Henry Jekyll / Edward Hyde
First Appearance: The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
Date of First Appearance: 1886
Author: Robert Louis Stevenson (1850–1894)
At that time my virtue slumbered; my evil, kept awake by ambition, was alert and swift to seize the occasion; and the thing that was projected was Edward Hyde.
The duality of man is one of those overarching philosophical concepts popularly discussed in psychology classes, used as the context for many a sermon from the high pulpit, and as the theme for scores of horror novels, especially gothic ones, penned by mostly English writers. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) set the nineteenth century’s gold standard for contemplation of the subject, and society churned with fear that the civilization priding itself on its achievements and level of human superiority was only a facade hiding the baseness that lurked below the surface and might at some inopportune moment come snarling to the forefront. The British seemed particularly pent up and susceptible to that fear, and this is precisely the situation put forward in Robert Louis Stevenson’s classic novella The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, a short work with a big impact. As society’s upper crust partook of proper high tea every afternoon with their pinkies raised at an appropriate angle away from their fine bone china teacups, they secretly worried that a gentleman by day might become an evil boogeyman by night. And indeed, he does.
Dr. Henry Jekyll appears on the scene in Victorian English society with its strict moral expectations imposed like a symbolic iron girdle or chastity belt designed to keep pent-up inner passions imprisoned. On the surface Dr. Jekyll is what he needs to be: a well-educated London doctor, a person of highly refined morals, and a respected member of the community who throws dinner parties, gives to charity, and behaves like a perfect English gentleman minding his p’s and q’s. But in the darker recesses of his intellect he is fascinated with the conflict between good and evil, and as a scientist he hopes to find this distinction through experimentation using himself as the petri dish. And what a germ culture he discovers! By swallowing a potion he concocts, Dr. Jekyll’s physical and emotional being becomes hideously contorted as Mr. Edward Hyde enters the arena of human depravity, and a star monster is born.
Dr. Jekyll is fully conscious that his inner demon, who bears another name and grotesquely distorted physical appearance, is an extension of himself. He and Edward are personalities in polar opposition, to be sure, but they are offspring of the same mind. Jekyll confesses to himself, “I stood already committed to a profound duplicity of me,” and he realizes that “of the two natures that contended in the field of my consciousness, even if I could rightly be said to be either, it was only because I was radically both.” The critical element here is that in realizing this, he not only fails to destroy the darker side of himself, he gives in to it. His having struggled to keep Hyde repressed, in fact, had only strengthened his dark persuasions, and in finally giving in to Hyde’s urging to be freed, Jekyll admits that because “my devil had been long caged, he came out roaring.”
The fact that there were real circumstances paralleling the Jekyll and Hyde dual personality certainly compounded interest in the novella’s subject. Stevenson had written an earlier play for the London stage called Deacon Brody, or The Double Life about a real case of a well-respected Scottish church deacon convicted of surprising crimes and eventually hanged. And two years after Jekyll and Hyde, the story was also linked to the White Castle murders, better known as Jack the Ripper murders, occurring between August 31 and November 8, 1888, in a seedy section of London. The actor playing Hyde in the theater’s version at the time was so convincing as the monster that at one point he was even suspected of being the murderer, and because the victims had organs missing there was suspicion that the killer might, like Dr. Jekyll, have been a physician. Fear ran so rampant about Jekyll and Hyde scenarios that anyone could be suspect now that human depravity had been so clearly linked to previously unquestioned members of proper society.
Interest in human nature’s potential for depravity may have had a specific earlier influence as well. Charles Darwin’s work cannot be denied at least tangentially as a force gaining notoriety in popular consumption and may have prompted Stevenson’s turn from his previous fiction’s lighter tone to this much more sinister timbre. Darwin’s theory in On the Origin of Species (1859) and The Descent of Man (1871)—the evolution of man from the lowest life forms, through apes, and finally to humans—shook the Christian world and Wordsworthian Romantic sensibilities espousing the idea that “trailing clouds of glory do we come / From God, who is our home.” If our origins are bestial instead of celestial, then what are we to think about humanity’s animal instincts and potential for evil? What are the stops that may be put on these urges to keep them submerged, or in Dr. Jekyll’s case, what forces might cause them to be released?
