THE STRANGE CASE OF DOCTOR JEKYLL AND MISTER HYDE [THIRTEEN FOR HALLOWEEN 2021]

23/11/2021

It is immediately clear that these “appetites” are sensual -and very likely sexual- in nature. Even were it not the intent of the original text, it is very easy to read -especially through a post-modern eye- a parallel between the experiences of Jekyll and LGBTQ men and women in their places of work, families and social networks.

Thirteen For Halloween 2021

The Strange Case of Doctor Jekyll and Mister Hyde

Article by George Daniel Lea

Given the consistent theme of this year's series, readers might be forgiven for finding this subject somewhat incongruous. Of course, outside the works of Oscar Wilde (and a rare few other notables), one would be hard pressed to find examples in classic literature (certainly of the English, Victorian variety) that directly represents or even references LGBTQ issues.

However, scratch the surface, and it's not uncommon to find ruminations on self, socio-cultural taboos, proscribed roles within society etc, all of which are profoundly resonant for LGBTQ individuals. That The Strange Case of Doctor Jekyll and Mister Hyde references them as directly as it does likely comes as quite a shock to many who know the book only by reputation (or via one of its universally less-than-stellar adaptations).

First of all, the common misconceptions: The Strange Case of Doctor Jekyll and Mister Hyde is often -reductively- presumed and presented to be a meditation on the moral dichotomy of humanity; that within even the most civilised, mild-natured and decent of us lurks a shadow self; a face of secret vices, unspoken yearnings and violent appetites that, when given reign, results in nothing but violence and self-destruction.

Whilst this is certainly one facet of the work, it is far, far from the entirety of its import:

I learned to recognise the thorough and primitive duality of man; I saw that, of the two natures that contended in the field of my consciousness, even if I could rightly be said to be either, it was only because I was radically both.

Whilst Jekyll -and the narrator himself- speak often of the “duality of man,” and often refer to Hyde as a manifestation of a secret self, the book goes on to evolve their understanding and shatter that very dichotomy: by the end, it is clear that the distinction between Jekyll and Hyde is not so clean cut, that the two are intermingled in varying quantities. Thus, the dichotomy they manifest is undone: Hyde reveals himself to be little more than a mask for Jekyll; another self in which he is free to indulge “appetites” that are referred to but never described (save by their apparent insalubriousness). That Jekyll experiences and indulges these “unclean yearnings” before he even has the notion to embark on his grand experiment is made clear; Hyde does and feels very little that Jekyll himself does not; the appetites in question and his willingness to engage in them are merely magnified and given free reign in Hyde, who is not anchored by the same social status or expectation of his other self:

The most racking pangs succeeded: a grinding in the bones, deadly nausea, and a horror of the spirit that cannot be exceeded at the hour of birth or death. Then these agonies began swiftly to subside, and I came to myself as if out of a great sickness. There was something strange in my sensations, something indescribably sweet. I felt younger, lighter, happier in body; within I was conscious of a heady recklessness, a current of disordered sensual images running like a millrace in my fancy, a solution of the bonds of obligation, an unknown but innocent freedom of the soul. I knew myself, at the first breath of this new life, to be more wicked, tenfold more wicked, sold a slave to my original evil and the thought, in that moment, braced and delighted me like wine.

Thus, it should be noted that the apparent duality of Jekyll and Hyde is not only a misconception, it is a defence mechanism that Jekyll himself employs to rid himself of responsibility and to indulge however and in what manner he pleases. The wider significance of the story therefore becomes an excoriation on the rigid protocol and etiquette of Victorian society, particularly with reference to its “polite” upper classes, of whom Jekyll is obviously a member.

Whilst the “appetites” Jekyll experiences are never defined, the nature of their presentation renders them something unspeakable and terrible; something that would undoubtedly undo his reputation, his social standing and leave him a pariah amongst his contemporaries. It is immediately clear that these “appetites” are sensual -and very likely sexual- in nature. Even were it not the intent of the original text, it is very easy to read -especially through a post-modern eye- a parallel between the experiences of Jekyll and LGBTQ men and women in their places of work, families and social networks. Even at the time of writing, in late 2021, I know of LGBTQ people in my close circle of contacts who still fear being open about their identities in their social or professional circles for fear of reprisal and censure. This is precisely the place Jekyll finds himself in when he embarks on his grand experiment. Here we have a man who operates in a buttoned-down, highly conformist society, but who is intelligent, inspired, imaginative and highly regarded by all who come into contact with him. The motivation for embarking on his experiment is to separate what he considers his higher self from the lower, to engage a kind of spiritual amputation in which the “darker,” more atavistic and dionysian elements of his nature might be divorced from the milk and honey of the higher.

