, or “Doctor Vic,” briskly dismisses the earlier plot, reorienting the narrative away from a Freudian preoccupation with infantile sexuality and toward, instead, a well-scrubbed interest in child development, dependence, and public health. She recounts her firmly twentieth-century life as a pioneer of reproductive medicine—including a flirtation with Marie Stopes-inspired eugenic thinking—and “homely cuddling and playful teaching,” expressed in a milky language intended to bring to mind the attachment theory that would become inseparable from the postwar British welfare state: “cuddling”’ she writes in a pamphlet “is like milk. It can and should nourish our health from birth to death.” (This “playful teaching” is also what she herself received: early in the novel we are told that her creator Godwin Baxter’s patient “lived in a great clutter because he wanted her to enjoy seeing, hearing, and handling as many things as possible”). The addition of this extra frame to a story already thronged with competing, parental narrators, is a technique not dissimilar to Winnicott’s “psychoanalysis partagé,” developed most fully in the case of child analysis known as The Piggle, in which the analyst’s observations share space with the perspectives of the analysand’s parents, as well as the child’s own extensive verbal experiments, recorded verbatim. Gray’s reader is furnished with all the material, and in the process offered the opportunity to piece together, from differing accounts, the history of the case as they find it. Lanthimos’s film, on the other hand, manages only to combine, unevenly, a straightforwardly sex-positive liberal feminist account of “becoming” a woman (at one point Bella’s husband actually says “it’s your body”) with a lazy attempt at satirizing a Pygmalion fantasy about “making” one.
I’ve had many conversations with colleagues and friends about the cinematic Poor Things, for almost all of whom the most readily available literary interlocutor is not Gray (or Winnicott, or Freud), but rather Mary Shelley’s 1818 novel Frankenstein. I get it, though for me Stone’s grotesquely feminized physicality is more akin to Helena Bonham Carter’s freaky bride in the exceedingly melodramatic 1994 film Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein than the monster himself. The most persuasive link between the two, I think anyway, is rooted in the relationship between narrative form and the formation—and revelation—of the unconscious. A decade before the publication of Poor Things, Barbara Johnson published a short essay called “My Monster/My Self.” In it, she reads Shelley’s novel through the lens of two more recent texts, Dorothy Dinnerstein’s The Mermaid and the Minotaur—“an analysis of the damaging effects of the fact that human infants are cared for almost exclusively by women”—and Nancy Friday’s My Mother/My Self—an account of the way the impossibly high standards of maternal love necessitate a level of repression that creates a heritage of “self-rejection, anger, and duplicity”—to argue that Frankenstein is really a novel about parenting. Victor Frankenstein himself, Johnson observes, grew up with two doting parents, and yet he abandons his own creation, repulsed by its monstrosity and its need, and the monstrosity of its need. (“The fact,” she says, in a formulation that always makes me laugh “that in the end both characters reach an equal degree of alienation and self-torture and indeed become indistinguishable as they pursue each other across the frozen polar wastes indicates that the novel is, among other things, a study of the impossibility of finding an adequate model for what a parent should be.” The good enough mother: frozen wastes edition).
“Bella/Victoria can be read as a problem posed for analysis itself—or, even, for psychoanalysis’s place in relation to literature: its readability.”
Johnson reads all three texts as feminist autobiographies “in their own right,” a definition which relies upon an understanding of the autobiographical as intimately related to the “the resistance and ambivalence involved in the very writing of the book.” Frankenstein, by this logic, rather than being “not one but three autobiographies of men,” is in fact a text that documents Shelley’s own ambivalence about motherhood: the child and namesake of a famous mother who died of a postpartum infection, by the end of 1818 she had already lost two babies herself. To write her novel, Johnson believes, Shelley must “figuratively repeat the matricide that her physical birth all too literally entailed”. In Poor Things, Bella/Victoria poses a matricidal problem and solution in one: she is, in one sense, emblematic of the problem of maternal autobiography in its entirety. A central concern of Johnson’s article is the idea of giving birth to yourself, specifically as an act of feminist narrative assertion or reclamation that is, still, inseparable from the problematic nature of maternal origin. (If the mother presents to the daughter as a cage, what happens when she realizes she’s stuck inside the same one?).
