Jekyll & Hyde Galleries

The purpose of my gallery is to demonstrate how racial stereotyping has transition through adaptations of a specific work. In an era where the discussion of racism and stereotypes about certain groups can come off as sensitive for most, I find it important to address these issues to further construct how society should respond to them. Indeed, showing these pictures could be hard for the easily offended but denying their existence only adds to the problem of how racism still affects society. I would like to be clear that my intentions are not to cancel the movies, books, or people…

The idea of Hyde being an ape-like monster is greatly inspired by Stevenson in his words like that of, “ape-like fury,” and “A dismal screech, as of mere animal terror, rang from the cabinet.” These passages not only give the reader a sense of Hyde’s animalistic tendencies but gives ideas to adapters on how best to show the monstrosity of Hyde. Yet where do the connections between ape and monster come from and how did they get linked to the racist undertones of Hyde and his many depictions? One can look back to Darwin in which whose words are almost a blueprint for how Hyde looks and acts…

Depicting Hyde Through the Gaze of Others

Introduction

Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde has become an essential culture text and common trope in potentially hundreds of different films and pieces of literature. There are a variety of aspects that add to the intrigue of the original story, but the one I’ve chosen to isolate can be summarized by this one quote: “He is not easy to describe. There is something wrong with his appearance; something displeasing, something downright detestable. I never saw a man I so disliked, and yet I scarce know why. He must be deformed somewhere; he gives…

Before reading the original text, I was only exposed to one adaptation of Jekyll and Hyde, which was on the ABC show Once Upon a Time, where like most characters in the show, both of them were ripped away from their respective stories and brought into the real. But after reading and also discussing different adaptations of the book, I came to realize a lot of characters I know across media might be inspired by Jekyll and Hyde in some way. And when I did realize it, it was always the characters that a form of split personality, which is what I want to talk about. I will…

Introduction

Hyde is the manifestation of the repressed id. In the original story, it’s evil that needs to be separated and excised from the host. In later iterations, the manifestation of the Hyde archetype changes in different ways. However, the animalistic nature of humans is often explored, and the primal urges that lie underneath our composed, socially acceptable ego is tested. Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde has been adapted hundreds of times, from plays to films, from comic books to video games (Wikipedia). Cultural retellings transformed the method of…

Introduction: The one story that depicts the aspect of a split or dual personality the best way is Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. There have been numerous depictions of the character over the years, some of them good and some of them not very good. A few of the good adaptations of this classic story include the two movies titled Jekyll and Hyde, one from 1920 and another from 1931. The 1920 silent film we did not watch in class but is still worth a watch. The 1931 adaptation was the #1 notable version to Stevenson’s iconic 19th century story.…

POV Shots
The intent of this series is talk and show how POV shots are adaptations of Robert Louis Stevenson’s text from being Jekyll and Hyde films directly or in a completely separate film adaptation. Stevenson’s text has been inspired by many films in the future for having the split personality such as The Incredible Hulk or Fight Club even as well. While those may not be directly adaptations from Stevenson’s text, they display an equal look at the transformation of a man into something else or even dual personalities as well. Such as how Jekyll is a doctor who experiments on…

How do adaptations of Jekyll and Hyde portray the concept of scopophilia using women?

Introduction:

Scopophilia, or the love of looking, is a concept which has been meddled with in the film industry since the latter’s inception. According to Laura Mulvey, Sigmund Freud denoted that males have a tendency to objectify women in their minds, “subjecting them to a controlling and curious gaze” (Mulvey 59). Referred to by Freud as the male gaze, scopophilia can provide some interesting insights into the minds of film directors, cast members, or even the audience’…

Introduction

The story of Dr.Jekyll and Mr.Hyde is resoundingly popular and has taken shape in many forms. Although each form of the story comes from a different angle or enhances different themes, there’s one thing that hasn’t changed since the original: the lowly depiction of women. 

Beginning with the widely known novel Strange Case of Dr.Jekyll and Mr.Hyde, author Robert Louis Stevenson hardly includes depictions of women, showcasing how meek women were seen as in 1886. The only non-man characters were that of a prostitute and a maid; neither of those…

I’ve chosen this gallery of images and annotations to convey that regardless of the director’s intentions, the use of Hyde is as a social commentary, representing whatever the director thought would most resonate as “evil” or “monstrous” to society at the time of each film’s creation. As you may recall from our classes on Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, most adaptations do some form of this, updating their themes and messages to comply with prevailing new thoughts. Hutcheon (2006) says that adaptation is a translation or interpretation of a source text. In trying to interpret or translate Hyde…

The Art of the Gaze: Male Gaze in Famous Renaissance Paintings is a gallery of paintings from the Renaissance created within the 14th to 17th century. The works in this series focus on the ideology of the “male gaze”. The term “male gaze” has developed and evolved through forms of art, film, and other entertainment entities. The “male gaze” is a term coined by  Laura Mulvey who wrote about this phenomena in her paper, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” in 1973. This term encapsulates the way the media describes and depicts women through the perspective of a man. Although…

I’m going to discuss how different television shows have used the chemical or molecular change seen in Jekyll after he drinks the potion and turns into Hyde as a trope. The first image I’m going to discuss comes from a television show on Nickelodeon called Danny Phantom. In Danny Phantom the change is used as an overall concept. However, there are times throughout the series where the trope shows through more than others. The next images come from the television show Supernatural. In this show the trope is used to construct the whole plot for a season. The last…

In Psychology & Religion (1938), Jung explains “Everyone carries a shadow, and the less it is embodied in the individual's conscious life, the blacker and denser it is. If an inferiority is conscious, one always has a chance to correct it.”  

Carl Jung was a student of Freud and carried many similar beliefs, while diverging on others. They seem to be in agreement here. Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde constantly brings up the ideas of suppressed emotions, separate beings of good and evil, etc. Going off of Freud’s teachings, Jung believed in a self-actualized person…

Introduction

The images that I have chosen I feel portray two ideas from the concept of the male gaze as discussed in class and explained in Laura Mulvey’s critical essay: the objectification of women in film and audience identification with characters onscreen, specifically male protagonists. Both ideas were worthy of having an entire gallery of their own, but I feel that they each represent crucial and important elements to understanding what the male gaze is, so I decided to include them both in my gallery. Countless films display this sexual objectification of women despite it…

Jekyll/Hyde in Ink

Introduction:

Illustration provides a means of depicting things that cannot be depicted in real life, and even in films without the use of special effects and intensive editing. The monstrous has been a particular well of inspiration for visual artists because there is so much potential for the imagination to envision the unreal. Before special effects editing techniques in films, ink illustrations could depict the transformations between Jekyll and Hyde, or the combination of the two sides together, without jarring spliced edits or jump cuts. They can also…