Imps and Snatchers and Spirits, Oh My! (The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Part 2)

In Part 2 of our discussion on Robert Louis Stevenson's The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, editor Caroline Levine discusses the lasting cultural impact of the novella, common challenges to teaching it, some of additional short stories by Stevenson which she included in the Norton Library edition, and more.

Caroline Levine is David and Kathleen Ryan Professor of the Humanities and Professor of English at Cornell University. She has written three books: The Serious Pleasures of Suspense: Victorian Realism and Narrative Doubt (2003), Provoking Democracy: Why We Need the Arts (2007), and Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network (2015). She is the nineteenth-century editor for the Norton Anthology of World Literature.

To learn more or purchase a copy of the Norton Library edition of The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and Other Writings, go to https://seagull.wwnorton.com/JekyllAndHydeNL. 

Learn more about the Norton Library series at https://wwnorton.com/norton-library.

Have questions or suggestions for the podcast? Email us at nortonlibrary@wwnorton.com or find us on Twitter @TNL_WWN.

Episode transcript at https://seagull.wwnorton.com/jekyllandhyde/part2/transcript.

Transcript

[Music] You are listening to the Norton Library Podcast, where we explore classic works of literature and philosophy with the leading scholars of the Norton Library, a new series from W.W. Norton that introduces influential texts to a new generation of readers. I'm your host Mark Cirino with Michael Von Canon producing. Today we present the second of our two episodes devoted to Robert Louis Stevenson's The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and Other Writings as we interview its editor, Caroline Levine. In part one, we explored Robert Louis Stevenson's biography, his writing of this novella, and its historical context. In this episode, we learn more about Caroline Levine's history with this work, her favorite line from the novel, the challenges it poses to new readers, and her Jekyll and Hyde hot take. Caroline Levine is David and Kathleen Ryan Professor of the Humanities at Cornell University. She has written three books: The Serious Pleasures of Suspense: Victorian Realism and Narrative Doubt (2003), Provoking Democracy: Why We Need the Arts (2007), and Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network (2015). She is the nineteenth-century editor for the Norton Anthology of World Literature. Caroline Levine, welcome back to the Norton Library Podcast!

[Caroline:] So nice to see you again, Mark, and hear you!

[Mark:] Nice to see you again, too. It was great to talk to you about Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and I'm looking forward to learning more about the novel and your association with it. The thing I wanted to start with first is: I'm holding the Norton Library edition of The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and Other Writings. Is the cover thematically important? Does it evoke something for you? I always love the job that the Norton Library does on these book covers. 

[Caroline:] Yes, they're mostly these blocks of color, right? So how much does color carry with it? Well, in this case, a lot. Because you've got this kind of red writing which suggests blood and gore, and you've got these dark colors so it definitely has the kind of creepy connotations that you would want for this book. 

[Mark:] So like the charcoal gray? I'm seeing that dominates—

[Caroline:] Yes, the charcoal gray rather than black, yes. 

[Mark:] Right, it's sort of the gray of our consciousness or something along those lines. Anyway, it's a striking, striking cover. When did you first read this novel? You mentioned that, as a younger reader, you sort of avoided male-dominated fiction, but when did you first come upon Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde? 

[Caroline:] I don't remember, and I think that's not surprising because the story we think we all know it before we read it. When I reread it in my adulthood, I was probably in my 20s, so I think I had read it before then although I don't remember. I was writing a book about suspense, and I actually thought, “Oh, this is a brilliant, brilliant book about the use of suspenseful techniques,” but it doesn't work anymore because everybody knows the end of the plot. So, I kind of have always wanted to write about the fact that you can't read it for the first time. It's just because we all know, so there is no first time with Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. 

[Mark:] That's a great point. You know, when you're thinking about literary texts that everybody thinks they know, whether they've read it or not—you know, “oh, I know what Romeo and Juliet is about”—are they usually right about, if they say, “oh, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Yeah, that's where there's like a good guy and a bad guy. You know, it's a split personality”? Is it basically right, or is the common perception of a Jekyll and Hyde story—or a Jekyll-and-Hyde character—inaccurate? 

[Caroline:] That's such a good question. I do think that one of the things that gets forgotten when we use it just in ordinary conversation, like we'll refer to a person as having like a Jekyll-and-Hyde personality, like they're really great on the surface, but then they have these moments when you see this ugly side comes out that Stevenson is actually really interested in splitting those into two people. So it's not two sides of one person, but what does it mean to have two separate bodies that act separately in the world, you know. So, the fact that Hyde actually has a different body—he's smaller and younger than Jekyll— is part of the story. If you think about multiple personalities, like are they actually different people, or are they two sides of the same person? 

