What happens to women when reproduction is no longer reliant on our gestational labour?
That’s not a question you’ll often hear teachers bringing up in high school discussions of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. But it’s precisely what I can’t stop wondering about after watching Guillermo del Toro’s new adaptation of Shelley’s groundbreaking novel.
Frankenstein is a difficult novel to adapt, because there is almost no direct narration. We learn of Victor Frankenstein’s story through a series of letters written by Captain Walton, a young polar explorer. The creature’s own story is thus filtered through both Victor’s and Walton’s recollection of it. And all three storytellers are, to one extent or another, unreliable narrators. As a result of this difficulty, film adaptations tend to choose either Victor or the creature as the character with whom we are meant to sympathize. Kenneth Branagh’s 1994 Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein chooses the creator. Branagh plays Victor as a misunderstood genius, a victim of his creature’s rage. By contrast, Guillermo del Toro’s new adaptation minimizes the creature’s thirst for revenge, omitting the murders he commits in the novel and emphasizing Victor’s cruelty and self-absorption.
Mary Shelley’s skill lay in portraying the virtues and vices of both creator and creature in equal measure. So far, no adaptation has matched her subtlety. On an aesthetic level, too, a lack of subtlety is precisely Frankenstein (2025)’s weakness. Del Toro often fails to trust the spectator to interpret his artistic vision correctly. It’s not enough to show that Victor has a close relationship with his mother as a child; a voiceover of his adult self has to remind us that, when his father was away from the family estate, “mother was mine.” Truly the Oedipal stuff of an English literature student’s dream. And in case you were wondering if you’re watching a charming period piece or a tale of torment and madness, del Toro splatters red all over his sets, whether it makes narrative sense or not. Victor is repeatedly visited by a bloody “dark angel” in his dreams. His mother is only seen wearing bright red clothing, and the camera dwells on her chewing a rare steak while blood trickles down her mouth. Victor himself only ever wears blood-red gloves in his laboratory.
Yet for all my criticism, I do think del Toro understands Shelley’s anxiety about the relationship between technology, human pridefulness, and femaleness better than previous filmmakers. In a powerful way, the film explores what happens when women are removed from the process of reproduction and replaced by technology.
Woman Erased
In Frankenstein (2025), birth is also always a kind of death. In the novel, Victor’s mother dies when he is already an adult, because she nurses her adopted daughter Elizabeth back to health from scarlet fever and then contracts the deadly illness herself. In both film versions, by contrast, Victor’s mother dies giving birth to his brother William. I don’t like this choice—more on that soon—but it is effective in bringing our attention to the proximity of birth and death. Mary Shelley herself never knew her mother, the philosopher and writer Mary Wollstonecraft, who died but days after childbirth. As literary critics Gilbert and Gubar pointed out in their seminal 1979 book The Madwoman in the Attic, Frankenstein is in many ways autobiographical, reflecting Shelley’s own experience both of growing up motherless, and, later in life, of miscarriage.
At the moment of the creature’s “birth,” del Toro’s aesthetic vision and his ideological interpretation of the novel converge in a way that is both artistically innovative and faithful to the source material. In a still from this scene (used in Netflix’s interview with del Toro), we see Victor gazing in awe at his creature, moments before his animation into life. The creature, tied to electrical machinery with his arms spread wide in a clear allusion to Christ’s crucifixion, is at eye-level with a gigantic bas relief of Medusa, a mythical figure that has historically symbolised mortality, divine punishment, and, in feminist scholarship, female rage. Victor, focusing only on his creation, turns his back to Medusa. The creature experiences a motherless birth. The first female face he looks upon is the lifeless, stony Medusa. He will not encounter a woman in the flesh until weeks into his existence.
Visually, the moment of the creature’s animation visually mimics not the birth of the child Christ, but the moment of his death. Victor looks up at him as Mary looked up at Jesus on the cross. In the Christian narrative, Mary sacrificially accepts the miracle of Jesus’ birth as her son. In Victor’s perverse mimicry of the virgin birth, by contrast, a man has constructed a human being by assembling parts of dead bodies. Victor has replaced sexual reproduction—procreation—with sexless creation.
