The Bride of Frankenstein
Maggie Gyllenhaal’s The Bride! (2026) is marketed as a feminist film, going to great lengths to comment on violence against women, harassment, and gender inequality in the workplace. Two women occupy important narrative positions in the film, and both experience setbacks on account of their gender—Dr Cornelia Euphronious uses only her first initial and not her full name when publishing her academic papers, leading Frankenstein’s monster to assume they were written by a man, and Myrna Malloy is not taken seriously by her colleagues as a competent detective. The main antagonist is a man who cuts out the tongues of the women he murders and keeps them in a jar—a rather unsubtle point about the silencing of women. This point carries through the film, and in an interview with Maggie Gyllenhaal published in the Los Angeles Times, she speaks of women that have been “tamped down and silenced and not able to express everything it is that you wanted.”[1] In the film, The Bride’s outburst at a high-society New York gathering thus inspires a revolution, with women copying her aesthetic style and taking to the streets with guns and weapons in a V for Vendetta style of anarchy.
Yet the central message is this: a man can take control of a woman’s body, lie to her and manipulate her, and be quite successful in winning her acquiescence.
It is the 1930s, and Frankenstein’s monster (now going by ‘Frank’ to avoid the slippage between the name of the monster and his maker) has been alive for over 100 years. He has grown lonely. He approaches Dr Euphronious so that she might create him a wife, and she takes the view that reanimating a corpse will be a lot more efficient than piecing together multiple body parts. They find a recently deceased woman, dig up her body, and bring her back to life. The woman, whose previous name was Ida, has no recollection of who she was before her death, and Frank and Dr Euphronious take this opportunity to lie to her—that she is already Frank’s bride, that they have been together for some time, that her name is Penelope, that she simply can’t remember him because she had an accident. Ida/Penelope accepts this explanation, and we are directed to interpret the couple’s growing closeness throughout the film as romance, as sexy, as rebellious. For many viewers, this seems to have worked—reviews of the film refer to them along the lines of ‘outlaws in love’[2] or ‘soulmates of damage.’ [3]
None of these reviews consider the deeply sinister nature of their relationship. In one scene, the two of them have sex based on her belief, affirmed by Frank, that they have fucked many times before. This is control, abuse, violence—but the viewer is asked not to see it as such, because the other men in the film are worse. Ida is used, harassed, threatened, sexually assaulted by these other men, but Frank is gentle, kind, and sad. He would never touch her without consent, only her consent is based on deception, which negates it entirely. It is sexual assault, but this is never acknowledged. Ida/Penelope is angry when she discovers that she has been lied to, but all is forgiven by the end, when The Bride chooses this title for herself and realizes that she has fallen in love with him. In the source material, James Whale’s film The Bride of Frankenstein (1935), the bride rejects the monster, screaming in horror at the man she has been created to be with. “We belong dead!” the monster responds, in rage and sadness, to her rejection, before destroying them both. Reading these films side-by-side, the woman’s choice is binary: surrender to the monster and live, or reject him and he will kill you.
The Monstrous Bride
To Elizabeth Young, writing about Whale’s The Bride of Frankenstein in the 1990s, this film is ‘simultaneously conventional and disruptive’ as it shows women as commodified bodies to be passed between men, and yet there is a ‘monstrous power that informs the bride's shriek of refusal.’[4] In the same decade, the film theorist Barbara Creed coined the term ‘monstrous-feminine’ to understand woman monsters on screen as representative of ‘what it is about woman that is shocking, terrifying, horrific, abject’[5]—typically deviance in relation to sexuality, reproduction, and heteropatriarchal gender norms. Creed explored the monstrous-feminine as a ‘construct of patriarchal ideology … a project designed to perpetuate the belief that woman’s monstrous nature is inextricably bound up with her difference as man’s sexual other’[6] Rejecting one’s place within the heteronormative patriarchal order reinforces this monstrousness, and so in The Bride of Frankenstein, the bride’s rejection of her to-be husband, and thus a rejection of her gendered role as wife, is why she cannot be allowed to live.