Of course, this fails spectacularly, ostensibly as a result of some imperfection or contamination of the potion he concocts, but this is only from Jekyll's own self-serving speculation (and, as is made apparent throughout, one of Jekyll's chief flaws is his self-denialism; he refuses to take responsibility for “Hyde,” even when Hyde is an entirely abstract face for his lower nature). The subtler truth is that Jekyll and Hyde can never be separated; they are the same consciousness, emphasised differently, but fundamentally parts and particulars of one another. The effort of one to destroy or deny the other is what leads to the extreme expression and self-destruction that is inevitable from the moment Jekyll establishes a conflict with his own hidden self, the parts of his soul that Victorian society has taught him to deny and suppress.

This, then, is the more sincere reading of the text: as a subtle, subversive condemnation of Victorian moral hypocrisy, a statement, however veiled, that repression of appetite leads to extreme expression thereof and, in certain circumstances, breeds monsters within us:

I had learned to dwell with pleasure as a beloved daydream on the
thought of the separation of these elements. If each I told myself could be housed in separate identities life would be relieved of all that was unbearable the unjust might go his way delivered from the aspirations and remorse of his more upright twin and the just could walk steadfastly and securely on his upward path doing the good things in which he found his pleasure and no longer exposed to disgrace and penitence by the hands of this extraneous evil.

Hyde, despite pervasive misconception, is not the “dark side” of Jekyll; he is what is born when an ostensibly intelligent, healthy and enlightened man is taught to demonise himself, to deny parts of himself that are otherwise blameless. The fact that Hyde's appetites run to the violent in their excesses is an example of how repression and demonisation of elements of ourselves that are fundamental leads to them swelling and congealing in the manner of cancer. Whilst the appetites Jekyll himself secretly indulges -and excoriates himself for- are never detailed, it is clear that they are not violent in nature (Jekyll is the kind of man who would have either harmed himself or turned himself into the authorities were that the case). Rather, it is not problematic to conjecture that his twilight dalliances are sexual in nature, and likely illicit in some peculiar fashion. The unspoken implications of this hang heavy within the text, leaving the reader to determine what, exactly, Jekyll engages in and why it causes him such moral distress.

Hyde is the manifestation of the repressed self; long before Freud and Jung et al would begin their studies into the human psyche, Robert Louis Stevenson dared to conjecture via his fiction that Victorian high society -of which he was a part- seethed and sagged with hypocrisy; that demons were breeding in the minds and souls of his contemporaries thanks to their self-denial, the culture of judgement and repression in which they operated. It is well known now, of course, that beneath the veneer of “polite” Victorian society, with all of its proscriptions and meticulous etiquette, lay a seething hotbed of drug-addiction, sexual license, violence, indulgence and any number of vices that operated in underground arenas, beyond sight and notice of those they might offend by their existence. In that, Jekyll and Hyde are Victoriana; personifications of culture itself, in all of its ambiguities, hypocrisies and neuroses.

But they are also extremely brave -and somewhat scandalous, given the standards of the era- dissections of the human animal: to even talk of appetite in polite Victorian society in such a manner was deemed inapproproiate, especially in the literary circles where Stevenson operated. To have written and published a book such as this which directly comments upon it and overtly lambasts the moral hypocrisies of its own audience is almost self-destructive in its daring and contrariness.

Whilst there is no direct commentary here on the status of LGBTQ people -either contemporary or present day-, the parallels are clear: Stevenson dares to draw a situation in which repression of the essential self, denial of appetites -that are not indulgences, as commonly defined, but essential to psychological health and mental wellbeing- quite literally leads a man to make a monster of himself. Hyde is not some Freudian release of the Id, as commonly understood, but a corruption of it made sick and violent by extreme repression. This is PRECISELY the situation many within the LGBTQ community face in cultures all around the world; it is no secret that we generally suffer more with mental health than our straight counterparts, nor that phenomena such as depression, anxiety and suicidal tendencies are extremely common amongst us. Whilst there are those that desperately try to cite that as evidence of some spiritual and/or innate flaw, the truth is far more prosaic and damning on a historical level: just as Jekyll is taught to demonise and repress elements of himself, so too are we, to the point that many of us suffer with internalised homophobia and/or transphobia throughout our lives. We are conditioned, even in cultures that generally consider themselves more “enlightened” on these matters, to regard ourselves as aberrant and lesser; to emulate our straight and cisgender counterparts as a price for “acceptance” into the meta-narratives of culture, the processes of politics, even the structures and traditions of family.

