Margaret J. Yankovich
This article is dedicated to my brother, Johnny, who always finds me the best Illustrated Classics horror novels.
The first horror novel I ever truly loved was Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein; Or, the Modern Prometheus (1818). At twelve years old, I was as avid a film fanatic as I was a reader, and so naturally I set out to watch James Whale’s first adaptation of the novel, simply and rather elusively titled Frankenstein (1931). Around Halloween a few months after I read the novel, I played hooky to catch the movie on TCM (as I was wont to do back then). And though the movie was a mere 71 minutes long, it felt like an eternity, because I loathed every minute. It was the kind of loathing that any believer in “the book is always better” maxim knows well: The way your heart sinks as you watch a movie destroy everything you built up in your mind while reading a book you cherished. That novel was just so perfect to me as it was, every change and deviation from the story was a fresh betrayal. I resented the way the film seemed to corrupt Shelley’s original work. And the change that truly marked it as an inferior version of my beloved novel was the filmmakers’ decision to deny the Monster his transformation from mute to eloquent tragic hero. I found Karloff’s Monster to be unrecognizable, and I could no longer identify with him the way I did reading the novel.
Years later, I enrolled in a short, intensive college seminar on Frankenstein and its legacy. The first week of the seminar we read Shelley’s novel and followed it with a viewing of James Whale’s Bride of Frankenstein (1935). Before we watched the film, my professor wanted us to think about all the ways the Monster can act as a kind of prism that refracts and reflects a host of diverse experiences of marginalized groups. She explained that the Monster, especially in Bride, has frequently been read in terms of the racialized, gendered, and queered Other: a mutable metaphor, a shifting canvas upon which the viewer may project their own experiences of marginalization and imposed difference. Given these new theoretical frameworks to work with, I gave Boris Karloff another chance.
I am not quite sure at what point during my first viewing of the film in that darkened lecture hall that it hit me how wrong I had been about Karloff’s performance as the Monster. Indeed, I think every scene held a quiet, powerful revelation for me, because for the first time I was seeing someone I loved more than anyone in the entire world so wholly embodied on film in a way that was both extraordinary and devastating.
When I saw the Monster, I saw my brother, who has autism.
The thing about autism, or Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD), is that, as an invisible disability, it may not always be clear to neurotypical/abled folks why a person who appears physically able or ‘normal’ would be acting in a way that seems odd or even inappropriate. The astonishing thing about Karloff’s portrayal of the Monster is that while he does appear physically different, it was his largely nonspeaking modes of communication and repetitive physical movements that suggest stimming that stunned me as someone intimately familiar with autistic pathology. I felt at once overwhelmed with love and dread. Love, because for the first time I was seeing my brother on screen unfettered by stereotypical and condescending Hollywood approximations of autism. Even the Monster’s height and physicality reminded me of my brother, whose large and at times imposing frame, coupled with his stimming, has occasionally resulted in trouble, though at no fault of his own. At the same time, I felt the old familiar dread settle in the pit of my stomach, because I knew what happens when well-meaning (or, not so well-meaning) neurotypical people misread my brother’s modes of communication and physical behaviors. And I knew how the Monster’s story would end.
Though the modern use and understanding of the term ‘autism’ would not enter the public consciousness until eight years after the release of Bride, the perception, fixation, and fascination with what we now deem ‘developmental disabilities’ were entrenched in the popular imagination that produced films and like Frankenstein and other classic Universal Monster films throughout the first five decades of the 20th century. In her excellent monograph Hideous Progeny: Disability, Eugenics, and Classic Horror Cinema (2012), Angela M. Smith examines how these films, while not explicitly about disability, embody certain cultural fears and anxieties about the disabled mind/body influenced by eugenic thought that was ubiquitous at the time of the early Universal Classic Monster movies. Smith points out “the genre emerged out of culture used to assigning pathological meanings to certain body and behavioral traits, and thus justifying the institutionalization, sterilization, and even elimination of certain individuals” (Smith 2). This is to say, minds/bodies that did not ‘fit’ within a socially constructed definition of normality were reflexively marginalized. Indeed, those who failed to conform to an arbitrarily defined ‘natural’ appearance or set of behaviors were violently erased or punished. This mode of Othering effectively functioned as a means to preserve a pre-existing social order that demanded ability.