This was not necessarily intended to reinforce heteronormativity but to comment upon it. Whale was openly gay, and The Bride of Frankenstein has been read by many commentators as having queer subtext. For Gary Morris, the alliance between Dr Septimus Pretorius and Henry Frankenstein to create an ‘unholy’ progeny is an example of a homosexual household, and the theme is underscored by the failure of the film’s heterosexual relationships.[7] As Young notes, Dr Pretorius lures Henry away from his marital bed for this scheme, and the monster indiscriminately refers to both the men he interacts with, and to the bride, as ‘friend’[8] When the bride rejects her to-be husband, she is, perhaps, rejecting heterosexuality altogether, and thus the monster’s statement of not belonging is for their sexual status. The destruction of a queer household and death as the consequence for deviance creates the illusion of normativity restored—an illusion because Whale is rumored to have laughed out loud at this ending at a screening some years later, and Shane Denson interprets his laughter as a symbol that ‘the normative order has been lastingly destabilized.’ [9]
Young’s essay also discusses several scenes omitted from the film that would have emphasized the brutality of gendered power. Adherence to the Motion Picture Production Code, also known as the Hays Code, was required from July 1934 for all films released under the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America. The Code included prohibitions and restrictions on content that would lower ‘the moral standards of those who saw it,’ including profanity, nudity, childbirth, sex or sexually suggestive scenes, surgical procedures, and gruesomeness. Frankenstein, released in 1931, was not required to adhere to the Code, but Whale’s sequel was. Scenes that were removed from the final cut of The Bride of Frankenstein include Dr Pretorius experimenting on a woman who is still alive, and a suggestion towards the end of the film that the bride’s heart came from Elizabeth—Henry Frankenstein’s wife. Young argues that the latter scene might have ‘implied that the customary emotional danger of romance—a woman's broken heart—might be the visceral, literal result of association with men.’ [10]
The Bride in Revolt
In Return of the Monstrous Feminine, Creed considers the reclamation of the monstrous-feminine in what she terms ‘Feminist New Wave Cinema’, where monstrousness is used by feminist filmmakers to challenge heteropatriarchal conventions of femininity, explore violence against women, and reorient women’s agency. Revolt is central to this movement—whether on social, political, or personal levels, characters in Feminist New Wave Cinema ‘revolt against male violence and corrosive patriarchal values including misogyny, racism, homophobia, and anthropocentrism.’[11] We can see elements of this in Gyllenhaal’s The Bride!—social revolt, in the women’s revolution that The Bride inspires, and The Bride’s own personal revolt against the men (other than Frank) that harm her. We see women as doctors and detectives—positions that, as the men in the film are eager to point out, are not for women; but they refuse to let that stop them.
However, the themes of revolt are taken much further by the version of the bride in the TV series Penny Dreadful (2014-2016), which sees Victor Frankenstein hasten the death of a sick woman, Brónagh Croft, so that she can be resurrected as a mate for his Creature. Like Ida in The Bride!, Brónagh experienced traumatic violence at the hands of men. Like Ida, she is lied to about who she is—Victor Frankenstein tells her she is his cousin, Lily, who was engaged to marry the Creature. Lily plays along, at first, telling Victor that she has no memory of before, but this is revealed to be a lie of her own. Over Seasons 2 and 3, Lily reclaims her autonomy and amasses power of her own, telling the Creature: “Never again... will I kneel to any man. Now they shall kneel to me. As you do, monster.” Jude Wright argues that Lily Frankenstein is both the ‘articulation of the bloodcurdling scream from Whale’s Bride of Frankenstein’ and an expression of the patriarchal nightmare ‘that women will indeed rise up and vanquish men.’[12] Lily’s revolt is, like the bride’s scream in Whale’s version, an assertion of self-hood, playing into the fears that Victor Frankenstein admits to earlier in the show when he tells Lily that women are kept in corsets because otherwise they would “take over the world.”
Penny Dreadful is far from perfect in terms of its representation of women and feminist themes, but it offers the bride some agency in her monstrousness and in her relationships where The Bride! does not. Lily does not draw distinctions between her abusers in her past life, and Victor and the Creature in her present—their violence is as violent as the men that beat her, sexually assaulted her, exploited her. Gyllenhaal’s Bride never connects the blatant misogyny on display from most other characters in the film to Frank’s manipulation of her. Lily not only revolts against her own abusers, but recruits other women like her—sex workers and other women that have been harmed or exploited by men—and encourages them, too, to take revenge. Gyllenhaal’s Bride is never really part of the revolution she inspires. If Penny Dreadful plays out the nightmares of the patriarchy, The Bride! offers a little more reassurance—your wife will still love you, unless you are the sort of man that cuts out women’s tongues and keeps them in jars.
