Poor things and Scottish education: Falling into the Clyde and being pulled up from the Thames

Abstract

Bella, in Gray’s 1992 novel Poor Things, fell into the Clyde attempting to end her life. She was pulled up from the Thames in Lanthimos’ 2023 film adaptation. Bella can be argued to represent Scottish Nationalism, but resetting the film omits this, recasting the source to be more palatable to a global audience. Similarly, Scottish education has been recast over centuries. This paper will problematise the drive to distinguish Scottish education from English, and the conflict between policy designed to play well on the local and international stages in the “global education race” (Sellar et al., 2017). Using a body schema, the paper is introduced via the Extremities: necessary information about the texts, Derrida’s hauntology (Derrida, 1994) and Lacan’s signifiers (Jacques Lacan, 2007), and how these are used to grasp at the argument being presented. The Limbs looks at Scotland’s first steps towards maturation through exploring the power dynamics of key education acts and the location of the Scotch Education Department. The Throat explores language’s importance and the impact of Scotland’s assimilation of English on its indigenous languages and their connections to Education. The Mind looks at Scottish education in present day in which, after successfully fighting for their own parliament, education has become a top priority, aiming to recreate a cherished (and mythologised) system, although it would appear that it finds itself dredging many of its foundational ideas from the Thames, or perhaps the Atlantic Ocean. Finally, the Whole concludes the piece. As Poor Things is a rewriting of Frankenstein, Scotland’s current education system is equally too a mishmash of recast myths, attempted fixes for past hauntings, and attempts to step into modernity. This work uses the comparison of the film and novel to generate fresh insights into Scottish Educational policy.

“Glasgow is a magnificent city,” said McAlpin. “Why do we hardly ever notice that?”

“Because nobody imagines living here… if a city hasn’t been used by an artist not even the inhabitants live there imaginatively” (Gray, 1987: 243).

“All stories are ghost stories, if only because each word, each random collection of syllables, is intended to conjure forth an unreal reality, to embody and to animate a strange imaginary entity that is both there and not there, actual and not actual” (Bergland, 2013: 375).

Thread: Exordium

Whilst this piece focuses on Alasdair Gray’s 1992 novel Poor Things, and its metamorphosis into Yargos Lathimos’ 2023 film of the same name, as an analogy for the Scottish Education system, the quotation given above is from Lanark, the text that, Massie (Miller, 2005: 11) argues, “changed the landscape” of Scottish literature, therefore, potentially, allowing Scotland to be “re-presented” as an “imagined community” (Anderson, 2006: 24–25). Here, Gray distinguishes himself by making the placement of the geo-political landscape in the west of Scotland in his works a political act in itself, apparent through McAlpin’s question and the rejection of Gray’s Lanark by a publisher in London:

I’m not convinced that Glasgow in the last 20 years is all that different from Manchester in the last 20 years or Wolverhampton in the last 20 years or indeed any other provincial town in the last 20 years (Glass, 2008: 97).

The London publisher thus, unable to perceive of a Scottish imaginative identity, acts out the cultural assimilation of Scottishness into Englishness through the comparison to other “provincial” English “towns”. This reduction of the Scottish identity to a state of assimilation is a key argument of this paper.

Lanark, derived from Gray’s political disappointment, is a fantastical retelling of the power of Scottish people and their Scottishness, exploring how creativity, imagination and artistic expression, even when suppressed by bureaucratic societal structures, can remain sources of hope (Glass, 2008: 146): “Gray explicitly stated that the trauma of 1979 [failed referendum] had knocked away a writer’s block that afflicted him for years” (Harvie, 1991: 77).

Gray’s proclivity towards political discourse is clear through his texts (Gray, 2013; Gray and Tomkins, 2005), so one can imagine the potential disappointment he would have felt in relation to Yorgos Lanthimos’ interpretation of the novel Poor Things in film (Lanthimos, 2023) with the re-setting of the plot in London, rather than Glasgow. According to Craig, “in 1997 the Scottish people voted finally and determinedly for their own parliament – perhaps in part because the Scottish novel had plumbed the depths of their fears” (Craig, 1999: 74) – if Craig is correct, this demonstrates the power of literature to enact change in a nation that lacks a homogenous linguistic identity or a unifying sense of culture and society. Missing the opportunity to continue Gray’s work in allowing people to “live there imaginatively” (Gray, 1987: 243), the film positions the protagonist, Bella Baxter, primarily as an emblem for feminism, omitting what she could more strongly communicate – Scotland’s post-modernist birth and fight for autonomy (Glendening, 2016; Kaczvinsky, 2001). Bella, who had previously fallen into the Clyde, was to find herself being pulled up from the Thames in service of the Hollywood movie mill whose primary concern is financial.

