INTRODUCTION
Hello, and welcome to The Monster & The Child, where childhood studies and monster studies collide! I am Dr. Kathleen Kellett, and today I am finally talking about Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein, about six months late. I do have a video where I talk about the original novel, along with the films The Sixth Sense and Dark Water, around the idea of “bad nurture,” and I see today’s video as a continuation of that theme. In that earlier video, I discussed narratives where a child is essentially good or “innocent” at the outset, and only becomes monstrous due to the failures of nurture that they receive. Today, I’m shifting the focus away from the “child” characters to the “parent” characters, and exploring narratives about the perceptions of monstrosity that can lead to rejection, abuse, and/or abandonment.
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All right, so as you will have seen in the thumbnail, I am pairing del Toro’s Frankenstein with Disney’s Hunchback of Notre Dame. That’s right, it is flawed yet thought-provoking adaptation day over here on The Monster & The Child. And I am going to keep things focused on the adaptations. For Hunchback, that means both the animated Disney movie and the stage adaptation, which has significant changes from the film, as it shifted the intended audience away from young kids and turned the story back into a tragedy. Obviously, though, both are very different from the original Victor Hugo novel. Similarly, Del Toro’s Frankenstein also differs greatly from the Shelley novel, and as much as my book-loving heart longs for an adaptation that cleaves close to the original for once – someday I will have that awful undergrad Victor of my dreams – I don’t actually think that an adaptation doing its own thing is necessarily a negative, especially when it comes to monster stories. Our pal Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, in “Monster Culture: Seven Theses,” reminds us that monsters are specific to their time and place: they mold themselves to fit the fears and desires that their current audiences harbor. So even when a specific monster type or even monster character, like Frankenstein’s monster, reappears through time, that monster will shapeshift (appropriately enough) to embody that historical moment’s taboo needs. It’s not 1818 anymore, so it makes sense that a Frankenstein of the 2020s would differ from the original.
With all that said, you may be wondering what I thought of del Toro’s adaptation – that is, if you’re not on my Patreon, where we’ve already talked about it, so check the link in the description if you’re interested in those bonus conversations. Ultimately? I thought it was kinda mid. I enjoyed watching it – as is always the case for a del Toro film, it was a feast for the eyes, with glorious sets and costumes, and the performances were also top notch. Though Jacob Elordi may have squandered a bit of his good will with another recent adaptation – and sorry to all you Wuthering Heights girlies – I did think he was wonderful as the Creature. He absolutely emanated loneliness, and it was palpable and aching through the whole film. Oscar Isaac was likewise a riveting Victor. He was absolutely convinced that he was the smartest person in every room, totally insufferable but really believably so. He was also a really angry Victor, and I found that very compelling. But writing-wise … look. While I think that del Toro has made some absolute masterpieces – and check out my video where I discuss Pan’s Labyrinth for more on that – I think we can acknowledge that sometimes he lets his own monster-loving sensibilities run away with him occasionally at the expense of complexity. I believe that happened here, and we’ll be talking about some of the ways that manifests when we discuss the explorations of parenting within the film.
For the most part, though, this video is not intended to be like a review of either del Toro’s Frankenstein or Disney’s Hunchback adaptations, but rather an analysis specifically of their treatment of parental – and particularly paternal – expectation, manipulation, and rejection when faced with a child that the parent deems “monstrous.” In both cases, we’re looking at a “child” who is not actually physically a child: the Creature was made with an adult body, and Quasimodo is a young adult in his story, excluding the prologue in which he is a baby. This is significant for the ways that these narratives deal with disability, and once again we will be seeing how the category of “monstrosity” interacts and intersects with childhood and disability simultaneously. So with that in mind, let’s take a closer look now at these modern bad dads of classic novel adaptations.
WHAT FOLLOWS CREATION? VICTOR AND THE CREATURE
In the worlds of Guillermo del Toro, bad dads abound. In my earlier video on his work, I talked about his fascist father figures, Captain Vidal of Pan’s Labyrinth and Podesta of Pinocchio. In Frankenstein, the oppressive systems predate but also prefigure fascism, and Victor’s father, Leopold, embodies the aristocratic patriarchal control that will shape the course of his son’s life long before said son even considers making a guy of his own. Leopold is played by Charles Dance, who is very good at bad dad-ing. Leopold is not only of high birth but also of high intellect, at least according to himself and his peers. He is a prominent surgeon who has already decided that his son is going to follow in his footsteps, whether he wants to or not. He is also the one who chose the name “Victor” for his son, setting those expectations from the very beginning. When he is actually present in the home, which is not that often, he drills Victor ruthlessly on medical knowledge that, these days, would wait until grad school, but that Victor is expected to memorize as, like, a twelve-year-old. Mistakes are punished with a sharp cane to the face – not the hands, since those are needed for his future work.
