THE READING RHEUM: THE STRANGE CASE OF DR. JEKYLL AND MISTER HYDE (1886)

The biggest mystery of Stevenson’s classic story is not the identity of the repulsive little man known as Mister Hyde. Within a few years of publication that identity became pellucidly clear even to people who never read the story, thanks to stage and film adaptations. The mystery is, why is Stevenson’s actual story not as popular as the adaptations? After all, though DRACULA and FRANKENSTEIN were often very freely adapted, one still sees raconteurs occasionally going to the original texts for inspiration. With JEKYLL AND HYDE, not so much.

Most versions do capture, or try to capture, the sense of Hyde as a sort of Victorian predecessor to Sigmund Freud’s theory of “the id,” the part of the human psyche that simply “wants what it wants when it wants it.” Later raconteurs usually don’t favor the idea that Hyde is physically smaller than Jekyll. Sometimes this aspect is attributed to Hyde’s incarnation of Jekyll’s younger self (said to have been “wild” in college), sometimes to his being a sort of “troglodytic” throwback. Obviously, in stage and screen, this would have been impossible to convey without using two actors, thus obviating the challenge of seeing a performer essay both the “good” and “bad” sides of humankind. But in this case, size is not the main problem with Stevenson’s text.

The fact that Hyde’s identity is no longer mysterious has a deleterious effect on most readings of the prose tale, but that too is not the greatest difficulty. It’s closer to the truth to say that Stevenson, while he calls Hyde “evil,” is deliberately obscure about what evil acts the little fiend commits. Aside from losing his temper twice in public—trampling a little girl and killing an old man—one never sees what acts of reprehensible gratification Hyde carries out when he usurps Jekyll’s body. It’s beyond doubt that this was a conscious choice on Stevenson’s part, whether from fears of censorship or simply from the desire to make his readers use their imaginations.

But the story might have flourished with all of these flaws, had it not been for the biggest one: Hyde has no voice. Solid citizens like Lanyon report some of the things he’s said, for Hyde is certainly capable of ordinary human speech, and Jekyll’s notes attempt to convey his alter ego’s perverse nature. But, once again drawing comparisons to the creations of Stoker and Shelley, those two worthies give their monsters character through their own speech. Proportionately speaking, Dracula isn’t “on stage” much more than Hyde is, but the king-vampire has just enough dialogue to make his character indelible. And though the Frankenstein Monster’s adaptations don’t often favor the grandiloquence of Shelley’s creation, even mute versions of the Monster seem suffused with the simple sentiment, “Did I beseech thee, O my maker, to create me?”

Adaptations of Hyde not only have to enlarge upon his career of self-gratification, they almost have to create Hyde’s presence out of whole cloth. Stevenson only gives the reader the sense of Hyde’s abominable temper, his spite toward the “ego” side of his nature, but Hyde does not come alive as a character. Indeed, in Jekyll’s final confession, he characterizes Hyde as if the latter were some “inorganic” process. That notion works fine for the alien beings of Lovecraft’s Cthulhu mythos. A reader who wants to “get to know his id,” though, can only come away from Stevenson’s JEKYLL AND HYDE with a sense of vague disappointment.

SUBS AND COES PT. 2

The principles of subordination and coordination also serve to further elucidate many of the complications regarding focal presences that I’ve touched on in earlier essays.

In CREATOR AND CREATED ENSEMBLED HE THEM, I gave various examples regarding the ways in which figures in horror-fiction did or did not share center-stage (and thus the centric will).

I opined that in Mary Shelley’s FRANKENSTEIN, the titular medical student and his abominable creation share center-stage, which means, in my current jargon, that they are “coordinated.” However, the Universal film-series promotes the Monster to the position of the sole focal presence, while both his creator and all of the other scientists who interact with the Monster are “subordinated.”  The Hammer film-series takes the opposite tack: Baron Frankenstein incarnates the centric will of all his films, and his various creatures are subordinated.

Stevenson’s JEKYLL AND HYDE anticipates this same pattern. No one reading the tale  cares that much about Jekyll, because he is subordinate to the presence of the mysterious Hyde. Of the film-adaptations I’ve seen, only THE TWO FACES OF DR. JEKYLL subordinates the peril of Hyde to the tortures of Jekyll.

