Feminist Frankenstein: A Brief History

A Brief History of Feminist Frankenstein

In Lisa Frankenstein, Zelda Williams and Diablo Cody’s reimagining of a sci-fi classic, the mad scientist is a teen girl in the ‘80s in search of love. This Weird Science gender-flip imagines our plucky goth girl turned amateur scientist bringing to life the corpse of a handsome Victorian gentleman, then trying to train him to be the ideal boyfriend while keeping his rotting flesh intact. The film is the latest adaptation of one of the most influential novels in history, and it’s hot off the trails of another reinterpretation of Mary Shelley’s novel, Yorgos Lanthimos’ Poor Things. Both films have brought a more female-focused gaze to the narrative, one making the scientist a woman and the other the monster. They join a proud and oft-undiscussed tradition of Frankenstein feminism that extends all the way back to the novel’s creation. The feminism of Frankenstein is embedded in its very soul.

Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley was 18 years old when she wrote the novel but had already lived a tumultuous life. Her mother, the feminist advocate Mary Wollstonecraft, had died 11 days after giving birth to her. She was raised by a loving anarchist father but had a tough relationship with her stepmother. At the age of 17, she ran off with the writer Percy Bysshe Shelley, even though he was already married. For two years, they faced ostracism across England as well as endless debts and the death of their first child.

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By the time they took a holiday in Geneva over a notoriously wet summer in 1816, Mary was still not married to Percy (his wife Harriet would die by suicide that year) and was already infamous among much of polite society. During their trip, stuck inside due to the weather, the notorious Lord Byron proposed that the attendants each write a horror tale. Mary took inspiration from a nightmare she’d had featuring “the hideous phantasm of a man stretched out” and brought to life by a “pale student of unhallowed arts.” Her short story would be expanded into a full novel, published in 1818 under the title Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus.

In her foreword to the novel, Shelley wrote that the book, her “hideous progeny” was “the offspring of happy days, when death and grief were but words, which found no true echo in my heart.” Certainly, life had grown exponentially more traumatic for her in the two years following the Geneva holiday. Her second and third children died before she gave birth to her son Percy Florence, the only one who survived beyond infancy. The same year her masterpiece was published, she and her family fled to Italy to live in self-exile, where both Mary and Percy dealt with intense bouts of depression. He died four years later in a boating accident at the age of 29. She was a widow by 25.

It’s not hard to see the echoes of the feminine struggle throughout Frankenstein. It is a story of bodily autonomy and the lack thereof when you are forced into a world you did not consent to. Dr. Frankenstein creates life and is immediately wracked with guilt and shame for what he has created, the ultimate taboo of a parent rejecting their child. The mere idea of creating life without pregnancy feels radical even today as arguments over IVF and surrogacy remain at the forefront of the so-called culture wars. You cannot divorce the novel from the idea of creation and how it is so explicitly defined in terms of gender. Dr. Frankenstein is a man who creates another man, but that doesn’t make what he does fatherhood, necessarily.

Adaptations and re-imaginings of Frankenstein—and there have been many over the past 200 years—didn’t immediately focus on what feels like an obvious detail. The folly of man versus the might of God didn’t seem instinctively gendered to many, and that’s easy to understand. Yet it’s in those adaptations where women are front and center that the novel’s undeniable feminism comes to the forefront.

James Whale’s Frankenstein remains one of the great horror films of all-time, but its sequel, 1935’s Bride of Frankenstein, might be even greater. The film opens with Mary Shelley and her friends on that stormy Swiss night telling them that there is more to the story of Frankenstein than first imagined. In the film, we see that the monster survived the events of the previous film, as did Dr. Frankenstein. The latter’s former mentor, the eccentric and lascivious Dr. Septimus Pretorius, wants to make a mate for the creature, a bride who will accept his monstrous nature. In the novel, Frankenstein contemplates making a female creature, but destroys her before bringing her to life. Yet their new creation, played by Elsa Lanchester (who played Mary Shelley in the opening scene), also rejects him.