In the first Frankenstein film, nearly every encounter the Monster has with others begins with prejudice couched in misunderstanding. Everyone—his creator, the villagers—sees his monstrous form and immediately assumes he has ill and violent intent.This is compounded by the fact that, like many autistic folks, the Monster is largely nonspeaking.[1] Those with ASD, especially children, “may have difficulty developing language skills and understanding what others say to them,” according to the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders, and those with autism “also often have difficulty communicating nonverbally, such as through hand gestures, eye contact, and facial expressions.” Some with ASD remain nonspeaking for their entire lives. Even more so, the gap that exists between abled folks’ ability to understand and communicate with those with autism on their own terms widens into a precarious gulf when they are unwilling to listen and learn autistic modes of communication. One need look no further than the Monster’s repeated attempts at communication with (abled) people across both films.
Perhaps the most devastating scene in the first Frankenstein film occurs near the end of the movie when the Monster meets a young girl named Maria. This scene begins in a markedly different fashion compared to his other interactions with (abled) characters. As the Monster approaches the little girl, Maria’s eyes widen in shock. Yet instead of running in fear from the Monster, she approaches him and invites him to play with her by the pond, taking his hand in hers. Next to the pond, Maria gives the Monster a daisy, and in a close-up of his face, the Monster brings the flower up to smell its sweet scent, and perhaps for the first time in the film, the Monster smiles, uttering a soft grunt conveying his happiness.
What begins as a reprieve from a film that sees the Monster constantly abused for his difference ends in tragedy for almost the same reason. Toward the end of the scene, Maria shows the Monster how to throw the flowers in the pond and make them float like tiny boats. The Monster, assuming the same would happen with Maria, picks up his new friend as she protests, and he throws her into the water, where she struggles and drowns.
Reading this scene in the context of the lived autistic experience, it is difficult not to see the parallels between what occurs onscreen and the way society so often grafts violence onto autistic folks and their reactions when taken out of context or misunderstood. Indeed, violence has long been insidiously associated with autism in a way that the aforementioned scene provocatively suggests: A 2017 study acknowledges that while violent behavior may occur among those with autism, decades of research have shown that “individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) may actually have an increased risk of being the victim rather than the perpetrator of violence.” What is extraordinary about the pond scene in Frankenstein, juxtaposed with earlier scenes of violence perpetrated against the Monster, is how acutely they evoke the way in which violence projected onto the autistic mind/body are rooted in miscommunication between the two discourse communities, the abled and the nonspeaking.
Of course, I did not pick up on the autistic subtext of Karloff’s performance the first time I watched Frankenstein. It was only after I watched Whale’s Bride of Frankenstein that I realized the revelatory significance of Karloff’s choice to perform the Monster as largely silent, which mirrors a common type of ASD known as nonspeaking autism.1 Crucially, by the end of Bride of Frankenstein, the Monster’s capacity for spoken language has evolved, in a way that reminded me of how my brother, who was nonspeaking for the first decade of his life, adapted his largely nonverbal mode of communication to include short sentences and telegraphic speech. Attaining this type of language—and the enhancement of his ability to understand abled speech—came with it a keener comprehension of arbitrary and imposed difference.
