queer street: the even stranger case of dr. jekyll and mr. hyde’s cinematic adaptations
by Douglas Messerli
Robert Lewis Stevenson Strange Case of Dr.
Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (London: Longmans, Green, & Co., 1886)
Much like Edgar Allan Poe, novelist,
journalist, poet, playwright. and storyteller Robert Louis Stevenson was
fascinated by the “doubleness” of human beings. As his most recent biographer
Claire Harmon notes, even as a child, often sick, he was aware of having “two
consciousnesses” which he described as “Myself” and “the other fellow”—the
first an everyday, common sense sort of being, while the other was irrational
and absurd.
Certainly as a young man brought up in a strict, well-do-do Scottish
Presbyterian household where it was expected he would continue in his sometimes
harshly dictatorial father’s footsteps, his development as an adult into an
atheist bohemian whose last grand adventure was to travel and live, like the
artist Paul Gauguin, in the South Seas where this creator of great romances and
childhood fantasies would write realistically about the corruption and poverty
he discerned there, argues for his own “double” sensibility.
Although his biography argues that there is no evidence that he
participated in homosexual activities, he certainly lived a double life with
regard to his sexuality, during his long courtship and marriage to Fanny
Osbourne being involved with several prostitutes and other women, one of whom
he may have gotten pregnant. Moreover, as a bohemian figure his manner and
dress has been described as “fey,” and he surrounded himself by men, many of
whom were homosexual, his close gay friend, critic Andrew Lang writing of him
that he “possessed, more than any man I ever met, the power of making other men
fall in love with him.” Among Stevenson’s best friends were the closeted
homosexual poet Edmund Gosse and novelist Henry James, as well as the later
openly gay poet, critic, and cultural historian John Addington Symonds,* with
whom he seemed to have a particularly close relationship throughout his life.
And with the recent publication of the correspondence between the Scottish
friends, James M. Barrie and Stevenson, we might well add the author of Peter
Pan to his list of would-be male lovers, Barrie ending one letter: “To be
blunt I have discovered (have suspected it for some time) that I love you, and
if you had been a woman —.”
Another friend H. J. Moors, an American who befriended Stevenson in
Somoa, wrote: “I was struck at once by his keen inquiring eyes, brown in colour
they were strangely bright, and seemed to penetrate you like the eyes of a
mesmerist.”
As Frank Wilson puts it in his Guardian review of the Stevenson
biography: “Harmon surmises that Stevenson ‘can’t have been unaware of the
homoerotic forcefield he generated’ and concludes that ‘he rather enjoyed it,’
given that he was ‘a man with an insatiable appetite for attention and affection.’”
Despite Stevenson’s extracurricular sexual escapades, he appears to have
deeply loved Fanny, even when her later mental state made life with her nearly
impossible. And Harmon does not represent her as a villain, as does Frank
McGlynn in his earlier biographer of Stevenson, as well as Stevenson’s many
friends who most certainly did not like her, nor did she like them. And
Stevenson himself once told a friend that his relationship with Fanny had
rendered him “as limp as a lady’s novel.” One only has to glimpse the aesthete
gay painter John Singer Sargent’s portrait of Robert Lewis Stevenson and His
Wife to comprehend how his male friends might have pictured him, as a
strikingly charismatic, lean, and imposing, apparently closeted gay man
constantly in motion.
The
writer himself described the painting as being “… too eccentric to be
exhibited. I am at one extreme corner; my wife, in this wild dress, and looking
like a ghost, is at the extreme other end… all this is touched in lovely, with
that witty touch of Sargent’s; but of course, it looks dam [sic] queer as a
whole.”
And no matter what how one perceives or describes Stevenson’s sexuality,
there is little doubt that the author knew a great deal of the Victorian gay
underworld and—particularly after the insightful essays by Wayne Koestenbaum’s
“The Shadow Under the Bed: Dr. Jekyll, Mr. Hyde, and the Labouchère Amendment”
(1988) and Elaine Showalter’s “Dr. Jekyll’s Closet” (1992), and my own
perceptions after rereading Stevenson’s original fiction—that Strange Life
of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde not only once more takes up the themes of the
double life but is and was intentionally coded as a homosexual text.
