The progressive emancipation of the female creature, from Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein to John Logan’s Penny Dreadful and Yorgos Lanthimos’s Poor Things PDF Free Download
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The progressive emancipation
of the female creature, from Mary Shelley’s
Frankenstein to John Logan’s Penny Dreadful
and Yorgos Lanthimos’s Poor Things
Marilyn Mallia
A brief episode in Mary Shelley’s 1818 novel Frankenstein, portraying the aborted
creation of a new Eve, has proven to be a particularly fertile imaginative stimulus for
writers and filmmakers. The novel’s eponymous scientist, having agreed to create a
female mate for his monster, reflects on the perils of such an enterprise and ends up
destroying the female creature. Frankenstein’s narrative reveals the singular violence
and frenzy of her savage dismemberment: “trembling with passion [I] tore to pieces
the thing on which I was engaged”,
1
as well as his intense repulsion towards this
monstrous entity: “the remains of the half-finished creature, whom I had destroyed,
lay scattered on the floor, and I almost felt as if I had mangled the living flesh of a
human being.”
2
The horrific obliteration of the female creature, before granting her
a chance to exist, has been read as stemming from male anxieties surrounding the
generative female who risks disrupting the patriarchal mythos of creation,
3
as well as
the sexually liberated female possessing an independent will.
4
The vague allusiveness
of this powerful episode, together with the novel’s richly layered gender dimensions,
has prompted a whole lineage of adaptations, which seek to unpack its ambiguity
and its latent ideological charge.
The first, most significant filmic reimagining of the female creature is
undoubtedly James Whale’s The Bride of Frankenstein (1935). With “her iconic,
lightning-streaked hairdo”, Elsa Lanchester’s Bride is “the most widely recognizable
female monster in the Gothic horror tradition”
5
, dominating the cultural
imagination. Despite being the eponymous heroine, however, her appearance in the
film is surprisingly brief – she comes to life in the final minutes, and lives just long
1
Mary Shelley, Frankenstein, London, Wordsworth Classics, 1999, p.127.
2
Ibid., p.130.
3
Burton Hatlen, “Milton, Mary Shelley and Patriarchy”, Bucknell Review, vol.28, n.2, 1983, p.19-21.
4
Anne K. Mellor, Romanticism and Feminism, Indianapolis, Indiana University Press, 1988.
5
Lissette Lopez Szwydky, “Penny Dreadful’s Palimpsestuous Bride of Frankenstein”, in Julie Grossman,
Will Scheibel, eds., Penny Dreadful and Adaptation, Switzerland, Palgrave Macmillan, 2023, p.197-215,
p.197.
10
enough to assert her defiance, before perishing in the destruction of the laboratory.
She is defined primarily by her primal hiss of anger towards her intended mate, a
gesture which has been interpreted as an assertion of sexual authority and a rejection
of patriarchal control.
1
Subsequent filmic adaptations which expand on this scene
include Terence Fisher’s Frankenstein created woman (1967), Jack Smight’s Frankenstein:
The True Story (1973), Franc Roddam’s The Bride (1985) and Kenneth Branagh’s Mary
Shelley’s Frankenstein (1994).
This article will analyse two recent Neo-Victorian retellings, namely John
Logan’s Showtime series Penny Dreadful (three seasons, 2014-2016) and Yorgos
Lanthimos’s critically acclaimed film Poor Things (2023), which probe in significant
depth the gender politics of the constructed female. A comparative analysis of the
two productions, which deal with the same thorny issues with vastly different tones
and outcomes, will shed light on the representational dynamics of the female
creature, as well as the persistent problems and limitations of her evolutionary
trajectory. The exploration of these questions in relation to these two adaptations is
especially fruitful, given that Neo-Victorian Gothic fiction tends to exploit the
supernatural to concede greater transgressive freedom to its heroines, thus enacting
what Esther Saxey calls the “liberation plot”.
2
Moreover, both Neo-Victorian screen
narratives set their female creature’s itinerary within extensively constructed fictional
worlds. Penny Dreadful, for instance, is a creative mash-up of storylines stemming
from canonical nineteenth-century Gothic classics, namely Mary Shelley’s
Frankenstein, Bram Stoker’s Dracula, Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray and
Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. These storylines
continuously intersect in the liminal spaces of a fin-de-siècle London, a Gothic
underworld termed as the “demimonde”
3
. The literary constructedness of this
demimonde, with its constant intertextual allusions, is grounded by a highly realist
and gritty aesthetic. Within this city setting, the woman Frankenstein selects to
resurrect as a bride for his creature is Brona, a destitute Irish prostitute pushed out
of factory work by the forces of industrialization, and dying of tuberculosis. Her
rebirth as Lily, Frankenstein’s genteel cousin, problematizes issues of class as well as
gender.
Yorgos Lanthimos’ Poor Things, on the other hand, is a wildly unconventional
film whose absurdist tone is closer to that of a surreal fable. The film adapts Alistair
Gray’s 1992 novel, an inventive postmodern retelling of Frankenstein, thus filtering an
already idiosyncratic tale through Lanthimos’ distinctive directorial vision.
Flamboyant and quirky, Lanthimos’ steampunk universe seems to be diametrically
1
Jude Wright, “Unbridling the bride: Feminism and patriarchy in Penny Dreadful’s Frankenstein
narrative”, Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts, vol.32, n.1, 2021, p.54–69.
2
Esther Saxey, “The maid, the master, her ghost and his monster: Alias Grace and Mary Reilly.” In
Rosario Arias and Patricia Pulham, ed., Neo-Victorian fiction: Possessing the past, Hampshire, Palgrave
Macmillan, 2010, p.58-81.
3
It is in fact the title of the series’ fourth episode.