At the climax of Bride of Frankenstein, the Monster receives what he has longed for: a mate, a friend. Yet when the Bride gazes upon the Monster, she reacts how almost every (abled) character in both films has: in a violent outburst of fear and disgust. An embittered Monster, now able to vocalize and convey his internalized self-hatred and despair, defeatedly declares, “she hate me, like others.” This line, spoken somewhat ably, signals the Monster’s realization of his own difference, relayed using his tenuous grasp of spoken language. This haunting scene encapsulates the fractured relationship between the two autistic figures, the Monster and the Bride, whose union collapses beneath the weight of a kind of disabled ‘double consciousness.’ A term first used by W.E.B. DuBois, double consciousness describes the psychological burden of perceiving one’s identity through the hateful and Othering gaze as routinely experienced by Black Americans in a racist society. More recently, disability advocates, especially from within the autistic community, have appropriated the term to account for the layered disconnection between how autistic individuals perceive themselves, and how they are (mis)perceived by the abled.[2] In fact, it is the conflict that arises from the disconnect between abled and autistic discourse communities, and its resultant double consciousness, that the final scene in Bride of Frankenstein encapsulates so tragically. In learning the language of his abusers, the Monster also learns how to express and internalize hatred for himself. Chillingly, it is right after this revelation that the Monster sacrifices himself and his Bride to save the abled ‘heroes’ of the film.
A word that was strictly verboten in my divorced parents’ households during my youth was the word ‘ret***,’ out of deference for my brother. Outside the relative safety of our homes, we would occasionally hear the word slung around, incidentally or purposely directed at my brother. Yet because he was nonspeaking for much of his youth, we assumed that he did not hear or understand what it meant. That assumption was upended when he gradually learned abled speech and began to talk. He not only understood what the word meant, but he began to associate it with himself and even other autistic kids. While he usually used the word because he thought it was “funny,” I distinctly remember a moment when, frustrated with himself, he turned the word inward, like a knife, and used its sharp blade to express his self-hatred. Having seen Bride of Frankenstein countless times since witnessing my brother’s moment of self-loathing, I cannot watch the ending and the Monster’s startling articulation of despair without thinking of the painful episode when my brother learned his Otherness.
When I first watched Frankenstein, I waited in vain for the transformation of the Monster from inarticulate beast to eloquent storyteller. Considering the time Shelley wrote her novel, this transformation would have been critical for establishing the Monster as inherently human through his capacity to learn abled speech, to own his narrative. Yet, after discovering my personal connection between the Monster in the first two Frankenstein films and autism, now I cannot help but see that much more obvious transformation as a limitation. In this way, it is astonishing to read Shelley’s novel with a critical focus on the way disability narratives (as scripted by abled writers and artists) often perpetuate the notion that one must endure and ultimately triumph over said disability. Thus, if we extend the reading of the Monster as a metaphor for the autistic experience to Shelley’s original novel, it retroactively renders her story as an early example of the ‘overcoming disability’ narrative. Such narratives are dangerous in the way that they have been utilized–both with good intentions and without– to further the stigma of autism and other disabilities as weaknesses or aberrations that must be ‘overcome’ for an individual to reach fulfillment and self-actualization.
What I failed to understand the first time I watched Frankenstein is that the filmmakers’ decision to deny the Monster his “transformation” resulted in a much more transformative and revelatory representation of a disability narrative. To this day, both Frankenstein and Bride of Frankenstein continue to challenge an abled viewer to identify with someone whose soul will not bend and break and warp in order to “fit” in and be accepted. His cinematic fate positions itself in striking contrast with that of Shelley’s original Monster, whose “overcoming” ends with him floating off the page and into icy, solitary oblivion. And, while the Monster does choose to sacrifice himself for his abled creator at the end of Bride of Frankenstein, his death is fleeting: He returns, again and again, in every cinematic adaptation of Frankenstein that has been produced in nearly a century since his first foray on the silver screen. He continues to exist as if in metatextual defiance, demanding space and acceptance in the popular imagination.
Notes:
[1] According to Healthline, those with nonspeaking ASD are “unable to speak clearly or without interference” and “25 to 30 percent of children with ASD are minimally verbal…or don’t speak at all” even as they progress into adulthood.
[2] See noahblev’s excellent post “The Double Consciousness and Disability,” on the CRG@CGP blog.
Works Cited
Bride of Frankenstein. Directed by James Whale, Universal Pictures, 1931.
Frankenstein. Directed by James Whale, Universal Pictures, 1935.
Smith, Angela M. Hideous Progeny: Disability, Eugenics, and Classic Horror Cinema.
Columbia University Press, 2012.
