Adaptation is everywhere! In the spring of 2026, MTC is running a new series called Adaptation Anxiety, where new and returning writers consider literary adaptations from the last few years. We ask not whether these adaptations are good or bad, faithful or unfaithful to the source, but bigger questions about the logic underlying contemporary works of adaptation and why audiences have such big feelings about seeing precious characters on screen. Why, in other words, are we so anxious about the move from book to screen, and what does all this angst about the adaptation as a form tell us about our present relationships to these mediums?
There are those rare books that make readers feel as if they are discovering something no one else has: Frankenstein is one of them, even as it is a literary classic consistently assigned in classrooms. I certainly felt like I had been struck by lightning upon my first read, and, like many others, my obsession only grew as I learned about Mary Shelley—her upbringing by William Godwin and the passing of Mary Wollstonecraft, her romance with Percy Shelley marked by secret graveyard meetings and the loss of her young children, and the Romantic sensibilities that she not only wrote into her work, but lived in her life. How can you not feel deeply about her? The question repeats across the reception – by fans and critics alike – of Guillermo del Toro’s 2025 adaptation of Frankenstein. Mary Shelley’s opinions (or our estimation of them) are called upon to qualify either an embrace or a rejection of the film: it’s clear that fidelity not just to the text, but to Shelley herself, was on people’s minds.
A generous critic would be thrilled that any 19th-century author is getting this kind of artistic and critical attention at all. I think there is something to love in every Frankenstein adaptation, and it was particularly exciting to watch del Toro – a director who has been making various iterations of Frankenstein for years – finally create his monster. But less generously, there’s a new creature that seems to be hovering in Frankenstein adaptation discourse: the parts of Shelley assembled by parasocial readers. As readers explore the questions of gender and monstrosity that hover over both the novel and Shelley’s life, especially as they relate to female rebellion against partners (Victor Frankenstein / Percy Shelley), parents (Baron Frankenstein / William Godwin), and acquaintances (Henrich / Henry / the Romantics), it’s not hard to see why these readings start to adopt the argumentative posture of doing justice to Shelley’s genius and her suffering.
This reverence is, on the surface, a noble cause. First published anonymously, then mistakenly attributed to Percy Shelley, the story of Frankenstein’s eventual incorporation into the canon reveals a pattern of dismissing Mary Shelley’s authorship. As we move into the 20th and 21st-century world of movie adaptations, there’s certainly a lot for Shelley fans to critique; despite the abundance of Frankenstein movies, a truly faithful Frankenstein adaptation still eludes us. A vast majority of Frankenstein films avoid the most interesting aspects of Shelley’s novel or substitute its complex exploration of gender, parenthood, and industrialization for platitudes about responsibility. To surface these concerns is to surface Shelley’s place in the history of gothic literature, speculative fiction, and romanticism. That being said, I feel like this valorization, often accomplished through an autobiographical reading of Frankenstein, is beginning to neutralize the unique radicalism of both Frankenstein and Shelley, in favor of a generalized sense of subversion.
Pieced together, a certain vein of parasocial Shelley-worship betrays a shallow image of feminist artistry—as if Shelley’s accomplishments only stand if she was the kind of author who rolled her eyes at the excesses of Byron’s Romanticism, resented being edited by her husband, and only ever hated her father. Del Toro’s decision to give Byron’s Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage the final word before we cut to credits (“And thus the heart will break, yet brokenly live on”) or to insert Shelley’s “Ozymandias” as part of the creature’s education is certainly one we can critique. The specific register of many viewer complaints wasn’t that it was a thematic mismatch or excessively sentimental pull-quoting, however, but that it was an encroachment from Shelley’s intimates and collaborators that somehow compromised Shelley’s own authorship. What is this need to tear Shelley away from her intellectual influences, desires, and complexity? I suspect that there is a dash of conservatism and condescension in this isolationist impulse, one which mocks a perceived emotional excess in the Romantics and skepticism towards the radical politics of anarchism, free love, and liberty through revolution professed by Shelley’s collective. The tendency to flatten any complexity or contradiction in Mary Shelley’s life, her relationships, and her work is not unlike del Toro’s characterization of the creature, where the director’s love for him is so blinding that he ceases to be monstrous—and consequently, transgressive—at all. We are not just declawing and defanging our monsters, but our authors as well.
