Imagine you wake up one day, and your parent/guardian/creator points to some eHarmony reject you’ve never seen before and says, “That’s for you. And you are for that. Go make it happy. Guess how.” Or imagine that you are a nice upper class young woman who went to all the right schools and who shops at all the right shops and who has finally met the right guy, and then you discover . . . his hobby, no, his obsession, is cutting up cadavers and making new people out of them. Like collage, or patchwork quilting, only with corpses. Va va voom! That’s so hot. And modern women complain there are no decent men around.

There are actually two brides in Bride of Frankenstein. One marries Baron Frankenstein, despite his “interests”, and the other is created to be the partner of a lumbering, inarticulate, patchwork-corpse-man with major impulse control issues. Neither partnership fits anyone’s idea of happily-ever-after.

Bride of Frankenstein begins where the original Frankenstein movie ends. In time honored sequel fashion, though it appeared at the end of Frankenstein that both the doctor and his creation perished, they survived, and immediately set about proving that they learned nothing at all from the mayhem they caused in the first film. The Monster escapes and finds a friend in an old hermit who lives in seclusion in the woods. Not surprisingly, that ends badly. Meanwhile, Dr. Frankenstein looks forward to marriage and (apparently) a life of hysterics and hypochondria, when a former professor of his appears and demands that he restart his experiments. Bride picks up on the part in Mary Shelley’s novel in which the Creature asks Dr. Frankenstein to create a mate for him, so he will not be so alone. In this sequel, Dr. Pretorius and the Creature join together to force the baron to create another patchwork being, this time female. That synopsis may not sound like the description of an excellent movie, but many people consider Bride to be one of the best horror films ever made.

Much has been made of the homosexual themes that run through the film. The director, James Whale, was gay, as was Colin Clive, who plays Dr. Frankenstein, and Ernest Thesiger, who plays Dr. Pretorius. Those themes do exist and are very interesting, particularly for the closeted time period in which the film was made. However, very little critical attention has been paid to the way the female characters are portrayed and utilized in the film, even though those elements are just as remarkable. Further, viewers new to the movie are surprised, and usually disappointed, to find that the Bride of the Monster appears onscreen for all of about five minutes at the end. Believe me, it’s enough to make some compelling statements about what it is to be female, at least according to certain male points of view.

Bride of Frankenstein is a film about creating life, an extraordinary thing that happens every day. It’s called pregnancy. However, in Dr. Frankenstein’s world, creating life the biological (old fashioned) way must be inferior, because it involves women. To become truly god-like, men must be able to create adult men, and skip all that icky, tiresome stuff like vaginas and diapers. That is the anti-female premise that underlies both the Frankenstein and Bride of Frankenstein films.

Further, Bride makes some sly and ugly commentary on how a woman is supposed to behave, and what her proper role in life should be. As in: Be feminine. Be a victim.

The idea of the captive, controlled woman runs throughout Bride of Frankenstein. First, the Baroness, though she refuses to see it, is captive to her husband’s passion – which is not directed at her. His passion runs only for his work, which he considers all-important. Her desire for reproduction – one of the reasons people get married, after all – is completely subordinate to his, for which he does not need her. He shows zero interest in her, and ditches her on the wedding night to go reanimating with his fellow mad scientist and the official Creepy Bastard of the film, Dr. Pretorius. This does not bode well for a passionate future conjugal relationship, or even for a lukewarm one.

Second, the Baroness becomes a literal captive – Dr. Pretorius arranges to kidnap her and thereby force Dr. Frankenstein to create another female captive, a “bride” for the Creature. While this might seem like a typical Hollywood Woman-in-Peril plot device, Dr. Frankenstein doesn’t even try to save his woman. He’s no hero. He just goes to work on creating another unfortunate female who will also live and die at the whims of others.

Third, the Creature’s bride-to-be only exists to be the property of the Creature, to be what he wants her to be; what she wants does not matter. It never occurred to her creators that she might even have wants and needs of her own. When she doesn’t want the life that has been thrust upon her, her male progenitors are all dumbfounded.