Poor Things is a fantastical rewriting of Frankenstein with Bella as a proxy for the monster. Gray’s narrative is nuanced, and whether Bella is really a Frankenstein-like creation, or not, is left to the reader’s interpretation of who best to trust – Bella, or her husband, Archibald McCandless, whose testimony comprises most of the text. McCandless tells us of his devotion for Bella, who begins the novel with a child-like brain, relearning the world as if she were growing up again. Bella begins to become disruptive and runs away with a man called Duncan Wedderburn. While travelling with him in Paris, she has both a sexual awakening and a political one, becoming a fervent socialist. Following this mindset, she gives away all of her and Duncan’s money, leaving them stranded. She turns to prostitution to make money, and enjoys this profession. Once she has earned enough, she eventually returns to Glasgow, and tries to wed McCandless. Here, it is revealed that she was already married to a Lord Blessington, from whom she fled because he was going to cut off her clitoris for enjoying sex. Failing to assert dominance over Bella, Blessington kills himself; Bella marries McCandless and becomes a doctor, taking over Godwin’s work.

At the conclusion of the novel, Bella, who is actually Victoria, disputes all of her husband’s testimony – she was a doctor and a social activist, and friends with Godwin, but she’s not a Frankensteinian creation. Lanithinmos’ interpretation has these similar plot points: her mind developing through travel, her career endeavours and love affairs; however, the nuance is lost – Bella is a creation of Godwin Baxter, there is no ambiguity. Furthermore, the transposition of the narrative from Glasgow to London reframes much of the meaning, precluding any Scottish nationalist political undertones (for more, see the section below, Extremities: Political Underpinning); instead, it tries to lean into the feminist aspects of Bella, but does so with such heavy-handedness that she becomes something of a villain: Blessington does not kill himself in the film, Bella surgically grafts him into a goat.

Like Bella, Scottish education moved through various stages of maturity. Historically, Scottish education was provided by the church and boasted higher literacy rates than England (Anderson, 2013: 242), particularly in Gaelic (McLeod, 2020: 75). The Gaelic aspect of local Scottish cultures was undermined, however, when James I commissioned his English language bible for Scotland. This homogenising force continued for over two centuries. When the Education (Scotland) Act 1872 came into being, churches no longer maintained control (with few faith exceptions); instead, it was overseen by the Scotch Education Department (SED) which was based in Whitehall, London (Knox, n.d: 3) and Gaelic provision was nowhere to be found. It took until 1918 for this to be ameliorated, when “adequate provision” became a requirement of the legislation. Nevertheless, the damage may have been done, and anecdotal evidence suggests that corporal punishment was often leveraged against both Gaelic and Scots speakers in Scottish schools in favour of homogenisation towards English (McLeod, 2020: 87–89). It was not until 1939 that SED was located within Scotland (Scotland, 1969: 5), and it took until devolution in 1999 for it to be under the political control of the Scottish (Gilles, 2013: 112). Although Scotland’s curriculum has been distinct from England’s throughout its history (Knox, n.d: 1; Macbeth, 1984: 168), it took until 2004 to develop – and 2010 to deliver – the Curriculum for Excellence – commonly known as the CfE – (Curriculum for Excellence | Education Scotland, n.d), the first curriculum developed by a devolved Scotland.

In our paper, the trajectory of Poor Things from novel to film serves as an analogy for trends in the Scottish Education system, which seeks to attain a sense of independence, separate from the history of the Union and all the political turmoil that that entailed, yet finds itself enmeshed in globalisation trends that tend to reframe Scottish issues through an Anglo-centric, neoliberalised lens. By exploring the various aporia and occlusions, which were part of Poor Things’ journey from novel to film, we seek to generate fresh insights into Scottish Educational policy, post-devolution, and the processes of its production. As part of this discussion, this paper will problematise and complexify the drive to distinguish Scottish education from English, and the conflict between policy designed to play well on the local and international stages in the “global education race” (Sellar et al., 2017).

All readings, including critical ones, are inevitably partial – in both senses of the term – and situated. This can’t be remedied but at least it can be acknowledged. In our case, we write as a teacher of English in the Scottish education system and a critical policy academic in a Scottish university. We acknowledge that our ‘progressive’ political stances shape our perspectives on policy and that our positionality may bias us towards certain readings of the texts in question. Nevertheless, our positionality may make it possible for such readings to be seen and given visibility, and, therefore, for others to engage with them from their own position.

Structured as a body, evoking the Frankensteinian creation of Bella herself, this paper will draw on theories such as Derrida’s hauntology and Lacanian psychoanalytic theory, in conjunction with readings of key moments in Scottish history, to argue that Scotland needs to understand itself as a nation, with all its tensions and contradictions, in order to create an education system that functions for late-modernity. The core of our argument is a retroductive one (Glynos and Howarth, 2007) and came from our readings of the texts we engaged with – Gray and Lanthimos – which, in turn, influenced which theories we engaged with as tools to articulate our particular understandings of the texts. In presenting our argument, and in keeping with the Frankenstein-like nature of Bella and the palimpsest-like nature of Poor Things, we deploy an organisational structure comprising body parts. The theories will be the extremities with which we have threaded together the ideas presented; the limbs mark Scotland’s first steps towards gaining governing autonomy; the throat section explores how Scotland is attempting to regain its native voice; and, finally, the mind represents the highest level of development to stitch together the body of the argument presented in this paper.

Extremities: Theoretical underpinning

Bella “owes her life” (Gray, 2002: 27) to the fingers of Godwin Baxter – ‘God’ as she calls him – who represents the historical and political context that this argument will bring to bear. As a dissatisfied and distraught young woman, she jumped into the Clyde; Godwin brought her back to life but chose to use the brain of her unborn infant to do so, obviating her suicidal tendencies. The genesis of Bella can be seen to represent the (post)modern Scotland: a woman who is searching for her place in the world, who has lost her memory and therefore her connection to her past (Kaczvinsky, 2001: 776), thereby reflecting the cultural amnesia (Craig, 1999: 34–35) that pervades Scottish society and has made its way into Scottish educational policy.

