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Radically Both: Transformation and Crisis in Jekyll and Hyde Porn

Laura Helen Marks

in Alice in Pornoland: Hardcore Encounters with the Victorian Gothic

This chapter discusses transformation and duality in pornographic adaptations of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Hardcore adaptations of Robert Louis Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde utilize the concept ... More

This chapter discusses transformation and duality in pornographic adaptations of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Hardcore adaptations of Robert Louis Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde utilize the concept of dual selves to explore crises in queer sexual subjectivity and female sexual desire. Through an analysis of the gay comedies Heavy Equipment (1977) and Dr. Jerkoff and Mr. Hard (1997), and the Vivid Video hetero drama Jekyll and Hyde (1999), this chapter demonstrates the different ways gay and straight pornographers draw on the erotic pleasures of transformation as a way of exploring sexual crisis and a desire to break free from rigid and illusory formulations of identity and desire.Less

Mysterious Bodies: Solving and De-Solving Disability in the Fin-de-Siècle Mystery

Kylee-Anne Hingston

in Articulating Bodies: The Narrative Form of Disability and Illness in Victorian Fiction

This chapter argues that disability becomes fully specimen in the fin-de-siècle mystery, which grants authority to the professional discourses of medicine, science, and law. Comparing Robert Louis ... More

This chapter argues that disability becomes fully specimen in the fin-de-siècle mystery, which grants authority to the professional discourses of medicine, science, and law. Comparing Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886) to Doyle’s ‘The Adventure of the Crooked Man’ (1893), the chapter illuminates the interplay between scientific discourse and narrative structure in fin-de-siècle mysteries, revealing the ambiguity with which late Victorians understood and criminalized disability. Despite Jekyll and Hyde’s modern Gothic, open narrative structure, the novella confirms the conservative disability stereotypes associated with late Victorian criminology and physiognomy, which placed anxieties of cultural deviance upon the disabled mind and body. In contrast, despite the conservative drive towards closure typical of detective fiction, ‘The Crooked Man’ undermines those stereotypes and the supposed criminality of the disabled body. However, when either narrative focalizes through characters with freakish bodies, that focalization troubles the professional authority of scientific discourse and denies the possibility of controlling deviance or separating it from imagined normalcy.Less

He, I say – I cannot say, I: Robert Louis Stevenson's strange case

in Labyrinths of Deceit: Culture, Modernity and Identity in the Nineteenth Century

Robert Louis Stevenson's 1886 novel, The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, tackles the impact of a late nineteenth-century metropolis and its institutions upon identity. It echoes the elements ... More

Robert Louis Stevenson's 1886 novel, The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, tackles the impact of a late nineteenth-century metropolis and its institutions upon identity. It echoes the elements of the barbarism found in early manifestations of the Gothic genre and relocates it in the modern city in the hyper-civilised and genteel world of fin de siècle England. Particularly in the context of British imperialism, the presence of Hyde represents a reversion to savagery in an apparently unlikely location. The novel also reflects the fragile discourse of degeneration theory and seems to speak more about the fears and the anxieties of the fin de siècle bourgeoisie than monstrosity in general. Stevenson's Gothic vision is rendered distinctive by the consistent intrusion of the elements and symptoms of nineteenth-century modernity, which also highlights the symbolic resonance of the relationship between Jekyll and Hyde.Less

Criminal Collaborators: Deacon Brodie and Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde

Audrey Murfin

in Robert Louis Stevenson and the Art of Collaboration

This chapter discusses Deacon Brodie (1880), one of three plays collaboratively composed with his friend W.E. Henley, along with Stevenson’s short story “The Body Snatcher” and his essay “A Chapter ... More

This chapter discusses Deacon Brodie (1880), one of three plays collaboratively composed with his friend W.E. Henley, along with Stevenson’s short story “The Body Snatcher” and his essay “A Chapter on Dreams.” Deacon Brodie is an early treatment of the themes more famously developed in the Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886). Thus, Jekyll and Hyde, which owes its origins to the literal dual authorship, becomes a reflection on the fragmentation of the single author, as well as a reflection on the collaborative space of the theater.Less

Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde

Michael Sragow

in Victor Fleming: An American Movie Master

Though Fleming started his first long-term contract with MGM at the beginning of 1940, progress on his project The Yearling stalled after his attempts at preparation. In its place, the studio gave ... More

Though Fleming started his first long-term contract with MGM at the beginning of 1940, progress on his project The Yearling stalled after his attempts at preparation. In its place, the studio gave him control over the adaptation of Robert Louis Stevenson’s novel Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. At the same time, actor Lee Bowman married Fleming’s stepdaughter, to Fleming’s frustration. Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, released in 1941, starred Spencer Tracy and introduced Fleming to the emerging starlet Ingrid Bergman. This chapter gives a detailed summary of the film’s plot and the backstage actions of Fleming and his cast. Though Fleming did not immediately fall for Bergman, she became infatuated with her director by the end of filming.Less

The Gothic Gnome and the Worm of Conscience

Jefferson A. Singer

in The Proper Pirate: Robert Louis Stevenson's Quest for Identity

Chapter 6 details Stevenson’s and Fanny’s initial years in Bournemouth, England, where they purchase their first home. Still suffering debilitating illness, and continuing to question his capacity ... More