Gay film historian Vito Russo noted the campness of Pretorius and how the film read as extremely queer in its take on the binary nature of gender: Make a man, make a woman, and force them together because that’s what society wants. It also creates a fascinatingly feminist slant to the narrative. The bride is intended to be a placating force for the monster, both wife and mother who will love him unconditionally because she’s been made for that purpose like all good Victorian women. She instantly refuses it, calling into question why such a concept would ever work.

Over the decades, the bride would become more a fashion icon than a prominent cultural figure (not that we blame anyone for taking inspiration from her amazing look). Frankenstein adaptations and revamps stayed pretty male-focused, from Christopher Lee in the Hammer franchise to Herman Munster to Dean Koontz’s rewrites. In 1985, The Bride brought the character to the forefront for a quasi-sequel to the novel that imagined how Frankenstein (played by Sting?) would deal with a female creation with whom he falls in love. Eva (because of course her name is a take on Eve) is not monstrous in appearance or attitude. Her evolution is more of a Pygmalion situation, although she ultimately rejects these trappings. When informed of her monstrous creation, she flees from Frankenstein and runs off with the male monster. It’s a cheeky callback to Whale’s film, offering a sort of happily-ever-after while still having the bride deny man’s intention for her. If the options are polite society and all its misogynistic restraints or life among your fellow outcasts, it’s no wonder the bride chooses the latter.

Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, the messy but fascinating adaptation by Kenneth Branagh, has the bride reject everyone and everything. Frankenstein, played by the director as a tortured romantic hero with well-oiled abs, brings his fiancée Elizabeth (Helena Bonham Carter) back to life after the monster kills her by putting her head onto the body of a servant. Both Frankenstein and the monster desire her, but when Elizabeth realizes what has happened to her, she is disgusted, rejects both suitors, and commits suicide by self-immolation. If women exist to be the playthings of men, created or otherwise, what option is left for those who say no?

This concept is taken further in the Showtime drama Penny Dreadful, where the bride is an Irish sex worker named Brona (played by Billie Piper). We see her life as a human dying of consumption before Dr. Frankenstein is called to treat her, where he decides to resurrect her as a mate for his own creature (Rory Kinnear). The resurrected Brona, renamed Lily Frankenstein, is taken in and becomes fascinated by who everyone believes to be her cousin. Unlike prior versions, however, this new bride has known of her origins from the beginning, but keeps her knowledge hidden from Frankenstein. She does not want to be human or a mere wife: She wants immortality and power over all men. This bride is a full-on misandrist, complete with an army of sex workers! It’s hard not to root for her when Frankenstein wants to drug her into passivity and all the men in the story just plain suck. Sadly, Penny Dreadful was canceled before we could see Brona/Lily’s crusade in full force. Mary Shelley would have been proud.

By the time we get to Poor Things, now up for 11 Oscars, the Frankenstein story has fully embraced the feminist foundations laid down by Shelley. Bella Baxter (Emma Stone) is brought back to life with an adult woman’s form but the brain of a fetus extracted from said body. She grows intellectually, discovering the boundless nature of life when raised without the confines of patriarchal rule, which leads to a lot of sex, a lot of left-wing literature, and a penchant for experimental surgery. It’s not just that Bella rejects society’s standards for women; it’s that she embraces a progressive, female-ruled alternative of socialist politics, sex worker liberation and queer polyamory. Can women have it all? Well, Bella can.

Frankenstein retellings will continue to pop up in the future, as is inevitable with public domain stories with omnipresent themes. We return to Shelley’s work time and time again because there will never come a time when ideas of birth, creation and liberation are irrelevant. They will certainly always be at the core of womanhood, because humanity seldom learns its lesson. Perhaps there is true freedom beyond the chains of our origins, so smothered by societal, cultural and political restrictions. Through Frankenstein, the alternatives are certainly evident.

Kayleigh Donaldson is a critic and pop culture writer for Pajiba.com. Her work can also be found on IGN, Slashfilm, Uproxx, Little White Lies, Vulture, Roger Ebert, and other publications. She lives in Dundee.

A Brief History of Feminist Frankenstein