Re‐birthing the monstrous: James Whale's (Mis) reading of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein

The myth of male self‐birthing (or parthenogenesis), immortalized in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, undergoes a crucial transformation in James Whale's film. This re‐envisaging of the “Frankenstein complex”; is significant insofar as it reveals hidden gendered assumptions and anxieties concerning technology. At an initial level, Whale's film downplays what Rushing and Frentz call the “dystopian”; aspects of the Frankensteinian complex, in comparison with the novel, as is evidenced in the film's elimination of sexual ambiguity and a tacked‐on happy ending. Yet the resultant strain in excising critical aspects of Mary Shelley's novel is so great that the film ends up both veiling and unveiling its severe repression, and as such, both reinforces and undercuts its patriarchal aspirations. Associated with this strained reinforcement and critique of patriarchal politics is an expression of the ‘flip side”; or “shadow”; portrait of the dominant Western myth of technology as progress.