This cultural amnesia is a manifestation of the “mutual haunting of the nation-people and the state” (Cheah, 1999: 245), giving shape to a spectral spirit that haunts the Scottish political and educational landscapes. Derrida’s “Spectres of Marx” (1994) created the deconstructive modality of hauntology – a ghost of a historical figure can haunt us outwith its time – thereby highlighting “the liminal form of being (and thinking) encompassing life and death, human and non-human, presence and absence, that spectrality has been taken to exemplify” (del Pilar Blanco and Pereen, 2013: 91). From our perspective, modern Scottish Education, like much of Scottish politics, remains liminal –haunted by ideas of independence and sovereignty as a reaction to the infantalising Anglicisation of Scotland, which left it “in a queer position of having its own parliament and legal system but a king in London, who overruled the Scots parliament and laws” (Gray and Tomkins, 2005: 22).

Following the process of Anglicisation, although Scotland wasn’t colonised by the English, it was certainly inferiorised (Miller, 2005: 14) and this undoubtedly impacted the Scottish education system; however, one can see that there may be conflicting narratives on the loss of language, culture and what it means to be Scottish, as opposed to British, “covering the spectrum from extreme fear and paranoia to comfort or reverence” (del Pilar Blanco and Pereen, 2013: 91). This conflict over Scottish culture and identity is mirrored in the changes to the education system over the past 300 years. Scottish education has always, ostensibly, been under Scottish control, but not always by people located within Scotland’s borders and not in Scotland’s language(s), which raises the question as to how much influence Scottishness has had in education under British Sovereignty.

Lacan suggests that truth exists beyond language – which as a symbolic system of representation can only provide us with a semblance of the complexities and depths of experience and the unconscious – and thus can “only ever be said by halves” (J Lacan, 2007: 36). In other words, language is also a spectral phenomenon, for, “like ghosts, words are disembodied presences” (Bergland, 2013: 375). In this light, perhaps the telling and retelling of the educational past through the spectral resource of signifiers – a haunting made more profound by the suppression of Scotland’s languages in the telling – has wrapped the truth in so many layers of symbols (Scots, Gaelic and English) as to mythologise some of the potentially positive traits of the Scottish system and has led to mourning a loss.

Literary Bella is suppressed by her husband, and the narrative that he creates, but is able to exorcise the spirit of his suppression when she gains her own voice at the end of the novel, even if she is unable, like all of us, to speak full truth, whatever that might be or mean. In contrast, cinematic Bella never finds a voice beyond the one she has at the beginning of the film, remaining a child’s mind in an adult’s body. This leads us to ask which version of Bella, literary or cinematic, maturing or infantalised, provides the best analogy for Scottish education. This is particularly important to ask at the current time, since devolution has had a foothold now for over twenty-five years and is well into its adult years. With this in mind, we explore whether this time has allowed Scotland to move towards a recovery of a national identity through the education system, or stumble and remain haunted by the spectre of a lost past and the political and class divisions that helped conjure it?

Limbs: First steps towards maturation and agency

Bella’s first steps are those of a child: clumsy, haphazard, and disorganised. In the film, Stone’s acting coveys this through long shots, messily walking towards maturing and autonomy. In a key scene, Bella, eyes-wide, is enthralled by the somewhat off-key music being played by a live band in the dining room of the cruise ship she and Duncan Wedderburn are traveling on. She stands up to dance in the centre of the dining room with the other guests. Her limbs flail with enjoyment. Wedderburn joins and desperately tries to constrain her free movements into a dance similar to the other patrons. Unsuccessful, he moves her back to her seat. This fight between etiquette, decorum and conformity against creative and spontaneous free movement can be read as a female fight for empowerment. If Lanthimos maintained Bella’s characterisation true to Gray’s text, a rich reading of Scottish nationalism could have been interrogated. With both characters becoming English, this direct reading has been denied by a process that is itself a meta-narrative on the impact of union upon that same nationalism: the omission itself acting as a statement on the position of Scottish nationhood.

Bella was, ultimately, constructed by Godwin through Frankenstein-means, her former adult mind replaced by that of her unborn child; yet she rejects the worldview that Godwin tries to impose upon her – she chooses to strike out on her own path to maturation. We gain an insight into the confusion and turmoil created in an identity when it is subject to such a shock. In a similarly Frankenstein-like process of creation, the Education (Scotland) Act 1872 came into force, and the Scotch Education Department (SED) was established – naturally, it was based in Whitehall, London, England (Knox, n.d: 3), rather than in Scotland.