Though most narratives have tended to emphasize the creator over the created, or vice versa, I’ve always explored some of the situations in which two opponents share center-stage, rather than following the more common paradigm in which a superordinate protagonist faces off against a subordinate antagonist.  However, in the former situations there’s usually some intrinsic connection between the characters of this sort of ensemble. I mentioned in ENSEMBLES ASSEMBLE the kaiju film THE WAR OF THE GARGANTUAS, in which a good giant monster contends with a bad giant monster. However, though the monsters are separate entities, the bad one is the de facto clone of the good one, so that they are almost as intimately tied as Jekyll and Hyde. There are no literal links between the characters of my other example of “opposed centrics,” Hjalmar Poelzig and Vitus Verdeghast of 1934’s BLACK CAT. However, though these two war-weary enemies are not even related to one another as much as are the Gargantuas, the narrative emphasizes their many similarities, to the extent that they seem like symbolic siblings.

Of course, this too is a question of emphasis. Just as creators and creations can take on individual superordinate status, so can siblings. The two films examined here, 1935's THE BLACK ROOM and 1964's DEAD RINGER, contain siblings who are aggrieved with one another, but neither film focuses on both siblings. In BLACK ROOM the “good twin” is subordinate to the bad twin, who then attempts, unsuccessfully, to emulate the good brother. DEAD RINGER takes the opposite tack: it’s a good twin who must masquerade for a time as the bad twin, and the film emphasizes that character’s “Jekyll-like” agonies rather than the menace of the film’s Hyde-figure.

The Jekyll-Hyde paradigm is the most common model for fantasy/SF narratives: the supernormal "creation" is the focus of the story, not the person who created it. However, when there's a particular type of "intrinsic connection" between creator and created, this can result in a greater focus upon the creator-figure. For instance, in the 1956 FORBIDDEN PLANET, the menacing Id Monster is the concatenation of Doctor Morbius's unleashed passions, so the centric will focuses on him, not upon the deadly thing he's created.  

To cite a (deservedly) more obscure example, I noticed upon reviewing Ulli Lommel's 1980 BOOGEYMAN that the viewpoint character had an unusually close relationship to the titular monster, unleashing the evil spirit in much the same way that Morbius releases the Id Monster:

...it's slightly interesting that although Willy is set up to look like another Michael, Lacey is both the person who revives the evil ghost and the person through which it manifests. She's also the one who apparently fantasizes about her brother killing hot women, which isn't totally off-the-beam since he almost does kill one woman. But the fact that she's both the one who unleashes her brother's madness and the malice of her mother's lover makes me wonder if she's not the true "boogieman" of the movie.

The concept of coordination is also one that allows me to break down the way centricity works with large ensembles that may, for a time, include individual members who are out to cause harm to the group as a whole, much as Hyde has a hostile attitude toward Jekyll. Some examples of this narrative strategy would include:

Wonder Man and the Swordsman in THE AVENGERS

Terra in THE NEW TEEN TITANS

Both Plastique and Lashina in SUICIDE SQUAD

Demonia in OMEGA MEN

However, again some sort of “connection” is necessary before such a “stealth enemy” might be considered as being coordinated with the rest of the ensemble. Terra, Lashina and Demonia remain in their respective ensembles for many exploits before their perfidy is uncovered, so that for a time readers may internalize them as being “real members.” However, I've stated in Part 1 that each story’s centric will is separate from that of every other story. Therefore, as long as Plastique, Wonder Man and Swordsman have functioned as members of an ensemble even for the better part of one story, then they are coordinated with the other members of the ensemble,  even if that one story ends with the “stealth enemy” being exposed and ejected. 

OUT WITH THE BAD WILL, IN WITH THE GOOD PT. 2

A few refinements to what I wrote in Part 1:

I stated that "...no matter what sort of viewpoint character the author may choose, he may focus as easily upon the "will" within the viewpoint character (or on some figure allied to him, or an ensemble of such characters), OR upon things, people, or phenomena that are perceived as "the other" to the viewpoint character's will." I should have noted, however, that the will of the viewpoint character is a construction of the author, since no fictional character is a willing entity. Thus the viewpoint character's will-construct may subsume even things that seem opposed to that character's personal interests.

