Poor Things

Content Warning: This section discusses colonial violence and non-consensual medical experimentation.

Poor Things is a story about the roles that white women were expected to fulfill in Victorian Britain. Those roles were different for lower-class and upper-class white women. Upper-class women like Victoria were expected to be relatively uneducated and wholly dependent on their fathers and husbands. They were not expected to have sexual desires of their own, and they needed to remain virgins until marriage, after which point they were meant to remain perpetually sexually available to their husbands and to no one else. They were expected to bear children, but also to keep the more visceral details of pregnancy secret from men. Lower-class women, on the other hand, were likewise expected to be uneducated, but were seen as useful outlets for men’s sexual desires. Because of their lack of social power, lower-class women were not typically able to refuse sexual advances, and men were at liberty to disregard those women and any unwanted children that resulted from sexual encounters with them.

Ultimately, as Victoria explains, these two roles were not actually all that different. All women, regardless of class, were meant to be subservient to and sexually available to men, without regard for their own desires and needs.