SED’s location was controversial: its status as “simply a room in Whitehall with the word ‘Scotland’ painted on the door” (Scotland, 1969: 5) embodied an infantalising and demeaning colonial relationship. The Permanent Secretary who oversaw the SED was the same person who oversaw the English department (Mckinney and Humes, 2022: 7). Scottish education was being subjected to its own surgery, a (mis)birth in which it was to look like Scotland, yet at its core have its mind located in England. The Anglicisation of Scottish education was felt by many politicians in the 1918 House of Commons sitting – according to Mr Ramsay Donald:

Its [SED] atmosphere is English. The influence which lies about it is English, and if anyone cared to take up the time of the House, which I do not want to do, by going into details of the changes in Scottish education during the last fifteen or twenty years, it could be shown that English influences have been changing fundamentally the conception of Scottish education, and certainly not for the benefit of Scottish education (UK Parliament, 1918).

It was felt at the time that Scottish education was not run by people who were fully invested in Scottish education’s best interests (Mckinney and Humes, 2022: 7), thus leading to the dismantling of Scottish education’s past as demonstrated by Mr Price in the House of Commons sitting:

I believe that if you do this it will Rave [sic] a very marked effect upon education in Scotland. In days gone by Scotland was a long way ahead of England, Ireland and Wales in the matter of education, and I say with great regret that it has not now the same lead as it used to have… My belief is that if this Department had been in Edinburgh it would have kept our education system vastly more in touch with the wishes of the Scottish people. Scotland has not got to-day the lead which it had, but if you remove this Department from London you will do something to encourage the prospect of education in Scotland (UK Parliament, 1918).

It took until 1939 for SED to move to Edinburgh (Scotland, 1969: 5); and even then, it was still controlled by Westminster until the devolution of 1999 (Gilles, 2013: 112).

Scotland’s (1969) analysis of the “relations with England” is that of a “running battle” between different acts in Education whereby, even though the acts were meant to be separate, issuing from separate departments, England would enact new sweeping acts – acts of wilful amnesia – dressed up in Scottish terminology and designed to instigate an English solution to problems Scotland had already resolved (Macbeth, 1984: 168; Scotland, 1969: 261), though it is worth noting that others perceive this as England getting “caught up” to Scotland and see the distinction between the two as no longer mattering (Anderson, 1985: 83).

By 1939, Scotland’s nationality was going through a modern renaissance, with writers, artists, musicians, and architects, transforming how Scotland was viewed (Kerevan, 2013: 263). What followed was a massive shift towards mobilising Scotland’s post-WW2 economy, though this was somewhat curtailed by the failure of the 1979 referendum (Kerevan, 2013: 263); but, as Gray argues, in his case, it was also the creative hammer necessary for unblocking his writing, thus amplifying his political voice and encouraging the voices of others (Kerevan, 2013: 268), which Craig argued supported the referendum on devolution in 1997 (Craig, 1999: 74). With hindsight it seems clear that devolution offered a glimpse of what an independent Scotland might look like, allowing it to start a process of ever-changing growth and the reimagination of its national identity.

A natural starting place for this identity is the remembered history of Scotland. However, the ‘truth’ of history is communicated through signifiers, which, according to Lacan, cannot fully express the truth – only a half-truth – due to the Real, as that which cannot be captured within the representational resources of the symbolic or imaginary registers, being only partially accessible to, and expressible through, the limited resources of language (Jacques Lacan, 2007; McGowan, 2025). Any narrative or discourse concerning the past will inevitably contain gaps, and it is through these gaps that spectres (Derrida, 1994) enter and haunt received knowledge – for instance, “the other of the social [as] the ghost of ideology, a condition of ‘nowhere’ that troubles nationalism in its contemporary constellations” (Hitchcock, 2013: 188). As this suggests, national identity is an uncertain thing (Anderson, 2006), drawn from fading colours, painted though local histories, articulated via heteroglossic languages and asserted through political machinations, while the history of nationalism itself “is far from banal”, involving the oftentimes-violent suppression of difference and the imposition of unity (Seymour, 2024: 16). When a smaller nation has part of its identity imposed upon it by a larger neighbour, perhaps the ‘invented’ nature of national identity (Hobsbawm and Ranger, 1992) is more pronounced: Scottish identity is growing, not just from a fading image, but in the form of a partially-reactive palimpsest, whereby everything done moving forward comes from a romanticised memory of the past before Britishness was superimposed. Locked together (with Wales) on the same ‘small island’ (Levy, 2009), there seems to be an inevitable entanglement of Scottish and Britishness: as if the Clyde were to feed into the Thames yet also be fed by it.

A example of such romanticisation could be the ‘Lad of Parts’ myth that Anderson (1985) discusses: the (partly-)mythologised egalitarian past, in which the working-classes went to university alongside the middle and upper classes – a myth that is not reflected in a modern reality, which does not see those of working-class backgrounds proportionately represented at the university level (Anderson, 1985: 101). Indeed, even as the myth was being developed, the meritocratic element of gaining access to university was overstated, and the very poor were not well-represented (Anderson, 2013: 242). If the basis for formulating an independent educational system rests on such faded tropes, half peering from beneath the scraped off paint of Britishness, then the danger of building a future on the basis of such myths is surely alarming.