In CREATOR AND CREATOR ENSEMBLED HE THEM, I stated that I considered that both Victor Frankenstein and his monster constituted an "ensemble," in that both characters were central to the concerns of Shelley's novel. Some iterations of the Frankenstein concept have chosen to center upon just one of the two. The 1931 FRANKENSTEIN film is *exothelic,* in that it emphasizes the monstrous "other" of the Monster, but the 1957 CURSE OF FRANKENSTEIN centers upon the megalomaniacal monster-maker, and is thus *endothelic.*

The novel FRANKENSTEIN is told from the POV of Victor Frankenstein, but this in itself does not make it *endothelic,* given that the 1931 film also follows Frankenstein's POV. But unlike either of the films, the Shelley novel explores the psyche of Frankenstein as a divided will. I'm far from the first to suggest that Shelley's work owes something to the German folklore of the doppelganger. The Monster is certainly not Victor's physical double in accordance to most folklore and literature about doppelgangers (notably Poe's WILLIAM WILSON). However, the Monster stalks Victor relentlessly after the former's unfortunate creation, and, more importantly, the creature may be acting upon Victor's suppressed desires and hostilities, visiting horrible deaths upon people Victor supposedly cares about. Thus, even though Victor and the Monster are opposed on the literal, "lateral" level of the novel's action, in terms of the story's *underthought* the two are one.

However, it's not impossible for characters linked via some sort of shared psyche to become distinct. In the ENSEMBLED essay, I argued that even though Robert Louis Stevenson's Jekyll and Hyde were literally two sides of the same man, Stevenson devotes far more attention to Hyde than to Jekyll, so that Hyde is the focal presence of the story-- as he is in most adaptations-- while Jekyll is reduced to something of a "supporting character" to Hyde, much as the beast-men of Wells' DOCTOR MOREAU are subsidiary to the titular scientist. Of course, both the Stevenson and Wells novels are told from the POV of a largely uninteresting narrator, so there's no question that both of these are *exothelic.* The matter becomes a little more complicated in that most Jekyll-and-Hyde film adaptations take Jekyll's POV, but these tend to be *exothelic* as well, like the 1931 FRANKENSTEIN film. In many respects "Jekyll the support guy" conjures forth a more dynamic "alter ego" a la both Clark Kent and Billy Batson-- and so all three would be examples of the theory of exteriorization discussed here, though the latter two examples are *endothelic* in that the alter ego is not an "other" to the viewpoint "support-character."

In (temporary) conclusion, I'm meditating on also devising adjectivial forms for "the idealizing will" and "the existential will." The appropriate Greek words would seem to yield *ideothelic* and *physiothelic,* but I'm not in love with these terms at present.

CREATED AND CREATOR ENSEMBLED HE THEM

Because one of my forthcoming "persona-essays" deals with the monstrous creation of Mary Shelley, I want to set down some thoughts about how characters in the tradition of Shelley's "mad doctor" may or may not enter into ensemble-relationships with their unholy offspring.

Just as some heroes evolve from characters who begin with villainous status, monsters sometimes evolve from the persona of a demihero.  I've termed the Henry Pym of the 1962 "Man in the Ant Hill" a demihero.  Given that he starts out as what I called a "Frankenstein  manqué," it would be easy to imagine the early Pym transforming himself into an ant-monster rather than a shrunken man, rather like this other monsterized scientist-character from another Marvel boogey-tale of the period:

Much later, long after Pym became a full-fledged superhero, writer Roy Thomas referenced that lost Frankensteinian theme, and had Pym/Goliath invent a murderous mechanical offspring, originally called "Ultron-5," who despite his similarity to Shelley's monster was framed as a "villain."

Shelley's original novel FRANKENSTEIN depicts a more complex relationship between the monster and the monster's creator-- and one in which both characters are central to the novel's concerns.  Therefore Victor Frankenstein and the being popularly nicknamed "the Frankenstein Monster"-- although Shelley never gives the latter a real name-- are equally important to the novel's structure, and form an *ensemble* much like that of those discussed here.

However, the interdependence of "creator and created" is not an inevitable development.  In the case of Robert Louis Stevenson's 1886 novel DOCTOR JEKYLL AND MISTER HYDE, there's the potential for the "two faces of Doctor Jekyll" to be of equal importance, just as Victor and his doppelganger-like creation are in FRANKENSTEIN.

However, in my judgment Jekyll is of secondary importance in the novel.  Stevenson's plot is focused principally upon the revelation of Edward Hyde's true nature, not on the aspects of Jekyll's character that lead to Hyde's creation.  Thus in this example, it is Edward Hyde alone who is the focal presence-- though I have seen renditions of the concept where Jekyll is more important than Hyde.

The reverse of this focus upon "the created" is one in which "the creator" alone is the focus, and his creatures are little more than manifestations of the creator's warped genius.  My example here is H.G. Wells' 1896 novel THE ISLAND OF DOCTOR MOREAU.  Whereas Mister Hyde is an eruption of Doctor Jekyll's primitive self-- a self that takes on a life of its own, one more dynamic than that of its "parent"-- the monstrous Doctor Moreau is the focal presence of the novel, and his assorted creations-- the beast-human hybrids he forges through the unlikely techniques of vivisection-- are just supporting characters.