The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and other fictional and real forays into the human psyche became the basis for a number of psychological premises. Sigmund Freud invested much of his life’s work on his theory of the psyche and its division not solely cleaved into good and evil halves but into the three stages of ego. Edward Hyde is a perfect representation of Freud’s pure “id,” the part of the mind that controls base instincts. Fitting Henry Jekyll into Freud’s “superego” controlling moral conscience and the “ego” balancing these is a bit more difficult, since he is aware of Hyde but does not control him. Current pop psychology has coined the “Jekyll and Hyde” effect or split personality, and clinical psychology uses the academic label “dissociative identity disorder” for more than one distinct personality found within the same body. Though not originating the concept, Stevenson’s novel certainly popularized it.
Putting clinical psychology aside, Jekyll and Hyde made a lasting fictional splash and no doubt inspired many works to follow, including H. G. Wells’s The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896) and Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897). These and a slew of so-called shilling shockers—what we today label as pulp fiction or mass-market thrillers—fed on sensationalism and fascination with the fear that our socially acceptable veneer could so easily be shattered. To relieve the dramatically dark side of the story, many versions to follow also played with humorous derivatives of Stevenson’s morose tale with stories such as Dr. Pyckle and Mr. Pryde, Dr. Jerkyl’s Hide, Hyde and Go Tweet, Jekyll and Heidi, and so forth, thus creating a spoof on something too dark to dwell on without some comic relief. Even Warner Bros. released cartoons spoofing the Jekyll/Hyde phenomenon.
Whether a story of individual human depravity or a moral cautionary tale about society as a whole, we continue to be fascinated by this macabre and mesmerizing tale, and we can only agree with Dr. Jekyll’s pronouncement that the internal battle between our better angels and our basest demons is “as old and commonplace as man.”
Bibliography
The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886)
Work Cited
Wikipedia. S.v. “Adaptations of Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.” Accessed October 10, 2018. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adaptations_of_Strange_Case_of_Dr._Jekyll_and_Mr._Hyde.
—GS
Ma Joad
First Appearance: The Grapes of Wrath
Date of First Appearance: 1939
Author: John Steinbeck (1902–1968)
Her hazel eyes seemed to have experienced all possible tragedy and to have mounted pain and suffering like steps into a high calm and a superhuman understanding.
The Dust Bowl of the 1930s added insult to injury during the decade of the Great Depression, and no group seemed more displaced by these two economic disasters than the Oklahoma tenant farmers derogatorily nicknamed “Okies.” As the blight on the American agricultural belt worsened, these farmers and their families took to the road with the few belongings they could strap to their beat-up jalopies, and in a sad version of The Beverly Hillbillies they headed to California in search of a new life. John Steinbeck poignantly captures this historical drama in his 1939 novel The Grapes of Wrath, which cast a glaring spotlight on the “have-nots” that the American dream of prosperity had abandoned. Steinbeck focused the novel’s social commentary on one family, the Joads, who become emblematic of the great human migration and the struggle to retain pride in self and family while their means of subsistence crumbles beneath them. Ma Joad rises out of this saga as one of the most memorable mothers in fiction.
The matriarch of the Joad family is a simple, uneducated farmer’s wife living quietly in the shadow of her menfolk. She keenly understands and respects the burden put on males as head of the family, and she has faith that as long as the men don’t break under the pressure, the family will be all right too. Ma senses, though, cracks forming and recognizes that such strife can cause even good people to lash out, so she and the other wives facing similar calamity leave “the men alone to figure and to wonder in the dust.” These husbands and fathers scratch in dirt that no longer yields crops, will give no answers, and acquiesces to the winds buffeting both the people and the soil from which they have come. Ma and her community of women obediently support their men and quietly dismantle their homes and the life they have known.
As one event followed by another erodes Pa Joad’s control over the family’s destiny and causes him to falter where he needs to be strong, Ma steps in with a swiftness that forever alters the family dynamics. When needed, she wields authority with a cast iron skillet, a car jack handle, or a sharp tongue to safeguard her family, and she just as passionately displays her gentle, humanitarian spirit by feeding other family’s hungry children, nursing the sick, and assisting the downtrodden. Ma’s selflessness as she eases Granma’s death in the back of the moving truck while shielding the family from this trauma is only one among many illustrations of her sheer determination, deep love, and true grit.
