The Bride and Her Afterlife: Female Frankenstein Monsters on Page and Screen

The story of Frankenstein is controlled by the voices of three male narrators, whose actions also determine the tragic rates of female characters such as Justine Moritz (who is executed for a crime she did not commit) and Elizabeth Lavenza (who is murdered by the monster), as well as the female monster herself whose creation and terrible destruction are the by-product of negotiations between Victor and his male Creature. Drawing on Parisi, we might recognize and note the significance of the female monster's status as "artificial flirt"-her ability to be at once seductive, monstrous, and posthuman, and consequently to unsettle our assumptions about what it means to be beautiful, what it means to be embodied, what it means to be alive. [...]as this paper has argued, it is her status as boundary creature and her ability to shake up not only our conceptions of what constitutes "human being" but also our established notions of the division between nature and technology that give the female monster her enduring power and allow her to operate within current narratives of posthuman presence, digital fabrication, and techno-embodiment.