11
opposed to Logan’s desire for verisimilitude. Painted backdrops, LED screens, fish-
eye lenses and studio-shot exterior scenes all contribute to what Lanthimos calls a
“tweaked reality […] based on familiar things in a familiar period.”
1
Such an
alternate, hyper-stylised world has a twofold objective, the director explains. It
conveys the female protagonist’s unique point of view and encourages the viewer to
accept this fantastic fairy tale’s narrative outlandishness. Conditions thus seem to be
propitious to the expression of what Cady Lang terms a “feminist fever dream.”
2
This article will analyse how this experimental mode enables the director to indulge
various scenarios and emancipatory possibilities related to his female creature’s
identity quest.
Within these two Neo-Victorian creative canvases, Logan and Lanthimos take
forward problematic issues already incipient in Shelley’s life and work – namely the
dynamics of creation, the creature’s intellectual and sexual awakening, and the
struggle for agency – while relating them to gender politics through a presentist lens.
The dynamics of creation
Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein has been famously defined by Ellen Moers as “a birth
myth”, dealing with “the drama of guilt, dread, and flight surrounding birth and its
consequences.”
3
The Miltonic epigraph chosen by Shelley, quoting a bitter and
rebellious Adam, immediately foregrounds the problem of the non-consensual
nature of creation and the responsibility it engenders:
Did I request thee, Maker, from my clay
To mould Me man? Did I solicit thee
From Darkness to promote me?
Paradise Lost, X, 743-5
4
In the Frankenstein bride narratives, the power imbalance between Creator and
Created is further complexified by the power imbalance between the sexes, while in
Penny Dreadful, this is further compounded by the social class discrepancy. Ever since
her first mention in Shelley’s novel, the monstress is posited as an object of sexual
exchange, owing her genesis solely to her intended fate as mate and to the fulfilment
of an obligation between men. In this regard, the motif of prostitution is already
incipient in Shelley’s novel, but it is concretised further in both Penny Dreadful and
Poor Things, in which both Brona and Bella work as prostitutes. Moreover, Lily is
1
Rebecca Keegan, “The Making of Poor Things”, The Hollywood Reporter, 20 Dec 2023,
http://bit.ly/48th0GU
2
Cady Lang, “Poor Things and the Profoundly Feminist Origins of Frankenstein”, Time, 13 Dec 2023,
https://bit.ly/3YDofsy (accessed 1/8/24).
3
Ellen Moers, Literary Women, N.Y., Doubleday, 1976, p.91.
4
Mary Shelley, Frankenstein, op. cit., p.11.
12
keenly aware of the transactional circumstances of her creation: “I was an offering.
A whore, resurrected to be given to your creature.” The monstress’ status as an
object of transaction takes on a powerful symbolic import within the 19th century
context, representing women’s lack of agency writ large.
In Penny Dreadful, the female body selected for reanimation exemplifies extreme
powerlessness. As an immigrant and a prostitute debilitated by disease, Brona is
positioned at the bottom of the social hierarchy. She is easily dispensed with by
Frankenstein, who, under the guise of mercy killing, suffocates her with a pillow to
expedite the reanimation process. She is thus doubly denied the possibility of consent
– first for her death and then for her resurrection as Lily. Moreover, as a nude
corpse awaiting reanimation, she constitutes what Howell and Baker call “a blank
screen for projected desires” (Fig. 1a). Frankenstein fondles her breasts in silent
fascination, redolent of a necrophilia “framed by power inequities of class and
gender”. This “make[s] Lily’s creation from the body of Brona a nightmare version
of George Bernard Shaw’s 1912 Pygmalion”.
1
The female creature’s body, a
vulnerable object on the verge of transformation, is often fetishised in screen
adaptations, combining ultimate femininity with the facticity of the non-human. In
the 1985 film The Bride, her bandages are slowly unveiled, revealing her beautiful
features behind the swaddles of white surgical cloth. Comparably, the resurrection
of Prima, in the 1973 film Frankenstein: The True Story, is portrayed through a
beautiful dreamlike water tank sequence, which Szwydky cites as a direct visual cue
for Penny Dreadful.
2
The ethical question of consent is also problematic in Poor Things, in which the
male scientist transplants a pregnant woman’s baby brain into the dead mother’s
body. However, the creator’s motivations, while not exempt of scientific ambitions,
are couched in more magnanimous terms, as an attempt to respect the suicidal
woman’s wishes:
I knew nothing about the life she had abandoned, except that she hated it so much that she had
chosen not to be, and forever. What would she feel on being dragged from her carefully chosen
blank eternity and forced to be in one of our understaffed, poorly equipped madhouses,
reformatories, or jails? […] Who was I to decide her fate?
In fact, Godwin Baxter presents Bella’s origin story as the “happy tale” of an
empowering transformation. This interpretation is corroborated by the directorial
choices for the opening scene, showing Victoria Blessington plunging to her death.
In a film which alternates between the use of black and white and colour, reserving
the latter for key stages in her developmental journey, it is telling that this scene is
presented in vibrant colour. In retrospect, Victoria’s suicide thus emerges as the
crucial first step towards her eventual emancipation.
1
Amanda Howell, Lucy Baker, Monstrous Possibilities: The Female Monster in 21st Century Screen Horror,
Switzerland, Palgrave Macmillan, 2022, p.142.
2
Lissette Lopez Szwydky, art. cit., p.202.
