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 discuss two...
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...
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’s intended...
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 characters...
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...
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...
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...