Of Penny Dreadful as a whole, Marie‐Luise Kohlke argues that for all its empowerment themes, ‘the series’ superficial feminist messages are repeatedly undercut by misogynistic subtexts. Feminism then and now is reduced to a misguided, misandrist, and megalomaniacal Gothic revenge fantasy.’[13] The same is also true of revolt in The Bride!, where the resolution to misogynistic violence is not justice, but more violence, casting a bloody feminist veneer over sinister patriarchal messages. Revenge is only one of the forms of revolt that Creed identifies in Feminist New Wave Cinema, and in many of the films Creed discusses, revenge against one’s abuser is not only about violence but ‘revolt against the universal and entrenched practices of rape culture which is a crucial power structure of the patriarchal symbolic order.’[14] Revolt in the shape of justice, transformation, and personal identity can be just as powerful, if not more so, than violent revenge.
Published just a month after the release of The Bride!, Bar Fridman-Tell’s debut novel Honeysuckle (2026), marketed as a ‘feminist Frankenstein with flowers’, addresses similar themes of creation and control. The novel is a reimagining of the Blodeuwedd’s story from Welsh folklore. The Blodeuwedd (‘flower face’) is a woman created from flowers for the hero Lleu Llaw Gyffes, who is cursed to never have a human wife. Blodeuwedd, never given a human name, falls in love with another man, and attempts to kill Lleu so that she can be free. To punish her, the magicians that created her turn her into an owl, to be hated by all other birds and unable to show her face in daylight. Like Whale’s bride, Blodeuwedd is created for a man and must suffer for rejecting him.
Fridman-Tell’s novel is a slow and unsettling exploration of control and coercion emerging from, as with Frank, the loneliness of an unloved boy. Having been abandoned by their parents, Rory’s older sister creates him a Blodeuwedd, which they affectionately name Daye, so that he won’t bother her anymore. Daye is a fragile thing made of flowers which die away with the seasons, only meant to last a short while, but Rory can’t let her die. Rory and Daye’s childhood friendship becomes entrapment before you as a reader are even aware of what is happening—gendered abuse in subtle forms, the forms that are often ignored or, worse—as The Bride! demonstrates—are presented as romantic. Rory is terrified that he will lose her and becomes obsessed with finding ways to save her, turning him increasingly into a Victor Frankenstein-esque figure, while Daye remains entirely dependent on him for her survival.
It is only towards the end of the novel that we are given Daye’s real perspective—she loves him, but she was created to love him. He hurts her, lies to her, manipulates her, controls her, traps her, tries to change her body so that she will stay with him always. In the end, her freedom is gained through a reclamation of her body, her identity, and her life, her feathered transformation what she needs to be able to leave him. “Come here,” he instructs her, and she responds with no, three times, before she takes flight. This—the power to say no, to refuse him, to leave him, to discover a new life—is the ending that The Bride deserves, the scream of refusal given wings.
The Robot Bride
In the last few years, AI ‘companions’—designed to simulate human relationships—have emerged en masse. These AI bots are programmed to give the user continual validation, to offer unwavering empathy, and to remember every personal detail the user shares. Unlike human companions, your AI friend will never forget your birthday, never disagree with you, never tell you that you hurt their feelings, never leave you. In a recent essay, Heather Parry refers to David Levy’s 2007 book Love + Sex with Robots, in which he argues that we will be having sex with robots by the year 2050 and ascribes the possibility of feeling human emotion to these robots, which Parry takes to be a foundational premise behind AI development: ‘the insistence that if you create a piece of software entirely to ape human behaviour, and it does exactly that, you must for some reason deceive yourself that there is a human-like mind inside of it.’[15] With AI companions, whether physical sex robots or apps on your smart phone, this belief that there could be a human-like mind there takes on a sinister edge when that companion’s programmed sychophantic behaviour means that it will not (or cannot) tell you ‘no’. This is the Bride of Frankenstein for the tech-billionaire age—the men in The Bride!, The Bride of Frankenstein, Penny Dreadful, and Honeysuckle all want a woman-robot-friend who can be programmed to do as they wish, reinforcing the gendered ideals of subservience that are often at the root of (heterosexual) intimate partner abuse.