The work was written in 1885, evidently during one of the many spells of
illness throughout his life. Apparently, the story came to him in a dream,
Fanny observing, according to biography Graham Balfour, “In the small hours of
one morning, ...I was awakened by cries from Louis. Thinking he had a
nightmare, I awakened him. He said angrily: ‘Why did you wake me? I was
dreaming a fine bogey tale.’ I had awakened him at the first transformation
scene.” Stevenson’s stepson, Lloyd, who has some critics have observed a
wonderfully dramatic flair for descriptions of his stepfather’s activities that
might reasonably be questioned, describes him coming downstairs in a fever
reading nearly half the book aloud; “and then, while we were still gasping, he
was away again, and busy writing. I doubt if the first draft took so long as
three days.”
It’s often been recounted how Fanny read the full original version and
left comments in the column suggesting that it was actually an allegory he was
telling, which forced him, again according to Lloyd’s dramatization to burn the
original manuscript and rewrite it anew in less than a week. Calmer minds
suggest that there was perhaps no burning of the original, but that it was
revised in the way Fanny had suggested. But actually, the allegorical aspects
of this work seem far less interesting to me than the original fable, and its
dark undercurrents. It’s the allegorical aspects, however, that most seem to
account for the work’s great success and certainly responsible for its many
retellings on stage and screen. Even Showalter gets carried away its the
story’s allegorical aspects as she explores the psychological implications of
the work reaching even to the Nunnally Johnson film The Three Faces of Eve (1957)
and other real and fantasy feminist retellings where I have no intentions of
traveling.
And clearly if it came to him in a dream he certainly had been very much
involved in putting the subject into his subconscious and conscious mind by
attending the trials his former Edinburgh friend, Eugene
Chantrelle, who was convicted and executed for the murder of his wife in
1878. The French teacher had seemingly lived an absolutely normal life before
poisoning his spouse with opium. The prosecution argued that he had, in fact,
committed other such murders both in France and Britain by poisoning his
victims with a favorite dish of toasted cheese and opium.
Surely having this story revealed about a man who he felt he knew would
have fit in with the Jekyll’s notion that we are all two beings in one, the
first a good one who strives for nobility while the other a man of impulses
which binds him to his animal nature, the two bound to one another causing the
deep repressions we suffer within, limiting us from attaining our true
potentials as either beast or saint.
In
her important essay on this work, Showalter suggests another, more possible
influence that was perhaps more crucial in its creating of the understructure
of the work:
“In January 1886, the same month that Robert
Louis Stevenson published The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde,
another strange case of ‘multiple personality’ was introduced to English
readers in the pages of The Journal of Mental Science.
It involved a male hysteric named ‘Louis V.,’ a patient at Rochefort Asylum
in France whose case of ‘morbid disintegration’ had fascinated French doctors.
Louis V.’s hysterical attacks had begun in adolescence, when he underwent a
startling metamorphosis. Having been a ‘quiet, well-behaved, and obedient,’
street urchin, he abruptly became “violent, greedy, and quarrelsome,” a heavy
drinker, a political radical, and an atheist. So far his ‘symptoms’ might be
those of any teenage boy; but what seems to have upset the doctors particularly
was that he tried to caress them. The French physicians attributed his
condition to a shock he received from being frightened by a viper, and they
cured him through hypnosis so effectively that he could not even remember what
he had done.
Stevenson (called ‘Louis’ by his friends), may well have read the case
of Louis V.; it had been written up earlier in the Archives de Neurologie, and
his wife recalled that he had been ‘deeply impressed’ by a ‘paper he read in a
French journal on sub-consciousness’ while he was writing Jekyll and Hyde.”
Showalter, points out, moreover, that Stevenson was a friend of
Frederick W. H. Myers, who discussed the case with English specialists. Just an
importantly, male hysteria was a popular topic of discussion during that year,
another scholar of the subject, Emile Batault observing such men in
Sâlpetrière’s special ward as being “timid and fearful men, whose gaze is
neither lively nor piercing, but rather, soft, poetic, and languorous.
Coquettish and eccentric, they prefer ribbons and scarves to hard manual labor”
(quoted as translated from the French by Showalter).
In
short, the male hysteric is equated with what today we recognize as some signs
of stereotyped effeminate versions of bisexuality or homosexuality.