Lanthimos, for the most part, prefers to leave the sticky maternal knot at the center of the story—the grotesque symbiosis of the mother-daughter-baby-woman—well enough alone: he chooses to prioritize a kind of sex-positive rompishness, a fantasy of sexuality that represses the problem of origin by playing it for laughs. In the novel, Bella discovers that her body bears the marks of a caesarean section immediately upon losing her virginity to the caddish lawyer Duncan Wedderburn, and the discovery has a profound effect on her. In the long letter Bella writes to Godwin recounting her travels with Wedderburn, which he titles “Making a Conscience,” she writes:
“I had a baby once. God, is that true?
If it is true what has become of her?
For I am somehow sure she is a girl.
This is a thought too big for Bell to think.
I must grow into it by slow degrees.”
In the film, however, the revelation comes much later, long after she reaches sexual maturity, while she is working at a brothel in Paris. This robs the narrative of its central duality: Bella’s recovery of her repressed maternal experience—her bodily memory—happens in tandem with the rapid development of her brain, which is, of course, the baby’s emergence into the ego. Adam Phillips writes in 2007, in relation to Winnicott, that psychoanalysis “has never been interested in sexuality in itself, but only in sexuality as the revelation of personal history; sex in the service of memory.” Bella/Victoria, then, in her unique relationship to her personal history and to infantile sexuality, can be read as a problem posed for analysis itself—or, even, for psychoanalysis’s place in relation to literature: its readability.
The surgeon Godwin Baxter comes across in the novel like a parody of a Freudian, or even of Freud himself: he misreads everything, especially is own motivations. In discussing the fantasy of a perfect female companion that led him to create Bella, he declares he has come to terms with his own subconscious: “No doubt a mother supplies this want in most young creatures.” Elaborating, he describes this mother-substitute as a character from Hamlet: not Gertrude, however, but Ophelia. He goes on, satisfied at having inverted the expected paradigm, to offer an explanation of the play: “It obviously described,” he writes, “the spread of an epidemic brain fever which, like typhoid, was perhaps caused by seepings from the palace graveyard into the Elsinore water supply.” He inserts himself into the drama, imagining that Ophelia would be powerless to resist the charms of an “efficient public health officer” pointing her toward a “clean and healthy future.” Baxter’s tone reminds me of another confident man of science reading Hamlet: “The conflict in Hamlet is so effectively concealed,” wrote Freud in “Psychopathic Characters on the Stage,” “that it was left to me to unearth it.”
Ψ
The question of what gets unearthed is a predominantly linguistic one. Jacqueline Rose, in Sexuality in the Field of Vision, offers an interpretation of the psychoanalyst Andre Green’s reading of Winnicott’s reading of Hamlet that identifies femininity, and more specifically maternity, as “the very principle of the aesthetic process,” the place where creativity resides in every psyche. Rose observes that, in Shakespeare’s play, “the woman appears at the point either where language and aesthetic form start to crumble or else where they have not yet come to be.” In Poor Things the novel, however, Bella/Victoria exceed the aesthetic framings imposed upon them, wielding linguistic creativity like a weapon. It’s this particular relationship between analysis and language that makes me want to turn again—surprising myself—to Phillips so soon (he is, after all, the preeminent laureate of the communicable psyche). In The Beast in the Nursery he writes, of Freud this time, that as “a very late Romantic,” he found “the passions and perplexities of the child exemplary; the child with her consuming interests, her inexhaustible questions, and her insisting body.” It’s difficult to find a better description of Bella Baxter, and the fact that her insisting body is that of an adult woman makes explicit the implicit cultural discomfort psychoanalytic accounts of child development inspire.
In Lanthimos’s film, this is flattened, indeed almost entirely removed: Bella’s progression is simply positioned as a binary tension between her voracious sexual appetite and her stilted, childish language. Although we see a rampaging toddleresque Bella babbling echolalia and banging on piano keys early on, for most of the film she remains at the level of forced baby-talk (“me Bella”) until she suddenly begins to speak like a “normal” woman. In the novel, however, Bella’s sexual and linguistic development operate in tandem, and both are, crucially, characterized as a form of Kleinian revelatory play, although the unconscious conflicts that make themselves known in Bella are the doubly recovered adult experiences of a lost former self.