As a Frankensteinian-construct Bella herself could be read as a palimpsest, as could the film, with a Greek director, spreading Hollywood’s paint with a globalised paintbrush over a Scottish novel, resulting in a strangely Anglicised narrative artwork with English, not Scottish, accents being heard. If one were to scrape away the overpaint to try and access Gray’s original concept one might interpret the dance scene very differently, as a power-struggle, with England and Scotland dancing between the evolution of education acts – the first one taking a clumsy, child-like step towards a distinctive system, the other perceiving this independence of spirit as a threat to its own identity and thus critiquing, in order to limit and restrain, such insubordination, and both, ultimately, continuing the spectacle. This power-struggle might appear to have been lost – the pressures of globalisation obscuring the Scottish message – but the scene is still haunted by the intentions of the source material if one can simply see past the superficial English adornments.

Throat: The voice of a nation

In the film, Stone plays Bella with an English accent, unlike Bella in the novel. The only reference to Scotland and a Scottish accent is Willem Dafoe, who plays Godwin – a homage to Gray himself (Alex Welch, 2023). The accent, however, is imperfect: it is a Jean Brodie accent with a side of American. Dafoe’s casting is linked to his established career, an asset when marketing the film to a globalised audience. Similarly, Mark Ruffalo, is another internationally-recognised American star whose English accent could have been improved – for instance, the word “heart” has the American tap, where the upper-class English would clip. As the film is set in England, one might question the choice behind casting American actors to play British people when there are British actors in Hollywood with global recognition. Nevertheless, the film has accrued many accolades due, in part, to these choices, which in turn has enhanced the marketability of the film – and as in the instrumentalised world of education policy, where ‘achievement’ and ‘results’ are the dominant currency, so too in cinema, profitability is the bottom line. This is, perhaps, inevitable, since a corollary of globalisation is the translation of culturally-specific works into an internationally consumable format – and translatability begins where authenticity ends (Kapsaskis, 2012). The cultural authenticity of Scottish languages is perhaps only needed in a globalised economy insofar as it serves economic ends, such as heritage-based tourism.

Stone’s accent, though, is believable, and one must admit that the voice of her character would be difficult to portray: how does one convey a Mancunian-Glaswegian-inflected, stilted, childlike-diction coming from the body of an adult? Bella at the beginning is a “child”, at least in her mind, and is meant to speak like a child: it is meant to be stilted and messy as she is literally learning how to speak (again), with sounds being articulated, words being formed, and sentences being constructed. Stone’s continuation of that stilted voice, even though her vocabulary suggests that she has reached full maturity, may lead one to question why she is still speaking with such weird diction? Perhaps, this is to remind the audience of Bella’s genesis – she may now be a fully developed adult, yet one cannot forget her Frankenstein-like origins.

With her mind replaced by that of a child, Bella speaks in a manner unnatural to her form, which provides a metaphor for Gray’s insights into what political union has done to the language of Scotland (Kaczvinsky, 2001: 782–784). However, one must acknowledge that the reason for English being the dominant language in Scotland could be due, at least in part, to a previous inhomogeneity in the national tongue (Matheson and Matheson, 2000: 211–212). Anderson states that language has great power in constructing a nation; however, neither languages nor nations are static, and signs and symbols can evolve over time, changing the balance of power between rival claimants (Anderson, 2006: 9–36). Language can, therefore, aid the symbolisation of a nation, its people, and its culture; but difficulties can also be created when a people does not identify with the language that is forced upon them, when they do not have just one language to identify, or when a homogenous language pervades a territory, owing to a loss of previous languages that local populations within that territory would have once used. For these and other reasons, English is the de-facto primary language of Scotland (and the rest of the U.K.), even if it was not always so.

The film version of Poor Things, then, rewrites characters to have English or American voices, erasing the Scottishness of the original text, and as such, the film unknowingly replicates the Anglicisation of Scotland. The initial loss of Scottish languages could be attributed to various factors, including King James VI of Scotland, in 1603, becoming King of Britain (Lowing, 2017: 4), and the spread of “print-capitalism”, which encouraged a sense of nationalism through a populous needing to identify as a nation through set of shared signs (Anderson, 2006: 37–46). Significant here is the commissioning of an ‘English’ Bible for Scottish people (Matheson and Matheson, 2000: 212), especially with Scotland being a nation whose education was previously shrouded in religion, would have been impactful: “it is hardly surprising that the language of religious and literary prestige became associated with southern English; and, with the great standardising pressures of the seventeenth and eighteenth century, Scots as well as Gaelic became widely associated with the vulgar, the barbaric, the parochial” (Corbett, 1997: 7).

The drive for intelligibility and homogeneity shaped not just the world of print and publication but also, perhaps inevitably, education. Here it took a greater toll on Gaelic than it did on Scots. In the 1872 Education Act (Scotland), Gaelic language teaching was omitted initially, though it is important to note that “highland educational initiatives had always insisted on the primacy of English” (Anderson, 2013: 245). The omission of Gaelic was potentially an endeavour to promote further homogeneity and support literacy (Mckinney and Humes, 2022: 13), however, there is an irony in that Gaelic literacy was higher than English literacy prior to 1872 (McLeod, 2020: 75). The omission was rectified, somewhat, in 1918 when it was mandated that “adequate provision” had to be granted in Gaelic speaking areas (Mckinney and Humes, 2022: 13). However, this provision was potentially not as meaningful as this suggests and many writers and activists recalled being beaten for speaking Gaelic on school premises or during school hours (McLeod, 2020: 87–89).