Ma Joad doesn’t have a first name in the novel; she is simply Ma, the “citadel of the family, the strong place that could not be taken.” Like forged steel, the fires of tribulation she faces seem to burnish her character rather than destroy it through the cascade of calamity she suffers: the initial loss of the homestead; the gypsy-like existence on the road; the deaths stacked nearly back to back—the family dog the first day out, swiftly followed by the deaths of Grampa, Granma, the Reverend Jim Casy, and finally daughter Rose of Sharon’s stillborn baby; and added to this horrific compilation, the desertions of son Noah and son-in-law Connie, her son Tom’s forced flight after he commits murder while fighting for the migrants’ cause, and Pa’s collapsed authority under the weight of these losses. Through it all, Ma Joad stands as the family’s pillar and toward the end of the novel delivers her life-affirming proclamation: “Woman got all her life in her arms . . . it’s all one flow, like a stream, little eddies, little waterfalls, but the river, it goes right on. Woman looks at it like that. We ain’t gonna die out.”
Ma’s travails do more than just engage readers on an emotional level. Her strength draws sympathy for the litany of misfortune engulfing the Joad family and other fellow migrants along the famous Route 66 or in the camps known as Hoovervilles that served as temporary pit stops for a moving army of the disenfranchised. Steinbeck’s poignant rendering in real time of a national crisis brought down to the personal level gained much attention and garnered important political support in high places. While reading The Grapes of Wrath, Eleanor Roosevelt was particularly drawn to Ma’s character and heralded her in the First Lady’s popular My Day column by saying, “Somehow I cannot imagine thinking of ‘Ma’ without, at the same time, thinking of the love ‘that passeth all understanding.’” Nor did Mrs. Roosevelt stop there. She championed the marginalized masses throughout the nation, supported her husband’s platforms for relief, testified in Congress about the plight of migrant workers, and helped encourage the passing of labor law reform. On the surface, Ma Joad and Eleanor Roosevelt have almost nothing in common, but in a remarkable way Ma dominates her circle of influence with the same vigor the nation’s First Lady did, and with much less to draw on for the task. Noted Steinbeck biographer Susan Shillinglaw goes so far as to say what national politics really needs in the twenty-first century is Ma Joad in the White House and that “President Ma would be a beacon for all women and all men.” Now that would be some sort of populism!
Early in the novel Ma suggests to her son Tom, whose inability to tolerate injustice is both his cross and his crown, that if everyone got mad in unison the power of the people might be enough to topple the powerful. Steinbeck underscores this socialism in making the Joads’ experience a synecdoche of a more sweeping nature, even a righteous cause. The opening lines of the Civil War song “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” from which the novel takes its title, suggest conflict no less epic than “the coming of the Lord” who in his anger at the world’s state “hath trampled out the vineyards where the grapes of wrath are stored.” That California’s vineyards are one source of the conflict creates a doubly delicious symbolism.
Steinbeck’s tour de force hit such a collective nerve that it went from a first printing and several reprints to a major motion picture release in less than a year. John Ford’s adaptation starring Henry Fonda is considered one of the great movies of all time, and Fonda’s star power no doubt helped the film’s popularity as a worthy tribute to the Pulitzer Prize–winning novel consistently listed on virtually every Top 100 reading list. But Ma is the true star, in both book and film, and her “We’re the people that live. . . . We’re the people” speech near the end is the emotional epiphany that solidifies her as the heart and soul of a fractured community. She is the fictional embodiment of the crisis, and while the novel leaves Tom Joad stealthily fighting for the people and likely becoming a martyr for the cause, Ma Joad is holding the family together and marching them quietly onward.
Bibliography
The Grapes of Wrath (1939)
Works Cited
Roosevelt, Eleanor. My Day. June 28, 1939.
Shillinglaw, Susan. “75 Years after The Grapes of Wrath, We Need Ma Joad in the White House.” Washington Post, April 18, 2014.
—GS