“She Deserved the Last Word:” On Del Toro’s Frankenstein and the Echo of Literary Erasure

After weeks buried under final-year coursework, I finally gave myself a rare luxury (beyond my increasingly habitual midday naps): watching Guillermo del Toro’s new Netflix adaptation of Frankenstein. For a moment, the act felt decadent - a reminder that my life exists outside of Turnitin submissions and Teams group chats.

Del Toro, long celebrated for his gothic and fantastical imagination, brings his visual and emotional signatures into familiar territory. His filmography, from Academy Award-winning The Shape of Water to Crimson Peak, from Blade II to Pinocchio, is steeped in monsters and tenderness. This adaptation fits comfortably within this lineup.

As someone who holds Mary Shelley’s novel close to her heart (pun intended; if you know, you know) - dog-eared, spine-cracked, annotated beyond recognition - I went in prepared to dissect the film like Victor Frankenstein himself, pacing around his freshly stitched creation. But for most of the runtime, I didn’t need to.

The visuals? Stunning.

The pacing? Deliciously slow and grim.

Jacob Elordi (Saltburn and Euphoria actor) as the Creature? Some unhinged part of my fangirl soul whispered, “Mary Shelley would be feral for this casting.”

Then came the ending – quiet, subtle. The screen fades after the final shot of Elordi basking himself in sunlight, and suddenly, text appears:

“The heart will break yet brokenly live on”

-          Lord Byron

My jaw dropped.

Because after 150 minutes of adapting a novel written by a teenage girl in 1816 - a girl who founded an entire genre of fiction while the rest of us, historically, would be dying from cholera – the final voice wasn’t hers.

This choice becomes even more layered when acknowledging that del Toro is a male director working within Hollywood, an industry built upon decades of male-dominated storytelling. Even unintentionally, choosing Byron over Shelley reinforces a familiar dynamic.

Not just any man: Lord Byron: poet, aristocrat. walking red flag with lace cuffs. And this matters, not because Byron was talentless – he was far from; but notoriously, his presence carries cultural weight. He was a man who benefited from (and was a product of) the exact patriarchal literary system that repeatedly sidelined women writers and (you guessed it) Mary Shelley herself.

Byron’s literature shows an earnest talent, and he wasn’t some random interloper in Shelley’s life; Frankenstein quite literally began in his house. The infamous 1816 summer spent at the Villa Diodati, where Byron challenged everyone to write a ghost story, sparked the creative storm that shaped Shelley's masterpiece. This proximity may very well be why del Toro reached for Byron in the film’s final breath.

But acknowledging his influence is not the same as handing him the last word.

Let’s be honest; this isn’t unique to Shelley; it’s practically literary tradition. Women write, men get credited, the world shrugs, and centuries later English majors everywhere quietly scream in libraries about it. Zelda Fitzgerald’s diaries and short stories were borrowed so liberally by F. Scott that scholars now debate whether part of The Great Gatsby should have her name on them. T.S. Eliot’s poem The Waste Land was sharpened heavily, and arguably shaped, by his wife Vivienne, only for her efforts to be footnoted into invisibility.

Reddit (r/Frankenstein, in a thread titled “I was so flummoxed by the quote at the end. I had to fix it”) offered other perspectives. One user argued Byron’s line was “better suited” than anything Shelley ever wrote. Another cited a del Toro interview explaining that the quote reflects heartbreak and perseverance:

“No matter what happened in life.. He would have to keep moving forward. This is what happened to both Victor & the Creature and hence why he used the Byron quote. We all have to move forward with broken hearts at some point”

Lovely sentiment.

But here is the issue: Shelley already said exactly that IN her own novel:

"Beware for I am fearless, and therefore powerful.”

It has the same emotional core but instead of quiet melancholy in acceptance, traits neither Victor nor the creature truly possess, there's rage and warning.

Mary Shelley did not write Frankenstein as a gothic love letter to tragedy. She wrote it in a world where women were not expected to write nor study philosophy, were not taught science, and certainly were not supposed to publish novels dissecting patriarchal hubris. As the daughter of Mary Wollstonecraft (feminist theorist, and author of Vindication of the Rights of Woman), Shelley inherited a legacy of challenging societal norms around gender and authority.

So, to end her story, one doubted and diminished for over two centuries, with the words of a man she admired (debatably), but who benefited from gendered privilege she never had, feels like stepping back into the very literary hierarchy she challenged simply by existing. Why should Byron, because he encouraged her or existed socially near her, get the final say in her story?

Across literary history, women’s voices have been erased; their influence treated as support rather than authorship. After all, early editions of Frankenstein were assumed to be authored by her husband, placing Shelley herself alongside Fitzgerald and Eliot in this long tradition. Critics openly doubted a teenage girl could have written so emotionally and philosophically charged. Against this history, choosing a man’s quote to close her story feels like a shrug of acceptance toward historical erasure.

So no, I cannot shrug off Byron's quote as inevitable because its symbolism matters. And in a film so maliciously crafted in every frame, voice matters. Whose words we choose to end a story with, especially a story written by a woman in a male-dominated era, matters.

She deserved the last word.