Poor Things, Female Bodies, and The Posthuman Imagination
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Yorgos Lanthimos’s 2023 film Poor Things brings to the forefront the female creature that was never brought to life in Mary Shelley’s 1818 Frankenstein. Through an odyssey of sexual awakening and intellectual empowerment, Bella Baxter gradually gains agency and autonomy as an independent being. In this essay, I examine the power dynamics between male characters who seek to dominate and Bella who refuses to be dominated. This resistance is made possible by Bella’s unique posthuman status, as a female entity born within the neo-Victorian fantasy crafted by Lanthimos. Not only the origin of her creation but also the process through which the new species goes through bodily, intellectual and psychological progression render her to establish her posthuman identity. As she is the very absence of sociocultural history and memory, Bella effectively resists male ownership of female bodies, deviates from the societal norms, and obtains female posthuman ownership. Through this, I insist that Poor Things critiques anthropocentric humanism and presents an alternative society created by the female posthuman with previously marginalized social others.
Abstract
Yorgos Lanthimos’s 2023 film Poor Things brings to the forefront the female creature that was never brought to life in Mary Shelley’s 1818 Frankenstein. Through an odyssey of sexual awakening and intellectual empowerment, Bella Baxter gradually gains agency and autonomy as an independent being. In this essay, I examine the power dynamics between male characters who seek to dominate and Bella who refuses to be dominated. This resistance is made possible by Bella’s unique posthuman status, as a female entity born within the neo-Victorian fantasy crafted by Lanthimos. Not only the origin of her creation but also the process through which the new species goes through bodily, intellectual and psychological progression render her to establish her posthuman identity. As she is the very absence of sociocultural history and memory, Bella effectively resists male ownership of female bodies, deviates from the societal norms, and obtains female posthuman ownership. Through this, I insist that Poor Things critiques anthropocentric humanism and presents an alternative society created by the female posthuman with previously marginalized social others.
참고문헌 (22)
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