Indeed, as Koestenbaum and others have made clear, homosexuality was a
common subject among scholars and journalists in 1886, the year the Labouchère
Amendment criminalizing homosexual acts became law, and in which Richard von
Krafft-Ebbing’s Psychopathia Sexualis: eine Klinisch-Forensische Studie (Sexual
Psychopathy: A Clinical-Forensic Study) first presented clinical studies of
homosexual men. The Victorian culture by this time had developed, as scholars
such as Jeffrey Weeks and Richard Dellamora have pointed out, active if hidden
subcultures replete with coded languages, practices, and secret locations. The
“double” which so attracted Stevenson even as a child and is at the heart of Strange
Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde—all resound with his biographers’
evidence of Stevenson’s regular visits
to brothels and special night-world venues of bohemian life, Steveson’s
suggestion of his own impotence regarding relations with Fanny, and his hinted
passionate feelings for his stepson, as well as the issues laid out in essays
such as William Veeder’s “Children of the Night: Stevenson and Patriarchy”
(1988) and Koestenbaum’s “Double Talk: The Erotics of Male Literary
Collaboration” (1989).
More importantly, I would remind readers that unlike the several later
cinematic adaptations, Stevenson’s work is actually an all-male affair. The
narrator and protagonist of the early Jekyll and Hyde text is not the
respectable Dr. Jekyll, writing in his journals, or his friend Dr. Hastie
Lanyon, the first to discover in both the fiction and in film versions the true
identities of Dr. Henry Jekyll and Eddie Hyde, but the lawyer Gabriel John
Utterson who through his cousin Richard Enfield, the testimony and his own
observations of the beating to death of one of clients, Sir Danvers Carew,
information he receives from Dr. Lanyon, and his own observations of his client
Henry Jekyll weaves together the book’s fragmentary and dissociated incidents.
As Showalter observes:
“The characters are all middle-aged bachelors
who have no relationships with women except as servants. Furthermore, they are
celibates whose major emotional contacts are with each other and with Henry
Jekyll. A female reviewer of the book expressed her surprise that ‘no woman’s
name occurs in the book, no romance is even suggested in it.’ Mr. Stevenson,
wrote critic Alice Brown, ‘is a boy who has no mind to play with girls.’”
The
doubling, accordingly, does not involve women or the romancing of them, but
men, who as Jekyll argues are “not one but truly two,” a “profound duplicity”
which results always in “an almost morbid sense of shame.” Jekyll’s goal is to
separate these two and thus free them to each behave in their own manner
without guilt and shame.
Throughout Jekyll’s journal entries, as Lanyon later relates, is the
repeated word “double.”
And,
indeed, the male observers who make up Utterson’s story believe, in fact, that
their friend Dr. Jekyll and his apparent new acquaintance, Edward Hyde, are two
separate beings since Jekyll is a “large, well-made, smooth-faced man of fifty
with something of a slyish cast” while Hyde is smaller, younger, cruel, and
remorseless for his actions. In this story Hyde is no simian-like beast with
hair on his face and hands and large, mishappen teeth, but just the kind of boy
a well-to-do bachelor seeking sexual release might choose, a ruffian from the
streets not unlike the Louis V. described in The Journal of Mental Science,
just the kind of boy Oscar Wilde might have met up with in his hotel visits
arranged by his friend/lover Bosie or in the gay brothels he frequented— what
today we might describe as “rough trade.”
Enfield first encounters Hyde trampling a young girl upon accidently
bumping into her. Outraged by the stranger’s behavior, Enfield insists he pay
him £100 to avoid a scandal—which, I remind the reader is itself a kind of
blackmail—Hyde taking him to Jekyll’s door, where he and Utterson stand as he
tells this story, handing him a check signed by a man whom at the time he knew
only to a reputable gentleman, who he now knows to be Dr. Henry Jekyll.
Utterson immediately presumes what Hyde is blackmailing Jekyll, not only
because of that check but because Jekyll has recently changed his will to make
Hyde his sole beneficiary of his considerate estate. Hyde, moreover, has given
the young man, who is seen regularly entering and leaving Jekyll’s home,
expensive paintings, and other gifts to hang in his Soho apartment. Enfield
describes Jekyll’s home as “Blackmail House” on “Queer Street.” “The more it looks like Queer Street the less
I ask,” he tells Utterson, suggesting he not only does not want to get involved
with arrestable offenses, but that he is perhaps sympathetic with such actions,
having visited “Queer Street”—a late 19th century term, as Koestenbaum reminds
us, implying shady circumstances, debt, bankruptcy, or blackmail—himself. As I just pointed out, furthermore, he has
just described himself as having entering that avenue, if from the other end,
with regard to Hyde. Jekyll’s butler Poole even comments that something “queer”
is going on with regard to his master’s affection for Hyde.**
As
critics have argued, for the readers of Stevenson’s day blackmailing would have
been immediately be perceived, particularly by an urban audience, to be
associated with homosexuality since for homosexual men the Labouchère
Amendment, often described as the “Blackmailer’s Charter,” as sexual historian
Edward Carpenter writes in The Intermediate Sex, “opened wider than ever
before the door to real, most serious social evil and crime—that of
blackmailing.” In Scotland, Stevenson’s homeland, the term, Showalter tells us,
had long been associated with buggery.