13
The murky ethical waters of Godwin Baxter’s actions, which would be highly
consequential in a realist narrative, are glossed over within the film’s absurdist
universe. At the same time, the film explores the problematic ways in which men try
to contain the female creature’s existence through contractual ties. When Godwin
senses Bella’s urge to escape her carefully controlled environment, he directs her to
marry Max McCandless, a man he can easily control, and draws up a legal document
of such binding severity that even the lawyer Duncan Wedderburn is intrigued by
this “contract of marriage that imprisons her”. Godwin’s contract thus serves to
parodically amplify another facet of the female condition in the 19th century, namely
the strictures of marriage agreements. It recalls in fact a famous sentence by Mary
Shelley’s mother, feminist writer Mary Wollstonecraft: “Marriage had bastilled me
for life.”
1
While the relationship between Bella and Godwin is initially marked by a power
hierarchy, it is nonetheless asexual (Godwin is a eunuch), and less exploitative than
other Frankenstein narratives. It is based on the motif of paternity rather than that
of a prostitution exchange (the later, extensive prostitution sequence turns out to be
the heroine’s free choice). If certain feminist ideas in Poor Things recall Mary Shelley’s
famous mother, the name ‘Godwin Baxter’ constitutes an explicit reference to
Shelley’s famous father William Godwin – to whom the novel Frankenstein is dedicated –
as well as to Shelley’s other father figure, the radical William Baxter. Mary’s
biological father had, in fact, sent her to Dundee at the age of thirteen to live with
the Baxter family. Mary Shelley’s personal and literary relationship with William
Godwin was indeed a complex one. She shared his political ideals; as the author of
Political Justice and Caleb Williams and the founder of philosophical anarchism, he
advocated progressive reform and the primacy of individual judgment. However,
their domestic situation was fraught with tension and marked by periods of
estrangement. Poor Things retains this paternal relationship’s complexity, while
enacting what would have been a dream fulfilment scenario for Shelley, namely the
father’s evolution from a domineering figure to one of loving understanding and
respect for his daughter’s autonomy. At the outset, Godwin Baxter’s outlook is one
of extreme scientific control – “she is an experiment, and we must control the
conditions, or our results will not be pure”. In conformity with his abbreviated
name’s connotations with the deity (God/Godwin), he wants to keep her enclosed
in an Edenic domesticity. However, he eventually accepts that she is “a being of free
will”, especially since his own subjection to fatherly control had engendered
monstrosity. In an intriguing reversal of roles, we discover that Godwin Baxter is a
victim of paternal exploitation, having been transformed into a physically repulsive
monster by a series of sadistic experiments. In his first appearance, the camera
rotates around him to reveal a close-up of his deformed face, monstruous scars and
1
In her novel Maria or the Wrongs of Woman.
14
surgical anomalies. He is first referred to as “the monster” by his medical students,
as opposed to Bella’s stunning looks.
The verbal slippage between God-Godwin-monster expands the polysemic
potential of Shelley’s complex model of male creation. Bella considers Godwin to be
her godlike father yet the irresponsible use of his powers to fabricate a stand-in for
Bella, Felicity, renders him monstruous. This act exposes his underlying assumption
that female bodies are interchangeable. The failure of the Felicity experiment forces
him to acknowledge the limits of his creative role and highlights the depth of his
paternal bond with Bella (Fig. 1b). He thus recognises that Bella has mostly
engendered herself through her determination to experience everything: “I have […]
watched you fearlessly create Bella Baxter with wonder.” She is in fact both
metaphorically and literally a product of parthenogenesis, since her caesarean scar
indicates how her body gave birth to her evolving consciousness.
The paternal creative model in Poor Things ultimately emerges as a positive one
since Godwin Baxter, as a ‘monster’ brutalised and maimed by patriarchy, is not
complicit with it. It is also quite telling that in adapting Alasdair Gray’s novel,
Lanthimos and McNamara omit the figure of Blayton Hattersley, Victoria’s
tyrannical father, thus doing away with an irredeemably negative paternal model.
Fig. 1a In Penny Dreadful, Frankenstein looks longingly at Brona’s nude corpse, his pose
suggestive of Narcissus. Penny Dreadful. Showtime Networks, Sky Atlantic, 2013-2016.
Episode 2.1
15
Fig. 1b In Poor Things, the model of male creation takes on a paternal and asexual dimension.
Poor Things, Searchlight Pictures, 2023.
If the film suggests an empowering message about female self-creation and
benign paternity, it is nonetheless important to tackle the question of who –
narratively speaking – creates Bella Baxter. In Alasdair Gray’s novel, Archibald
McCandless’ lengthy account of his wife’s story is framed by two paratexts: an
introduction by Gray in the role of editor, giving full credence to McCandless’
version, and a final letter by Bella/Victoria herself, strongly refuting the contents of
her husband’s text and recounting a much more realistic and plausible series of
events. Despite the higher credibility of Bella’s story, Gray the editor persists in
advancing McCandless’ more colourful story as the truth. He positions Bella’s letter
at the end, to show that “it is the letter of a disturbed woman who wants to hide the
truth about her start in life.”
1
In fact Alkan-Genca describes the novel Poor Things as
a collective effort by three men – Godwin Baxter, Archibald McCandless and Gray
himself – to “mold a woman of their liking disregarding what that particular woman
is or wants to be known for.”
2
What happens to these narratorial perspectives when
adapted to the screen? Screenwriter Tony McNamara explains the process as
follows:
1
Alasdair Gray, Poor Things, Bloomsbury, Kindle Edition.
2
Papatya Alkan-Genca, “Doctor-patient interactions in Alasdair Gray’s Poor Things and Janice Galloway’s
The Trick is to Keep Breathing”, Bulletin of the Transilvania University of Brașov, vol.11, n.2, 2018, p.147-156, p.153.
16
[In the novel] all the men tell Bella’s story. And then 700 pages later, she tells her story for two
pages, and it’s nothing like anything the men said. So that was one of the keys: this is a movie
about a woman and all the people who try to control her body, her ideas, her experience of life.
