Mary Shelley is often underestimated on screen – does The Bride! finally get her right?

Warner Bros. Ostensibly, Maggie Gyllenhaal’s second film, The Bride! offers a reimagining of the 1936 film The Bride of Frankenstein, in which the bride appears only briefly and does not say a single word. This is undoubtedly rectified in Gyllenhaal’s version. From the afterlife, Mary Shelley (Jessie Buckley) seeks a body through which to insert herself. She chooses the body of Ida (also Buckley), an escort entangled in the seedy world of crime boss Mr Lupino (Zlatko Burić) in 1930s Chicago. After Mary forces Ida to perform a shouting outburst in front of Lupino, she is sent careening down the stairs, breaking her neck. Shortly thereafter, she is dug up from her pauper’s grave by Frankenstein (Christian Bale) and Dr Euphronious (Annette Bening). Euphronious reanimates Ida and Mary, too, reappears. This film offers less a story about the bride of Frankenstein, and more a commentary on the lesser-known sad second life of Mary Shelley – and all she might have said if she had the chance to rewrite Frankenstein, and her life.

Who was Mary Shelley? Shelley is generally remembered as a kind of wunderkind. Born in 1797 to esteemed writers William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft, married to the esteemed poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, she is famed for writing the first science fiction novel when she was just a teenager. Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus was published in 1818 when she was 20, just two years after she began writing the story on a fateful night in Geneva. It tells the story of an ambitious young scientist, Victor Frankenstein, who plays God with devastating consequences. He succeeds in making a man from the remnants of corpses, only to abandon his creation when he sees how monstrous it is. The novel went on to become one of the most famous works of English literature. This is not a simple story of a teenage girl turned creative genius. Shelley, aged just 18, had already eloped with a married man, suffered the death of a daughter, and given birth to a son. Frankenstein was not born from a girlish wondering at the world, but rather was clawed from her grief and rage. Within a year of Frankenstein’s publication, Shelley had buried three children and given birth to a fourth. She was just 21 years old. Shelley’s later works were largely ignored. But at various points in the 200-plus years since Frankenstein’s publication, Shelly has been called a radical, a feminist and the mother of science fiction. She has also been called a heretic, an adulterer and “as mad as her hero”. Mary in The Bride! is haggard, lit in a way that highlights undereye circles and the few lines Buckley has on her face. Her mouth is often downturned into a scowl, except when she releases a humourless laugh. There is nothing funny about this Mary. This is a Mary who has lived a hard life.

Depictions of Mary Shelley This is not the Mary Shelley we know from other film versions. The 1931 film The Bride of Frankenstein is introduced by Mary Shelley (Elsa Lanchester), when she tells Lord Byron and Percy Shelley the tale she first told them in the 1931 film, Frankenstein, has a second part. The film is actually startling removed from its source material, and here, Mary is prim and dressed all in white. Byron commands the room; Percy writes – Mary embroiders. When she is asked to look at the storm raging outside the room, she declines, saying “You know how lightning alarms me.” Mary, in this version, is sweet, mild-mannered and moral.

Mary Shelley (2017) saw a fresh-faced Elle Fanning playing the author from girlhood to grief-stricken motherhood. For the majority of the film, Mary is youthful and energetic, endlessly inspired and writing at all hours of the day. Her love affair with Percy is a key plot point. Much of the film is spent dealing with the low expectations of her by the men she is surrounded by in Geneva.

Neither film offers a particularly flattering representation. In both, Shelley is at the mercy of her husband. In The Bride of Frankenstein, Mary cannot so much as light a candle without the aid of “Shelley, darling”. The 2017 film suggests Mary wrote Frankenstein as a way of pointing out Percy’s flaws to him through the character of Victor Frankenstein. But The Bride! asks viewers not only to reconsider what they know of Frankenstein, his monster, and his monster’s bride, but the woman we remember through them. This Mary is a possessor, a demon. She says during her lifetime, she couldn’t say all she wanted to – in life and in her work. Now, she will take the chance, by any means necessary. Ida refuses to be silenced. She is often seen screaming and thrashing about. Her mouth is dyed black by an inky substance, highlighting how often it is open. Through Ida, Mary gets to call out the bad behaviour of the men who want girls like Ida, and, by extension, Mary, to be quiet. To be a good girl. To be placid and sweet and unable to light their own candles. Mary uses Ida to – literally – hold a gun to their heads and make them apologise for their behaviour, paving the way for a wave of women to fight back against the patriarchal structures that have bound both Ida and Mary. Here, finally, we have the Mary who could stitch together literature’s favourite monster, rather than a pretty sampler.

Fiona Wilkes does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.