At best, the assorted beast-men of the novel are secondary excrescences of Moreau's twisted genius, not separate ensemble-characters in their own right. Moreau's death ends his hold over the hybrids, who eventually revert to their lower natures, but the narrator Pendrick realizes at one point that he might have regained control over them after the passing of Moreau and his assistant:

I know now the folly of my cowardice. Had I kept my courage up to the level of the dawn, had I not allowed it to ebb away in solitary thought, I might have grasped the vacant sceptre of Moreau and ruled over the Beast People.

I've now demonstrated that the co-existence of a "creator" and his "creature" in a narrative does not necessarily mean co-equal status as focal presences. I will further note that these figures are also mutable in terms of their persona-status.  Shelley's Victor Frankenstein, Stevenson's Doctor Jekyll, and the two Marvel characters discussed-- the original version of Henry Pym and the forgettable guy who transforms himself into "Bruttu"-- are all demiheroes.  As stated earlier the persona of the demihero tends to represent the narrative's "life-sustaining" potential.  That persona can turn negative, though usually not to the same degree as one sees in the persona of "the monster." Of the examples cited, the "monsters" who assume centricity include Shelley's Frankenstein Monster, Stevenson's Mister Hyde, and Bruttu.  In the original Henry Pym story, he is a demihero who does not share centricity with the "monstrous" ants he encounters.

The difference in the degree of negativity, however, makes me label Wells' Doctor Moreau a "monster" rather than a "demihero."  As established in EXPENDITURE ACCOUNTS PART 2, the term that for me best captures the tenor shared by monster and demihero is that of "persistence."  Moreau's function in the story is to be the originator of the ghastly hybrids, and he does so through a persistent dedication to science not unlike that of Victor Frankenstein or Henry Jekyll. However, the negative effects of Moreau's unscrupulousness makes him into more of a monster than any of his creations, who, as I said, are not as significant, as numinal, as the mad doctor.  Thus, Wells' book is one of those works in which "the mad doctor" is far more of a "monster" than his creations, as well as being the most significant monster in the book.

This compare-and-contrast can't examine in depth the treatment of these very mutable figures in the medium of film. However, I must note-- given that an upcoming essay will deal with one filmic version of the Frankenstein tale-- that many Frankenstein stories vary as to whether the creator, the creature or both enjoy centricity.

It's been commented somewhere that in the Universal Frankenstein series, the creature was the central character, while in Hammer's Frankenstein series, the creator was the center. I would certainly agree with the latter statement: most of Hammer-Frankenstein's creations are no better than those of Wells' Doctor Moreau: mere "excrescences."  However, it's not quite that simple with the Universal Frankensteins.  The first three make a rocky effort to follow the example of the book, in which the mad scientist and the monster are of roughly equal importance to the story.  However, the fourth and fifth films in the series diminish the role of the "mad scientist" to nugatory dimensions. And in the last three films in the series-- all of which were "monster-mashes"-- the Frankenstein Monster shares focal space with Dracula, the Wolf Man, and some version of a "mad scientist"-- though none of the scientists belong to the line of Frankenstein. 

 

FINDING SIGMUND PART 3

“For the imagination… is very mighty when it creates, as it were, another nature out of the material that actual nature gives it… We may even restructure experience; and though in doing so we continue to follow analogical laws, yet we also follow principles which reside higher up, namely, in reason (and which are just as natural to us as those which the understanding follows in apprehending empirical nature. In this process we feel our freedom from the law of association…”—Kant, CRITIQUE OF JUDGMENT, Section 314, tr. Pluhar).

In Part 2 I stated that Laurence Olivier’s Freud-influenced HAMLET was largely under the sway of Kant’s “reproductive imagination,” in that the film accepted, rather routinely, the Oedipal associations of Sigmund Freud’s interpretation of the Shakespeare play.

Nevertheless, as stated in Part 1, the Oedipus complex is a legitimate archetype, which need not be represented in art as an empirical construction, but can become a vehicle for “productive imagination” when used with the sort of imaginative “free play” Kant recommends.