1
Putting Bella’s experience at the heart of the film allows McNamara to grow and
expand her story. What he does not comment upon, however, is the creative choice
to ignore the two-page narrative in which Bella asserts her voice, and to focus on
reappropriating the male narrative of seven hundred pages. While a series of changes
have been made in the adaptation to grant Bella’s character further agency, there is
an uncomfortable irony in the way the scriptwriter takes the narrative advanced by
McCandless’ novelistic perspective and presents it filtered through the filmic female
character’s point of view. Of course, McCandless’ narrative offers rich material for a
fantastic and outlandish tale, more in line with Lanthimos’ quirkiness than Bella’s
sobering version of events. An adaptation based on her short account (in which her
cranial scar results from paternal abuse and her change of identity is triggered by
marital abuse), would have required a much more pessimistic and realistic tone.
Indeed, it would have needed to be closer to Penny Dreadful’s portrayal of Brona’s ill-
treatment, without the supernatural elements.
In fact, while some critics extoll the film’s feminist virtues, others consider it to
be a superlative example of the male gaze, combining the visions of another
masculine triumvirate: novelist Gray, screenwriter McNamara and director
Lanthimos. Samira Ahmed calls the film “a middle-aged straight man’s fantasy about
nymphomania”,
2
while Angelica Bastién claims that it “demonstrates the limits of
the modern cis-male auteur’s vision for and about women — particularly their
sexual selves.”
3
These claims will be taken into account in our final evaluation of the
female creature’s emancipation on screen.
A song of innocence and experience
In the various filmic adaptations of Frankenstein’s bride, her fabrication entails a
crucial question, namely whether the resurrected Eve offers a complete tabula rasa
for the male scientist. In The Bride (1985), such a prospect constitutes the ultimate
male fantasy of creative power:
Frankenstein: She might be taught everything, Clerval. Think of it. She might be made into
anything.
Clerval: The most pliant of mistresses.
1
Rebecca Keegan, art. cit.
2
Samira Ahmed, “She’s bound and gagged for laughs’: is Poor Things a feminist masterpiece – or an
offensive male sex fantasy?”, The Guardian, 24 Jan 2024, https://bit.ly/3BWqZZ0 (accessed 1/9/24).
3
Angelica Jade Bastién, “Is Poor Things the Best We Can Do for Female Sexuality Onscreen?”, Vulture,
10 March 2024, https://bit.ly/4eU3caT (accessed 9/8/24).
17
In Penny Dreadful, Frankenstein hopes his creature will not recall her “benighted”
past life as a tubercular prostitute, nor the fact that he had, effectively, euthanized
her without her consent. His choice of her new name, Lily, symbolising “the flower
of resurrection and rebirth”, suggests the purity of a virgin canvas. In fact, both
Victor and the male creation project their idealized female fantasies onto her. Victor
tries to implant fake memories of an idyllic childhood spent together, while the
creature fashions her as a fairy-tale Beauty who loves the Beast despite his ugliness.
Lily’s apparent malleability renders her a supremely attractive object of desire who
mimetically validates Victor’s identity. The first word she utters is his name, and she
immediately sheds her Irish accent to adopt his high-class English accent.
Victor, in training Lily into patriarchal norms of femininity, seeks to convert her
into the ideal ‘Angel in the House’,
1
thus exercising another level of creation. As he
dyes her hair blonde (a possible allusion to Hitchcock’s Vertigo), Lily hints at the true
motivations behind her makeover: “You’re making me into an angel. Or maybe just
the cousin you always wanted.” However, the return of Brona’s traumatic memories
and Lily’s violent rebellion constitute a monstruous deviation from Victor’s idea of
female perfection. Victor’s belief that “[i]t is our memories that make us monsters”,
echoes indeed Freud’s assertion that “Hysterics suffer mainly from reminiscences”.
2
Once again, he seeks to mobilise science to restore her to the tabula rasa equated
with true womanhood. The annihilation of consciousness thus emerges as the
ultimate punishment for the transgressive, monstruous female, as this would entail,
as Lily points out, being “unmade. Become a non-person”, or indeed, killing Brona a
second time.
On the other hand, in Poor Things, Bella’s mental tabula rasa offers multiple
liberatory possibilities. Unshackled by past experiences of social conditioning, her
understanding of sexual experience is playful, jubilant and free of shame. In an
interview, Lanthimos says that his film is about:
a human being that has a chance in the world – someone who hasn’t been moulded in a very
specific manner to perceive the world in a certain way […] She’s a 28-year-old woman who […]
comes back with a blank slate, able to start again, and to own that life.
3
Like Shelley’s creature, her formation is wholly dependent on what she is
exposed to after her creation, but unlike him, Bella embarks on her journey armed
with the optimism of Voltaire’s Candide. Hungry for experience, Bella learns rapidly
1
The Angel in the House is a narrative poem by Coventry Patmore published in 1854. The expression has
come to refer to Victorian ideals of domestic femininity.
2
Josef Breuer, Sigmund Freud, Studies on Hysteria, 1893-1895, https://bit.ly/3AaSNsb (accessed
5/10/24).
3
Mark Kermode, “My films are all problematic children’: director Yorgos Lanthimos on Poor Things,
shame and his creative soulmate Emma Stone”, The Guardian, 31 Dec 2023 https://bit.ly/48lZeFg
(accessed 8/8/24).