Observing the awakening of sexual desire in Bella, Baxter notes that her response to a new man (McCandless) “showed that her body was recalling carnal sensations from its earlier life, and the sensations excited her brain into new thoughts and word forms.” He specifically associates this with a “bawdy” Shakespearean punning instinct, and Bella does go on to try and emulate Shakespeare, or at least iambic pentameter, but she moves through other stages first: “I am taking Candle for a walk saunter stroll dawdle trot canter short gallop and circum-ambu-lation […] Without Bella you will grow glum glummer glummest.” Her letters, after she elopes with Wedderburn, begin in a fragmented style:
“DR CNDL, Y WNT GT MCH FRM M THS WY. WRDS DNT SM RL 2 M WHN NT SPKN R HRD.”
before becoming, by the end, “forty lines of closely written words.” In the Bella case study, it is within language that the potential for pathology lies. All the “specialists in diseases of the mind and nerves” consulted agree, says Baxter,
“that she shows no signs of mania, hysteria, phobia, dementia, melancholia, neurasthena, aphasia, catatonia, algolagnia, necrophilia, coprophilia, folie de grandeur, nostalgie de la boue, lycanthropy, fetishism, Narcissism, Onanism, irrational belligerence, unhealthy reticence and is not obsessively Sapphic. They say her only obsessive trait is linguistic.”
“Hysteria is exemplary, here: that canonically female disease in which the sheer too-muchness of the past exceeds its boundaries.”
Charcot, we are told, was convinced this would simply make her into a poet; Breuer, on the other hand, believed that the obsessive tendency would diminish as her memories increased. For Bella, meanwhile, such an accumulation means the recovery of lost experiences as much as the acquisition of new ones. Bella is curious first about other people’s pasts: “Tell tell tell your Bell Bell. I am a collector of childhoods since that collision destroyed all memory of my own.” Soon, though, she decides collecting such memories won’t be enough. When she describes her reasons for eloping with Wedderburn, she writes that
“A whole quarter century of my life has vanished crash bang wallop. So the few wee memories in this hollow Bell tinkle clink clank clatter rattle clang gong ring dong ding sound resound resonate detonate vibrate reverberate echo re-echo around this poor empty skull in words words words words wordswordswordswordswordswordswordswordswordswords that try to make much of little but cannot. I need more past.”
To need more past poses an interesting problem for a story that so self-consciously pastiches the excesses of the nineteenth century. Hysteria is exemplary, here: that canonically female disease in which the sheer too-muchness of the past exceeds its boundaries. The nineteenth-century part of Poor Things, described in Victoria’s postscript as a document that “positively stinks of all that was morbid in that most morbid of centuries,” positions itself in dialogue with contemporary debates about what medical science is and, crucially, what it can “make”: several chapters that recount crucial episodes in the character’s psychological development are named “Making Me,” “Making Godwin Baxter,” “Making Bella Baxter” and “Bella Baxter’s Letter: Making a Conscience” (the frontispiece of this one is an anatomical drawing of a vulva). It is also profoundly invested in gendered forms of insanity in the period, namely the treatment of hysterics, erotomaniacs, sex workers, governesses, and grieving mothers. The decision to let Victoria Blessington’s adult brain die is read, in this context, as a kind one: the alternative would have been to drag her back from her choice “not to be” and condemn her to confinement in an asylum, a reformatory, or a jail.
Bella/Victoria is simultaneously a hysteric and a hysteric’s opposite: her brain hungers for more past—she is haunted by a lack of reminiscences—but her body remembers its trials. This makes her a singular patient: during her encounter with Charcot at the Salpêtrière, she pretends to have been hypnotized, leading him to declare with a wink that she is “the sanest English woman he had ever professionally examined.” Without memories, there is nothing for the hysterical symptom to spring from. And yet, during her cruise of psychosexual development, Bella disembarks at the port of Alexandria and, while there, encounters for the first time the suffering of impoverished babies and young children. In the film, this is simply used as shorthand for her awakening political conscience (she naively gives away Wedderburn’s money in the hope it will reach the children in question). In the novel, however, the incident inspires a “catastrophic reversion” expressed at the level of language, represented in enormous scrawls across several pages:
“no no no no no no no no no, help blind baby, poor little girl help help both, trampled no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no, no where my daughter no help for blind babies poor little girls I am glad I bit Mr. Astley”
Her recently acquired linguistic proficiency unravels as her repressed maternal experiences rear their head.[1] Still, the composite case history manages to resist the legibility of diagnosis. When Bella recounts her experience in Alexandria to Charcot, he asks her to pose as a hypnotized patient at a lecture he’s delivering that evening and reveal “how the sight of the poor children affected you.” “I suppose,” replies Bella, seeing right through him, “you will tell them that my pity for poor people is caused by a displaced sense of motherhood.” “You recognize that?” he replies. “Then you are a psychologist!”