Little Victor has a much closer relationship with his mother, who is played by Mia Goth, who also plays Elizabeth, the woman with whom Victor will later fall in love, because this movie is Oedipal as hell. Victor even has a lifelong affinity for drinking big old glasses of milk. And like, I know I generally carry this air of exasperation whenever I talk about a narrative that really gets Freudian with it, but there are elements of this “complex” that are compelling, right? Not in terms of actual psychological science, because lol, but fathers and sons locked in cycles of envy and competition, foisting that cycle upon their own offspring: that’s nice, chewy stuff. It does, however, tend to shortchange the female “mother” figures: the men get to enjoy all the weird complexity, while the women are just kind of there as objects of desire for nurture. At least this film’s version of Elizabeth later on gets to reject Victor as simply the worst, but still.
Anyway, Victor’s mother dies in childbirth with his brother, William. Leopold vastly prefers the newborn baby, who is fair like him, not dark like Victor and his mother. William doesn’t have to become a master surgeon; he is lavished with gifts befitting a Romantic belief in innocent childhood. Victor, meanwhile, blames his father for not saving his mother’s life – some surgeon he is – and even after his dad’s death, Victor continues to be motivated by the residual resentment and spite. This does not a healthy outlook toward his own creations make.
Fast-forward through a lot of plot, and Victor finally succeeds in his twin goals of creating life and conquering death. By cobbling together his Creature out of dead parts, he is able to best his father at his own craft, and essentially convince himself that his mother would not have died on his watch. It doesn’t seem to occur to Victor that he’s still playing by his dad’s rules, giving him what he wanted: a successful son and a medical legacy. Nor does Victor realize that he immediately begins recreating his father’s cycle of abuse once his Creature – for all intents and purposes, his son – comes to life. At first, Victor is ecstatic. Unlike his novel counterpart, he is not disgusted by the Creature’s grotesque appearance – which, considering this Creature is Jacob Elordi with some artistic scars, makes sense. He is thrilled that his seven-foot-tall baby can walk and respond to stimuli like sunlight and warmth, and even more excited that the Creature can speak: he says “Victor.” Except then … that’s all he says. Over and over, day after day, the Creature simply says Victor. And Victor gets frustrated.
He admits, in retrospect, that “I had never considered what would come after creation. And, having reached the edge of the earth, there was no horizon left. The achievement felt unnatural and void of meaning … and that disturbed me so.” In other words, Victor forgot to consider that after he created life, he would then have a living being on his hands – one whose physical needs would need tending to, and one who could get hurt, unless Victor protected him. And that’s a lot of work that Victor doesn’t really want to do. Victor still views himself as the son showing up his own dad, and that leaves him incapable of taking on the new role of father. Just as his father made Victor an extension of himself, a living proof of his own abilities, so now does Victor inflict this fate on his Creature. But the Creature cannot live up to the expectations that Victor sets.
This aspect of the film can lend itself to a disability reading, which is something the patrons and I discussed back when the movie came out. I said then, and I maintain now, that I don’t necessarily think the Creature was intended to be read as a direct one-to-one for having like a learning disability or an intellectual or developmental disability, because that doesn’t wind up carrying through the rest of the Creature’s arc. Once he is out of Victor’s creepy lab castle, he winds up acquiring knowledge and language in a rapid and culturally “typical” way, in which he learns to talk through learning and repeating the language of others, and then eventually learns to read through tutelage. Yes, the Creature does not acquire language as quickly as Victor wants, but he also is like literally a baby. Victor’s impatience I think was probably intended to just show how unreasonable Victor is being, and I think the physical disconnect between the Creature’s adult body and his experiential infancy is actually a pretty cool visual metaphor for the particular type of faulty parenting that Victor is carrying out. Victor’s seeing a man, a successor, a legacy, and getting mad that the Creature isn’t living up to that, when in reality, the Creature is a very young child. It’s similar to how Leopold saw a full surgeon instead of a little boy when beholding the young Victor.
With all of that said, whether or not it was intended, a disability reading is still very much available to us here. “Thwarted expectations” are a major theme in experiences of parental rejection – as well as scholarship about ableism. The two can and very much do go hand in hand. I’ll admit that my research for this video didn’t end up quite as thematically cohesive as I usually like it to be, because I kept finding studies about the effects of various forms of problematic parenting on the kids themselves: their behavior, their risk factors for various issues in school or the criminal justice system, their mental health, etc. All of these things are obviously important to study, but it wasn’t what I was looking for. I was hoping to find more qualitative research about either kids’ perceptions about the reasons of their parents’ rejection, which I found a little bit of, but not much, or, ideally, information about that from the parents themselves. Now, I recognize why that would be very hard to study – especially the latter. Getting a population of parents who for some reason don’t like their own kids to agree to participate in research about that would presumably be incredibly difficult. But I still think we have a gap in scholarship when we focus entirely on “effect,” often using quantitative data, at the expense of “cause,” with more rich, deep qualitative analysis. I don’t have an answer in terms of any kind of like proposed research design here, but it is something I will be pondering.