This is a defensive stance that I find myself holding, and I fear that I’m going to be trapped in this intellectual shadow-boxing match forever (or until interpretation can be recognized as interpretation). The irritating challenge of my critique is, of course, that it is in the service of my own Shelley adoration. Isn’t it crazy how I have the most precious and personal connection with Mary Shelley, even as I maintain a level of intellectual rigor and avoid these parasocial pitfalls? It’s too late, I’ve already depicted you as the misguided reader goth-girl-bossing Mary Shelley because you read Frankenstein in high school, and myself as the enlightened scholar with a heavily annotated copy of Mathilda.
Of course, this discussion on how we should either refer or defer to Shelley speaks to a more fundamental question about female self-actualization through writing, one Barbara Johnson describes in “My Monster/My Self,” when she discusses the ways “the monstrousness of selfhood is intimately embedded within the questions of female autobiography.” Yet the majority of autobiographical readings of Frankenstein completely neglect the repression and self-contradiction that Johnson argues fuels this interpretation: “the desire to create a being like oneself — which is the autobiographical desire par excellence — is also the central transgression in Mary Shelley’s novel.” If we are to constantly invoke Shelley and her life, filmmakers and viewers will get nowhere without engaging with Shelley’s own theorizations of female authorship and monstrosity. When Shelley answers the question, “How I, when a young girl, came to think of, and to dilate upon, so very hideous an idea?” in her 1831 introduction, she gives us something like an intellectual biography by citing her childhood scribbling, Byron’s insistence in 1816 that they write ghost stories, and Percy’s encouragement. This is certainly one narrative of Frankenstein, but the second lies – as Johnson argues – in how “the autobiographical reflex is triggered by the resistance and ambivalence involved in the very writing of the book.”
Movies, like men, are made in the image of their creators. And filmmakers are certainly not immune to a deep self-consciousness about Shelley’s presence – remember Kenneth Branagh’s Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein? What a tedious phrase and absolute misnomer – talk about mixed authorship! All Frankenstein interpretations, whether artistic or critical, are at their best when they recognize the fleshy and messy work of reanimation. I’m not only talking about the lightning strike and the delirious cry of “It’s alive!” here, but the way that filmmaking in particular demands the gathering, cutting, and vivisecting of numerous bodies (put less grotesquely, collaboration!). The movie monster, the movie as monster, the monstrous movie – we could be here all day.
Perhaps the most curious cinematic invocation of Shelley herself (and one of the more interesting application of the double-casting gimmick so popular among Frankenstein adaptations) was one of the earliest: when Elsa Lanchester appeared as both “The Monster’s Mate” and Shelley herself in the sequel to James Whale’s Frankenstein (1931), Bride of Frankenstein (1935) (which is set for retelling in Maggie Gyllenhaal’s The Bride! which begins with the ghost of Shelley possessing the protagonist). Whale’s insight here—that the actress, herself animating these roles, could sit at the top of the food chain (as author-creator) and the bottom (creation for a creation for a creation)—speaks to a bizarre dream-within-a-dream cycle of imagination, conception, and creation. The strangeness of Lanchester’s author-monster captures, for me, a director who acknowledges two obvious, but essential facts that may help us escape this discourse: first, that his work cannot exist without Mary Shelley, and second, you can’t make a creature without some light butchering. After all, every adaptation and sequel has–poorly or capably–carried out the great imperative of Shelley’s 1831 introduction: “And now, once again, I bid my hideous progeny go forth and prosper.”
Charline Jao is a lecturer at Tufts University. Her research focuses on nineteenth-century American radical print culture, abolition, and representations of children. Her favorite off-beat Frankenstein is Frankenstein Created Woman (1967).
Series banner illustration by Carolyn Jao