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Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde
Tonight on midnight literary analysis, let’s talk about queerness in Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde.
The thing you need to remember about this story is that when it was first published, no one knew how it ended. Which seems obvious, but everyone today approaches that story having been already spoiled. When you’re reading it for the first time, even if you’re 8 years old
- oh, that’s why I have such a thing for late Victorian horror. Oh. That makes sense. Thanks, Ms. McDonald. -
you’re looking for foreshadowing. You know what to expect. This can lead to the attitude my brother had when reading Dracula for a class - “Stop describing your breakfast and get to the vampires!” (He was mostly upset because he’d wanted to read Frankenstein.)
But you’re not supposed to look at it like that. You’re not supposed to know what’s going on with Jekyll. If you don’t know what’s coming, there’s suspense. The main image through the book is the fog. We get the story second hand, someone tells someone else, someone reads a document, everything is detached and not quite certain. That’s the atmosphere we start with.
It’s a mystery story.
So, you start with bachelors talking to each other. Actually, everyone is a bachelor - women show up as victims, and otherwise not at all. And you start with fine, upstanding Dr. Jekyll, who has a friend.
A friend he’s left all his property to. A friend who can get money off him at a moment’s notice. A friend he’s fond of even though he does terrible things. A friend who’s younger and smaller than him. A friend who looks normal but gives everyone the creeps. A friend who has a key to his house.
Is he blackmailing Jekyll? Is he some black sheep relative? Is he Jekyll’s illegitimate son? Or is he Jekyll’s lover? Even if it’s just blackmail, the question becomes what in Jekyll’s past is so absolutely terrible that he can’t risk the possibility of it coming out, even when he has lots of people on his side and there’s plenty of evidence against Hyde.
For the Victorians, there was a very close connection between blackmail and homosexuality. The 1885 Act criminalizing any “gross indecency between males” was known as the Blackmailer’s Charter.
Jekyll begins to live in fear. He avoids his friends. He suddenly leaves conversations. He stays in his house and doesn’t talk to his servants. And then his former close friend discovers something about him that’s so horrible that he has a breakdown and refuses to see or speak to Jekyll ever again.
Jekyll is not intended to be gay. But the hints of homosexuality - and illegitimacy, and blackmail, and various ‘nameless crimes’ - are used to draw the reader in, and it’s assumed that the reader will easily read between the lines.
it isn’t a gay allegory. It’s deliberately using the idea of homosexuality, which the reader is assumed to already know about, for its purposes.
The narrative resonated with contemporary queer men - J. A. Symonds and Gerald Manley Hopkins both commented on it.
But what it’s actually doing is playing with all kinds of forbidden sexuality to build up an atmosphere of secrecy and darkness, so it can then reveal that in fact the truth is something far worse…
Probably. Of course, if Jekyll’s secret was that he was gay, the book couldn’t have been published.
The thing you need to remember about this story is that when it was first published, no one knew how it ended. Which seems obvious, but everyone today approaches that story having been already spoiled. When you’re reading it for the first time, even if you’re 8 years old
- oh, that’s why I have such a thing for late Victorian horror. Oh. That makes sense. Thanks, Ms. McDonald. -
you’re looking for foreshadowing. You know what to expect. This can lead to the attitude my brother had when reading Dracula for a class - “Stop describing your breakfast and get to the vampires!” (He was mostly upset because he’d wanted to read Frankenstein.)
But you’re not supposed to look at it like that. You’re not supposed to know what’s going on with Jekyll. If you don’t know what’s coming, there’s suspense. The main image through the book is the fog. We get the story second hand, someone tells someone else, someone reads a document, everything is detached and not quite certain. That’s the atmosphere we start with.
It’s a mystery story.
So, you start with bachelors talking to each other. Actually, everyone is a bachelor - women show up as victims, and otherwise not at all. And you start with fine, upstanding Dr. Jekyll, who has a friend.
A friend he’s left all his property to. A friend who can get money off him at a moment’s notice. A friend he’s fond of even though he does terrible things. A friend who’s younger and smaller than him. A friend who looks normal but gives everyone the creeps. A friend who has a key to his house.
Is he blackmailing Jekyll? Is he some black sheep relative? Is he Jekyll’s illegitimate son? Or is he Jekyll’s lover? Even if it’s just blackmail, the question becomes what in Jekyll’s past is so absolutely terrible that he can’t risk the possibility of it coming out, even when he has lots of people on his side and there’s plenty of evidence against Hyde.
For the Victorians, there was a very close connection between blackmail and homosexuality. The 1885 Act criminalizing any “gross indecency between males” was known as the Blackmailer’s Charter.
Jekyll begins to live in fear. He avoids his friends. He suddenly leaves conversations. He stays in his house and doesn’t talk to his servants. And then his former close friend discovers something about him that’s so horrible that he has a breakdown and refuses to see or speak to Jekyll ever again.
Jekyll is not intended to be gay. But the hints of homosexuality - and illegitimacy, and blackmail, and various ‘nameless crimes’ - are used to draw the reader in, and it’s assumed that the reader will easily read between the lines.
it isn’t a gay allegory. It’s deliberately using the idea of homosexuality, which the reader is assumed to already know about, for its purposes.
The narrative resonated with contemporary queer men - J. A. Symonds and Gerald Manley Hopkins both commented on it.
But what it’s actually doing is playing with all kinds of forbidden sexuality to build up an atmosphere of secrecy and darkness, so it can then reveal that in fact the truth is something far worse…
Probably. Of course, if Jekyll’s secret was that he was gay, the book couldn’t have been published.