Ruhina Prasad and Sudhir Narayan Singh argue that the feminization of AI, ‘where female-coded voices are used in obedient, aesthetic, and emotionally supportive roles,’ reinforces these ideals by reducing women to ‘Digital Dolls’ in symbolically associating femininity with ‘compliance, warmth, sensation, sexuality, and digital servitude’ while lacking ‘the agency and autonomy humans possess’ [16]. This feminization has the potential to ‘perpetuate societal conceptualization of womanhood anchored in domesticity, subservience and tolerance to (male) abuse’, whether through unconscious bias or where users employ threatening, harassing, and sexually explicit language in conversations with (feminized) AI bots, and this carries over to their human interactions [17]. In (mainstream) science fiction, while masculinized artificial intelligence often presents as domineering and emotionally-closed off, feminized androids tend to be sexually accessible or otherwise submissive [18]. Science fiction can either critique or reinforce these stereotypes, and in this moment of ever-present misogyny and the attempt to create ‘conscious’ artificial intelligence at all costs, the stories we tell matter.
It matters, then, that a quirky comedy ‘romance’ film masks coercive abuse under a veneer of feminist rebellion. It matters that the being created to validate a man is shown to willingly accept that role for herself. It matters when patriarchal control is the happy ending. Gyllenhaal’s fantasy works hard to comment on the sexism of the past, all while leaving our own cultural moment stable and intact. Here, though, is where revolt is needed.
Zoe L. Tongue (she/they) is an academic based in Leeds, UK. She (mostly) researches and writes about feminist theory, reproductive justice, and science fiction, and her work has been published in Strange Horizons, Ancillary Review of Books, The Witcher and Philosophy, The Legend of Zelda and Philosophy, and others. Their favourite book is Alice in Wonderland because anxious rabbits are relatable, and you can find them on Bluesky at @whiterxbbit.bsky.social.
Notes
[1] Olsen, Mark. 2026. “Maggie Gyllenhaal builds her own kind of monster with the ultra-alive ‘The Bride’.” Los Angeles Times, March 1. https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/movies/story/2026-03-01/maggie-gyllenhaal-bride-pam-abdy-warner-bros-jessie-buckley-interview.
[2] Dargis, Manohla. 2026. “‘The Bride’ Review: Frankie, My Dear.” The New York Times, March 5. https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/05/movies/the-bride-review.html.
[3] Gleiberman, Owen. 2026. “‘The Bride!’ Review: Jessie Buckley and Christian Bale Are Magnetic Monsters in Maggie Gyllenhaal’s Lumbering Punk Horror Trip.” Variety, March 4. https://variety.com/2026/film/reviews/the-bride-review-jessie-buckley-christian-bale-1236677964/.
[4] Young, Elizabeth. 1991. “Here Comes the Bride: Wedding Gender and Race in “Bride of Frankenstein.” Feminist Studies 17(3): 403-437, 412.
[5] Creed, Barbara. 2024, 1st Edn. 1993. The Monstrous-Feminine: Film, Feminism. Abingdon & New York: Routledge, 3.
[6] Creed 2024, 82.
[7] Morris, Gary. 2002. “Horror Films”. GLBTQ Archive. http://glbtqarchive.com/arts/horror_films_A.pdf.
[8] Young 1991, 410.
[9] Denson, Shane. 2025. Bride of Frankenstein: film/minutes. Ann Arbor: Lever Press, 166.
[10] Young 1991, 414-415.
[11] Creed, Barbara. 2022. Return of the Monstrous-Feminine: Feminist New Wave Cinema. Abingdon & New York: Routledge, 2.
[12] Wright, Jude. 2021. “Unbridling the Bride.” Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts 32(1): 54-69, 54.
[13] Kohlke, Marie-Luise. 2018. “The lures of neo-Victorianism presentism (with a feminist case study of Penny Dreadful).” Literature Compass 15(7): e12463, 11.
[14] Creed 2022, 4, 51.
[15] Parry, Heather. 2026. “they want (you) to believe.” general observations on eggs, May 10. https://heatherparry.substack.com/p/they-want-you-to-believe-fbd.
[16] Prasad, Runiha and Singh, Rudhir Narayan. 2025. “Feminised AI as Digital Dolls: cyber-feminist perspectives on technology and gender, digitally smart or socially aloof.” International Cybersecurity Law Review 6: 627-650, 646, 630.
[17] Sindoni, Maria Grazia. 2024. “The femininization of AI-powered voice assistants: Personification, anthropomorphism and discourse ideologies.” Discourse, Context & Media 62: 100833, 7.
[18] Hook, Sarah and Sassine, Jacinta. 2026. “He, her, they robot: gendered AI chatbots and the proliferation of technologically facilitated violence.” Griffith Law Review 35(1): 1-20, 4-5.