When Utterson attempts to discuss the issue of Hyde with his doctor
friend, Jekyll insists that the lawyer drop the matter, while admitting, “I do
sincerely take a great, a very great interest in that young man.”
When on an October night, a servant sees Hyde beating Sir Danvers Carew
to death with a half broken cane, the police contact Utterson, who, recognizing
the cane as the one he had given as a gift to Jekyll, leads them the doctor’s
home. Although Hyde has vanished, they find the other half of the cane, and
when Utterson later confronts Jekyll he shows him a note from Hyde apologizing
for the trouble that he has caused. Since the handwriting is similar to Jekyll’s
own, but written in backhand, the doctor concludes that Jekyll had forged the
note to protect the boy.
Over the following two months, Jekyll returns once more to his sociable
self, but as the new year arrives he begins to refuse visitors as before.
Jekyll’s friend Lanyon suddenly dies after receiving information relating to
his professional friend. But before his death, he passes on a letter to
Utterson to be opened only after Jekyll’s death or his disappearance, obviously
not something that soothes Utterson’s endless curiosity as he determines to
play Mr. Seek in relationship to Mr. Hyde, suggesting as Showalter and others
have wondered that perhaps Utterson’s own life is equally enmeshed with
repression and fantasy, particularly when even he begins to have rape fantasies
of a faceless being who opens Jekyll’s bedroom door, pulls back the bed
curtains, and forces Jekyll to rise and do his bidding, something oddly
prescient in its similarity to Bram Stoker’s 1897 book Dracula and the
role Dr. Caligari performs with his minion / lover Cesare in Robert Wiene’s
film The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari.
As
much as Utterson may see himself attempting to protect his client he is also
subliminally seeking to rape and perhaps sodomize him. He is no more innocent
about what he abjures that is his cousin Enfield. Like the lovestriken Freddy
infatuated even by the thought of Eliza Doolittle in George Bernard Shaw’s play
Pygmalion, Utterson begins to haunt the street where Jekyll lives.
That house and street is itself described by Stevenson in terms of the
human body being sodomized. During Hyde’s comings and goings he is described as
traveling in a “chocolate-brown fog” beating about the “back-end of the
evening.” Hyde enters Jekyll’s house always by the back door which is “equipped
with neither bell nor knocker,” revealing the “marks of prolonged and sordid
negligence.” Hyde’s visits to Jekyll represent a “muddy,” “dark” route.
In
late February, during another walk with Enfield, Utterson starts a conversation
with Jekyll at his laboratory window, when Jekyll suddenly slams it shut and
disappears, shocking and concerning Utterson.
The
narrator imagines that perhaps Jekyll may have contracted a disease from Hyde,
as he puts it, “one of those maladies that both torture and deform the
sufferer, which explains his endless laboratory experiments. Perhaps he is
seeking a drug which will cure “the cancer of some concealed disgrace;
punishment coming, pede claudo,” which Showalter cleverly points out may be a
bilingual pun, the Latin meaning “on halting foot,” while in English suggesting
the pederasty through which Jekyll may have contacted syphilis.
That same critic observes that in his original manuscript Stevenson was
even more explicit about the sexual practices that had driven Jekyll to his
double, quoting Jekyll’s statement that “from an early age” he has become “the
slave of certain appetites,” vices which are “at once criminal in the sight of
the law and abhorrent in themselves. They cut me off from the sympathy of those
whom I otherwise respected.” Showalter argues that even with these missing from
the final version, the work is still filled with associations of “abnormality,
criminality, disease, contagion, and death.”
More importantly, even nearing death, in Stevenson’s published version,
Jekyll is convinced, like so very many gay closeted pre-Stonewall (and some
surely still today) that having been caught in a homosexual situation that they
might still overcome their addiction as if it were merely a bad habit, like the
people who still believe in “conversion therapy.” As we shall see, these
passages are particularly important when we turn attention to the cinematic
representations.
The ending of the original fiction is not so very different from the
scenes in many of the cinematic versions. After the butler Poole visits
Utterson to tell him that Jekyll has secluded himself in the laboratory for
weeks, they break into the back room attached to Jekyll’s house only to find
Hyde’s body dressed in Jekyll’s clothing, apparently having died from suicide.