In any case, I did find a smattering of sources that I think can help contextualize my analysis. One is The Disabled Child: Memoirs of a Normal Future by Amanda Apgar. As the title would suggest, this book is an analysis of memoirs written by parents of disabled children and the tropes and ideological underpinnings that emerge from them. Apgar argues that this whole genre largely exists because “the cultural imperative for self-betterment and an ableist investment in a disability-free future demands an explanation for the child with a disability: how did this happen? What will you do about it?” (2). Now, obviously, this genre of life-writing pretty much requires an ultimately positive (or at least seemingly positive) assessment of the child. No one’s out here publishing like I-hate-my-disabled-kid literature, which is good. But this drive to provide a socially acceptable reason for the child’s existence is clearly something that Victor Frankenstein (who does hate his kid) feels keenly, which is kind of understandable in his case because he did make him from spare parts on purpose. People are probably gonna ask why. Victor clearly believes that the mere fact of reanimation is not enough: his progeny must excel to have been worth the effort. This notion in and of itself is inherently ableist. Apgar explains that most of the parental memoirs she examines “reiterate a dominant cultural narrative of disability as inherent in the individual and as compromising quality of life via the foreclosure of opportunities, especially in terms of future labor, sexuality, and reproduction” (1). If a child cannot realize these opportunities in the way that society imagines them, then the child is perceived as having an “incomplete future adulthood” (1).
Apgar explains that parent memoirists frequently counter this perceived loss “through a narrative achievement of normality in childhood, most typically through the enactment of gender and sexuality norms and/or narratives of value or contribution; in other words, through narratives of productivity and potential reproductivity” (1). That is to say, the memoirists commonly insist that their child is, in fact, just like any other child: they emphasize milestones met and similarities between typical behaviors and their child’s. If those similarities cannot be found, then they assign a special purpose to their child’s life – often to teach some moral virtue to the able-bodied-and-minded people around them. And, if little girls like “girl things” and little boys like “boy things,” then that is another surefire way of proving proximity to “normality.” Apgar writes, “Parent memoirists argue, then, for their child’s seat at the table that their child does not fit. They seldom suggest destroying the table itself” (2).
Obviously, inherent in that statement is an argument that trying to shoehorn everyone into roles within an ableist society is never going to actually make that society less ableist. It ultimately just upholds the hierarchies of achievement and normality. Victor, of course, is so relentless in his pursuit for a place at the top of those hierarchies that he doesn’t even have the parent memoirists’ drive to make a case for his atypical child. He does not see similarities between the man he created and the man he himself is. (Again, I would suggest that expecting a brain he just switched on to operate like an adult’s is mostly his problem here, but he didn’t ask me.) Victor is also immediately disgusted by the tedium of actually caring for a dependent – something that the parents of all children, disabled or not, must contend with.
And here is where it is particularly significant that Victor is a father – a man. Victor’s paternal failures were, of course, originally imagined by a very young woman. In “Responsible Creativity and the ‘Modernity’ of Mary Shelley’s Prometheus,” Harriet Hustis explains that Shelley’s novel “explores the ethics of a male creator’s relationship to his progeny by questioning the extent to which he incurs an obligation for the well-being and happiness of that creation by virtue of the creative act itself” (846). This theme is made even more poignant by the fact that Shelley had already lost one child at the time that she first wrote Frankenstein; she would shortly thereafter lose two more. Victor has the opportunity that Shelley has been denied: the chance to raise his child. But he abdicates this responsibility because the Creature “does not overtly embody the sublimity of his creative intentions” (848). In the novel, Victor’s disgust is based entirely on appearance, but del Toro’s version focuses on his narrow definition of intellect, as shaped by his own non-nurturing father. In the highly patriarchal 19th century, “great deeds” were reserved for men, even more than they are now, and they were the measure of men’s worth. Victor’s great deed is, theoretically, creating life, but he is incapable of separating his own identity from his Creature’s – just as he was incapable of separating his own identity from his parents’. Unless the Creature can match his greatness, he is a worthless product – or even worse, he is an indictment of Victor’s own failures of masculine achievement.
Men in patriarchal societies have been enabled to frame their beliefs about the purpose of having children in such a way in large part because they have historically been removed from the actual day-to-day labor of keeping a dependent child alive. This patriarchal organization of the spheres of society is not as rigid today as it was in the nineteenth century, luckily, but it hasn’t been completely dismantled, either. In “Falling back into Gender? Men’s Narratives and Practices around First-time Fatherhood,” Tina Miller explains that even the modern men who want to be “involved fathers” often wind up taking a secondary role to their female partners when it comes to direct care for their young children. Not all of this is necessarily the fathers’ choice, either; this was a UK-based study, where fathers are generally given two weeks of paid paternal leave from work. They are therefore quickly removed from the home again while their female partners remain with the infants, developing the routines and practices of caregiving. If you’re in the US, you will recognize this paltry couple of weeks as more than most dads here get! These institutional constructions, Miller argues, “do not provide ideal conditions in which to try to disrupt or transgress normative parenting patterns: at times the path of least resistance may be to fall back upon these” (10). Del Toro’s Victor clearly would prefer to take that normative paternal role – providing the model of achievement that his son could follow – as opposed to the maternal role of hands-on child rearing. Except Victor didn’t involve a woman in this process, so he can’t.