Jekyll is a peculiarly queer-coded character for his era; a factor that is likely not conscious on Stevenson's part, but conspicuously apt given his status as someone operating on the fringes of what is deemed “society.” Even as Jekyll, the man is something of an enigma to those that know him; isolated, strange and intensely private. Once again, the ethos of a character with secrets, struggling with maintaining a public and private persona, is pronounced and obviously parallel to the dynamic in which many LGBTQ people find themselves. Hyde, on the other hand, is far more public and voluable than Jekyll and extremely at home in the world outside his door. In many respects, Hyde is the perfect creature of the Victorian night; a child spawned not from its diseased underbelly, but the pressures and proscriptions from higher quarters that necessitate that state of disease. Hyde, unlike Jekyll, is also unerringly straight: there is no ambiguity made of his sexuality, which is painted in fairly lurid colours for a character of his era: rapine, violent and predatory, he is as sincerely straight-coded as Jekyll is queer. That in itself lends credence to the notion of Hyde as a child of the repressions that Jekyll has been conditioned with all his life: he is not only id and appetite run amok; he is those factors of humanity mutilated, poisoned and perverted to serve a particular, public expectation:

I have been made to learn that the doom and burden of our life is bound forever on man’s shoulders; and when the attempt is made to cast it off, it but returns upon us with more unfamiliar and more awful pressure.

It's also significant to note that, throughout the book -which is told retrospectively through the accounts of Jekyll's few close acquaintances-, there is little-to-no indication of the truth that is now culturally enshrined and pervasive: that Jekyll and Hyde are the same person. In the story, Hyde is painted as the unsavoury “friend” of Jekyll, who visits him at ungodly hours and seems to have some peculiar hold or sway over the “innocent” doctor. His friends even attempt to stage what would be now called an intervention, proclaiming that, no matter what hold Hyde has over him -what secrets he knows-, it is paramount that Jekyll turn him away and amputates their relationship for the sake of his own mental and physical wellbeing.

Of course, Jekyll cannot comfortably do this.

Even before Hyde becomes a fixture in his life, there is a suggestion of some lurid secret, some second, insalubrious existence that those closest to Jekyll suspect. The almost angelic face he is painted with in the earliest chapters is simply too pristine; a mask of shining sugar-work that cannot help but break and slough away. Again, parallels with LGBTQ experience are fairly clear; like Jekyll, so many of us present a particular face to friends, family and wider society, even when we operate in relative freedom and openness, whilst maintaining shadow lives beneath the surface. The state of repression breeds this dynamic, and creates the kind of internal fracture of self that Jekyll and Hyde have become euphemistic for. Furthermore, early in the story, it is suggested that Jekyll might have prevented his ultimate fate had he stopped at one experiment; he had no particular need to continually recreate the potion that facilitates his transformation, yet he does. There is an undeniable addiction in the release of Hyde, the unshackling of the mind from any strictures of shame or guilt afflicted upon it by a society informed by hypocritical censure and -largely class-dependent- repression.

Yet, were Jekyll not to make that choice, were he to continue in his state of self-denial, it's not beyond the realms of conjecture that the negative qualities Hyde embodies would have festered inside, finding expression elsewhere and -potentially- in similarly destructive fashions.

In the case of LGBTQ individuals, those expressions have, historically, almost always been self-destructive; we turn on ourselves, emotionally, mentally, even physically. Occasionally, we are even given to turn on one another, as a means of expressing externally the proscribed contempt of tradition and culture (the so-called “ex-gay” movement that was incredibly pervasive and lucrative during the early-to-mid 2000s in the US was almost entirely populated by individuals who expressed such dichotomies in their natures).

Now, the conflation of repressed appetite and conditions of humanity with a creature as extreme and self-destructive as Hyde could be read as incredibly problematic; a condemnation of something within humanity itself (triply so when applied to LGBTQ themes and issues. There is more than one reading of the text that might just as well be considered homophobic, transphobic etc. There have certainly been adaptations of the story in the past that have emphasised those very qualities).

However, when one considers that the pervasive reading of the juxtaposition between him and Jekyll is a misapprehension, largely brought about by simplified adaptations of the story for cinema and television, it becomes remarkably less so: Hyde is not human appetite in and of itself, nor is he an expression of any kind of sincere, misanthropic truth at the heart of humanity. Rather, he embodies appetite that is denied, sublimated, repressed and masked for the sake of propriety; the twisted, mutilated, diseased incarnation of all we are and might be, and a part of Jekyll that can never be exorcised, no matter how earnestly he tries; only understood.

I learned to recognise the thorough and primitive duality of man; I saw that, of the two natures that contended in the field of my consciousness, even if I could rightly be said to be either, it was only because I was radically both...

Further Reading

A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET: PART 2 [THIRTEEN FOR HALLOWEEN 2021]

LOST SOULS BY BILLY MARTIN (WRITING AS POPPY Z. BRITE) [13 FOR HALLOWEEN]

IN THE HILLS, THE CITIES BY CLIVE BARKER [FEATURE]

THIRTEEN FOR HALLOWEEN 2021: GONE HOME [FEATURE]

LIFE IS STRANGE [THIRTEEN FOR HALLOWEEN 2021]