The Bride of Frankenstein (Reaction Paper)

1. How does Frankenstein the book and the film reflect upon the role of morality and science?

Just to make things clear, I haven’t read the book, so most of my opinions will be based on the film and general knowledge of Frankenstein only. If you asked a random person on the street to describe Frankenstein, then you might get responses of descriptions pertaining to a huge human-like monster made out of parts of various corpses. And you’d probably know that they were wrong. They were describing Frankenstein’s monster, not Victor Frankenstein himself. But that doesn’t make the scientist any less eligible to be called a “monster”.

                Victor Frankenstein’s breakthrough of uncovering how to bring life to the lifeless is certainly controversial, both in the context of morality and science. He tried to play “god” and create life, and he kind of did, but at what cost? He created a creature that probably doesn’t want to exist and is dangerous to the society. Said creature then lives on hatred and tries to kill pretty much anyone he meets. Sure, it’s a scientific breakthrough. So is human cloning, hypothetically. But the risks are too many that they overrule the choice to pursue the actual experimentation of these theories.
               

2. The difference between the movie adaptation of the monster and in the book is that the monster was able to carry a decent conversation. Why was the monster made dumb?  Did it work?

                On the topic of why Frankenstein’s monster was made dumb in the movie unlike its original persona in the book, I’m not too sure why James Whale, the director of the movie “Bride of Frankenstein”, or whoever was in-charge in that department did do so. My hypothesis to this is that they didn't want the plot of the film to be that complicated and that they wanted to be able to add comedy to it by allowing the audience to laugh at the monster’s grunting and attempts to speak. If that was their purpose then it certainly came across. Additionally, if the monster was able to speak like in Mary Shelly’s book, then the film would have been lengthier and the script would require more intellectual conversations worthy of quoting, probably.

Yanna Palo

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