I don’t believe I’m alone in feeling such an attraction to the tale. Stevenson wrote the novella as a mystery. It takes nine chapters for Stevenson to get to the revelation that every modern reader knows already. Yet we keep coming back to it. Adaptations add elements (like the love triangle in the Jekyll and Hyde musical) or change the viewpoints to keep us guessing, however I believe moments like this …
It was a fine, clear, January day, wet under foot where the frost had melted, but cloudless overhead; and the Regent’s Park was full of winter chirrupings and sweet with spring odours. I sat in the sun on a bench; the animal within me licking the chops of memory; the spiritual side a little drowsed, promising subsequent penitence, but not yet moved to begin. After all, I reflected, I was like my neighbours; and then I smiled, comparing myself with other men, comparing my active good-will with the lazy cruelty of their neglect. And at the very moment of that vainglorious thought, a qualm came over me, a horrid nausea and the most deadly shuddering. These passed away, and left me faint; and then as in its turn faintness subsided, I began to be aware of a change in the temper of my thoughts, a greater boldness, a contempt of danger, a solution of the bonds of obligation. I looked down; my clothes hung formlessly on my shrunken limbs; the hand that lay on my knee was corded and hairy. I was once more Edward Hyde.
… are what has allowed the novella to compel us despite the spoiled twist ending.
I’m not a genius literary scholar, or even an ordinary literary scholar. I won’t pretend I have the true answer to the subtext of the novella, whether it’s about good and evil or animalistic urges or if I’d been picking up on some weird sexual metaphor since my preteens. What’s undeniably true is that what our modern society’s art is a little bit more obvious in its treatment of what we find horrible. When we first meet Mr. Hyde in Stevenson’s novella, he bumps into a small child and responds by stomping all over her.
So Alan Moore ups the ante in the League for Mr. Hyde’s behavior by having him commit rapes. While I hate how often League has relied on rape as a plot point (We’ll talk about Lord Voldemort later.), I think the scene after Mr. Hyde rapes and kills the Invisible Man in the second volume is great. I’ve heard criticism of that scene and Moore’s choice, but I think it makes sense that Mr. Hyde, who is the essence of evil in a person, would do something so horrible. There’s a certain irony that he does it for the noble cause of getting back at Griffin for hurting Mina.
This has been the long way around to saying that just like how the original story has been a favorite of mine for years, I really enjoy the character in League. They aren’t the same, of course. Stevenson’s original doesn’t have the same biting sense of humor. But Alan Moore seems to have been more diligent in explaining away the differences between the original novella and what ended up on the comic book page than he was with Mina. Didn’t Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde die? Moore has that explained away. Wasn’t Mr. Hyde shorter? Alan Moore has an explanation for how he made him a behemoth, too.
The latter explanation is my favorite part of the second volume. Moore has Mr. Hyde say Dr. Jekyll had few sins, but that since he has been allowed to grow with no restraints, both in his size and his evil deeds. It goes slightly beyond Stevenson’s story, but if you return to the novel, you can easily see it working. Like when Dr. Jekyll says in the last chapter:
indeed the worst of my faults was a certain impatient gaiety of disposition, such as has made the happiness of many, but such as I found it hard to reconcile with my imperious desire to carry my head high, and wear a more than commonly grave countenance before the public. Hence it came about that I concealed my pleasures; and that when I reached years of reflection, and began to look round me and take stock of my progress and position in the world, I stood already committed to a profound duplicity of me. Many a man would have even blazoned such irregularities as I was guilty of; but from the high views that I had set before me, I regarded and hid them with an almost morbid sense of shame. It was thus rather the exacting nature of my aspirations than any particular degradation in my faults, that made me what I was, and, with even a deeper trench than in the majority of men, severed in me those provinces of good and ill which divide and compound man's dual nature.
Mr. Hyde says in the comic book Dr. Jekyll had homosexual fantasies and didn’t return a library book, but you can see that working as well.
Of course, how does one reconcile Mr. Hyde’s noble actions in the second volume with his monstrous nature? I’ve talked about how much Moore’s version matches up with Stevenson’s novella, but why am I okay with the parts where it doesn’t?
When Moore created his first League team, as well as all subsequent teams, in some way he was forcing other authors’ characters into the stereotypical team roles. Sometimes that works well, like when he makes Mina the leader instead of “the girl.” Other times, like when he makes Orlando the namedropping comic relief, it feels sadly reductive. Mr. Hyde’s role is the strong, Thing-like heavy, and those characters always aren’t as monstrous as they seem to be. Mr. Hyde may be terrible, but he’ll never be as terrible as Hawley Griffin, who has made the choice to fulfill his desires with no consequences out of his own greed, rather than a misguided wish to be pure. So the Invisible Man lives long enough to become the villain, while Mr. Hyde redeems himself in his respect for Mina and his sacrifice, and is remembered with a statue and a park.
It may not be Stevenson, but it makes a great story.
Is This Book Worth Reading? Yes. Furthermore, it’s worth reading even if you know the ending.
Will This Book Enhance My Reading of the League? Yes.
Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and Other Tales (Oxford World's Classics)
For Further Reading:
Next Post: Stops #5-7: The movies Get Carter, Performance and Villain
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