A brief cinematic history of Frankenstein’s Bride as a feminist icon
Frankenstein’s female creature, also known as “the Bride”, was the first female monster to appear on screen, in the 1935 Frankenstein sequel: The Bride of Frankenstein. An unruly and rebellious figure, she has inspired dozens of adaptations since.
Most recently, the Bride, as a dramatic character, has been part of a series of creative reimaginings through an explicitly feminist lens. For instance, the dark coming of age comedy, Lisa Frankenstein (2024). It imagined the Bride (Kathryn Newton) in the role of the scientist, who accidentally brings to life a young Victorian man (Cole Sprouse).
Released just a year earlier, Poor Things (2023) brought an even more complex exploration of power, agency and consent, set in a retro-futuristic Victorian era. In it, the female creature Bella (Emma Stone) negotiates what it means to be both a scientific object and creator (being created out of the pregnant body of a woman and the brain of the mother’s unborn baby). Bella does not abide by the rules and conventions of polite society, using her body against the purpose of her creator and causing several mental breakdowns for the male characters in the process.
Now, a new movie directed by Maggie Gyllenhaal, The Bride!, brings the character to life in moody 1930s Chicago. Jessie Buckley plays the female creature brought back from the dead to be Frankenstein’s mate. But she is not the sort of creature that is inclined to serve someone else’s purpose. When Frankenstein (now the monster, not the scientist, and played by Christian Bale) calls her “the Bride of Frankenstein”, she replies: “No, just the Bride.”
Although the film promises a “Bonnie and Clyde” story – two lovers and rebels on the run from the law – this Bride refuses to belong to any man. Instead, gun in hand, she demands to be seen and heard on her own terms.
Reanimating the Bride from novel to screen
Since her inception, the Bride’s struggle has been for autonomy. She first appeared in Mary Shelley’s novel Frankenstein (1818), named after an egomaniac scientist who creates a creature from cadavers. In the novel, Dr Frankenstein begrudgingly agrees to make his male creature a companion, but destroys her before she can live. He is afraid she might reproduce or become even more powerful than the male creature.
Her destruction is the most violent episode in the novel and makes apparent the anxiety that her unruly female body causes to the mad scientist. The erasure of Shelley’s original female creation set the scene for the way she continues to be written out of most adaptations of the novel. This includes, most recently, Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein (2025).
Read more: Guillermo de Toro’s Frankenstein: beguiling adaptation stays true to heart of Mary Shelley’s story
One hundred years on from Shelley’s novel, the Bride was finally brought to life in James Whales’ The Bride of Frankenstein and played by Elsa Lanchester. Although central to the film’s title, she appears only in the final five minutes. But that was more than enough time to establish her cinematic legacy.
She stands tall, dressed in a white gown, her dark, voluminous hair streaked with lightning. Scars and stitches run around her face. She is both alive and dead, a bride and child, beautiful and monstrous, futuristic and otherworldly. Her appearance defies categorisation, not quite the demure wife she is meant to be.
Even more memorable is the Bride’s defiant scream when she rejects the male creature and the role assigned to her by the film’s title and her creator. Feminist scholars have read this as an assertion of sexual autonomy and agency, a rejection of patriarchal control and a refusal of the role of wife and mother. She is a powerful symbol of defiance, and both costume and voice become tools for future Brides to say no to their fate. Lanchester’s Bride, however, is not able to invent alternative possibilities for herself and is ultimately destroyed by the male creature, punished for her rebellion.
The limitations of patriarchy are made even clearer in later adaptations in which Brides who choose to end their lives, such as Frankenstein Created Woman (1967). Her limited options also show the constraints of a narrative in which she is made a mere character in someone else’s story.
The creature Lily (Billie Piper) in the television series Penny Dreadful (2014-2016) is another Bride who attempts to make her own path. But the memories of her body’s previous life as a sex worker have shown her that the world is rotten to the core – her only solution is to destroy it. Lily chooses destruction over radical change, and while she rejects both Frankenstein and the male creature, the man she does willingly choose ultimately betrays her.
For some Brides, power comes from reclaiming the role of creator. This can be seen in Lisa Frankenstein and Poor Things, but also in an earlier adaptation – the exploitation comedy Frankenhooker (1990). The film ends with the Bride taking revenge on her creator by attaching his head to female body parts.
Poor Things is one of the only films where the Bride is not only invested in radical social change, but also escapes the expectations put onto her body as a scientific and sexual object. Bella actively subverts these expectations by repurposing her body as one of personal scientific enquiry. This extends to the way she uses sex. It puts her in a complicated position in relation to exploitation and empowerment, where she is simultaneously both and neither. Instead, her actions sit somewhere on the outside of our current perceptions of both.
As Jessie Buckley’s new Bride graces our screens, she promises to follow in the footsteps of her rebellious predecessors – and a long horror tradition.
This article features references to books that have been included for editorial reasons, and may contain links to bookshop.org. If you click on one of the links and go on to buy something from bookshop.org The Conversation UK may earn a commission.
Polina Zelmanova receives funding from the Arts and Humanities Research Council to support the research undertaken as part of her PhD..