18
from a whole series of mentors: the paternal surgeon Godwin Baxter, the
unscrupulous libertine Duncan Wedderburn, the cynic Harry Astley and the wise
old Martha von Kurtzroc, Swiney the brothel keeper, and for a brief while, Victoria’s
husband General Blessington. These encounters advance her sexual and political
education in parallel, in ways which Frankenstein scholar Anne K. Mellor relates to
the lineage of Mary Shelley. Mellor points out that Bella’s world tour in the film:
parallels the travels of both Shelley and her mother, writer and noted women's rights advocate
Mary Wollstonecraft, who wrote A Vindication of the Rights of Women […] Bella’s sexual liberation
can be read as a reference to both Shelley and Wollstonecraft’s unconventional sexual
relationships outside of marriage […] Bella’s intellectual awakening, which leads to her embrace
of socialism, is a reflection of the class struggle inherent in Frankenstein [...]
1
The film thus renders explicit feminist and political dimensions which could
only be expressed indirectly in a 19th century novel like Frankenstein. In the latter
work, the domain of exploration is clearly marked as a masculine activity, pertaining
to the eponymous scientist and Captain Robert Walton, whereas in Poor Things,
Bella’s unsatiable curiosity, which she attributes to “explorers’ blood in me”, allows
her to freely explore contrasting facets of existence through the empirical methods
learnt from God(win). In Lisbon, she claims, in her unexpectedly poetic idiolect: “I
have adventured it and found nothing but sugar and violence. It is most charming.”
Bella advances through various sexual stages, from her enthusiastic discovery of
masturbation to her apprenticeship of “furious jumping” with Wedderburn and
culminating into a lengthy sequence in a Parisian brothel, during which she
experiences a mind-boggling variety of sexual desires. Considering herself to be “a
flawed experimenting person”, she finds her prostitution a fascinating learning
experience. During each of these stages, she assumes agency and control of her
sexual experience. In the final leg of her journey, she willfully explores the sexual
tyranny of Victorian domesticity (her original name being, after all, an overt
reference). In a fleeting shot, Bella reads the palimpsestic traces of Victoria’s female
rage: compulsive scribblings of the expletive “fuck” (Fig 2). Apprehending her past
self’s trauma with a sense of detachment, as being “another person’s story”, she
knowingly rejects marital oppression.
1
Cady Lang, art. cit.
19
Fig. 2 Bella traces signs of Victoria Blessington’s domestic rage. Poor Things, Searchlight
Pictures, 2023.
Bella’s sociopolitical education explores the notion of perfectibility, starting with
her reading of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Love and Friendship (1841). Her comments on
Emerson’s exclusion of women from his egalitarian ideal immediately provide a
feminist slant to her awareness and reformist impulse. The crucial threshold
moment occurs in Alexandria, when the cynic Astley confronts her with societal
cruelty and human suffering, leading to a primal reaction of despair. This highly
traumatic experience recalls the Genesis episode in which Eve chooses knowledge
and her eyes are opened. Bella, however, is able to recover from this setback, musing
philosophically that knowing the truth about the world is an inevitable step towards
improving it. Her outlook leads her to enthusiastically embrace the socialist ideas
introduced by her prostitute co-worker Toinette. She even combines her sexual and
political education, by describing their sex work as enabling them to be “their own
means of production.”
In the case of Lily, the transition from innocence to experience is murkier since,
rather than progressing linearly, her experiences as Lily are superposed on Brona’s past
traumatic ones and filtered by her perception as an immortal granted supernatural
strength. The series makes unclear the exact point at which Lily recovers her
memories as Brona and her creation. The viewer therefore needs to assume that
during several scenes, she acts duplicitously, masquerading as the docile Lily while
plotting her way ahead. In fact, Lily’s sexual and political education has already taken
place through her previous existence, in which she was embittered by abuse and
20
brutalized by loss. Ironically, it is her creator Victor who is led by her from sexual
innocence to experience. After seducing him, Lily tells her creator that he was, after all,
“sublimely malleable” and that “in a way, I created you more than you created me”.
Since Lily’s memories inform her feminist agenda, her political awakening leads
her in a very different direction from Bella’s. Rather than seeking to reform the
world, she considers it rotten to the core by patriarchal dominance and therefore
targets its systemic overhaul: “Never again will I kneel to any man. Now they shall
kneel to me.”
The journey towards emancipation
In both Lily’s and Bella’s trajectories, the female creatures need to contend with
male efforts to abject the undesirable aspects of their monstrous-feminine.
1
Both
women’s otherness threatens the stability of the symbolic order, which is why critics
have linked them with end of the century anxieties about the Victorian ‘New
Woman’ seeking female empowerment.
2
If women were allowed to exert
themselves, Victor tells Lily ,“[t]hey’d take over the world. The only way we men
prevent that is by keeping women corseted...in theory and in practice.” The two
female creatures, possessing varying degrees of self-awareness and knowledge of the
workings of patriarchy, advance towards their emancipation through starkly
different methods.
Lily, already far too aware of the cruel constraints that keep women corseted,
mobilises her monstrosity deliberately, ardently believing that only violence and
destruction can lead to their emancipation. As she tells her faithful acolyte, Justine,
3
results can only be achieved “By craft. By stealth. By poison. By the throat quietly
slit in the dead of the night. By the careful and silent accumulation of power.” She
disapproves of the public protest methods of the “awfully clamorous” suffragettes,
since, “[l]iberty is a bitch who must be bedded on a mattress of corpses”. Through
her transgressive excess and her “apocalyptically post-human” goal,
4
Lily confirms
men’s worst fears about female misuse of power, going back to those expressed by
Mary Shelley’s scientist, namely that unleashing a female creature would spawn “a
race of devils […] who might make the very existence of the species of man a
condition precarious and full of terror”.
5
Lily’s emancipation project, fuelled by
passionate extremity and blind rage, gives rise to the audience’s repulsion rather than
sympathy. Kohlke for instance, deplores the way in which Penny Dreadful reduces the
1
We use Barbara Creed’s term, The Monstrous-Feminine: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis, New York,
Routledge, 1993.
