tragically over exposed (Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde - Robert Louis Stevenson)

Name: Bryn Pearson

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Product:	Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde - Robert Louis Stevenson
Date:	23/05/02 (202 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: really groundbreaking when first written, fascinating plot

Disadvantages: too many films

The trouble with Jekyll and Hyde is that everyone knows about it - through endless repeats, revisions, parodies and the like it has become part of our consciousness and the book that started it all off has suffered greatly for this. When I first read "The strange case...." I could not help but wonder what it would have been like to encounter that book with no preconceived ideas, no notion of where it might be going.

The plot is far too well known - Dr Jekyll is a good man dabbling in weird science. He invents a potion that turns him into Mr Hyde - a bestial, violent and unpleasant man. The book itself is nothing like as violent as later interpretations, but much darker in its own way, because it was the first time anyone had really explored the possibility that who we may appear to be and who we are are not always the same thing. Everyone has the odd inner monster hidden away somewhere, and this book brought them all into the light.

The book has become muddled up with several key things - firstly with the Jack the Ripper case - a play of the book was on stage at the time of the murders, and the tale became intertwined with the events (many later films have mingled the two a good deal and made Hyde far more violent than he is in the book.) Theories about the ripper became muddied by the book, and it is now very hard to encounter one without being put in mind of the other.

The other muddler is Freud - theorist in the workings of the mind, who postulated the existence of the id, a powerful underlying selfish force that, if unchecked by the superego (the moral, responsible bit) would rampage freely causing no end of harm. Hindsight has made it all too easy to see Jekyll as the superego overpowered by Hyde the impulsive id representation.

Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde also belong to the tradition of the mad scientist tampering with nature - something that really has its roots in the Victorian era, with this text, Frankenstein and oth
ers. As the image of the mad scientist became more popular (think 50s b movies) this became the dominant way of viewing the book.

There is no going back, no ridding ourselves of the impedimenta this book has collected, no viewing the work as the first reader might have done, but it is worth tryig to hold on to the thought that for those first readers, this was a very different text.

I think (and this is just my thought really)That Jekyll and Hyde may have first been presented to the world as social figures rather than psychological ones. The Victorian period suffered a good deal from hypocrasy - for while all claimed that the family was central, prostitution was at an all time high and the poor suffered immensly. A man who might appear to be the modle of social decorum could well turn out to be corrupt and unsavoury on closer inspection.

You can take this book as a literal horror, as science gone wrong and monstrosity unleashed. You can take it as a metaphor, and what you take it as a metaphor for is very much up to you.

I just wish I could have been there to read it before anyone knew what it was all about.

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