Victor fears the kind of future for the Creature that an ableist society would declare horrific: eternal dependency. Apgar writes about the “denigration of dependency” in American society, which is the context of her analysis, but while we in the U.S. may be particularly adept at fetishizing “independence,” this particular construct exists outside our borders, as well. Victor can’t even handle a couple months of the Creature’s dependency, and the Creature’s failure to achieve immediate perfection leads Victor to determine that he will never change from what he is now – except, perhaps, by increasing what he threatens to take away from Victor. Elizabeth, who in this adaptation isn’t even Victor’s fiancée, she’s William’s, has an immediate care for the Creature, in a maternal but also erotically charged way because Oedipus, and the Creature’s second word is consequently “Elizabeth.” Since Victor also wants Elizabeth as an extension of himself, he is threatened by any connection that the two of them make. He is also, incidentally, threatened by the powerful physicality of his Creature, whom he keeps chained up, but he is infuriated when the Creature seems physically afraid of him. As a man, as a son, the Creature is simultaneously too similar and too different for his father to accept. So Victor blows up his lab castle with the Creature locked inside, as you do. He does almost change his mind at the last minute when he hears his Creature wailing his name, but then the explosion throws him back, destroying his leg in the process – giving Victor an imperfection, a disability, that he can now resent his child even more for foisting upon him.
Now, fathers are not always doomed to repeat patterns of remote expectation and distance from dependence. Del Toro demonstrates a positive, interdependent vision of fatherhood through the character of the Blind Man. The Blind Man isn’t given a name in the credits, but his novel counterpart is DeLacey, the patriarch of the family that the abandoned Creature watches and learns from. It is in this section of the film where, as I alluded to before, the metaphor of the Creature’s monstrosity as disability kind of dissipates. Once the Creature escapes from the burning wreckage, he acquires language at a rapid rate and becomes adept at normative verbal communication. Del Toro gave an interview in which he explained that the Creature only says “Victor” when he is under Victor’s dubious care because it is the only word he needs; his father figure is his whole world. So, again, there’s more going on here than just a one-to-one disability metaphor, which does not seem to have been top of mind for the director. But the Blind Man is, obviously, blind, so his disability allows the Creature to fit into his world in a way that he cannot fit into anyone else’s. The Blind Man is left behind by his family when they go off to try to hunt the wolves that have been feeding on their livestock. The Creature, who has been watching and learning about humanity from them, takes this opportunity, when he knows he cannot be seen and therefore feared for his appearance, to approach. He has already learned a great deal of speech just from listening, so he is able to communicate to the Blind Man that he wishes to stay and help him in his solitude through the winter. The Blind Man is pleased for the help and the company, and in return, he teaches the Creature about the wider world. The father figure and the child figure both aid one another, without the hierarchy of achievement and the expectation of eventual independence.
So, naturally, a bunch of wolves show up and kill the Blind Man. The family returns, assumes the Creature was the culprit, and shoots him. This version of the Creature can’t actually be killed, though, so it is this that propels him after his original creator, to demand a bride for companionship and/or accountability for his creation and abandonment. Victor is reluctant to provide any of this, to say the least. In “Communicating Disappointment: The Viewpoint of Sons and Daughters,” Michelle Miller-Day and Josephine W. Lee differentiate between state disappointment and trait disappointment. State disappointment “refers to present feelings of being let down based on failure of another to meet a current expectation,” while trait disappointment “refers to ongoing or frequent feelings of being let down by others” (114). In other words, in trait disappointment, the quality of being disappointing is perceived as a persistent characteristic of the child. In Miller-Day and Lee’s research in which young adults communicated the instances and reasons they believed their parents were disappointed in them, state disappointment is more common (which, you know, is good), but “repeated state disappointment may lead to trait disappointment” (114). Victor’s state disappointment in instances of the Creature failing to advance as quickly as Victor wanted him to turned quickly to trait disappointment, and by the time the Creature catches back up with him, Victor has an ingrained persistent negative view of his progeny, which he perceives as his ultimate failure. So, again, he’s acting like his own father did. Miller-Day and Lee write, “Parents communicating their disappointment in a child for not meeting their expectations might serve to manipulate a child’s sense of self, engender a child’s emotional dependency on parental validation, inhibit individuation, and serve as a means for psychological control” (113). This all was certainly Leopold’s MO, but honestly, Victor doesn’t even want any of that. He just wants his Creature to stop existing – to end the disappointment. But the Creature’s adaptational immortality proves that parenthood is not something that can simply be undone, however far the father runs from the child.