One might question why it was so important to control language in this manner. Here, again, nationalism rears its troubling head:

Language, then, is simultaneously external and internal to the speaking subject. It is both pedagogic in teaching them the awesome responsibility of being English and performative in that it is only through their speech that the nation is given voice and so redeemed (Donald, 1992: 54).

If language is both pedagogic and performative, what language one is taught in and identified with is imperative to the forming of a nation. With Great Britain established on the primacy of England amongst its kingdoms, Britain becomes an English-speaking Island – British becomes English. However, the Scots are not English, so teaching Scottish tongues is also imparting the responsibility of being Scots. Gray even comments on the phenomenon himself in his political text, Why Scots Should Rule Scotland, stating in an imaginary conversation with his publisher:

…The Scottish Education Department did it [eradication of language] to the Gaels.

PUBLISHER: That was cruel, but would it not have been more cruel to leave them ignorant of English?

AUTHOR: Of course they should have been taught English – every child should learn a second language and the earlier they learn it the easier. Good schooling promotes self-confidence by enlarging on our parents’ culture, not by denying it (Gray, 2013: 83).

Scotland is still haunted by these accounts of denying culture through the subjugation of language, and this is something the Scottish Government sought to rectify in policies set by the Scottish parliament in Holyrood – such as implementing the Gaelic Language (Scotland) Act 2005.

Despite the potential perception of rectifying the loss of indigenous languages, a language hierarchy is inevitably established in modern day Scotland. For example, the CfE benchmarks and Scottish Education policy documents are written in English, while “the final draft of the experiences and outcomes for Literacy and English cut the explicit references to Scots Language and texts in every outcome” (Niven, 2013: 289–290). Although, superficially, Gaelic can be taught like English, it still occupies an inferiorised position: many of its policy documents written in English and its subject selection limited relative to those taught in English – both of which could relegate it to second language status, despite the aim of the Gaelic Language (Scotland) Act, which was “securing the status of the Gaelic language as an official language of Scotland commanding equal respect to the English language” (Scottish Parliament, 2005).

The question as to whether Scotland was inferiorised, and whether that is why they lost their languages, is contested, though it is worth noting that inferiorisation and infantalisation are signature strategies of colonial and patriarchal powers such as imperialist England. Arguably, the Scottish Government’s desire to regenerate Scots languages in schools is a politically charged aim to right the wrongs of a past where students were beaten for speaking their mother tongues. But the narrative of losing language due to the cultural colonisation of the English is perhaps not so much a question of accuracy, as it is a notion of perception, a longing for an authenticity and purity that is, ultimately, ahistorical (Kapsaskis, 2012: 4). Scotland, and Scotland’s education system, is, like Bella, an entity with many affectations to its voice, which reflects a rich history, albeit without a complete memory of how it came to sound the way it does:

The muscles of Bella’s throat, tongue and lips still move as they did in their first twenty-five years of their existence, which I think was nearer Manchester than Leeds. But all the words she uses have been learned from me, or from elderly Scotswomen who run my household, or from children who play with her (Gray, 2002: 34).

As an allegory for Scottish language, Godwin reconstructs a Scottish voice from one that had become English, but the effort is imperfect. We see the very same occurring in Scottish education, where efforts to reinvigorate Scotland’s native tongues fall short due to geopolitical realities and political expediencies. The Scots language in the film rendition of Poor Things is reduced to the accent of one actor on the auspices of global appeal; perhaps this speaks of the history of the Scots language in the Scottish education system.

Mind: Reimagining a new Scotland

In the film rendition of Poor Things, Bella defeats General Blessington by facing his tyranny with tyranny – as an ethically questionable surgeon – of her own and forms an unclear union with McCandless. This contrasts her trajectory in the novel, which sees Blessington die, at his own hand, to “political disappointment” (Gray, 2002: 239), thereby enabling the marriage of Bella and McCandless, legitimating their union by dissolving that with Blessington. If her marriage to General Blessington represents the Union between England and Scotland (Kaczvinsky, 2001: 780), her active refusal to return to Blessington, with whom she no longer wishes to have an allegiance, could be representative of Gray’s desire to dissolve the Union. In both iterations, we find Bella re-presenting herself as an individual with full autonomy over her own mind, but to different ends. The question for Scotland is, which of these interpretations did it choose? Did it renounce England only to engage in globalised behaviours dominated by the same neoliberal discourses? Or did it remove itself from English influence and redefine its own national identity? Perhaps this is a non-choice – perhaps it did both.

Scotland began to re-present itself as political forces moved it towards two referenda. Perhaps if the 1979 referendum was lost on account of the dead, the 1997 was won by their haunting and so, in gaining devolved political power in 1997, Scotland’s mind could turn to a reimagined Scotland through at least some political autonomy. But, despite gaining Holyrood, there was a perceptible voter apathy in the years that followed (Munn et al., 2004: 434). The hypothesised rationale for the decline was that “people’s expectations of the Parliament were high” (Munn et al., 2004: 434). Perhaps for this reason, political drive was sublimated into education; whatever the reason, education reform was high on the political agenda (Munn et al., 2004: 434) and manifested in the new CfE, which was sold on the basis of aims to create a “participatory democracy” (Munn et al., 2004: 434). Undoubtedly, the apparatus of education can be used to shape and control understandings of cultural discourses and unite nebulous concepts, such as “’race’, community and locality” (Donald, 1992: 69), as part of the process of nation building.

