Dr. Jekyll and Miss Thang

The BBC has developed a new version of Robert Louis Stevenson's The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and Louise Welsh has written an interesting, insightful essay on the story's continuing allure. Partly it has to do with the way Stevenson suggests Hyde's "unspeakable practices, unnatural acts" without ever actually, well, speaking about them. Not directly.

Stevenson was acutely aware of Victorian hypocrisy -- considering his own rejection of his Scottish Calvinist upbringing for bohemianism (and ultimately, the South Pacific). An early poem of his sardonically mocks "fine, religious, decent folk," prefering instead "the publican and the harlot." Inevitably, though, Ms. Welsh writes, "critics mused on what vice inspired Jekyll to create Hyde to sin for him in proxy. A queer reading of the text is tempting" -- particularly when, despite Hollywood and Broadway's love of putting harlots in the story (along with a threatened damsel -- usually Dr. Jekyll's fiancee), Stevenson included no women in it other than an untempting housekeeper. And one of Hyde's more brutal crimes occurs when an elderly gentleman whispers in his ear late at night by the river "with a very pretty manner of politeness." Hyde clubs him to death.

Such a gay reading, however, has been neatly, and I think, rewardingly anticipated by Graham Robb in his brilliant 2003 book, Strangers: Homosexual Love in the Nineteenth Century:

"Sexuality is not a skeleton key to the work of Andersen, Melville or Kafka. The sense of shame and strange excitement comes from the process of concealment rather than from the object that is being concealed. This is one of the problems faced by any sexually partisan form of criticism. Some writers, like Henry James, avoided the subject so completely that gay readings of their work have to operate on such deep or abstract levels that they could be applied to almost any writer. Others, like Robert Louis Stevenson in Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886), used homosexual references to create an atmosphere of unspeakable and mysterious depravity, but without intending the character to be seen as homosexual."