Fourth, Dr. Pretorius fashioned a little human menagerie of petri-dish people, including a queen, a ballet dancer, and a mermaid, all kept in glass display cases for his amusement. The array of miniature people featured in Bride were grown as cultures from “seed” by Dr. Pretorius (the mental image of what repulsive Dr. Pretorius did to come up with the seed provides the biggest shudder of the film for modern audiences). These tiny people, kept in Sylvia Plath bell jars, are like dolls. Dolls are easily controlled. One of the tiny doll people is the queen, but her realm extends only so far as the edges of her little glass cage. The other female dolls, the ballerina and the mermaid, fit traditionally acceptable roles for women and conform to “appropriate” ideals of femininity. One of the male dolls is, of course, a randy king who keeps finding ways to climb out of his jar. His world is less limited.

Because of their size, these little puppet people are inferior. According to Drs. Frankenstein and Pretorius, the ultimate entirely man-made race must be full-sized – but still completely controlled.

All this provides another way to ensure male control of reproduction, whether or not the reproduction occurs in a female body. Without creative manufacturing, men have to rely on things like restricting access to medical coverage for birth control to enforce their ideas about reproduction. So indirect. So much better to just hijack the entire process and render the participation of women irrelevant.

Irrelevant, in the same way that Dr. Frankenstein’s bride, Elizabeth, is irrelevant to his life and work. In contrast to the beautiful, cultured, acquiescent, passive Baroness, however, the Creature’s Bride (like the monster, she has no name) is a hissing, shrieking shrew of a woman.

She is unfeminine.

To audiences of the 1930s, when the film was made, she would have read as a true monstrosity, a horror of womanhood that men feared their wives would turn into. Today she reads like, duh, how did you expect her to react?

There’s a whole tradition of silent, suffering, victim-brides in the horror genre, and this Bride is the opposite of that. For example, in the novel Dracula (and many of the Dracula-based films as well), Mina forms the epitome of the Gothic, Victorian ideal of the silent, suffering woman. That’s truly ironic, considering that the male characters in the book Dracula would quite literally be lost and helpless without Mina. It’s an ideal that pervades even the non-horror literature of the 19th Century; look at the silent, self-effacing, saintly help-mate heroine of Jane Eyre. The qualities that made for a perfect wife were exactly the same ones that made for a perfect servant: decorative, decorum-minded, quiet, unobtrusive, and indefatigably selfless. That’s because servants and wives were almost interchangeable. Jane Eyre starts out as an employee, a member of the household staff, the governess who makes sure the female children don’t intrude too much on their parent’s lives. She’s so good at being quiet and supportive that she gets promoted, to wife. The job description is mostly the same. These women don’t bother anyone with their thoughts, opinions, or feelings, and certainly not with their own desires and demands. This view of femininity held sway even until the 1930’s; it’s not entirely extinct today. All of which makes me want to express my personal femininity by erupting in filthy limericks while snapping and popping an enormous wad of neon green gum and saying “the fuck you looking at” a lot, and maybe laughing like a braying donkey for good measure. The Creature’s Bride in Bride seems like the kind of woman I would like to have a couple mojitos with; we could have a lot of fun laughing, spitting on the floor, and pissing in the good doctor’s lovely potted plants.

All of this brings us to the Bride’s reason for being. Baron Frankenstein and Dr. Pretorius put her together as if to say, “Hello, welcome to existence, go do this monster so he stops running amok and messing up our shit. There, there, my dear girl, lay back and think of our convenience.” The cure for the monster’s loneliness and isolation is her: what’s hers?

Some states allow a legal cause of action for wrongful birth or wrongful life, which posits that but for someone’s mistake (usually a doctor’s), a person born with severe mental and/or physical limitations wouldn’t have been born at all – and that would have been better than living. The Creature and his nameless Bride, by virtue of their outsider status and the lack of control they exercise over their own existences, opt for annihilation rather than isolation and suffering. As the Creature pulls the switch that will destroy the doctor, himself, the Bride, and the lab in which they were created, he says “We belong dead.” This illustrates the premise of a wrongful life suit: that a person can be wronged by being born, and that life can be a punishment that should not have been inflicted. All this points up the uncomfortable truth that a lot of women in this world have very little choice about their marriage partner or their situation in life. Certainly the Bride has none. She doesn’t even get to choose whether to live or die, it’s all done for her.