Bella wriggles away, time and time again, from this maternal displacement, which is suggested by multiple characters. (On more than one occasion, too, the suggested cure for her excessive empathy is, as it was for hysterics, to marry). To read Bella/Victoria’s body as an iteration of displaced maternal feeling rather than an incorporation of it—both matricidal and maternal at once—is to try and impose a single narrative upon a multiplicity: to do, in other words, what Lanthimos’s film does in selecting only one part of this story to tell. Charcot, in his attempts to diagnose Bella, instructs her to “describe your present sense of the human condition. Be as Socialistic, Communistic, Anarchistic as you please.” The implication is, perhaps, that it is only in a doubly embodied maternal feeling and repression of it—a full inhabitance of the unconscious—that a politics can be forged. In this dual case history, the conditions of masculinity, medicine, and their impositions on both the body and the psyche are made legible by Bella/Victoria as she learns to read and teaches us to, too.
Baxter, in his Ophelia fantasy, glamorizes the role of public health officer as one befitting a masculine romantic protagonist, but in the twentieth-century narrative strand of Poor Things it is Bella/Victoria who becomes an expert in public health, specifically that of “little girls, mothers and prostitutes”: psychic impotence, or the Madonna-whore complex, inverted. Almost as significant in the novel as the Alexandrian regression sequence is one that precipitates Bella’s resignation from the brothel she works at in Paris. This scene, which Lanthimos entirely cuts, involves the arrival of a doctor who enforces public health regulations by inspecting Bella’s fellow brothel workers for venereal disease with a speculum, as much a dramatization of the British Contagious Diseases Acts of the 1860s that sought to control the spread of sexually transmitted infections by submitting the bodies of sex workers to painful examination as the specific conditions in Parisian brothels. Initially impressed that the municipality cares about the health of its citizens, Bella is shocked to realize that the vagina (or, in her words, the “loving groove”), “was the only part of women he cared about”: she refuses to submit to the examination, and is summarily dismissed, with most of her earnings withheld in order to keep the doctor sweet.
This—just as much as her lost baby and her recovery of some maternal affects if not their associated memories—forms the basis within the case history of Bella for what becomes the case history of Doctor Victoria McCandless. The 1946 narrative is explicitly socialist, concerning itself with the ideas that would come to define, if only for a short while, the postwar settlement in Britain: reproductive health care, play-based childcare, and “the great task of the twentieth century—to make a Britain where everyone has a good clean home and is well paid for useful work.” The two case histories, read together, might wriggle away from expected diagnoses, discarding hysteria along with erotomania and maternal displacement, but they do offer a conclusive reading of the political development of a woman’s psyche: Bella becomes Victoria, in the end, by meeting the world, reading between the lines of memory and experience. A symbiotic intersubjectivity—the woman who is also her own baby—in this way, becomes a symbol for a kind of responsibility that knits the individual into the world, incites us to care for each other. Lanthimos’s film, in dispensing with this, hands us only another hollow work of selective empowerment.
[1] We later learn that when Victoria ran away to her father’s house in order to escape her miserable marital home, he sent her back because he was “afraid you would go into labour and 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.” In the characterization of Victoria’s matrophobic father and of her first husband General Blessington, Britain is also being characterized as place made insane by its past. Blessington is a fanatical agent of empire who seems to predate Juliet Mitchell’s male hysterics of the battlefield: when he orders Bella/Victoria to shoot him, McCandless realizes that “General Blessington truly wanted to be shot, had wanted it all his life, which was why he had been wounded so often. This historical command and passionate plea were so powerful that I imagined all the men killed in his battled rising from their graves to shoot him where he stood.”