Title: The Un-Bride, or No Gods and Marxists
Author: Anya Martin
Date of First Publication: 2016
Place of Publication: Eternal Frankenstein
Type: Short story
Characters: No Character
Themes: MAD SCIENTIST/MONSTER; ANDROID; WOMEN WRITING MONSTERS; RACE/POLITICS
Critical Summary: Rain is not a normal occurrence in the city of Hollywood, CA, but on this night, it came down hard. Elsa, her husband Charles, and their friend Jimmy cozy up in the living room of the La Brea Terrace home. When the storm knocks the lights out, candlelight evokes the mood for story time. The three, even compare themselves to the likes of the Shelley’s and Lord Byron. As the thunder claps, Elsa turns the clock back to when she and her older brother Waldo were kids back in London.
She speaks of electric shock parties the two hosted with the neighborhood kids and how they also fancied frogs. When Waldo revives a frog named Lazarus from a watery grave with electric shock, his interest in experimentation sparks. Jump forward to the siblings’ 20s where they have had little interaction, until Elsa’s stage performance one night. Waldo attends with their mother, Biddy. Suspicious of their random appearance, Elsa follows their taxi, which picks up her Russian spy boyfriend, Sergei and comes to a final stop at her family home. With suspicions higher than before, she enters the dark house to find Waldo, Biddy, and Sergei in a laboratory upstairs. The three explain to Elsa that they have Eleanor Marx’s brain. Waldo is going to revive her brain in a host’s body so she can save the Soviet Union from Stalin when Lenin passes. Tables turn when Sergei reveals he is a Stalin spy and the new Eleanor Marx is actually to be Stalin’s bride. Now forced at gunpoint, Waldo continues the experiment and it is done. She is alive and her name is May. Sergei goes into a self-proclaiming, chauvinistic speech, angering May. In a tussle that sparks a house fire, May kills Sergei. Elsa, Waldo, and Biddy make it out, attempting to lead May out as well. The floor crumbles beneath her. She is assumed to have perished with the house.
There are many parallels between The Un-Bride, or No Gods and Marxists and Frankenstein. One of these parallels is a mad scientist who creates a being. However, the group does not consider May to be a creature or monster. The fact that they refer to May as “she” and even give her a name shows they believe her to be human. Waldo and Victor both were motivated to discover the creation of life, though Waldo’s reason is to revive a life for the good of a country.
Another parallel is between May and the Creature. They both are created as proof that life could be revived. Both are semi-humans and murderers. The Creature murders Victor Frankenstein’s brother, William, wife, Elizabeth, and friend, Henry. All of these murders were to make Victor suffer. May on the other hand, only gets a body count of one. She kills Sergei who turns out to be a villain, by strangling him. Strangling was the Creature’s method of killing as well. Additionally, since Sergei provided the host body for May, he qualifies as one of the creators she directly made suffer by killing him.
In closing, this story is the classic Mad Scientist and Monster because within it, Waldo plays the scientist and May is the monster. The story’s time period is somewhere in the 20th Century centered on Communist Soviet Russia, making it political. This includes the continued discussion of Lenin, Stalin, and Marx. Not only did a woman write this story, but also the monster is a woman, taking down a man that sees women as inferior.
Administrative Notes: Chanel Woodard, CSUF; Dr. David Sandner (editing)