In this session, we seek to engage with and to build upon the work of Erin Hawley in “The Bride and Her Afterlife: Female Frankenstein Monsters on Page and Screen” in order to develop a more complete picture of the roles of the Bride of Frankenstein and her analogues within the Frankenstein tradition. In 2025, James Whale’s film Bride of Frankenstein will celebrate its 90th anniversary. This is an important milestone, but it has a larger impact beyond the world of film. In both Frankenstein (1931) and Bride of Frankenstein, Whale and make-up artist Jack Pierce gave life to two iconic figures of modern popular culture: the Monster (played by Boris Karloff) and the Bride (played by Elsa Lanchester). The creation of the Bride was especially significant since in the source, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, the mate of the creature is destroyed while still in progress. There is no meeting of Victor Frankenstein’s creations. In the film, however, the Bride is completed, brought to life, and briefly interacts with her intended. Unfortunately, the pair fail to connect, and, by the film’s end, the Bride is destroyed again. Despite this, once having encountered her in the flesh through Lanchester’s portrayal, it was impossible for creative artists to let the Bride stay dead. For at least six of her almost nine decades, the Bride of Frankenstein has been revived time and again in a diverse variety of media, including artwork, cartoons, children’s books, comics, films, games, prose fiction, and television programs. Each new text offers an innovative contribution to the ongoing Frankenstein tradition through the ways the Bride and her analogues forge new narratives as they act with and react to other characters within the base story.

Following the lead of Erin Hawley in “The Bride and Her Afterlife: Female Frankenstein Monsters on Page and Screen,” submissions might explore the ways the Bride of Frankenstein and her analogues transform the story through their roles as wives and mothers as they bring to fulfillment many of the hopes expressed by the creature in Shelley’s novel; others might turn to those versions that take a darker turn and could look instead at ways in which these female Frankensteins bring about the bleaker visions Victor Frankenstein has for his creation. Besides these, we are also interested in how the existence of female Frankensteins (even when absent) reshapes many of their male counterparts by moving them from menaces to husbands and fathers.