Bella’s appetite for knowledge foregrounds some of the ambivalence in modern day education: on the one hand, her active acquisition of knowledge and disobedience embody a rejection of older ways of working that are seeing a resurgence in the form of neoconservative discourses and practices in many contemporary schools, with children being exhorted to chant ‘silence is my natural state’; yet her individualism, resilience, and adaptivity are all key aspects of the neoliberal subject (Brathwaite, 2017; Chandler and Reid, 2016) and are encountered in many contemporary education systems, including Scotland. The CfE, for example, embodies neo-liberal traits such as encouraging preparation for the market-driven workforce through programmes like Developing the Young Workforce (Scottish Government, 2023). Indeed, the curriculum has been criticised by writers, such as Gray, for dismantling Scottish cultural values and freedom of thought, in favour of something more palatable for an Anglicised government with its eyes on international rankings and league tables (Humes and Bryce, 2013: 143). Cultural subordination is also evident in the CfE; for instance, the latter’s four capacities (successful learners, confident individuals, responsible citizens, and effective contributors) echo similar characteristics in the English National Curriculum (Patrick, 2013: 3) and other neoliberal policy agendas, even if other commentators dispute this charge (e.g. Hedge and MacKenzie, 2016).

The CfE has attempted to construct a Scottish education system fit for the twenty-first century (Curriculum for Excellence | Education Scotland, n.d) but has perhaps been hampered by the demands of global competition and the pressure on nations in the ‘global education race’, which “pits countries and school systems against one another. Fear of being left behind in this race now haunts policy-makers and school leader around the world” (Sellar et al., 2017: 4). But as well as pitting countries against each other, the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) (PISA: Programme for International Student Assessment | OECD, n.d) and other such international tests subject national education systems to a global gaze. Following Frosh (2013: 70–74), and his ‘speculative list’ (p. 70) of the ways a patient might experience the analyst’s gaze, we suggest that the global gaze of international testing is liable to haunt education systems in various ways: as alienation, when subjects find themselves turned into objects; as non-recognition, persecution or pity for those assessed as weak; or as potential seduction for those, like Finland, held up as role models to be mimicked by others. Against this context, Scotland attempts to tell a distinctively Scottish story, and it lacks the same degree of competition between schools owing to less privatisation than other countries (Gutiérrez and Exley, 2025: 518), but in pursuit of international recognition, it replaces much of its story with globally palatable content —inadvertently inviting alienation by mimicking the neoliberal tactics of the English education system (Brathwaite, 2017: 434–435). Like Bella in the novel, Scotland has found itself in the Clyde flowing inexorably towards the Atlantic and the neoliberalism of international waters and has panicked, resulting in tactics that undermine its vision of socially democratic equity.

Indeed, despite its self-image as an equal society, Scotland’s declining reading and maths scores (2002–2012) and international comparisons suggest otherwise. Davidson (Bryce and Humes, 2013) argues countries like Finland and Canada perform better in international tests, like PISA, by addressing social diversity, particularly for disadvantaged learners. The OECD (2007) notes that socio-economic status in Scotland outweighs which school one attended as a factor in predicting achievement. Similarly, Wilkinson and Pickett (2010) link greater inequality to poorer educational outcomes, challenging Scotland’s egalitarian ideals. The Scottish Government has tried a range of tools to redress the attainment gap – including creating their own data analysis tools (McCluskey, 2017: 4–5), but the decline in PISA results has continued in the years following the OECD’s (2007) comment. McCluskey suggests that Scotland needs “to think more deeply about cultural, historical and social barriers to achievement” (McCluskey, 2017: 20) in order to close the gap – which demands a clear view as to what these cultural, historical and social barriers are.

Returning to Poor Things, at the end of the text, Bella has a strong notion of social equality, much like the Scottish educational imaginary. However, in Bella’s narrative, there is an added ambiguity: at the end of the text there is a framing letter by Victoria McCandless, who denounces the main text as a work of fiction. If this is the case, then Victoria, unlike Bella: “failed to bring about social reform or even successfully raise her sons, and we see in her understanding of history that her optimism outweighs her ability to accurately assess reality” (Glendening, 2016: 78). Similarly, PISA results and the OECD’s comments frame the Scottish self-image of an equal society as a fiction, behind which is an education system failing to address the societal barriers that create iniquity.

When it comes to the film, we might say it is a Frankenstein of a Frankenstein of Frankenstein, and it shows; maybe similar seams are showing in Scottish education, as Scotland seems to be awkwardly stitching together an eclectic mix of components, including traditional Scottish values and deeply rooted myths, modern Scottish ideals, and half-hearted neo-liberal concepts, the incompatibility of which leaves them in a middle ground that could be described as a conservative-corporatist model (Jopling and Vincent, 2020: 726). At the same time, Scotland’s policy makers are attempting to distance themselves from the experimental laboratory for neoliberal education policy that is England’s education system (Ball, 2016: 1047), as well as from Englishness and, by extension, any historical complicity in empire (Swanson and Gamal, 2021: 460–461). Like the film version of Poor Things, Scottish education seems in many ways to be a multi-layered Frankenstein.