Women are no longer necessary for gestation and birth. Neither is sex itself. Indeed, Frankenstein is a completely sexless novel. Victor ultimately refuses to make a female companion for his creature because he fears that they might reproduce. He never provides the Eve to the creature’s Adam. And, in retaliation, the creature kills Victor’s wife, Elizabeth Lavenza, on their wedding night, thus ensuring Victor’s reproductive potential is also stifled. Ironically, this sexlessness has the effect of objectifying the female body. Holly Lawford-Smith wrote for Fairer Disputations recently about how intercourse can instrumentalize women. Yet, within a certain context, sex can be self-giving, and a means of recognizing the wholeness of the other person. Victor instrumentalizes the female body not by sex, but by its absence: by assembling and destroying the female body as he pleases.
For a film that dwells on gruesomeness and nakedness—there are protracted, almost voyeuristic shots of Victor sewing off body parts, and a few instances of gratuitous nudity—del Toro’s Frankenstein surprisingly glosses over the abortive creation of the female monster. In this version of the story, Victor never truly contemplates making a companion. In the novel, on the other hand, Victor assembles the female creature’s body before changing his mind and hacking her apart. Shelley scholar Anne K. Mellor suggests that Victor is “afraid of her reproductive power” and even goes so far as to conclude that “What Victor Frankenstein really wants to do… is to eliminate the need to have females.” Victor may objectify his male creature by literally assembling him from corpses, but at least he never destroys him.
Del Toro somewhat makes up for this missed destruction by changing the plot to have Victor, instead of the creature, kill Elizabeth (albeit accidentally). In either telling, the message is clear: when sex is taken out of reproduction, misogyny is not far behind.
Not a True Creator, Not a True Mother
Despite his efforts, Victor never manages to become either a true creator or a true mother. Nor is he a good adoptive parent. In Branagh’s 1994 adaptation, Victor is immediately horrified by his creation and attempts to destroy the creature. In the novel, his instinct is to flee the room and wish he had never made him. Victor does later acknowledge that “I created a rational creature, and was bound towards him, to assure, as far as was in my power, his happiness and well-being. This was my duty.” Yet he maintains that his greater duty is to his own “species,” and that he was right in destroying the female creature. Even on his death bed, after an examination of conscience, Victor doesn’t find his conduct to have been “blameable.”
In del Toro’s film, Victor does try to take care of the creature for the first few weeks. He is seen bathing, feeding, and reassuring the creature as a mother might a newborn. But he quickly grows weary of the task. He begins to act touched out and sleep deprived, becoming increasingly frustrated as the creature fails to learn any words other than “Victor.” We quickly learn that any affection Victor feels for the creature is not unconditional, but contingent on his showing signs of intelligence. “Say one word,” he challenges the creature as he contemplates murdering him, ‘One word more. Anything. Make me save you.”
I have already mentioned that I think it was a mistake on del Toro’s part to show Victor’s mother dying in childbirth rather than from scarlet fever. Although death in childbirth was a haunting reality for Shelley, the original story emphasizes a different aspect of motherhood.
As moral theologian Oliver O’Donovan argues in his 1984 book Begotten or Made?, in which he makes a (still highly relevant) case against artificial reproductive technologies, humans view things they make as exactly that: things, not persons. We view that which we beget (i.e. children) as people, not objects. In bearing and giving birth to one’s biological children, mothers are called to exercise a natural kind of charity. Pregnancy bonds women to their unborn children, and, unless a tragedy occurs, that bond compels mothers to look after their newborns. Victor obviously doesn’t have this bond. Nonetheless, O’Donovan argues, many adoptive parents are able to practice a kind of “supernatural charity.”
