A Sacred Obscenity

Transmasculinity in Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein

A feathered mother-lover crown, a crimson angel, blood dripping down a softened chin, a winged being trapped in glass. A creature, man-shaped and alone, stitched together from the blue-gray bodies of the dead. 

These are the images that linger. The conjurings of Guillermo del Toro’s film adaptation of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. I will always remember sitting at the Nitehawk Cinema, buzzing and ready to see one of my favorite classics brought to life on the screen before me. 

They say one can never step in the same river twice, for either the man or the river will be changed. My relationship with the creature, upon examination, has continued to evolve and change. With del Toro’s reimagining, the beast has changed. While still venturing from childlike, innocent, and curiously loving towards violence, del Toro’s monster is far more forgiving than Shelley’s. I have seen various critics point out both the discrepancies and the moments when film mirrors literature with specificity. Rather, crucial characterizations of Frankenstein’s creature are changed in the film. For instance, in the book, the monster strangles Elizabeth on Victor and Elizabeth’s wedding night as a climactic moment of vengeance. Del Toro salvages the creator’s relationship with Elizabeth, staring into the same eyes that gazed upon a leaf as she passed, killed by Victor instead. I have come to believe that book-to-film adaptations should be consumed as separate entities, and I felt held by the liberties del Toro took, creating a clear dichotomy between the greed and violence of man and the learned violence of the creature, even as he remains loving in the face of cruelty. I can hold love for both creatures. I can see myself in either one. 

With my own viewing, I have changed, as well. As of six months ago, I have finally released myself from my own trappings, coming out as transmasc at twenty-seven. When I read Shelley’s Frankenstein for the first time nine years ago, the monstrosity called to me, in the same, yet irrevocably altered way it does today. Shelley’s devotion to the horror of creation, the violence of life, and the wound of abandonment felt familiar to me in what was then, what I saw as my womanhood, in my trauma, in my queerness. After the discovery of several journal entries alluding to Shelley’s bisexuality, the way that queer people have always felt connected to the creator’s abandonment by its creator, disconnection from his father, isolation, resisting a life as an outsider, yearning for an inaccessible companionship, and the way that one’s nature becomes villainous and monstrous to wide society seems to be not only inarguably clear, but perhaps, intentional and extension of Shelley’s own experiences. Frankenstein can be seen not only as an allegory for womanhood but also as an allegory for queerness. For me, as a trans viewer, both the book and the film construct a trans allegory. Just as a piece of literature, or source material, can not be divorced from the political atmosphere of the time it was written, its modern consumption can not be divorced from the political atmosphere of the present, nor from the identity of the viewer. 

While watching the film, this idea didn’t immediately jump out. However, when I left the film, I sent a text to a friend. If Frankenstein’s creature is a metaphor for being a woman, then isn’t his relationship with Elizabeth inherently queer? There has been some debate regarding whether Frankenstein’s creature has a romantic or familial relationship with Elizabeth. I appreciate the way del Toro presents this relationship with complexity and ambiguity. Since the film’s source material is a gothic novel, it’s likely there was some level of Oedipal intricacy to their relationship, carried through the film. But back to my message to my friend- Wait! If Frankenstein’s monster is a metaphor for womanhood buried in the body of a new man, is he kind of he/him lesbian coded? And I want to be clear here- I don’t think the experience of transitioning is so simple as one’s previously defined “womanhood” being wrapped in a new, surgically altered (if one chooses) man-shaped body. Most trans men don’t identify with ever being a woman. My own experiences with gender don’t rely on a binary. However, I still feel connected to the experiences of girlhood and feminine trauma, so I feel seen in Frankenstein operating as a dual symbol of womanhood and transness. This is my own personal experience, and I don’t wish to generalize this for all trans men or all transmasc individuals. Regardless, I do believe Frankenstein’s creature exists as a representation of transmasculinity. 

