What the ending of 'Frankenstein' means for women in this society

When it first hit screens, I, like so many avid readers and fans of the frightful, could not wait to watch the newest “Frankenstein” (2025), directed by Guillermo del Toro. I presented research on the original novel by the same name (1818) just a few months prior and have been a fan of Mary Shelley’s work since I first got my hands on it. As always happens when a book is adapted to a film, there were butchered plot lines, misplaced references and strange character insertions that were never in the original.

Despite the long list of changes, I initially thought the movie was well done. However, it was when the film came to its close, just as the screen went dark, that I found a mistake I still cannot forgive, not even in the name of Oscar Isaac. The ending quote reads: "And thus the heart will break yet brokenly live on.” It is a beautiful line on the dynamic strength and plight of the human condition pulled from a poem by Lord Byron, an influential writer of the same era often considered one of Shelley’s best friends.

Yet, to call them friends is a misrepresentation of the complexities of their relationship. Mary and Byron’s background begins with Mary’s husband, Percy Bysshe Shelley, a renowned poet and fairly dislikable person. Percy and Byron shared a friendship that centered around their passions for the arts. It was at a gathering with Byron where Mary first came up with the idea for “Frankenstein.”

Despite their mutual admiration for each other’s work, there is a huge problem with closing a film inspired by Shelley with a quote by Byron. Mary’s relationship with her fellow writer has long since been overshadowed by her husband’s friendship with him. Today, it is still Percy who remains in greater association with Byron. The long story short is that the creators of the newest “Frankenstein” had an opportunity to choose any quote from anyone, but they chose Lord Byron– and I have a problem with it. Transplanting the words of her husband’s friend onto a film inspired by Mary’s work is the continuation of history’s long problems with the erasure of women.

Frankly, to put a quote by any male author would likely be inappropriate for this film. At the time Mary wrote “Frankenstein,” women's authorship was extremely limited. The book was originally published anonymously because there were so many concerns about how its themes would create social stigma in Mary’s personal life. One of the greatest books of the literary canon, one still taught in classrooms around the world today, came into the world with fear for how the patriarchal society would react. That Mary was brave enough to pursue publication at all is audacity worth celebrating.The complications around “Frankenstein” did not end with its publication. Rumors immediately swirled that the book was actually written by Mary’s older, more established husband, Percy– rumors that are still alive and well today. Some scholars remain insistent that Mary was too young, too immature and too new to writing to have possibly written the book. Instead, they suggest that Percy wrote or so heavily edited the manuscript that it should really be credited to him. Even years after Mary’s handwritten notes and letters have been made public, there is still a push to give Percy the glory for her hard work.

It is Women’s History Month, thirty-one days dedicated once a year to recognizing the women across the world who have made their voices heard, caused change and brought us a better tomorrow. In addition to celebrating women like Mary Shelley, this month is also a time for self-reflection, a prompt to examine our own perspectives on women’s issues– like how we credit hard work. We live in a time where something as simple as putting a quote at the end of a film has a lot of implications. It is everyone’s job to ask questions about what it means for the last line in a film based on Shelley to be written by Byron. In the worst scenarios, that one quote could be viewed as giving Byron credit for having the Shelleys at his house when the idea hit or as recontextualizing their relationship into something more. Worst of all, there is a lasting implication that rewriting so much of the plot and ending on someone else’s work means Shelley’s words just are not good enough.

Mary Shelley, however, has always been more than enough for me. There are several lines from her various works that I think would have been more appropriate for this film. The book of the same name proclaims that “Life, although it may only be an accumulation of anguish, is dear to me, and I will defend it.” Those striking words never cease to leave an impression on my heart. In “The Fortunes of Perkin Warbeck,” Shelley writes, “If grief kills us not, we kill it.” What a particularly fitting line for the Creature who, at the end of the film, has overcome great struggle and is working through much grief. One of my favorite works of Shelley’s is a short story entitled “The Mortal Immortal” about a young man who surrenders “this body, too tenacious a cage for a soul which thirsts for freedom, to the destructive elements of air and water.” At the end of the film, as the Creature embraces his own humanity, even as a nonhuman entity, he is also giving himself up to a certain vulnerability– one viewers assume he sustains.

There is one line from Mary Shelley’s original “Frankenstein” that I will always wish had been placed at the end of the film. I think this pondering of Victor’s is the greatest reflection of the plight of humanity, the race that continues and continues, much like Byron’s human heart, despite so many horrors: “How mutable are our feelings, and how strange is that clinging love we have of life even in the excess of misery!”