So how does this story end? In my opinion, by being tied up in too neat of a bow. After Victor hears the Creature’s whole story, he repents of his horrible fatherhood. Not for nothing, Victor is dying at this point, of self-inflicted injuries from trying to destroy the Creature along with himself, so he still doesn’t have to actually act on his change of parental tune. Like, he doesn’t return to the long-term care of his offspring that he had so detested; he just apologizes and then dies. The Creature forgives him, which: eh. Look, man, I’m generally a hope springs eternal kind of guy, and I don’t really do bleak endings in my own writing, so maybe I don’t have a leg to stand on here, but I’m not sure every story needs resolution. Victor never gets it in the novel. He never realizes that his sin was not creating life, but abandoning it. I think that’s more powerful, and, when you think about how many broken parent-child relationships there are in the world, kind of more resonant. Obviously, in real life, I would hope for understanding and forgiveness to be able to come to everyone, but it doesn’t, and based on the characters as they are portrayed in the rest of the film, I feel like that sadder ending would more likely be the case here. I know del Toro wants us all to be on the monster’s side – and, buddy, I get it – but not everyone does eventually around. If we want to imagine a happy ending for the Creature, I would ask how might he become whole without his father’s love and approval? How might a child grow past their parents’ disappointment and thwarted expectations? Perhaps those are more interesting and potentially more pressing questions.
Unsurprisingly, many stories explore strained parental relationships. Much like monsters, these narratives can mold themselves to meet the moment. So let’s take a look now at another of these relationships in adaptation – in two adaptations, actually: Frollo and Quasimodo in Disney’s The Hunchback of Notre Dame.
“HOW COULD YOU DO THIS TO ME?” FROLLO AND QUASIMODO
It is not a new observation that Disney’s choice to adapt a Victor Hugo novel into one of their feel-good animated children’s movies was an absolutely wild move. The resulting film is a masterpiece of animation with one of, in my opinion, the best Disney soundtracks to date – and it’s also a complete tonal mess. It swings from exceptionally dark to irritatingly goofy and back again, without any real sense of cohesion. The less said about the comic relief gargoyles, the better. The fact that the antagonist is mainly motivated by objectifying lust does make for an absolute banger of a villain song, but also made the movie pretty confusing to me as a seven-year-old when it came out in 1996. I’m not saying that in a think-of-the-children too-innocent-to-be-exposed-to-such-themes kind of way; I’m just reporting that my child self didn’t really get what Frollo’s whole deal was. I remember being like, okay, so he’s mad that he likes Esmeralda because he’s racist…? Which was a major part of it, to be sure, but the whole concept of lust-as-sin just went over my head. All that to say, many children’s movies have this sort of dual intended audience of kids and parents, but in this one, I feel like there’s a sharper divide, with neither half of that audience being entirely narratively satisfied.
But the music’s really good! So clearly someone over at Disney wanted to give that score the story it deserved, so Hunchback got a stage adaptation, first in Germany, and then many years later in the U.S., though it never made it all the way to Broadway. I was lucky enough to see it during its run at the Papermill Playhouse in New Jersey, with an absolutely incredible cast of Michael Arden, Ciara Renee, and Patrick Page of Hadestown fame as Frollo. The stage adaptation returns Frollo to the profession that he has in the novel: a priest. The animated version stopped short of portraying lustful clergy, so it had made him a judge instead. The stage show also turns the story back into a tragedy, which brings some of its own tonal dissonance issues after the narrative had been run through the Disneyfication machine, so now it has a kind of believe-in-yourself thematic throughline that then jarringly ends with everyone dying, but I still think it works pretty well, all things considered. People who know me in real life know that I am carefully downplaying how much of a fangirl I have historically been about this show. Before it came to America, did I listen to the German stage soundtrack so much in college that I memorized it despite not speaking any German at all? Who’s to say? We all need a flawed piece of media to be completely rabid about, is my point.
In any case, one thing that the stage re-adaptation does that I really like is restore some complexity to the character of Frollo. In the animated film, he is a two-dimensional (pun intended) villain, entirely motivated by self-righteousness, power, and lust. He has no genuine feelings for Quasimodo, despite having raised him from infancy to young adulthood. But stage Frollo has more of a bond with Quasimodo, who, in this version, is his wayward brother’s son. Both versions of the Disney Frollo, however, when they first lay eyes upon the baby, gasp, “A monster!” Quasimodo’s skeletal and craniofacial differences are evident from birth, and this, in the medieval setting, calls his humanity into question. As with the public perception of Frankenstein’s Creature, there is a conflation of physical difference with diabolical evil: if something looks “wrong” then it must morally be “wrong.” Frollo at first believes that the “monster” should be destroyed, but his hand is stayed by religious guilt and concern for the state of his own soul. In the movie, Frollo muses, “Even this foul creature may yet prove one day to be/Of use to me.” But in the show, he sings, “See this loathsome creature from whom lesser men would flee/I will keep and care for him and teach him at my knee/To think like me.” And that is much less mustache-twirling, but also way scarier!
