Journal Article

Unbridling the Bride

Wright, Jude

2021

Overview

This article examines the way in which John Logan’s television series Penny Dreadful adapts Mary Shelley’s Romantic era text into a Neo-Victorian context, focusing on the “Bride” narrative of seasons two and three and how it reshapes the novel’s original anxieties. The series’ transposition reframes the novel’s anxieties about reproduction as specifically related to women’s agency. Drawing on the work of adaptation and performance theorists Kamala Elliott, Thomas Leitch, and Marvin Carson, this article examines the way in which the depiction of Victor’s attempts to subordinate Lily and her defiance can be situated in relation to the source material, most notably Shelley’s novel and James Whale’s two famous Universal films, as well as Victorian representations of patriarchal violence and restraint that are relevant to the series’ re-envisioned fin de siècle milieu. Lily functions as both the articulation of the bloodcurdling scream from Whale’s Bride of Frankenstein—which Mary Jacobus has productively read as an assertion of selfhood and rejection of patriarchal control—and an expression of the patriarchal nightmare embodied in the Victorian Gothic, the anxiety that women will indeed rise up and vanquish men.

• Publisher: Brian Attebery, as Editor, for the International Association for the Fantastic in the Arts,The International Association for the Fantastic in the Arts,Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts
• Subject: Adaptations / Audiences / Bibliographic literature / Biographies / Bodily integrity / British & Irish literature / Consciousness / Context / Criticism / English literature / Exegesis & hermeneutics / Feminism / Film adaptations / Gender / Gothic fiction / Hegemony / Ideology / Literary devices / Literary influences / Literature / Logan, John (screenwriter) / Misogyny / Narrative techniques / Narratives / Patriarchy / Plot (Narrative) / Shelley, Mary / Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft (1797-1851) / Source materials / Stoker, Bram / Television programs / Victorian period / Whale, James (British movie director) / Women