Frankenfeminisms 6: The Bride of Frankenstein (1935), or Bitches Get Stitches

The opening of The Bride of Frankenstein puts women—and indeed feminism—front and center. We meet a very haughty Lord Byron, chillaxing with Percy and Mary Shelley on a stormy evening. Byron swoons in admiration of Mary’s recent work, Frankenstein, and they all three hope it may soon be published. No one tries to minimize the significance of Mary’s achievement, nor the bravery of her wish to take it to the public: when Mary confirms that she thinks it will be published, Percy says in a tone at one admiring and admonitory, “Then, Darling, you will have much to answer for!” Byron and Percy heap praise upon Mary: Byron says, “Whatever your purpose may have been, my dear, I take great relish in savoring each separate horror!” From there, they encourage Mary to tell them what happened next, after the end of her brilliant novel. She of course agrees, giving birth to the main film.

The Bride of Frankenstein is envisioned as Mary Shelley’s own brainchild, one born of a conversation about her own status as a woman—whom Byron calls an “astonishing creature” in the schmaltzy opening—as well as a creator of one of the greatest works of horror in history.

If you’re startled by the implicit feminist leanings of this whole picture, do remember that the 1930s was smack in the middle of the Great Depression, an economic cataclysm that had forced many homemaking women into the workplace, to try to help their families make ends meet. Also remember that women gained the vote in the United States in 1920, and spent much of the next two decades lobbying for things like equal pay and equal employment opportunities. The opening salvo of Bride of Frankenstein is tied up with all of that, as is the rest of the film. When Mary says, “Why shouldn’t I write of monsters?” the film’s latent investment in the idea that women can and should do the things usually reserved for men is right out in the open. Why shouldn’t she, indeed.

So she launches into a oral delivery of the sequel to her original novel. Her husband, Percy, and her swooning admirer, Byron, hang on her every word.

In Mary’s sequel, Dr. Frankenstein has taken sick, and his young wife Elizabeth encourages him to leave off his diabolical experiments. He seems open to that, until, alas, he falls under the spell of his former teacher, Professor Pretorius, who convinces him to work on making a female monster this time.

Meanwhile, the monster is also still alive—he somehow escaped being burnt by local villagers. Wandering around the countryside, he saves a woman from drowning, but is thought to be attempting to attack her, so he is captured, bound, and taken brutally to prison by the local people. When he escapes, he finds his way to a blind hermit’s hut, and the two become friends in their misery. (If you’ve seen Young Frankenstein, you can probably picture the original scene close to correctly, minus the slapstick.) Eventually, the monster is driven out into the night again by some vengeful locals.

Finally, we integrate the storyline about the mad scientists with the story about the monster, when Dr. Pretorius meets the monster and befriends him, telling him he wants to make a woman monster for him. The monster picks up a female skull and says, “Woman. Friend. Wife.”

But Dr. Frankenstein is having qualms, spurred to clearer-headed thinking by his practical wife, Elizabeth. So Dr. Pretorius is left no choice but to get the monster to kidnap Elizabeth and hold her hostage until Dr. Frankenstein builds the monster a bride.

So, if nothing else, it’s already quite clear that Dr. Pretorius is a bad friend.

In fear for Elizabeth’s safety, Dr. Frankenstein does, indeed, reanimate a dead young woman, to make the famous bride of Frankenstein—the lightning-haired, white-gowned monstress. The male Monster approaches her, hauls her off to sit next to him on a bench, and then tenderly strokes her hand. She is having none of it. She screams, she hisses like a terrified cat, and she summarily rejects him. The Monster is wounded and irate, and proceeds to destroy the creepy castle where all this stuff has been happening--but not before he frees Dr. Frankenstein and Elizabeth, who run off to have their happy, monster-free life together. Only the monster, the monstress, and Dr. Pretorious die.

End of film.

So, ok, there’s a lot to unpack here. First, it’s worth noting that the female monster has no speaking lines and is only onscreen for about three minutes. She is the titular heroine/villain of the film, and yet she plays essentially no role. Second, even in her non-entity-ness, she manages to reject a male (the monster) and to pay for that rejection with her life. So, The Bride of Frankenstein takes its ostensible main subject (the Bride), makes it clear that she is a passive object who has no real agency. She didn’t choose to be reanimated, of course. Nor did she choose to pair up with the male Monster. She didn’t consent to let him paw her. The men around her chose all of that for her, without her consent or even her knowledge. In fact, when she attempts to exert her agency by rejecting the monster, she is killed for it. By my lights, that’s a fairly disappointing role for a leading monster-lady.

But there’s an added detail that is so goddamn interesting, I can’t even sit still. The actress who plays the bride is Elsa Lanchester. That name may not mean much to you (though she went on to have a huge career after this film, which was her breakout role), but for our purposes, what’s important about Lanchester is that she played a second role in Bride: the role of Mary Shelley.

So now, the fact that the Bride dies mute, dehumanized, and addled in the end has some serious significance. Because she’s Mary Shelley, reanimated into the form of a monster.

