Representations of Monstrous Transsexuality in the Frankenstein Film, 1945-1975

DePaul University Via Sapientiae College of Communication Master of Arts Theses College of Communication Spring 6-12-2020 Built bodies: Representations of monstrous transsexuality in the Frankenstein film, 1945-1975 Carmilla M. Morrell DePaul University, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://via.library.depaul.edu/cmnt Part of the Communication Commons, and the Other Film and Media Studies Commons Recommended Citation Morrell, Carmilla M., "Built bodies: Representations of monstrous transsexuality in the Frankenstein film, 1945-1975" (2020). College of Communication Master of Arts Theses. 34. https://via.library.depaul.edu/cmnt/34 This Thesis is brought to you for free and open access by the College of Communication at Via Sapientiae. It has been accepted for inclusion in College of Communication Master of Arts Theses by an authorized administrator of Via Sapientiae. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Built Bodies: Representations of Monstrous Transsexuality in the Frankenstein Film, 1945-1975 by Carmilla Mary Morrell Thesis Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of DePaul University in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Master of Arts in Media and Cinema Studies DePaul University June 2020 Abstract Built Bodies: Representations of Monstrous Transsexuality in the Frankenstein Film, 1945-1975 By Carmilla Mary Morrell DePaul University, 2020 Thesis Advisor: Michael DeAngelis Committee: Dan Bashara This thesis considers the relationship between representations of the Frankenstein’s Monster on film and the transsexual identity to argue that they can be ontologically consolidated into the figure of the Monstrous transsexual: a constructed, hybrid being whose uncategorizability within conventionally rigid structures of sex and intolerable embodiment of incongrous “parts” renders them as simultaneously powerful with radical potential and vulnerable from ostracization, oppression, and hostility. By analyzing both Frankenstein films from the post-war era of 1945-1975 and the power dynamics of the gender clinics in which the modern understanding of transsexuality was established, this thesis demonstrates the ways in which their developments are mutually reinforcing, co-constituting, and intertwined, with the body of the Monster serving as the language through which transsexual subjectivities can be understood and articulated. Table of Contents Introduction . 1 Words, Words, Words . 6 Scope and Limitations . 12 Chapter Proceedings . 22 Chapter I: The Ontology of the Monster . 24 The Monster and the Doctor . 31 Lightning Strykes . 41 Classification Nightmares . 49 The Monstrous (Trans)feminine . 56 Gender is a Construct . 61 Conclusion . 70 Chapter II: Frankenstein Created Woman . 77 Bombshells . 86 Workshops of Filthy Creation . 94 Monstrous Transsexuals in the Movies . 101 The Perfect Woman . 121 Conclusion . 150 Conclusion . 154 Works Cited . 165 Morrell 1 Introduction It began in 1816 with the drowning of the Villa Diodati. Rain fell relentlessly from the sky that summer, smothering the quaint Swiss countryside in an impenetrable veil of water. Lightning, whenever it lashed out to cleave gashes in the black expanse of storm clouds above, was the only reprieve from the deep and torrential darkness. The hostility of the weather trapped the Villa Diodati’s guests indoors for three days and nights straight. Inspired by their dreary circumstances, they took to reading stories of the supernatural and horrific—and then, later, writing their own. These guests were the poets Percy Bysse Shelley and Lord Byron, physician John William Polidori, and Byron’s lover Claire Claremont. Also present was Shelley’s betrothed, Mary, and her contribution to the contest held during this legendary storm over Lake Geneva would become one of the most famous and enduring works of fiction in the English language, a work with a fittingly legendary genesis in its own right. Her story was Frankenstein. In the two hundred and some years since its first edition in 1818, Frankenstein has become accepted as “what many view as the first true work of science fiction” (Holmes 490; Aldis 52-53). Although the appreciative critical consensus on the novel is relatively recent (Hitchcock 272), it has maintained a monstrously powerful presence in popular culture ever since its publication, to where the original text is “the founding, but not necessarily the most influential” Morrell 2 version of itself (García 224). Its first dramatic adaptation, Presumption; or, the Fate of Frankenstein by Richard Brimsley Peake, premiered merely five years into the novel’s printed life. In 1910, the novel would be adapted to film for the first time by J. Searle