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

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.