So, you remember all that good, juicy 1930s feminism at the start of the film? All that talk of how amazing Mary Shelley is? What a great writer? How surprising but also delightful that she could write such a scary story? Remember watching Mary Shelley have two of the greatest English poets of the 19^th century—Percy Bysshe Shelley and Lord Byron—verily mewling at her feet for a second installment? Well, she gets monsterized and killed off in the end.

So where does that leave us? It leaves us in a state of profound ambivalence about the role of women in producing great works of horror. The ostensibly terrifying, lightning-haired she-monster—the Bride of Frankenstein herself—is powerless. She’s not scary; she’s scared. Why? Because she thinks she’s about to be pawned off on a heavily stitched-up leatherface dude whose primary goal is to make her his “wife,” whatever that means to him. Why does she think that? Because she is about to be pawned off on him. He forces her over to sit next to him on a bench before he lovingly strokes her hand; she’s not into that. She’s terrified of him. Terrified of all these men who want to control her. Given that the Bride is also Mary Shelley, the ending of the film is also a dark and frankly depressing allegory about what the men who have reanimated Mary Shelley and her novel into this film—and here, I’m talking about the all-male stable of directors and producers that made this flim—have done to her. They’ve made her mute. They’ve made her nonagential. They’ve coerced her terrifying, profoundly philosophical, wonderfully realistic-feeling science fiction horror story into a vacuous narrative about an incel—a monstrous man who can’t get laid—who turns on his mark and kills her.

Depressing is maybe not the right word. Maybe the right word is predictable.

As I said, the 1930s was a decade of gains for American women. They had the vote, thanks to the massive activity of suffragettes in the earlier decades of the century. They had employment outside the home, thanks to the Great Depression. But as almost always happens in the long history of the advancement of the rights of women, those advances are met with profound ambivalence by the people who are seeing it happen. Byron may be enchanted by Mary’s daring little brain, but there’s no mistaking Percy’s anxiety when he tells her that she’ll “have much to answer for” if her book gets published. He knows, and she knows, too, that she’s reaching a little too far, stretching the limits of what’s allowable for a woman just a little too much. Percy loves her and finds her enthralling, but he also knows there will be payback from the public, and that she’ll have to rise to meet it.

The Bride of Frankenstein isn’t really about the monstress that Dr. Frankenstein engineers. It’s really about Mary Shelley, who engineered a monster all her own, and in a way that radically challenged what people thought women should or even could be capable of thinking about or writing about. It’s Mary Shelley’s own monstrosity that the film cannot, ultimately, tolerate. It’s Mary Shelley’s own monstrosity that has to be rendered campy and ludicrous, and that has ultimately to be killed off by the very creature that she created. And, of course, the casting choices make that killing off more than just allegorical: it’s literal. Elsa Lancaster, as both the bride and Mary Shelley, joins the monstress and the authoress together into her own body. When she is killed off, both die.

But the narrative killing of Mary Shelley doesn’t stop there. It also happens in the specifically and spectacularly stupid way that Mary Shelley’s original monster gets rebooted in this film. Because he’s a near-mute moron. Again, if you’ve seen Young Frankenstein, you’re in the right zip code for understanding him in this film. The monster grunts and flails; he’s awkward and never quite gets it together to understand proper English grammar or syntax, even after his extensive coaching by the hermit. By contract, Mary Shelley’s original monster is terrifying precisely because he is not a moron. The monster in the novel is articulate, empathogenic, profoundly insightful about the calamitous and tragic nature of his own condition, and highly strategic in his behaviors and choices. The monster from the novel commands our respect, and our sympathy, in spite of all the horror he commits. That impulse to humanize the inhuman is what makes Mary Shelley’s novel so crackling and so powerful, so creepy and so unnerving. We think this monster should be a monster—brutal, unthinking, cloddish, and unrelatable. But instead, the monster is human. The one who ends up looking the worst in the novel isn’t the monster, but Dr. Frankenstein himself.

Compare that with Bride of Frankenstein, in which the monster ultimately lets Dr. Frankenstein and Elizabeth go on, to live out their happy monster-free lives together. The film ends with upbeat music, ensuring us that this horrible wretch—the monster—will never bother us or the Frankensteins again. Quite the contrary, Shelley’s novel ends with Frankenstein in hot pursuit of the monster, who’s roaming the Arctic somewhere. No comfort there for anyone.

For me, this is what’s so important about Mary Shelley’s brand of horror: it really does aim to leave us with a wicked horror hangover. A hangover in which we don’t know whether the monster will live or die, and in which we don’t know whether we are ever going to be safe from the particular threat he represents. But it’s also a hangover in that we don’t even know how to feel: whom are we rooting for, in the end? All I know is that, when I read the novel, I always find myself hoping the monster will get away.

Specifically, I find myself hoping that the monster will get away and make more horror stories.

I’m taking to you, Mary Shelleys of the world, in all your various and sundry reanimations.