Chapter 6 details Stevenson’s and Fanny’s initial years in Bournemouth, England, where they purchase their first home. Still suffering debilitating illness, and continuing to question his capacity for earning a living independent from his father’s support, Stevenson drives himself to write constantly, including taking on “Christmas crawlers”—gothic-style suspense tales for magazines. Facing a deadline, and playing with a story focused on a double identity, he has a nightmare that provides him with the bare images and outline of “Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr Hyde.” The chapter goes on to explore Stevenson’s development of this tale and its extraordinary success. It provides an analysis of the novella’s allegorical elements, demonstrating how its critique of efforts to separate dualistic elements of the personality parallels Stevenson’s own developing understanding of the complexity of identity and moral action.Less

Dissecting the Doctor: Mr. Jekyll, Dr. Hyde, and Robert Knox

Caroline McCracken-Flesher

in The Doctor Dissected: A Cultural Autopsy of the Burke and Hare Murders

This chapter looks at Robert Louis Stevenson's “The Body Snatcher.” Thoroughly subjected by Scotland and by period medicine, Stevenson writes here as if he has at last escaped the clutch of both, and ... More

This chapter looks at Robert Louis Stevenson's “The Body Snatcher.” Thoroughly subjected by Scotland and by period medicine, Stevenson writes here as if he has at last escaped the clutch of both, and thus the traumatizing reach of Doctor Knox. In the Christmas Extra for the Pall Mall Gazette of 1884, he purveys this Scottish horror for the British market. England celebrated his winter's tale in screaming advertisements, and gobbled it up through numerous reprintings. But “The Body Snatcher” is only Stevenson's first visit to the doctor. Trauma demands repetition, and in Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886), Stevenson translates the anxieties of 1828 into the era of chemical medicine—and exports them to London. In The Wrong Box (1889) he displaces them into yet another genre: comedy is the symptom of a broader critique.Less

Conclusion: Friedrich Nietzsche, Walter Benjamin

James McFarland

in Constellation: Friedrich Nietzsche and Walter Benjamin in the Now-Time of History

This concluding section presents three vignettes that indicate various ways in which the constellation of Benjamin's and Nietzsche's writings illuminate contemporary culture. A discussion of Robert ... More

This concluding section presents three vignettes that indicate various ways in which the constellation of Benjamin's and Nietzsche's writings illuminate contemporary culture. A discussion of Robert Louis Stevenson's Strange Case of Doctor Jekyll and Mister Hyde sets the stage for a reading of Charlie Chaplin's “Pawnshop” and a closing section organized around Immanuel Kant's “The End of All Things.”Less

Hollywood: The Breakthrough Years

David Luhrssen

in Mamoulian: Life on Stage and Screen

Mamoulian's second film, the gangster picture City Streets (1932), was based on a screenplay by Dashiell Hammett with Gary Cooper co-starring with Sylvia Sidney. From there, Mamoulian moved on to Dr. ... More

Mamoulian's second film, the gangster picture City Streets (1932), was based on a screenplay by Dashiell Hammett with Gary Cooper co-starring with Sylvia Sidney. From there, Mamoulian moved on to Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1931), in which leading man Frederic March was transformed by groundbreaking special effects from the respectable Dr. Jekyll into Mr. Hyde, a monstrous sexual predator. Restlessly exploring genres, he next made Love Me Tonight (1932), an innovative musical pairing the songs of Richard Rodgers with stars Maurice Chevalier and Jeanette McDonald, and a sophisticated tragic-comedy with Marlene Dietrich, The Song of Songs (1933).Less

Truly Two: Calvinist Anthropology and the Positive Gothic Double from Christopher Marlowe to John Buchan

Alison Milbank

in God & the Gothic: Religion, Romance, & Reality in the English Literary Tradition

Chapter 7 outlines the nature of Reformation anthropology as Gothic in the sense of being under the power of the usurper, Satan, and in seeing God as wrathful enemy before justification by faith. It ... More

Chapter 7 outlines the nature of Reformation anthropology as Gothic in the sense of being under the power of the usurper, Satan, and in seeing God as wrathful enemy before justification by faith. It examines Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus in relation to the Lutheran Faustbook, and as an example of a character who wishes to escape the ambiguities of election in favour of a settled reprobation. Calvinist double predestination is shown to produce a dualist subjectivity, and this is then explored in a series of Scottish Presbyterian Gothic fictions: James Hogg’s Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner, Stevenson’s Jekyll and Hyde and Markheim, and John Buchan’s historical tale of demon-worshipping Covenanters, Witch Wood. It is argued that the protagonists’ problem is not duality as such but an attempt to circumvent it, and that the Calvinist anthropology is not itself the problem, although it requires ‘Anglican’ mediation.Less

Sin and Redemption

Michael Ruse

in Darwinism as Religion: What Literature Tells Us about Evolution

Jesus died on the Cross for our sins, making possible our eternal salvation. Darwinism likewise stresses our sinful nature and likewise offers hope of redemption. The Darwinian evil side to human ... More

Jesus died on the Cross for our sins, making possible our eternal salvation. Darwinism likewise stresses our sinful nature and likewise offers hope of redemption. The Darwinian evil side to human nature is explored in many novels including Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson, Dracula by Bram Stoker, and McTeague by Frank Norris. Thomas Hardy explores sin and degeneration in Tess of the D’Urbervilles and George Eliot in Middlemarch shows how it is possible for people to change their ways and move from selfishness to genuine love and concern for others. Underlying much of the writing is a concern about the possibility of free will in a Darwinian world.Less