To prove this, I suggested that I would give an example of the hybridization of productive and reproductive imagination. Shakespeare’s original HAMLET would certainly qualify, for the play certainly contains more archetypes than just the Oedipal one. However, I decided that the best possible counter-example to Olivier's HAMLET should share that film's major attributes, i.e.: (1) that it too was produced some time after Freud’s ideas were popularized, (2) that it made clear use of some Freudian paradigms, and (3) that it adapted a work whose origins predated Freudianism.


My ideal counter-example is the 1931 film DOCTOR JEKYLL AND MISTER HYDE, adapted by director Rouben Mamoulian and his scripters from the 1886 Stevenson novella. To be sure, the Mamoulian film also adapts some story-motifs that were not in Stevenson. A JEKYLL play by Thomas Russell Sullivan was one of the first adaptations to inject a level of sexual conflict not overtly present in the original story, and Mamoulian certainly took advantage of that sexuality for his Freudianized reading. But even here the parallel to the Olivier film seems sound, for Olivier’s film, appearing in 1948, may well have borrowed some of its conceits from earlier Freudianized iterations in film or theater.


As I have not yet reviewed the Mamoulian film on my own site, one can read a detailed summation and analysis on the site CLASSIC HORROR.COM. One of reviewer Eric Miller’s best insights in this review-- and one germane to my Kantian project--is his comment on the Freudian paradigm of “repression”-- a paradigm of questionable applicability to the original story. Because Mamoulian expanded on this typical Freudian concept, Mamoulian’s Doctor Jekyll bears no resemblance to the paradigm of the neurosis-riddled individual that so informed Freud’s view of HAMLET.

Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde’s other main theme is the consequence of repression, making this film much more than your standard “good versus evil” morality tale. Jekyll is portrayed as a curious, open young man. Mamoulian resists the temptation to portray Dr. Jekyll as a hedonistic libertine, instead giving us a decent, honest man wanting to explore perfectly natural and healthy desires. As a forward thinking scientist, Jekyll wants to learn about the world, and is not afraid of what he might find. The representatives of public opinion, however, do not share these views. One by one, we see all of Jekyll’s desires and goals thwarted by “proper” society.

In addition, I'd add that while Freud believed that repression was a necessary evil to maintain society, Mamoulian’s movie is not so resigned. The final images of the film --which show Jekyll looking beatific in death, followed by the sight of a pot boiling over on a stove-- indicate not that repression is necessary, but that it will inevitably create more monsters like Mister Hyde. Mamoulian may not exactly be Herbert Marcuse, but he doesn’t seem to be saying that sexual neurosis must be man’s fate.


But even apart from matters of theme, the more important examples of “free play” in the Mamoulian film are those which embody a new myth for both Jekyll and his alter ego. Mamoulian was not the first to present Hyde as an ape-like creature, but some of his scenarios are as indelible to the modern image of Hyde as anything in Stevenson, much less the best-known silent version, the 1920 John Barrymore version.


Most often praised is the scene where Hyde, in one of his earliest transformations, stands laughing in a downpour. One can, if one likes, read this scene as symbolic of Freud’s “ego.” But it’s an image that goes beyond any simple illustration of a conscious theme. As such it incarnates the kind of “free play” that Kant sees as the result of the “productive imagination.”


Of course, there’s the chance that some forgotten theatrical director was actually the first to use the scenario. I recently read Susan Hitchcock's book, FRANKENSTEIN: A CULTURAL HISTORY, and thus learned that many of the cinematic fates meted out to the Frankenstein monster-- being burned, falling through the Arctic ice-- had actually appeared in earlier theatre-adaptations. Still, even if Mamoulian or his scripters copied their scene from someone else’s, that “someone else” was using his “productive imagination” to conceive “another nature” out of the materials given by “actual nature,” even as Robert Louis Stevenson had.


My principal reason for advancing this somewhat schematic examination of two famous Freud-influenced films is a simple one. I’ve not dealt extensively with Oedipal archetypes on this site, but I’ve always been aware that some creators are more drawn to them than others. One of the most noteworthy—and one that I’ll eventually cover in my “1001 myths” essay-series-- is the Lee-Ditko SPIDER-MAN, which follows some Freudian patterns but (shall we say) “disavows” others. Given that I have frequently disparaged the reductive psychology of Freud and such followers as Frederic Wertham and Gershon Legman, I wish to make clear that I see the patterns Freud identified as enfolded within a larger conceptual structure, one informed by my own particular influences: Jung, Frye, Campbell and Cassirer. My opposition of Olivier and Mamoulian, then, is my way of showing that there are good ways and bad ways to “find Sigmund” in modern works of art.

A few more Sigmundoscopies may be forthcoming...