Friday, August 15, 2014

The Jekyll / Hyde Mystique (Essay by Bob Racine)



When I was eight years old my mother, upon my insistence, took me one evening to see the movie “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde” starring Spencer Tracy in the dual role.  Other kids had spoken of it as the latest horror flick not to be missed.  It scared the stuffings out of me and gave me nightmares as well as day-mares for at least a week afterward.  It was hard for me to be alone in our apartment.  I imagined that I saw Hyde standing in every doorway, glowering at me with murder on his mind.  Naturally I did not let any of my friends know about my internal emotional reaction to having seen it.  I did not want to be considered a scaredy-cat.  (I believe that was the slang term in vogue among youth at the time.)  I do not recall that I discussed it with anybody, not even my parents.   

Another fifteen years would pass before I would ever see it again – at a theater in my college town.  By then I was intellectually distanced enough that I could understand what Jekyll in his experiments was up to, what he was trying to prove.  That time, no nightmares, just a studied approach to the projected drama of human transformation, however strange it might still have seemed!  When I was eight I entered into the fantasy of it, the same way I later learned to get excited and shudder as I watched Frankenstein pictures.  It was all a game of make believe, and I knew it.  My cousin and I loved to play the roles of the monster, the Wolf man and Dracula.  We would switch parts and pulled other playmates into playing with us.  But in college I was ready to consider “Jekyll / Hyde” a subject for academic study.  I became aware that a famous author, Robert Louis Stevenson, was behind the creation of the tale, the same one who thrilled us with the adventures in “Treasure Island.”  And over the years as a student of theology I began to ask what this children’s author was up to in writing a book that would terrify the most impressionable of kids, namely me. 

In case anyone reading this is uninformed as to the nature and content of the original book, let me lay it out briefly.  Jekyll is a London physician who devotes himself to research and experiments regarding the brain and how it might be influenced to separate the good side of an individual from the evil or dark side.  He decides to use himself as a guinea pig to test the effectiveness of a drug compound in pursuit of a cure for moral imbalance. He assumes that the good side of him, released from the evil side, can go on to better fulfill its creative destiny.  His experiment is successful.  Too successful!  After much writhing and wrestling with the pain the drug causes, Edward Hyde, this corrupt alter ego that has been dormant in his psyche for all his previous life, is born.  Jekyll’s transformation into Hyde is physical in form as well as mental.  He comes out shorter in height and more gruff and unsavory and violently antisocial in appearance, not recognizable as the man everyone knows.  The doctor is pleased at first that he can change back to his respectable self at any time, a practice that he thinks will keep Hyde under control. 

By night Hyde becomes a prowler and a molester; by day Jekyll is the loving and caring doctor.  But somewhere along the way Jekyll gets hooked on the habit.  Hyde makes an ignominious name for himself and slowly takes possession of Jekyll.  Eventually he is able to put in an appearance without the drug.  The outcome of this calamity is tragic.  A crucial turning point in the story is the murder of a member of Parliament, with Hyde identified publicly as the murderer.  Jekyll knows at this juncture that he must keep his nemesis hidden, and after futile attempts to perfect the drug and restore order to his life and person, both monster and monster maker meet their odious and disreputable death.  

It does not take much brain power to imagine how Stevenson’s contemporaries in the 1880s responded to his writing.  What a shaggy dog tale!  What an absurd scroll of circumstances!  What a spook show!  I am sure some pious folk considered it obscene or blasphemous or heathenish.  After all, the soul is God’s domain; no medical scientist has the right to try to muck around in it!   Whoever heard of a drug that can alter human personality?  Whoever heard of multiple personality or fracturing in any form?  Whoever heard of evil as an issue of the nervous system or related in any way to it?   Is not evil the work of the devil in the heart?  Whoever heard of the notion that the body’s chemistry can be an agent in the manifestation of evil?  Whoever  heard of the facets of the brain having anything to do with moral choice?  Whoever heard of the idea that good and evil uneasily coexist as factors in the human mind or that there is evil in the most righteous of us?  How much agony of mind and heart Stevenson had to go through being so far ahead of his time and braving these assaults I cannot say.  Probably on the order of what Darwin endured.  The two men, after all, were contemporaries.

