Sunday, May 17, 2020

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.


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