That is precisely the kind of charity that Victor’s mother Caroline showed in adopting Elizabeth Lavenza, raising her, and eventually dying not through childbirth, but, crucially, through her active choice to lovingly nurse Elizabeth through scarlet fever. This plot point is significant, because it shows that Victor had an example of sacrificial, supernaturally charitable love in his own family, and yet failed to extend that kind of love to his own creature. Removing such a key detail diminishes our sense of how responsible Victor is for all the ensuing suffering. In Shelley’s story, he does not lack a role model. He simply chooses, of his own free will, not to imitate it.
Why Motherhood?
Motherhood is by nature sacrificial. But in Frankenstein, the roles of child and parent are reversed. It’s the creature who must sacrifice any sense of belonging for the sake of his creator’s ambition. Victor thinks only of his own convenience, making the creature larger than normal human beings because it simplifies the process for him as a scientist. It simply doesn’t occur to him that the hulking creature will be feared and shunned by society.
Two hundred years after the publication of Shelley’s novel, we now routinely put the desires of parents above the needs of children in the process of their creation. Artificial reproductive technology allows prospective parents to screen for genetic traits that are deemed undesirable, from congenital diseases to high risk of mental illness. The embryo is chosen to suit the parents’ wishes. And they can just as easily discard it.
How we come into the world matters. When the creature finds Victor’s research papers, which detail the way in which he was made, he begins to think of his origin as “accursed,” and describes the process as a “series of disgusting circumstances.” Being made rather than begotten instrumentalizes him and denies his personhood. The creature feels this deeply.
In today’s world, we have only managed to separate sex from reproduction, not to eliminate the need for women entirely. But scientists are trying. It may still seem like something out of a sci-fi novel, but tech companies are actively seeking to develop artificial wombs and to synthesize eggs from male cells. The motivation, as always with new technologies, sounds altruistic: artificial wombs could save very premature babies, or allow pregnant women who develop cancer to start chemotherapy without harming their unborn child, and in-vitro gametogenesis would allow gay male couples to have children who are genetically related to both men. Yet even if women are no longer needed for the actual process of gestation or the provision of genetic material, we should ask ourselves: what would be lost in removing that initial physical bond between mother and child?
Victor’s creature shows us just that. It is an innate human desire to want unconditional love, which requires placing someone else’s wellbeing over our own. Even children who are raised by adoptive parents, grow up knowing that a woman bore them in her womb and went through labour to give them life. It’s no coincidence that there was a medieval tradition of addressing Jesus as “mother.” Julian of Norwich, for instance, famously describes the suffering of the crucified Christ as labour pangs. I am not advocating against rejecting medical interventions that ease the suffering of childbirth. I am simply suggesting that the Christian tradition is helpful in giving meaning to our pain. If we do indeed live in a fallen world, then any kind of physical distress for the sake of another human being mimics Christ’s sacrificial love on the cross.
Rather than saying that motherly suffering is necessary, then, I think it’s more helpful to say, to borrow once again from a medieval thinker, that it is fitting. That is the term that philosopher Anselm of Canterbury used in the eleventh century in Cur Deus Homo to explain why God became man and suffered death on the cross. Within a Christian framework, God is considered omnipotent, so he could have redeemed humanity however he wished to. But sending his son to earth and permitting him to suffer how humans suffer is a fitting redemption because it allows humanity to experience the kind of unconditional love we so deeply desire, in a way that we can comprehend. Similarly, if we accept that some level of pain is an unavoidable part of the human experience, then we can argue that the burden placed on women in the process of reproduction has the positive effect of modeling sacrificial love for the child. Ultimately, that’s what Victor can never give the creature.
I don’t think del Toro’s Frankenstein is a film that will go down in the history of cinema. It’s far too self-aware to become a classic, and its penchant for gore and gratuitous nudity will make it feel dated quickly. Still, it’s worth watching, even if just once. Del Toro is—perhaps more than any other filmmaker who has adapted this extraordinary novel—keenly attuned to Shelley’s anxiety about the catastrophic consequences of motherlessness.
Mary Shelley could never have foreseen all the ways in which technology is changing how we reproduce. Still, her story of what happens when we separate sex from reproduction, and the mother from the child, is prophetic. We would do well to heed her warning.
