By Anna Karnedy
The title of James Whaley’s sequel to the film Frankenstein (1931) is misleading. The titular bride in Bride of Frankenstein (1935) only appears in the last moments of the film, gracing the screen for less than five minutes. She’s an icon of Halloween costume options, but how does she really appear in the canon of Frankenstein stories? And what does her appearance mean for the representation of women in literature and film?
Mary Shelley does, in fact, give Frankenstein’s creature a bride in the original novel. The creature promises his creator that if given a wife, the two of them would leave civilization and be alone, together. Victor Frankenstein agrees out of fear, and begins to put together a female.
However, he is deeply afraid of the two procreating and delivering more and more so-called ‘monsters’ into the world. When the creature watches him destroy the unfinished bride, he retaliates by murdering Frankenstein’s wife, Elizabeth. This leaves the brides of the novel in the same place; inanimate and dead. Even when she comes to life on screen, the bride only works as a vehicle of sympathy for the creature. The audience’s heart breaks for the monster (Boris Karloff) because yet another connection is lost; his bride (Elsa Lanchester–uncredited in the film) wants nothing to do with him. Though a rightfully sympathetic moment, it is unfair to assume that this newly created human should be expected to do exactly as these men say.
This is especially true in Mel Brooks’ comedic adaptation Young Frankenstein. The bride of Frankenstein appears through the classic male rape fantasy–a woman resistant to sex at first comes to enjoy it halfway through. After Frankenstein’s monster (Peter Boyle) rapes Elizabeth (Madeline Kahn), she assumes the look of the 1935 bride. It is meant to be a joke, but unintentionally proves the point Shelley made in 1818: that women are, over and over again, sacrificed for the sake of male power.
Both The Bride of Frankenstein and Young Frankenstein are great films. The former is an example of expert horror filmmaking while the latter remains laugh-out-loud hilarious. The personification of Frankenstein’s bride, however, is to the detriment of both. Instead of expanding upon Mary Shelley’s original meanings behind the bride–violence against women, unfair expectations of women, and women as sacrificial lambs–they instead only prove that the novel must continue to be read again and again to fully understand the reason for the bride’s existence at all.
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