Unveiling the Surreal and Subversive: Interrogating Gender, Patriarchy, and Everyday in Poor Things

Abstract

Yorgos Lanthimos in Poor Things has created a world where the audience’s sensory perception is immediately shocked by the eerie and surreal ambience of it. Godwin Baxter, a Frankenstein-like doctor, in the narrative has created a mansion removed from the everyday reality of the world outside. The surreality of Godwin’s world is in stark contrast with the world that Bella Baxter (a ‘woman’ Godwin created) encounters outside. Godwin has created Bella, or given life to Bella, by inserting the brain of an embryo into the body of a grown woman; thus Bella is born into an everyday life which is created by Godwin (or God as Bella called him). Bella goes on a journey of self-exploration, a journey of self-awareness, where she interrogates her gender, sexuality, sexual pleasure, morality, and constructs her everyday identity. Bella consolidates her gender through various performative acts all through the movie. Everyday life has been an important element of cultural studies in the twentieth century; a critique of everyday life is a result of interrogating the prevailing structures in all segments of life: how a ‘person’ is constructed, becomes a part of the everyday through various performances is one of the aspects of investigating everyday life in cultural studies. This paper aims to read Bella’s everyday life before she leaves Godwin’s mansion and Bella’s encounter with the everyday realities of different cities, in other words, the diversified everyday life of the world. This paper will further explore how Bella constructs her gender identity, femininity, sexuality, and class consciousness gradually as the narrative progresses. Bella's investigation of the prevailing structures of everyday life and subsequent subversion of it is what this paper aims to explore. This paper uses some feminist and cultural theorists to study Bella’s interrogation of different structures and cultures. This paper is an attempt to capture Bella’s transformation from infancy to adulthood, from innocence to experience, from a docile individual to a rebel.