Some more recent Disney and Pixar movies have tackled problematic parenting or familial relationships, such as Encanto or Turning Red. In those films, however, the flawed parents or grandparents aren’t villains, per se; they are just people who need to see the error of their ways in order to resolve the conflict of the story. Going back to Tangled, we do have an example of a full parent-figure villain, and the movie does explore the complexities of emotional abuse from the point of view of Rapunzel, who experiences guilt, confusion, and shame from Mother Gothel’s manipulations. But Mother Gothel herself is not complex; like movie Frollo, she’s motivated entirely by her own gain, and doesn’t actually have any emotional regard for her (stolen) child. Stage Frollo is a midpoint between these two character types: a really, really bad parent who thinks he’s actually a good parent – and who does not get redeemed. It’s not lost on me that this character is only allowed to exist in media that’s no longer intended for young children to watch. We present kids with out-and-out villains all the time, and we also now show them adults with serious flaws that they can work to improve, and I’m glad that we do. I think that’s an important thing for kids to see. But we still balk at showing them adults, specifically parent figures, with serious flaws that will never improve, even if that parent figure thinks that they love their kid. I kind of get it. I mean, that is bleak. But there are kids out there who may need to see that, too. And in any case, I don’t think any of that is harder than lust for young audiences to understand.
Frollo’s first failures at fatherhood are, of course, rooted in ableism. I mean, calling the kid Quasimodo is not a good start. He raises him to be the bell ringer because that keeps him out of sight, where his disabilities cannot reflect negatively on Frollo himself. In both Disney versions, Frollo claims that staying locked away is for Quasimodo’s protection, and in the show, he seems to actually believe that, to an extent. He has convinced himself that he is doing the right thing. Interestingly, unlike Victor, Frollo does not fear his disabled child’s dependency. He wants Quasimodo to remain totally dependent so that he never thinks independently. Frollo therefore continues to treat Quasimodo as a young child despite the fact that Quasimodo is like twenty at the time that this story unfolds. This is especially emphasized in the stage version, where Quasimodo is also Deaf due to the hearing damage from the bells (a detail restored from the original novel). The way Frollo physically handles Quasimodo’s face and hands while Quasimodo is trying to communicate demonstrates a persistent control over his body that unfortunately is true to life for many Deaf or other disabled people. More broadly, in “Implicit Attitudes Towards People with Disabilities,” Kübra Efendıoǧlu and Elif Emir Öksüz explain that infantilization is a common ableist phenomenon that stems from a perception of the inadequacy of people with disabilities, which leads to able-bodied people treating disabled people the same ways they would treat children in society. The authors cite studies that demonstrate how nondisabled adults “use a similar verbal interaction pattern with the child when interacting with a disabled person, and they use more words and speak at higher frequencies” (36). Some studies show that these conversational patterns persist among medical students or professionals in care settings even after they are made aware that “patients were cognitively alert and able to fully participate in treatment processes” (36). Which is not to say that infantilization would be okay if there were a cognitive disability at play; as Catherine Thornberry and Karin Olson write in “The abuse of individuals with developmental disabilities,” infantilization prevents people “from being allowed to take risks in their lives and to experience what other people want to, or can, experience” (4). So, for instance, withholding human connection and experience under the guise of protection – as Frollo does to Quasimodo – is abuse through infantilization.
The fact that treating adults like children is so harmful also tells us something about the way we treat children, doesn’t it? E. Kay M. Tisdall makes this point in “The Challenge and Challenging of Childhood Studies? Learning from Disability Studies and Research with Disabled Children.” She explains, “Children and disabled people have been treated as ‘lesser’ because they are positioned as dependent on adults or carers/able-bodied people respectively. This ignores the realities of people’s interdependencies and the different types of ‘work’ done (whether paid or unpaid) [Lewis, 2003]. It ignores contributions made by children and disabled people in their personal and more public lives” (183). The societal power that adults or carers/able-bodied people are given over children and disabled people allows for these intertwined hierarchies to persist, and when those systems of power intersect with others – for example, the patriarchal power of the church – then you have a perfect recipe for overwhelming parental control. Frollo believes that a child’s behavior, morality, and literal mobility should be tightly constrained to keep out worldly danger – and because Quasimodo is disabled, he can keep him in that confined social space of “childhood” indefinitely.
As much as Frollo (on the stage, anyway) can convince himself that this is for Quasimodo’s benefit, he gives the game away after Quasimodo is humiliated at the Feast of Fools. Quasimodo has always endeavored to be a loyal, if not son, then at least pupil and servant. He calls Frollo “master,” not “father” – another choice on Frollo’s part that distances him from the child that he’s raising, despite the fact that he is very much the only parent Quasimodo has. Quasimodo believes in the strict Catholicism that Frollo has raised him in, though he can’t help longing to be part of the community of people he sees far below, despite Frollo’s insistence that they are wicked. Like Frankenstein’s Creature, Quasimodo is desperately lonely. Both of these narratives show how the parent shouldn’t be the only other person in the child’s life – even if they’re not as bad at parenting as Victor and Frollo are.
