So. Why are there no women in Jekyll and Hyde?
Would love to hear contributions from those more knowledgeable. But let's start with the best and most obvious answer:
Jekyll and Hyde is a story about men.
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Would love to hear contributions from those more knowledgeable. But let's start with the best and most obvious answer:
Jekyll and Hyde is a story about men.
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I don't just mean the characters are men. It's actually *about* the sphere of Victorian men.
Stevenson's Victorian London is a stuffy, claustrophobic web of professional men, deeply enmeshed in each other's lives but essentially unknown to each other.
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Stevenson's Victorian London is a stuffy, claustrophobic web of professional men, deeply enmeshed in each other's lives but essentially unknown to each other.
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Your profession and your respectability are your key to entering this world, and the price is repression. Stevenson, of course, explores the consequences of that repression.
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Stevenson also explores the role of repressed homosexuality in such a society. Utterson's fascination with Jekyll's "strange preference" could be an example of what in 2018 we call "gay panic".
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The absolute key passage is Utterson's dream vision of Jekyll's bedchamber, invaded by Hyde's homosexuality. It's a thread to the carefully constructed personae of the Victorian gentlemen.
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This is NOT to say that you should describe characters in the text as "gay" -- I think that applies too definite a label to feelings that are mostly unexplored in the text.
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Now, while there are *some* female characters in J&H, they are very minor parts. There's a HUGE gap in the text where women should be: as the wives of these respectable, Christian men.
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Are we really to believe there's no Mrs Utterson, Mrs Lanyon, Mrs Enfield, Mrs Jekyll? I'd love a better contextual view, but instinct is it stretches credibility.
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It's a marked contrast, too, to other key gothic texts such as Frankenstein or Dracula which are very much based around a paradigm of heterosexuality.
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So, why does RLS leave those relationships fully out of J&H?
It certainly heightens the dramatic effect: there is no release valve for the intense, repressive, interwoven relationship between these men. There is no domestic space in which they reveal their true characters.
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It certainly heightens the dramatic effect: there is no release valve for the intense, repressive, interwoven relationship between these men. There is no domestic space in which they reveal their true characters.
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Another idea that I like but can't prove: Victorian readers would just have been TOO scandalised if the emotions and events in J&H were portrayed as involving women or contaminating married relationships.
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But really: I think this a novel about men. About a particular type of male society in which women just don't have a part.
Thanks for reading.
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Thanks for reading.
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