I am interested in the levels of creation that bring us to del Toro’s rendition of Frankenstein’s monster. Mary Shelley wrote Victor Frankenstein, who, thus, at her hand, created his monster. Del Toro examined Shelley’s work, created his own Victor, who made his own monster. The complexities of each creator’s gender blur for me. If we look at the monster as a representation of transmasculinity, we can examine how, in each rendition of the creature, he must reconcile the way he is perceived versus the way he exists. As the creature says in del Toro’s Frankenstein, “I am obscene to you, but to myself, I simply am.” This line really hits for me, as a trans guy living in a country that has become increasingly hateful towards my own community, and to my very body and soul. I, myself, am obscenely defined by an overwhelming number of people, and by our country’s religious and governmental institutions. Yet to myself, I am just a guy. Trans people, trans kids- we are not obscene. We are not deserving of the world’s demonization. Upon this demonization, upon this characterization as being perceived as obscene, del Toro’s creature declares, “I have love in me the likes of which you can scarcely imagine, and rage in me the likes of which you would not believe. If I cannot satisfy the one, I will indulge the other.” I see myself in this infinite love, in this ceaseless rage. 

I am also interested in looking closer at the way that the monster learns to align his identity as a person, more specifically, as a man with carnal violence. How does one who feeds blueberries to a peaceful deer become one who slaughters strangers on an ice-buried ship seeking his creator? It’s simple: one gets left behind, chained by his father in a burning building. One sees the blueberry eater shot clean through the eye, blood splattering his own face. This is something I resist in my own relationship with masculinity, with learning about the man whom I have finally allowed myself to become. There is so much pressure to lose one’s softness, to close oneself off, to become cruel and unmoving. Recently, I have been reading The Flowering Wand: Rewilding the Sacred Masculine, which has been incredibly healing. It is a book that examines mythology and deconstructs harmful tropes of masculinity. Although del Toro’s creature succumbs to the violence of manhood, he holds some softness within him. He is both a cautionary tale for me and a symbol of resistance. But he, like many trans guys living in anti-trans fascist America, realizes this simple truth when he says, in del Toro’s Frankenstein, “an idea, a feeling became clear to me. The hunter did not hate the wolf. The wolf did not hate the sheep. But violence felt inevitable between them. Perhaps, I thought, this was the way of the world. It would hunt you and kill you just for being who you are.” 

Some may push back on trans viewers’ ability to see themselves in the monster, especially now. Some may think this is not what del Toro or Shelley intended. We know better; we can find ourselves again and again in art and reality. Whether or not our figures were made for us, we will make them ours. And Shelley may have, subconsciously or consciously, written Frankenstein with the intention to deconstruct gender. As C.E. McGill writes in “An Unnatural Body:”Queerness, Monstrosity, and Frankenstein, 

"In the Victorian age – and well into the twentieth century – gender and sexuality were closely entwined; gay individuals were viewed as sexually “inverted,” with sapphic women thought to possess some kind of masculine aspect that explained their attraction to other women, and vice versa. Thus, to be queer at all was to be gender non-conforming, and to be gender non-conforming was to be queer. Mary, with her attraction toward other women and her desire for a career in science and her aversion to pregnancy and motherhood, is queer in many ways by Victorian standards, a perversion of all that nature supposedly intended her to be."

Shelley’s relationship with her own alleged queerness brings us the very queer, very trans, very resistant monster we see today in del Toro’s reimagining of her work. If we go back to the source text, there are a few lines that I wish to leave you with. She writes, “heavy misfortunes have befallen us, but let us only cling closer to what remains, and transfer our love for those whom we have lost to those who yet to live.” Just as I mourn the trans people we have lost and will continue to lose, I cling to our survival, I sing our unending song, for “life, although it may only be an accumulation of anguish, is dear to me, and I will defend it.” For although some of my fears sit on my chest heavy and inescapable, suffocating me slowly, I also emerge from this river of despair again and again, reaching out to the hands of my trans siblings, parents, and lovers. For, as Shelley writes, “beware, for [we are] fearless, and therefore powerful.”