“A Changingable Feast”: Postmodern Female Grotesque in Gray’s and Lanthimos’s Poor Things
Silva Baiton | University of Western Ontario
ORCiD ID: https://orcid.org/0009-0004-2327-065X
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.71106/WZIJ7368
Publication: Volume 7
Abstract | This paper investigates the convergence of postmodern narrative strategies and the grotesque in Alasdair Gray’s Poor Things (1992) and Yorgos Lanthimos’s 2023 film adaptation. Specifically, it asks to what extent the grotesque and the postmodern work together in these texts to subvert gender conventions and explore utopian futures, and where they fall short in these goals. Both works emerge from transitional periods of heightened anxiety about gender norms and women’s position in society—Gray’s novel from the early years of third-wave feminism, and Lanthimos’s film from renewed contemporary debates around reproductive rights. A focus on the female body and common grotesque motifs, including the chimera, fertile death, and the feast, represent new possibilities. I argue that both the novel and film employ polyphonic and chimerical narrative forms to subvert expectations while aiming to optimize their respective mediums. At the same time, I consider the issue of adaptation: while the film medium allows for increased expression of the visual grotesque, its limited runtime necessitates simplification of Gray’s originally complex narrative structure. Further, while both the texts’ hyperfocus on sexuality critiques traditional gender conventions and the Victorian Fallen Woman narrative, their reliance on grotesque aesthetics risks both perpetuating problematic associations between femininity and monstrosity, and collapsing lived experience into symbol or archetype. The appropriation of the female image as a posthumanist agent of change may undermine the texts’ subversive goals.
Keywords | Grotesque, Postmodern, Feminism, Monstrosity, Historiographic Metafiction, Alasdair Gray, Yorgos Lanthimos, Poor Things, Cinema, Scottish Literature
Silva Baiton (sbaiton@uwo.ca; ORCiD ID: https://orcid.org/0009-0004-2327-065X) is a second-year PhD student in Comparative Literature at the University of Western Ontario, Canada. She completed an MA focused on biopower and the grotesque in Japanese speculative fiction at the same institution in 2025. Her current research interests include literature and film; feminist, queer, and disability studies; consumption; temporality; and the grotesque. Her planned thesis will explore the feminist and queer grotesque in speculative fiction published between 1995 and 2025.
MLA Citation for this Article:
Baiton, Silva. ““A Changingable Feast”: Postmodern Female Grotesque in Gray’s and Lanthimos’s Poor Things.” Language, Literature, and Interdisciplinary Studies, vol. 7, 10 Aug. 2026, pp. 6.21–6.37, https://doi.org/10.71106/WZIJ7368.