So Quasimodo leaves the tower on the Feast of Fools, where the “ugliest face in Paris” will win the title of king for the day. Quasimodo wins, and what at first feels triumphant for him quickly turns to horror as the crowd turns against him. Frollo does not rescue him from the shaming, as he feels that this is just punishment for his disobedience – especially because said disobedience makes Frollo look bad. Any ridicule and scorn that is heaped upon Quasimodo is also now associated with Frollo, which undercuts the moral authority on which he relies. That moral authority is further diminished when the Romani dancer Esmeralda steps in to free Quasimodo. At this point, Frollo has already been disturbed by his own lust for her, and her demonstration of the compassion that he failed to show only fuels his shameful resentment. The racism, of course, is a compounding factor, and it’s important to remember that Quasimodo is also Romani. In the movie, Frollo kills his mom for trying to escape him, but in the show, Frollo’s younger brother had run off with a Romani woman much to Frollo’s shame, and then both of them died during Quasimodo’s infancy. So Frollo is suddenly associated with all of these “monstrous” things – disability, racial and religious Otherness, sinful disobedience – and he is terrified of being tarnished by these connections. Like Victor, Frollo doesn’t see Quasimodo as a full person separate from himself. As the paternal figure, the child is an extension of his own identity, and if that child “fails,” then so does he. In the show, after Quasimodo’s humiliation, Frollo sings, “See how it’s cruel/See how it’s wicked/See how I sheltered you from having to go through this/How could you do this to me?”
“How could you do this to me?” is parental rejection summed up in one succinct question. Miller-Day and Lee explain how certain parental behaviors constitute psychological control, including behavior that “appeals to pride and guilt, expresses disappointment, withdraws love, isolates the child, and involves shaming” (113). That’s essentially just a checklist of Frollo’s parenting strategies. And it’s clear that those strategies do effectively control Quasimodo – for a while, anyway. Like the Creature, once he experiences the outside world, his adherence to his father figure’s expectations start to break down. Frollo’s abuses correspondingly ramp up. When he realizes that Quasimodo cares for Esmeralda, Frollo secretly uses him to track her down and then arrest her for the crime of not submitting to Frollo’s advancements – I mean, “witchcraft.” Turns out, all that grave-robbing from Frankenstein isn’t necessary to make monsters; all you need is a fiery metaphor and a pulpit. Yet Frollo still seems to believe that, after the witch is eliminated, he can return his monster-son to his previously dependent position. Again, I’m struck by the ways in which Frollo and Victor, these two failed fathers who view their sons as monsters, have such similarities in the ways in which they reject their children as failures to embody their worldviews while simultaneously being unable to separate their own identities as men from their sons, but then they have this fundamental difference in what they actually need that son to prove. Victor needs the Creature to prove his maker’s brilliance to the world, so he throws him away when he thinks he cannot. Frollo needs Quasimodo to prove his own goodness and power to himself, so he tries to hold onto him even when the relationship is unsalvageable.
There is no reconciliation at the end of The Hunchback of Notre Dame. In the film, Quasimodo saves Esmeralda from Frollo’s attempt at executing her, and then when Frollo fights his son in the belltower, Frollo winds up falling to his death, as is the Disney villain way. But in the show, the responsibility for Frollo’s death is returned to Quasimodo, just as it was in the original novel. Esmeralda does not survive in this version, so Quasimodo is not swayed by Frollo’s pleas to return to the way things once were in their “sanctuary.” Quasimodo turns Frollo’s oft-repeated lesson against him: “The wicked shall not go unpunished.” Frollo yells for him to let go, but Quasimodo says, “I told you, master, I am very strong.” This had previously been a point of pride for Quasimodo in his ability to do all the tasks around the cathedral that Frollo set him; now it is an assertion of his own power, and his lack of dependency upon Frollo. He throws Frollo from the roof, and then, in a line taken straight from the book, regards the broken bodies of Esmeralda and Frollo and says, “Here lies everything I have ever loved.”
Because even the child who has been made to feel monstrous wants to love his parent. The Creature wanted nothing more, and Quasimodo also desperately wished for a connection that ultimately was beyond his ability to maintain. Even when Frollo seemed to care for him, he still fundamentally rejected too much of who Quasimodo was. The Creature and stage-Quasimodo both end their stories with their father-figures and the women that they loved dead. But while the Creature gets a deathbed apology that gives him the will to carry on living, Quasimodo follows Esmeralda to her tomb and lays there until he dies, again like he does in the novel. As much as I’m for emotional complexity in children’s media, I do get why they didn’t go this route in the animated movie. But for me personally, it rings truer than the eleventh-hour turnaround from del Toro’s Victor. Parental rejection is a deep wound, a violent act. And it can have monstrous consequences.
