#like the bride ……………………i get it i really do
thinks about how frankenstein revolves around the exclusion of women and the removal of agency from women… thinks about how a key component of frankenstein is identity and the experience of being denied identity… thinks about how women in frankenstein are stripped of identity outside of how they relate to men… thinks about how all of these things coalesce in the bride…
like ofc you have the concept of unnatural birth but like. every woman in the story lives and dies in her relevancy by a man.
carolines life was determined by the men around her, elizabeth was only adopted to be a gift for victor, agatha and safie only exist in relation to felix, all we ever learn about margaret is that she is walton’s sister, justine is introduced as william’s caretaker.
and even beyond just existing for men these women are stripped of agency. margaret listens but never speaks, elizabeth dies for a husband she had no choice in, agatha and safie are only allowed to wafch as felix strikes out against the creature, justine dies taking the punishment for the actions of men, a girl drowns in the river while her male companion is the one holding a gun.
who are these women? we learn very little about them aside from how they serve the men in their lives: whose sister they are, whose love interest, who they teach a lesson, who they die for. We never get true identity. In the inverse of the way the creature is given no identity - no home, no family, no name - these women are given little else.
and at the intersection of it all sits the bride, right? a nameless, faceless women whose existience is little more than a moral question or a fantasized daydream. her life serves men, her death serves men. she is the product of the unnatural birth, and she is the fear of it. the very moment victor considers that she might have agency, a mind of her own, that she might think to reject her assigned lot in life, he destroys her.
