Young, Elizabeth. “Here Comes the Bride: Wedding Gender and Race in Bride of Frankenstein.” 1991. The Dread of Difference: Gender and the Horror Film. Ed. Barry Keith Grant. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1996. 309-337.
The climax of the film is a creation scene in which the two men bring a female form to life. 312
Indeed, for all the apparent contrast between them, Elizabeth and the monster’s mate are two of the film’s female doubles—a twinning that the very title of the film ambiguously encodes. For just who is the bride of Frankenstein? Frankenstein, of course, is Henry’s surname, and his bride is Elizabeth; indeed, because it is not clear exactly when in the film the two marry, Elizabeth is perpetually Frankenstein’s bride. Yet in the creation scene, Praetorius triumphantly baptizes the female monster as “the Bride of Frankenstein.” There are, then, not one but two brides of Frankenstein—or perhaps even more than two, for the film’s title phrase, “bride of Frankenstein,” omits the definite article, as if to suggest the endless repeatability of this most common female role. 313
the actress Elsa Lanchester plays both bride and Mary Shelley. 313
She who seemed ostensibly to be the creator, Mary Shelley, is, at the end, reduced to man’s creation; she, too, is “of Frankenstein,” if not his wifely property then his artistic and scientific achievement. 314
This analysis of the film’s gender dynamics considerably expands the explanatory rubric of Oedipal rivalry with which we began, for it suggests that Bride of Frankenstein offers not only a psychoanalytic paradigm of male rivalry and female erasure but also the performance of a more capacious and complex system of gender exchange. 314
Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick has argued that, in patriarchal culture, sexual ideology must negotiate uneasily between two very similar arrangements: homosociality, the constant affirmation of shared interests between men, which, in a patriarchal society, works to consolidate male power; and homosexuality, the overt, erotic expression of sexual desire between men, which is of great subversive potential within such a system and therefore must, by its logic, be brutally suppressed. Women serve, then, not merely as a medium of exchange in the homosocial system but also as a desperate cover-up, a means of channeling suspicion of homosexuality into heterosexual appearances. In such a homophobic culture, any threat of exposing the potential homoeroticism that underlies male homosociality constitutes a challenge to the whole system of exchange. 315
At this moment, the doctor appears in the visually coded form, here rendered campily, of the homosexual as decadent aristocrat. 315
To be sure, order is nominally restored at the film’s end: it is the heterosexual couple, Elizabeth and Henry, who remain alive. But given the instability that has preceded their happy coupling, it is doubtful that the system as a whole now looks so smooth; at the very least, the violence with which such eruptions must be suppressed has been exposed. 316
After all, the bride’s composite female form translates the idea of the social construction of woman into an essentialist nightmare, whereby women are literally constructed, assembled horrifically from female body parts. 317
Despite her secondary status as a creature of male fantasy, the monster betrays the fear that all female bodies are in fact unspeakably monstrous—and in this monstrosity, unspeakably powerful. 318
a narrative conveniently telescoped, in the bride’s case, to the only two events deemed essential for the woman: birth and marriage. Finally, we should note that when the bride just says no to being the monster’s first lady, her rejection is significant specifically as an act of speech—one whose authority is implicitly twinned, via the double casing of Elsa Lanchester, with the authorship of Mary Shelley. After all, Shelley, who not only speaks but writes, sets the story in motion with a female signature. Reading backward, we can see Mary’s opening words as forming the story that gives voice to the bride’s scream; reading forward, we can see the bride’s scream as the most visceral and impassioned version of the “angelic” Mary’s story. Together, that is, the bride’s scream and Mary’s speech offer a rejection of the systems of circulation that would disembody, dismember, exchange, and erase them in a moment—suggested only to be suppressed—when the female goods get together and refuse to go to market. 318
Yet if relations between genders were fundamentally unchanging during the era [1930s], relations within genders were slowly altering in terms of the ideological construction of same-sex desire. John D’Emilio and Estelle Freedman suggest that in the 1920s and 1930s, discussion of homosexuality was taking new, and newly anxious, forms. In this period, a variety of discursive forms—books like The Well of Loneliness, blues songs like “Sissy Man” and “Bull Dagger Woman,” the psychiatric language of “inversion”—brought the newly “invented” category of “the homosexual” to the public eye from a variety of perspectives. 319