The Bride’s true, original creator was the author of the book that spawned (sorry, couldn’t help it) all the Frankenstein-based stories. Mary Shelley was a woman who lived at a time and in a place where women didn’t get to make choices about their lives, and their only value lay in their femininity – including their ability to reproduce.

People forget that one of the most enduring storylines written in English (ironically, second only to Romeo and Juliet) was written by this woman when she was nineteen years-old, in the year 1816. Two-hundred years later, iterations of the Frankenstein story continue to be born and reborn. Further, the idea of humans creating monsters through ill-conceived experimentation permeates literature, film, popular culture, and occasionally, politics. Mary Shelley, this teenaged creator of Frankenstein, thereby started the whole mad scientist archetype, as well as that of the man-made monster. Frankenstein constitutes the first true horror novel. She later wrote the first science fiction novel as well, The Last Man. The story consists of the first post-apocalyptic narrative ever, about the last survivor of a disease that wipes out the human race. That leitmotif has also been born and reconstructed over the centuries, as I am Legend, The Last Man on Earth, and The Omega Man, and more loosely forms the basis for stories like The Road and even The Walking Dead. Not a bad resume for any author; for the age and sex and milieu of Mary Shelley, it was damn near supernatural.

Mary Shelley’s mother was the first recognized feminist, and Mary was strongly influenced by her mother’s work. She was also strongly influenced by the fact that her own birth resulted in her mother’s death, from infection after childbirth. She felt like a monster. Mary’s father was an anarchist and proponent of free love, an idea which attracted Mary for a time as well. Unfortunately for Mary, her father remarried a woman who had children of her own, and who favored those children. So Mary, who already had one older stepsister, became herself a stepchild. She detested her stepmother and spent a lot of time away from home. She understood the feeling of being an outsider, unsettled and uncomfortable in her own house. She met the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley at sixteen; throwing her parents’ notions of free love in her father’s face while simultaneously finding an escape from the unhappy home life, she ran off with him, even though he was already married. Her father and stepmother temporarily disowned her. Mary suffered family and social ostracism for her relationship with Percy all her life. She lost a child who was born prematurely, lost two other children as toddlers, and suffered a miscarriage that almost took her own life. Her view of procreation and creation must have suffered from all that tragedy.

So it is not surprising that progressive thinking permeated Mary Shelley’s work. Her Dr. Frankenstein in the book refuses to create a “bride” for his earlier, male creation. She would have been appalled at the construction of a woman destined for what amounts to sexual slavery; considering the unhappiness in her own marriage, she would have been equally appalled at the unequal marriage of Elizabeth and Baron Frankenstein.

Her marriage, despite its heady illicitness and hints of passion, was neither happy nor easy. The couple was nearly always broke, and living out the ideals of “free love” and “open marriage” is much harder if one party is much freer and more open (Percy) than the other( Mary). Further, Percy felt revulsion for pregnancy and childbirth, and had no use for his young children. Many of Mary Shelley’s biographers believe that Baron Frankenstein – single-minded, self-absorbed, egotistical – was based on Percy Shelley, including his aversion to the repercussions of reproduction the old-fashioned way.

Mary Shelley’s novel follows her philosophy (and that of her free-thinking parents) out to its farthest conclusion – that if you treat people badly, they turn to evil. It was a revolutionary idea in 1818, when Frankenstein was published, but today constitutes a commonly held assumption. Whenever some mass murderer strikes, the media begins examining his past to see what circumstances led to his heinous acts. What conditions create the world-hatred and self-loathing which compel someone to go on a rampage?

In Frankenstein’s monster’s case, it was being born, or at least created, without love, and without connection to people. Without even meaning to, he keeps killing people and setting things on fire. I’ve had days that felt like that. Wouldn’t it have been an interesting twist for the film if it was the Bride who went berserk?

All kidding aside, unlike the Bride in Bride, while I also didn’t control the circumstances of my creation, I have enough freedom and control over my own life that I do not exist solely as someone else’s slave, or even as an unnecessary appendage, like the Baroness. Maybe that’s why I am not a monster.

So far. There’s always the possibility of a sequel.