2
Stephanie R. Green, “Lily Frankenstein: The Gothic new woman in Penny Dreadful”, Refractory: A
Journal of Entertainment Media, n.28, 2017, https://bit.ly/4fb5GBF (accessed 12/8/24).
3
A telling allusion to the 1791 Marquis de Sade novel Justine, ou les malheurs de la vertu.
4
Amanda Howell, Lucy Baker, op. cit., p.136.
5
Mary Shelley, Frankenstein, op. cit., p.127.
21
female emancipation plot to “a misguided, misandrist and megalomaniac Gothic
revenge fantasy”,
1
while Chloe claims that this vilification of Lily’s radical feminism
becomes “a typically postfeminist gesture that both articulates and affirms
misogynist fears about powerful women”.
2
Bella’s agency, on the other hand, is achieved through less belligerent, but more
effective means. The film structures her picaresque journey through chapter titles
(Lisbon, The Ship, Alexandria, Paris, London), charting both her education and
emancipation in the manner of a bildungsroman. As Bella advances in her quest for
self-knowledge, she progressively discovers the trappings of patriarchy: namely that
her freedom and sexuality are considered ‘monstruous’ and threatening, and that
men seek to curtail them through different methods. Her accelerated learning pace
leads her to quickly pick up the nature of these male weapons of dominance and to
redirect them against those who try to stop her. Part of the film’s dark humour
stems from the way in which Bella insouciantly and matter-of-factly sabotages the
men’s efforts, taking them unawares. For instance, shortly after Godwin silences her
rebellious outburst with chloroform, she similarly narcotises Max McCandless when
he opposes her wishes. After learning persuasive rhetoric from the lawyer Duncan
Wedderburn, she quotes his own arguments to defend her position:
Bella: You are cross at Bella’s outings and adventures, and yet, we must discover by whim, as
spoken by Duncan Wedderburn to Bella Baxter day one of Lisbon love affair.
Duncan: Touché.
Moreover, as she tries to decipher her lover’s possessive outburst, she
defamiliarizes its profound absurdity: “So you wish to marry me, or kill me? Is that
the proposal?” In fact, Duncan, exasperated by the way Bella eludes his grasp and
unwittingly outwits him, ends up resorting to physical containment, doubly
enclosing her in a box and in a ship (Fig 3).
1
Marie-Luise Kohlke, “The lures of neo-Victorianism presentism (with a feminist case study of Penny
Dreadful)”, Literature Compass, vol.15 n.7, 2018, p.1-14, p.9.
2
Chloé Germaine Buckley, “A tale of two women: the female grotesque in Showtime’s Penny
Dreadful”, Feminist Media Studies, vol.20, n.3, 2020, p.361-380.
22
Fig. 3 Duncan Wedderburn encloses Bella in a box to imprison her in a ship. Poor Things,
Searchlight Pictures, 2023.
Finally, in a highly amusing and ironic final twist, when General Blessington
seeks to resort to surgery to suppress her sexual freedom, she ‘fixes him’ by putting
to practice her superior surgery skills.
In comparing the two women’s itinerary towards freedom, it is telling that
both Penny Dreadful and Poor Things contain a highly symbolic choreographed
sequence which signals their defiance to male authority. Victor, in a desperate
attempt to reclaim Lily for himself, interrupts Lily’s dance with Dorian Gray and
fires at both in a fit of passion. Being immortals, his action proves ineffectual, but
it gives rise to a visually striking scene, in which Lily and Dorian, elegantly dressed
in white, continue their waltz in the lavish ballroom, ignoring both Victor and the
rich flow of blood staining their clothes and marking their passage on the floor.
This scene constitutes a particularly chilling moment of defiance, in which Lily
reveals her true nature to Victor as well as the power she holds over him. Lily and
Dorian’s waltz announces their decadent triumph over mortals. In Poor Things,
Bella’s idiosyncratic dance scene, which went viral at the time of the film’s release,
shows a different power game at play. While Bella moves uninhibitedly to the
rhythm, she ignores Duncan’s attempts to lead and force her back into
conventional movements. Adamant to break free from his control, she improvises
increasingly wild dance moves which enact her liberation and autonomy. Such
strange and symbolic dance scenes are a recurrent feature in Lanthimos’ films and
23
serve to explore power relations.
1
The difference between the two scenes
described, however, serves to illustrate why Bella’s quest for freedom succeeds
while Lily’s fails. Bella aims in fact, to dance solo and express herself freely, while
Lily rejects Victor’s control only to accept to dance a predefined waltz with
another male character. Her partnership with Dorian Gray will in fact prove to be
her undoing.
Fig 4a
Lily and
Dorian’s
bloody waltz
of power.
Penny Dreadful.
Showtime
Networks,
Sky Atlantic,
2013-2016.
Episode 2.10
Fig 4b
Bella’s
emancipatory
dance.
Poor Things,
Searchlight
Pictures,
2023.
In both Bella and Lily’s final reckoning, men attempt to convert them into
‘proper women’ through drastic means – clitoridectomy for the former and
chemical lobotomy for the latter. Each of these surgical procedures aims to remedy
these women’s problematic blurring of boundaries, which render them abject.
Frankenstein wants to separate the pure Lily from the contamination of her
1
Tugce Kutlu, “The rule of the weird: power relations in the films of Yorgos Lanthimos”, Studies in
European Cinema, vol.20, n.1, 2023, p.36-46.
24
previous self, while Blessington seeks to divorce Victoria’s reproductive body from
the rebellious consciousness of her child. Blessington identifies her sexuality as the
source of her monstruous deviance: “The root of the problem is between your legs
and I will have it off and it will not distract and divert you anymore.”
