Mutual Bondage

Elizabeth is dead, Henry is dead, and Charlotte Gordon refuses the reading Victor offers of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein: that the creature is simply evil. Victor made this situation, she says, first by abandoning his creature and then by promising him a female companion and tearing her apart. She wonders aloud what would have happened had he finished her, and offers three motives for the destruction: hostility to natural creation, misogyny, and an unadmitted jealousy of a son who wants a partner.

The turn is the word need. Victor and the creature say they hate each other, yet they are all the other one has, mirror images of loneliness and rage, locked in a cycle Gordon traces to the book's epigraph from Paradise Lost. She also stops for Elizabeth, the replacement mother who longs to leave the house, whose groom tells her he dreads their wedding night. The film ends on the questions the last chapter has to answer: will Victor ever accept the creature, and will they murder each other?