Dawley for Edison Studios, and on the one-hundredth anniversary of the novel’s revised 1831 edition, James Whale would create his own immortal version of the story for Universal. These films would hardly be the last of their kind, and the Monster’s prolific cinematic afterlife largely transcends the novel outright in the popular imagination. This persistence of Frankenstein in our culture for two centuries has afforded it the privilege of being a particularly pervasive point of reference for discourse in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Scientists have evoked the name of Frankenstein for ethical debates in eugenics, cybernetics, genetic engineering, and physician-assisted suicide, just to name a few fields (Pernick 97; Lehman-Wilzig; Rollin; Saunders). Comparisons to the Monster have also been “uttered without apology by political commentators, news reporters, and intellectual powerhouses” for generations to describe intolerable creations that include mismanaged governments, undesirable underclasses, weapons of mass destruction, and processed food (Hitchcock 306). To wit, it seems as if Frankenstein itself—both the original novel and the larger myth that includes its cinematic legacy—contains unlimited meanings and metaphors. Paul O’Flinn argues that “there is no such thing as Frankenstein, there are only Frankensteins, as the text is ceaselessly rewritten, reproduced, refilmed, and redesigned,” and that while the text “meant certain things in 1818 [it] meant and could be made to mean different things in 1931 and 1957” and so on, “irrespective of authorial ‘intention’” (22-23). Lester D. Friedman and Allison B. Kavey write that “generations of readers have discovered not only a home amid the luxuriant Morrell 3 materials embedded in Frankenstein but one that is comfortable and well-furnished…Every academic gets the Frankenstein [they want] to see” (12). Robert Horton arrives at a similar, broader sentiment: “each historical moment gets the Frankenstein it needs” (39). With all of this in mind, it’s imperative when writing about Frankenstein to choose which Frankenstein one is writing about—which texts, which meanings, in which cultures, and in which periods of time. My endeavor here is no different. A focus must be chosen, and this is mine: I have selected a small canon of Frankenstein films from the post-World War II era, generously considered here to span from 1945 to the early 70s, to argue that the Monster—a stitched-together and scientific construction of a human(-like) form—is a medium for reflecting, representing, and reaffirming the the transsexual body as it was created and conceptualized in that timeframe. Two frameworks that have had an especially prolific relationship with Frankenstein have been feminist and queer theory, but these frameworks in isolation have their limits. They have primarily focused on the Monster as either just a woman (or generally “feminine”) or just homosexual (or generally “queer”). The figure of the Monstrous transsexual triangulates, as it were, both of these maligned identities into a single embodied horror while also uniquely engaging with the institutional powers that have historically defined transsexuality within strict, pathological parameters. If monsters exist to return and return and return across time, “each time to be read against contemporary social movements” such as “new subjectivities unfixed by binary gender” (Cohen 5), then the relationship between Frankenstein films and transsexuals in psychology, medicine, and pop culture reveals a conversation that is mediated through Monstrousness. It is a language that communicates prejudices and sympathies alike. Morrell 4 Whether as a triangulation, a synthesis, or merely an extension, I like to think of this transsexual reading of Frankenstein as part of the same project as the aforementioned feminist and queer readings that have so richly plumbed it for meaning already. Its unique potency within these frameworks can be attributed to the story’s ability to “articulate (or rather, embody) areas of crisis in…identity [and] gender” (Badley 66, emphasis mine). Caroline Joan Picart wrote that the parameters of Monstrosity in the Frankenstein film specifically are “intrinsically tied up with anxieties about gender and technology” above all else (Rebirths 189). In her first book Gender Trouble, Judith Butler wondered “what sense can we make of a construction that cannot assume a human constructor prior to that construction?…To what extent does the body come into being in and through the mark(s) of gender?” (8). Three years later in Bodies That Matter, she would ask again, “if gender is a construction, must there be an ‘I’ or a ‘we’ who enacts or performs that construction?”

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