Ultimately, Lily is spared only because her impassioned plea to retain memories
of her dead daughter brings her closer to Victor’s idea of womanhood. Her final fate
remains ambiguous and open-ended, as she disappears in the night after her army of
rebellious whores is disbanded. Bella’s narrative ends on a much more triumphant
note, as she effectively contains the threat posed by her husband (by transplanting a
goat’s brain in his body) and creates a utopian socialist phalanstery. The new Eden
created by Bella is made up mostly of women (Toinette, Felicity, Mrs Prim), a
supportive male (Max) and a male pet (Blessington), living in egalitarian harmony.
This model of relationships exists outside the scope of law and conventional
morality; we can assume that Max and Bella are not legally married, given the
general’s survival. Bella is also able to become the first female doctor, since Godwin
Baxter dies bequeathing his medical practice to her, enabling her to achieve
professional autonomy. Such an unequivocally optimistic outcome is indeed atypical
of Lanthimos and departs from Gray’s problematic novelistic conclusion.
Are we to accept this euphoric conclusion as the definite answer to the
problems that have long beset the question of the female creature’s emancipation? Is
Poor Things a mark of substantial progress when compared to the postfeminist sexual
politics of Penny Dreadful? In Poor Things, the male creator’s role as paternal enabler as
opposed to sexual predator, the liberatory potential of her tabula rasa, as well as the
final utopian outcome are only narratively possible because the film is presented as a
delirious fantasy as opposed to a realist tale. Is it, moreover, a truly emancipatory
fantasy or one generated by the male gaze? As indicated previously, several critics
have found Lanthimos’ film to be profoundly problematic in its romanticisation of
prostitution and its hypersexualised narrative. Has the Sadeian narrative shifted from
that of Justine in Penny Dreadful only to become that of a naïve Juliette in Poor Things?
The overinvestment in the sexual liberation plot, such as the extensive Paris brothel
sequence, is typical of “a number of screen Victoriana”, which “portray overt
sexuality as a source of female empowerment in a deliberately repressed Victorian
context”.
1
The spectacle of Bella’s prostitution with several repulsive men, under
Swiney’s pedagogical proviso that one must experience horror and degradation to
become whole, hardly feels emancipatory. Bella’s experience of genuine intimacy
with Toinette (a filmic addition) is important but receives very cursory treatment. As
does Bella’s medical career, another avenue of emancipation which is developed in a
lot more detail in the novel. These limitations, however, serve to remind us of the
ideological challenges posed by the female creature’s journey, even in a fictitious
universe unconstrained by realistic logic. Mary Shelley had called her novel, “my
1
Antonija Primorac, Neo-Victorianism on screen: Postfeminism and contemporary adaptations of Victorian women,
Hampshire, Palgrave Macmillan, 2018, p.14.
25
hideous progeny”
1
; Lanthimos likewise acknowledges that his films are “problematic
children.”
2
It will be interesting in this regard to find out what female director
Maggie Gyllenhal will do with this material in her upcoming remake The Bride! set in
1930s Chicago, in which, it appears, dance sequences will also have an important
role.
3
Indeed the fascination with the female creature’s destiny shows no sign of
abating.
Marilyn MALLIA
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Primary sources
Poor Things. Directed by Yorgos Lanthimos, Searchlight Pictures, 2023.
Penny Dreadful. Written by John Logan, Showtime Networks, Sky Atlantic,
2013-2016.
The Bride. Directed by Franc Roddam, Columbia Pictures, 1985.
The Bride of Frankenstein. Directed by James Whale, Universal Studios, 1935.
Frankenstein: The True Story. Directed by Jack Smight, Universal, 1973.
SHELLEY, Mary, Frankenstein, London, Wordsworth Classics, 1999.
GRAY, Alasdair, Poor Things, Bloomsbury, Kindle Edition, 2023.
Secondary Sources
AHMED, Samira, “She’s bound and gagged for laughs’: is Poor Things a feminist
masterpiece – or an offensive male sex fantasy?”, The Guardian, 24 Jan
2024, https://bit.ly/3BWqZZ0 (accessed 1/9/24).
ALKAN-GENCA Papatya, “Doctor-patient interactions in Alasdair Gray’s Poor
Things and Janice Galloway’s The Trick is to Keep Breathing”, Bulletin of the
Transilvania University of Brașov, vol.11, n.2, 2018, p.147-156.
BASTIÉN, Angelica Jade, “Is Poor Things the Best We Can Do for Female
Sexuality Onscreen?”, Vulture, 10 March 2024, https://bit.ly/4eU3caT
(accessed 9/8/24).
BREUER, Josef, FREUD, Sigmund, Studies on Hysteria, 1893-1895,
https://bit.ly/3AaSNsb (accessed 5/10/24).
BERGESON, Samantha “Maggie Gyllenhaal’s ‘The Bride!’ Will Have ‘Big Dance
Numbers’ and Singing, Says Peter Sarsgaard”, Indie Wire, 30 Aug 2024,
https://bit.ly/4e2vGOl (accessed 9/9/24).
CREED Barbara, The Monstrous-Feminine: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis, New
York, Routledge, 1993.
GERMAINE BUCKLEY, Chloé, “A tale of two women: the female grotesque in
Showtime’s Penny Dreadful”, Feminist Media Studies, vol. 20, n.3, p.361-380.
1
Mary Shelley, op. cit., p.5.
2
Mark Kermode, art. cit.
3
Samantha Bergeson, “Maggie Gyllenhaal’s ‘The Bride!’ Will Have ‘Big Dance Numbers’ and Singing,
Says Peter Sarsgaard”, Indie Wire, 30 August 2024, https://bit.ly/4e2vGOl (accessed 9/9/24).