As far back in my adult life as I can remember, I have been fascinated with this gripping narrative.  The many dramatizations of it on screen that have come about had a lot to do with that.  In fact, the release of the Spencer Tracy version did not mark the first time Stevenson’s tale had been brought to the screen.  John Barrymore portrayed the tragic doctor in a silent movie treatment.  Frederic March took a hand at him in a 1932 version, which won him an Oscar – just nine years before the Tracy one that sent me into those fearful jitters.  There was at least one live TV rendition in the 1950s and Kirk Douglas at a later point stirred up a squall in a TV musical derived from the fable.  My latest stimulus is a new book by a first time author named Daniel Irvine entitled “Hyde,” in which he tells an expanded version strictly from the view point of the monstrous alter ego.  In fact, Hyde narrates it all in the first person.  

Jekyll’s motivation in following his doomed course of action in his secret lab has previously been assumed to be plain curiosity.  He just wants to find out if he can bring about the desired result and pokes around like any scientist until he strikes pay dirt.  But Irvine has broadened the basis of motivation by ascribing to the doctor a torturous childhood, under the domination of an abusing father who forced him to debauch himself and robbed him of his sense of manhood by all kinds of unspeakable means.  This Jekyll strives for a disassembling of his persona as a means of cleansing himself of his alleged taint.  He wants a companionable version of himself from whom he can learn and whose heart and mind he can inhabit.  He begins his experiment not knowing what he will bring forth but hoping for a renewed self.   A process of cleansing and redemption! 

He is dismayed and undone by the emergence instead of a truly corrupt alter ego in Hyde, whom he sees is more evil and unconscionable than he himself has ever been.  And, as I have indicated, he finds Hyde impossible to suppress.  Jekyll even begins to enjoy being Hyde on his secret forages in the dark of the city.  To keep Hyde under a measure of control he pretends to his household and friends that Hyde is a protégé entitled to come and go in his house as he pleases, while he secretly purchases another property for Hyde’s own personal and forbidden use.      

There are points in this new novel when I was made to feel some sympathy for this ugly furtive character.  He believes Jekyll has brought him out of dormancy and given him all this freedom for a purpose but has difficulty at first figuring out what the doctor expects of him.  What emerges is the realization that Jekyll relies on him to do the evil that Jekyll himself does not have the nerve to do.  Hence the murder of the member of Parliament by whom Jekyll feels threatened with exposure!  And, of course, Hyde becomes painfully aware that his survival depends upon Jekyll’s, they being inseparable.      

Actually, the publishers of “Hyde” have included Stevenson’s original fictional work, entitled “The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde,” at the rear of the binding.  It is a very short work, less than a hundred pages in length, and sticking it there poses no problem whatsoever.  It gives the reader a chance to see how Irvine’s writing has emerged from Stevenson’s and to catch up on the evolution of the saga. 

Let me make it clear that, brilliantly written as “Hyde” is, I do not recommend it for the general reading public, only for those as fascinated with it as I am and for those who still thrill to a juicy Gothic mystery.  My purpose here is simply to remind us all that we are more than what we appear to be on the surface.  The human psyche is rigged and we have a long way yet to plow to understanding adequately the nature of life’s dark, shadowy side, in which so many individuals on this planet get trapped.  Some are snared before they are even old enough to grasp what is happening to them.

In a time in our world’s history when senseless killings are taking place – on the order of Va. Tech’s sniper and the insane young man who tried to take the life of the Congresswoman a few years back in Arizona – notable authorities on the subject of insanity and brain chemistry are varied in their explanations of cause.  The rigorous search for scientific answers to the problem of bald evil goes on, as we wait for further disclosures.  In the meantime, we all grope for ways to subdue our own demons.  We experience thoughts and impulses that we would not want to admit to our friends that we house.  We deal with internal foes that are sometimes monstrous and threatening, however respectable our outward reputations might be or our otherwise good intentions.  We are many shades rolled into one.  We are not one dimensional; we are multi-dimensional, and keeping our multi-dimensionality in harness is not a simple matter.  

To read other entries in my blog, please consult its website:  enspiritus.blogspot.com.  To learn about me consult on the website the blog entry for August 9, 2013.

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