The Whole: Denouement & Conclusion

With the story knitted into a whole, the sutures helping to bind things together have served their purpose; the “untying” of these knots is the denouement: the disentangling of the story. In the novel, this is achieved through a letter from the previously mentioned Victoria (Bella). She denounces the novel as “sham-gothic” (Gray, 2002: 275), a figment of her husband’s (McCandless) imagination, and names a list of all the texts from which McCandless’ text was copied (Gray, 2002: 272–273). The image given on page 45 of the novel is of “Bella Caledonia” (Gray, 2002) while in the contents page the image is described as “Bella Baxter, from a photograph in The Daily Telegraph” (Gray, 2002: 7). “Bella Caledonia” could mean beautiful Scotland, which would also tacitly tell the reader that it is not Baxter/McCandless – but there is still an implication that it might be, and even she admits that there is a “likeness”. This parallels the notion of the beautiful Scotland that can be envisioned in one’s head, that is not real – it is just a spectre.

Bella’s existence as McCandless’ fantasy is a reading that is completely omitted from the film. Bella is a new person created by God(win). Lanthimos allows us to explore the new world alongside her through fisheye camera lenses and colour shifts throughout her development. In the end, Bella becomes a tyrant and capitalises on her power over men, whereas in the novel she does not – she is just a person with a husband who has created a fantastical novel in which she is the key protagonist.

In both versions of the story, Bella is a character trying to regain control over her own narrative, identity, and body. Bella lost these parts due to being colonised by the men around her, either through her creation, through marriage, or through narrativizing her, and she seeks to reassert her autonomy:

If there is a common theme running through the novels of Banks and MacLeod (and of Scottish Science fiction as a whole) it concerns the issues and frictions that arise between coloniser and colonised, and between races of different values and types of society. It is not too far-fetched to see in this a reflection of Scotland and Scottish culture trying to reassert itself with the UK, and as part of a wider world (Kerevan, 2013: 269).

In the novel, Bella fights against Blessington and McCandless to become something new, whereas in the film she is denied this ability. Bella in the film is haunted by all the men and, as result, her trauma turns to tyranny, and she puts Blessington’s brain into a goat and vice versa: she becomes the thing she rebelled against.

Conclusion

Donald (1992) argues that education creates culture, and culture creates a nation (1992: 50). The study of literature, in education, may help to generate a sense of shared culture (Donald, 1992: 48–49). Donald states that all forms of reading, whether that be high literature or popular texts, asserts a level of culture on the individuals of a nation through engaging with the practices in everyday life – including reading “narratives of the book, the cinema or the school” (Donald, 1992: 50). Bearers of culture, the novel and the newspaper, may act as drivers of culture (Anderson, 2006: 9–36), and, if so, then culture exists as an intermediary between education and nationhood, which renders such readings of texts like Poor Things a valid way of interrogating the connections between national identity and the values embedded in the education system.

The CfE has not achieved what Bella in the novel has managed to do because it is haunted by its history, whereas Victoria is not; she has her memories that she has chosen to look past. The CfE needs to decide which way to go – be haunted or move past the myths to create something new. Should Scotland be constructing an education system that works for Scotland, or one that plays well on the global market and the “education race” (Sellar et al., 2017) – like the film. If, like Lanthimos, Scotland appeals to a global market and removes Scottishness, thus denying themselves the ability to live there imaginatively (Gray, 1987: 243), they may run the risk of becoming a “society whose imagination is retarded or stagnating… looking at a bleak future” (Kenneth Baker in Donald, 1992, p. 54).

However, Scotland’s memory of the past is also compromised. Poor Things can be read as an analogy for memory: as Kaczvinsky (2001) states “Gray underscores how texts, like memory, can be lost through the accidents of history or the wilful disregard of the power structure. The identity of a nation (or a self) may be found in its stories, but those stories are vulnerable to the thousand natural shocks” (2001: 797). An example of a vulnerability to a “natural shock” is the evolution of the text to film overshadowing the original nationalist message that Gray conveys (Kaczvinsky, 2001: 797). This has potentially deleterious implications for the novel from the film adaptation.

In the limbs, we have explored the myth-making process that haunts Scottish policy making from a half-formed historical narrative; in the throat, the Anglicisation of Scotland’s native tongues is discussed; the mind has seen neo-liberalisation influence the development of the Scottish system. Thus, Scottish Education suffers from such loss of memory through the continual evolution of education acts which arguably Anglicised the nation – which has led in devolution to the creation of the CfE. The CfE is dichotomous in presentation as a result: there are similarities to the English system, with its neoliberal undertones – perhaps adopted in fear of looming gaze of the “global education race” (Sellar et al., 2017) – yet it appears to regard itself as antithetical to England. Mythmaking appears to have been present in Scottish beliefs for centuries, and in education it serves the purpose of engaging Nationalist pride. These myths, however, are the spectres appearing through the gaps in memory and have passed the ghost on to the current curriculum.

Scottish Education, like Bella, has fallen into the Clyde, been found floating down the Thames, towards the North Atlantic Ocean. Maybe Scotland should be pragmatic about its culture and, therefore, Scottish Education, as the only true reflection of themselves is the one they are in; after that, they become yet another palimpsest, leaving more gaps in truth for spectres to take form.