CONCLUSION
It’s important to me that I don’t make this an adults versus children kind of channel. I personally got very lucky in the parents department, so I know that kids can have a positive, supportive relationship with the people who raised them. So even when I’m talking about individual characters, like Victor or Frollo, I want to always put my analysis in the context of larger systems. Cruel parents would obviously be a problem in any setting, but enmeshed in an adultist society that very much does see children as parents’ property, as well an ableist society that treats disabled people as children forever, we can see how the power that cruel parents can exert over their kids is reinforced and multiplied. Those of us who want to make the world a freer place for kids can’t magically make every single parent out there a good person, as much as we’d like to, but we can work to chip away at the institutions and systems that make it really easy for those people to isolate and control their kids. To that end, I have a link to the National Youth Rights Association in the description if you would like to learn more about what you can do to support young people’s freedoms.
As always, I also think that interrogating our cultural monster metaphors helps us to see our society more clearly. The opening song of Disney’s Hunchback poses the unsubtle question, “Who is the monster and who is the man?” Del Toro’s Frankenstein, even more unsubtly, ha William tell his brother, “You’re the real monster.” This did make me roll my eyes pretty hard, because it’s been over 200 years of this story, man, we do get it, but fine, I will take the bait. When we point to characters like Victor or Frollo as “the real monster,” what are we identifying as monstrous – as so beyond the pale that it no longer can exist within our category of humanity? Del Toro and the Disney teams of Hunchback adapters (twice over) highlight specifically hatred of one’s child – monstrosizing of one’s child – as an inherently anti-human behavior. The inability to separate one’s own identity from the child, and thereby denying them their full humanity as a person outside of the expectations of the one who raised them, is anti-human. And though the adaptations we discussed today are definitely flawed pieces of art – in more ways than I even talked about here, because I tried to keep things relevant just to this parental analysis – I think that the attention they call to the rejected children that society so often overlooks is really important. I think that making audiences pay attention to lives that are otherwise hidden away (in a bell tower, perhaps, or a lab castle) is one of the best things that storytelling can do.
What are your takes on these adaptations? Are there any other narratives of monstrosized children and power-hungry parents that you would recommend? Let me know down in the comments. I hope that you enjoyed this discussion, and if you did, remember to like the video and subscribe to the channel. Typically, we have video essays every two weeks here, but this time around it will be a little longer until the next one, because I am going on my belated honeymoon. So instead, we are going to have two weeks in a row of new chapters of my YA manuscript, Our Sharp Forsaken Teeth. If you enjoy werewolves, and if you’re on this channel, you probably do, now would be a good time to start this story from the beginning if you haven’t yet – the playlist is up there in the corner and also in the description. Then in three weeks from today, the next video essay will be back. In the meantime, you will also start seeing some fun shorts over here, as requested by the donors to the Indiegogo campaign. If you would like to request a topic of your own – or you would like some writing feedback from me – and you want to support positive social and educational programs for teenagers, please head on over there. My Patreon is also down in the description if you’d like to join that community. It’s been really exciting to get to know the viewers of this channel more and more. Thank you all for the great comments on my last essay, and thank you all so much for watching this one. Take care, and I will see you soon for more monstrous food for thought.
Media discussed:
- Frankenstein, dir. Guillermo del Toro (2025)
- The Hunchback of Notre Dame, dir. Gary Trousdale and Kirk Wise (1996)
- The Hunchback of Notre Dame, dir. Scott Schwartz (2014-2015)
References:
- Apgar, A. (2023). The Disabled Child: Memoirs of a Normal Future. University of Michigan Press.
- Cohen, J.J. (1996). Monster Culture: Seven Theses. In J.J. Cohen (Ed.), Monster Theory: Reading Culture (pp. 3-25). University of Minnesota Press.
- Efendıoǧlu, K. & Öksüz, E.E. (2024). Implicit Attitudes towards People with Disabilities. Çukurova Üniversitesi Sosyal Bilimler Enstitüsü Dergisi, 33(1), 31-46.
- Hustis, H. (2003). Responsible Creativity and the “Modernity” of Mary Shelley’s Prometheus. Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900, 43(4), 845-858.
- Miller, T. (2012). Falling back into gender? Men’s narratives and practices around first-time fatherhood. Sociology, 45(6), 1094-1109.
- Miller-Day, M. & Lee, J.W. (2001). Communicating Disappointment:
The Viewpoint of Sons and Daughters. The Journal of Family Communication, 1(2), 111-131. - Thornberry, C. & Olson, K. (2005). The abuse of individuals with developmental disabilities. Developmental Disabilities Bulletin, 33(1-2), 1-19.
- Tisdall, E.K.M. (2012). The Challenge and Challenging of Childhood Studies? Learning from Disability Studies and Research with Disabled Children. Children & Society, 26, 181-191.
Kathleen Kellett 