There they discover Lanyon’s letter to Utterson.
That letter and another from Jekyll reveal what we know early on in the
movies, that the doctor has discovered a way to transform himself into Hyde and
thereby indulge in his evil, self-indulgent vices without fear of detection.
But once having achieved those transformations, Jekyll found no way to control
them, Hyde taking over his body at certain moments without using the formulated
serum. On one of those occasions, far from his laboratory and chased by the
police, he wrote to Lanyon, who brought him the needed chemicals. Observing
Hyde mixing them and drinking the serum to be transformed back into Jekyll so
shocked his friend that his health deteriorated and he died.
As
the unwanted transformations began to appear with greater and greater
frequency, Jekyll ran out of the original chemicals, forcing him to remain in
his studio and finally to take poison to end Hyde’s control of his life.
Even
in this last section of the work, when we might have finally felt that there
will be no further revelations of who Hyde truly was, the terrible secret kept
with the normative-living Jekyll, we nonetheless get further evidence that goes
directly back to the images of the young male hysteric over whom the French
doctors pondered at the beginning of Showalter’s essay. For here, in Lanyon’s
letter we see him absolutely horrified by the hysteria of Jekyll’s request that
he bring to Hyde the needed chemicals, particularly in lines such as these:
“Confident as I am that you will not trifle
with this appeal, my heart sinks and my hand trembles at the bare thought of
such a possibility. Think of me at this hour, in a strange place, labouring
under a blackness of distress that no fancy can exaggerate, and yet well aware
that, if you will but punctually serve me, my troubles will roll away like a
story that is told. Serve me, my dear Lanyon and save.”
Lanyon writes that he “Upon the reading of this letter, I made sure my
colleague was insane.”
And when he actually meets up with Hyde, like
all the others feeling an immediate dislike of him, he is shocked when the
eager boy, so lively with impatience, dares to lay his hand upon his shoulder
and to shake him, certainly a series of events that might remind us of the
shock of the French doctors when Louis V. attempted to “caress” them.
The restrained gentleman, “puts him back,” commenting on the fact that
he has not yet “had the pleasure of his acquaintance,” experiencing an “icy
pang” along his blood in the consciousness of his touch. The language here
seems to be almost contradictory or doubled, the ice opposed to the attack of
anguish or the piercing of pain. Hot and cold, struggle and impassiveness seem
to run at odds through his blood. Here is precisely the kind of “doubling”
which destroys all impulses in the lives of these old bachelor men who cannot
permit themselves the dangers of pleasure, or a simple choice of one or the
other.
And although Jekyll as Hyde momentarily regains his “composure,” Lanyon
can evidently still see “in spite of his collected manner, that he was
wrestling against the approaches of the hysteria.” In short, he recognizes him
still as the hysterical boy who cannot control his hands. The great French
queer director Robert Bresson would speak of just this kind of hysteria
throughout several of his films, particularly in The Diary of a
Country Priest (1951).
Strangely, this man who has doubted all of Jekyll’s seemingly irrational
scientific claims, cannot let go of his curiosity enough to take
Hyde’s/Jekyll’s advice to save himself from witnessing the scientific wonder/terror
he insists upon watching, the transformation of Hyde back into Jekyll.
Obviously, given his inability to assimilate what he perceives as irrational,
he dies with the shock of the experience, just as ultimately so must Jekyll die
since in his gentle, doctorial personae he is one with them—the already dead
men like Utterson, Enfield, and Poole who in resisting all impulse rot to death
in reasoned control of their lives.
*Although earlier in his life, Symonds was
rather closeted, by 1873 in his A Problem in Greek Ethics, we wrote what
was basically a gay history which represented a true eulogy of “Greek”
pederastic love. Symonds argued for what he described as l’amour de
l’impossible (a love of the impossible) which would include homosexuality
in both pederastic and egalitarian male/female relationships. By the end of his
life his bisexuality was an open secret, as he worked from 1889 to 1893 on his
private memoirs, perhaps the earliest self-conscious LGBT autobiography.
**The world “queer” meaning a sodomist or
Uranist entered the English language in the latter half of the 19th century
before the word homosexual existed, so that Lord Alfred Douglas’ father the
Marquis of Queensbury might easily use that word, as he did, in the trial
against Oscar Wilde with fear of being misunderstood.
Los Angeles, November 29, 2021.
Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog
(November 2021).
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