Making of a Monster: Rewritten Monstrosity in Alasdair Gray’s Poor Things
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2019
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Abstract
Rewriting as a strategy has found great resonance in the postmodern movement; it gives a voice to the oppressed, suppressed, and ignored in the target text, but also it enables a reconstruction and a deconstruction of taken-for-granted conceptualisations. In his rewriting of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Alasdair Gray presents a female monster of great beauty, Bella, instead of a physically abominable male one. In this respect, Poor Things thematically engages in the creation of a monster; however, the monstrosity of Bella lies not in physical abnormality but in her excessive beauty and sexual appetite. Rewriting is also performed by the characters in the novel, especially in the making of Bella. Each male she encounters commodifies her body to varying degrees. Bella’s body and sexuality, thus, are constantly rewritten by different male characters throughout the novel. This chapter examines Alasdair Gray’s Poor Things in terms of how the female body and sexuality can be the site of monstrosity, and it argues that monstrosity is not an epistemologically and ontologically solid state of being but a discursive construct perpetuated through the male gaze and appropriation. © Inter-Disciplinary Press 2014.