26
GREEN, Stephanie R., “Lily Frankenstein: The Gothic new woman in Penny
Dreadful”, Refractory: A Journal of Entertainment Media, n.28, 2017,
https://bit.ly/4fb5GBF (accessed 12/8/24)
HATLEN, Burton, “Milton, Mary Shelley and Patriarchy”, Bucknell Review, vol.
28, n.2, 1983, p.19-21.
HOWELL, Amanda, BAKER, Lucy, Monstrous Possibilities: The Female Monster in
21st Century Screen Horror, Switzerland, Palgrave Macmillan, 2022.
KERMODE, Mark, “‘My films are all problematic children’: director Yorgos
Lanthimos on Poor Things, shame and his creative soulmate Emma Stone”,
The Guardian, 31 Dec 2023 https://bit.ly/48lZeFg (accessed 8/8/24).
LANG, Cady, “Poor Things and the Profoundly Feminist Origins of Frankenstein”,
Time, 13 Dec 2023, https://bit.ly/3YDofsy (accessed 1/8/24).
MELLOR, Anne K., Romanticism and Feminism, Indianapolis, Indiana University
Press, 1988, p.220-230.
KOHLKE, Marie-Luise, “The lures of neo-Victorianism presentism (with a
feminist case study of Penny Dreadful)”, Literature Compass, vol.15 n.7, 2018,
p.1-14.
MOERS, Ellen, Literary Women, N.Y., Doubleday, 1976.
PRIMORAC, Antonija, Neo-Victorianism on screen: Postfeminism and contemporary
adaptations of Victorian women, Hampshire, Palgrave Macmillan, 2018.
SAXEY, Esther, “The maid, the master, her ghost and his monster: Alias Grace
and Mary Reilly.” In Rosario Arias and Patricia Pulham, ed., Neo-Victorian
fiction: Possessing the past, Hampshire, Palgrave Macmillan, 2010, p.58-81.
SZWYDKY, Lissette Lopez “Penny Dreadful’s Palimpsestuous Bride of
Frankenstein”, in Julie Grossman, Will Scheibel, eds., Penny Dreadful and
Adaptation, Switzerland, Palgrave Macmillan, 2023, Palgrave Studies in
Adaptation and Visual Culture, p.197-215.
KUTLU, Tugce, “The rule of the weird: power relations in the films of Yorgos
Lanthimos”, Studies in European Cinema, vol.20, n.1, 2023, p.36-46.
WRIGHT, Jude, “Unbridling the bride: Feminism and patriarchy in Penny
Dreadful’s Frankenstein narrative”, Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts, vol.32,
n.1, 2021, p.54–69.
The progressive emancipation of the
female creature, from Mary Shelley’s
Frankenstein to to John Logan’s Penny
Dreadful and Yorgos Lanthimos’s Poor
Things
L’émancipation progressive de la
créature féminine, du Frankenstein de
Mary Shelley aux Penny Dreadful de
John Logan et Pauvres Créatures de
Yorgos Lanthimos.
Since Mary Shelley’s 1818 novel
Frankenstein, the male scientist seeks to
appropriate God’s creative power by
moulding not only a new Adam but also a
new Eve. If the novel’s abortive attempt
Un bref épisode du roman Frankenstein de
Mary Shelley (1818), décrivant la création
inachevée et la destruction d'une nouvelle Ève,
s’est révélé une piste particulièrement féconde
pour l'imaginaire de plusieurs cinéastes. Dans
27
ends in the female creature’s savage
dismemberment, subsequent writers and
directors have taken forward her
embryonic potential. In her most iconic
representation – James Whale’s 1935 film
The Bride of Frankenstein – the eponymous
female creature asserts her agency and
rejects her imposed mate through a primal
expression of rage. This article will chart
the female creature’s journey from anger to
emancipation in two recent neo-Victorian
representations: John Logan’s Showtime
series Penny Dreadful (2014-2016) and
Yorgos Lanthimos’ Poor Things (2023).
Both probe thorny issues already present in
Shelley's life and work – namely the
dynamics of creation, the creature’s
intellectual and sexual awakening, and her
struggle for autonomy – while filtering
them through a more contemporary
perspective on gender. This comparative
analysis highlights the different
representational strategies surrounding the
“monstrous” female creature, as well as the
limits of her evolutionary trajectory.
sa représentation la plus emblématique – La
Fiancée de Frankenstein (1935) de James Whale -
la créature féminine éponyme affirme son
pouvoir et rejette le partenaire qui lui est
imposé en exprimant une rage primitive. Cet
article trace le chemin de la créature féminine,
de la colère à l’émancipation et à la jouissance,
par le biais de deux représentations néo-
victoriennes récentes : Penny Dreadful (2014-
2016), la série de Showtime de John Logan,
et Pauvres Créatures (2023) de Yorgos
Lanthimos. À travers ces deux canevas créatifs,
Logan et Lanthimos explorent des questions
problématiques qui sont déjà présentes dans la
vie et l’œuvre de Shelley - à savoir la
dynamique de la création, l’éveil intellectuel et
sexuel de la créature ainsi que sa lutte pour
l’autonomie. En même temps, ces thématiques
sont filtrés par une perspective plus
contemporaine en ce qui concerne la politique
de genre. Une analyse comparative des deux
productions, dont les tons et les résultats sont
très différents, mettra en lumière la dynamique
de représentation de la créature féminine
« monstrueuse », ainsi que les limites de sa
trajectoire évolutive.
Marilyn MALLIA est maîtresse de conférences au département de français de
l'Université de Malte. Ses recherches portent sur la condition féminine dans la
littérature gothique et romantique du XIXe siècle, ainsi que sur les adaptations
cinématographiques d’œuvres littéraires. Elle a publié un livre sur George Sand
et le roman gothique chez Classiques Garnier.
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