If such an interpretation can only proceed metaphorically, with the film allegorizing the tensions of its era, then the history of Bride of Frankenstein as an artifact of mass culture offers more specific connections between the work and its cultural moment. Bride of Frankenstein was made five years after the establishment of the infamous Hollywood Production Code and less than a year after Will Hays, responding to public pressure, created the Production Code Administration to enforce it. 320
It was trimmed at this point from ninety to seventy-five minutes, and among the later changes was the omission of a grim scene in which Praetorius experiments on a live woman, dissecting her until she awakens and screams for mercy. 320
Whale was ostracized professionally for being openly gay in homophobic Hollywood. 321
Within this cluster of stereotypes, one—that of the black “brute”—carried particular force, perhaps because it exposed the fears domesticated by valorizing the figure of the black servant. From Birth of a Nation onward, as Donald F. Bogle describes, black men were depicted as “subhuman and feral . . . nameless characters setting out on a rampage full of black rage.” Delinquency, criminality, inferiority, subhumanity—these attributes fully converge in Bride of Frankenstein’s monster. Indeed, in an era when Hollywood hesitated to depict black characters committing violence, the film’s monster—for all his apparent distance / from “reality”—may more fully emblematize the iconography of U.S. racism than any other film, more openly mimetic, could have in this era. 322-323
His large, black-clad, awkward form embodies the racist association of blackness with subhumanity, as does his facial appearance, which makeup artist Jack Pierce apparently designed “to give the monster a primitive, Neanderthal appearance” by sloping “the brow of the eyes in a pronounced ape-like ridge of bone.” 323
Captured partway into the film, he is strung up on a tree as an angry cluster of men surrounds him. This visual moment is so shockingly reminiscent of the imagery of lynching that, as with the monster’s “blackness,” the film here radically rewrites boundaries between the “fantasy” of horror film and the “realism” of other cinematic genres. 323
Composed of the mutilated and dismembered parts of corpses, the monster emblematizes the frequent mutilation and dismemberment of lynching victims. 323
When the old man comforts the monster to sleep, a crucifix remains brightly lit above their heads even after the shot fades to black. With the monster recognizably coded as a black fugitive, this religious symbolism translates, via Uncle Tom’s Cabin, into the Christian abolitionist narrative of slave humanity, misery, and redemption. 324
for as Valerie Smith notes, “The fiction of a black male perpetrator automatically [sexualizes] a nonsexual crime.” But the perpetrator, in this case, is also a victim, in an overlay of iconographic forms—rapist and martyr—that sets the film in conflict with itself. 326
As male, the monster is allowed into some of the homoerotic bonds that are determined through the exclusion of women, particularly those with Praetorius; indeed, with his indiscriminate “friends,” his inability to grasp normative gender codes, the monster manifests this homoeroticism too overtly for the stability of the film’s sexual plots. As a black man, however, the monster is also, contradictorily, defined against these same men as a figure of monstrous heterosexuality. And having incarnated both these threats—the excessively homoerotic white man and the excessively heterosexual black man—the monster’s presence is too explosive for him to survive. Hence he effects the explosion that closes the film, a suicidal act that literalizes the self-canceling effects of embodying sexual and racial contradictions. 326
Reproducing life by animating corpses, Frankenstein is thus both camera and directorial eye—roles in which, as Penley describes it, the producer of the bachelor machine “submits to a fantasy of closure, perfectibility, and mastery.” 328
For the moment when the bride shrieks is also one in which she gazes: in the first moment of her creation, a close-up shows her looking directly back at the camera, disrupting the cinematic economy that usually presents women as objects of looking. 328
For insofar as feminist film theory continues to rely on psychoanalytic categories, it will suffer from the limitations of their ahistoricity. As Jane Gaines puts it, film theory “based on the psychoanalytic concept of sexual difference . . . is unequipped to deal with a film which is about racial difference and sexuality.” Bride of Frankenstein’s unusually full rehearsal of the iconography of lynching and interracial rape also allows us to locate one specific factor in film theory’s shortsightedness. For as Gaines notes, “In the context of race relations in U.S. history, sexual looking carries with it the threat of actual rather than symbolic castration.” 330
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