Under the Skin

So we read Under the Skin. I have to confess I am extremely disturbed by the book after the first reading. The human/vodsel inversion totally got to me and I didn’t realize until way too late that the ‘vodsels’ are actually us humans and the ‘humans’ are actually the Other. Especially the part where Isserley is grieved that she is ‘human’ underneath it all and ‘why can’t anyone see that’—I was highly confused.

Anyhow, this book really concretizes what I said before about bodies being a great determinant of who we are. I want to talk about Isserley, mainly.

How does Faber make Isserley a sympathetic character? Why doesn’t her body get in the way of our sympathy for her?

The changes that have been made to her body singled her out as an Other in both worlds. In the text’s human-world, her physicality others her; in the vodsel-world, her interiority others her. In both worlds, she doesn’t belong. And she struggles in both worlds to belong, especially with the ‘humans’.

For me, what makes me sympathetic is precisely this struggle of not-belonging. And her not-belonging is because of the changes made to her body, which are made in order to further the cause/interests of the ‘humans’. In effect, she was sacrificed by her community, and subsequently alienated by them. This is already horrible in itself. On top of that, she is made to look like US, or ‘vodsels’ (in the text). Somehow the feeling that someone is othered precisely because they look like us just gets to me.

Maybe that’s why her body doesn’t get in the way of our sympathy for her. Because firstly, her body resembles our body (in the real world). That already establishes an identification with her, physically, even though she was surgically modified to look that way. On top of that, because I’m a girl, there’s the next level of identification with her as a female, especially in the rape scene (199).