[Caroline:] You started thinking about this novel in that in your work on suspense. What has continued to sustain your interest in this novel? 

[Caroline:] Like all of my favorite works of literature, every time I read it I see something new in it; it really is dense and rich with reading possibilities. Sometimes people are kind of surprised that you can keep writing literary criticism about the same books. You know, what new is there to say? but one of the things about Jekyll and Hyde is that it keeps tapping into new parts of our discussions and conversations that we're having today. When I first read it, I thought mostly about science and the kind of an imperialism and the ways that Stephenson is drawing those questions into the novel, but then now we're seeing this huge revolution in gender identity going on around us, where people are talking about having a presentation that's feminine but feeling really masculine inside or vice versa. So, I feel like Stephenson keeps speaking to us in new ways and what will it be next, you know, in the next 10 years how will he speak to us in any way. 

[Mark:] Are there common challenges to reading this book? 

[Caroline:] I always find that, when I teach it, I am trying to get my students to imagine themselves into a mindset that doesn't know the plot already because I want them to see how carefully it is constructed and how there are all these suggestions of possible, you know, is it blackmail? —that's one of the ones that's explicitly suggested in the text. Is it a sexual relationship between men? Is it some kind of father-son relationship?—because at some points Hyde is mentioned in the will and then he seems to seems to kind of run away with the plot that his father is trying to impose on him, you know. So like, trying to pick up on the pieces when we already know the answers so we know those are false leads is one of the challenges.

[Mark:] Year, you have to get them to unlearn what they already know and how sort of be the state that it would have been in 1886. 

[Caroline:] Yeah, even if we don't think about it—I don't necessarily want my students always to just picture what it's like to be the first reader of a book because, I think, books continue to speak to us later, and that's okay. But with this particular one, I think, you miss a lot if you feel like you've already read. 

[Mark:] The genius of the plot. 

[Caroline:] Yes.

[Mark:] Do you have a favorite line in Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde? 

[Caroline:] I do. There's a lot of great lines, and Stephenson is a great stylist. I love his sentences that go on and on and on. They're not hard to read, but boy are they complex. Right at the beginning of the story, Mr. Enfield, Mr. Utterson’s friend—he kind of walks around town—is telling the story of seeing Mr. Hyde, and it's a terrible violent episode where Hyde tramples a little girl in the middle of the night, and then everybody's trying to figure out what to do with him because the girl is actually okay. She's unscathed, so how should he be punished? And all these men who are watching, Mr. Enfield and then the doctor who's on the scene and some eyewitnesses, are trying to figure out what to do. They decide that they want Mr. Hyde to kind of pay a fine to the girl's family, and they the banks aren't open, so how are they going to get him to pay a fine? And Enfield says, “So we all set off, the doctor, and the child's father, and our friend and myself, and passed the rest of the night in my chambers; and next day, when we had breakfasted, went in a body to the bank.” I love this line for a bunch of reasons. One is like what are they doing spending the night together and having breakfast together? Like, are they talking? Are they chatting?

[Mark:] That sounds uncomfortable. It sounds like a tense situation. 

[Caroline:] A tense situation, which is not given any details. But then the idea that they went in a body to the bank. I just love this idea of all these upper-class men forming one body. So, you've got Jekyll who splits into two, but then you've got this idea of a whole class of people who are really just one person. 

[Mark:] Why do you think of all the infractions that could have happened running down a little girl in the street, like triggered this whole sort of discovery? 

[Caroline:] It is such a weird scene, I have to say, because the streets are completely empty. Mr. Enfield’s coming back from a night in the town, and there's nothing anywhere, and suddenly a little girl is running across the street. So, what is a little girl doing running across the street at 3 o’clock in the morning in a totally empty—or 2 o'clock, whatever it is in the morning—in a totally empty London, which is also, by the way, never empty? And we know that partly because, you know, we're told about people sleeping in the streets even in this book, and then Hyde is coming from the other direction, and somehow the narrator can see them coming from two directions, which is also interesting. So, they can't see each other, but the narrator can see both of them. Mr. Enfield is the narrator, and then they run into each other and Hyde just tramples over the body. So, we can hear the little girl screams. Part of what's brilliant about it is how incredibly creepy and eerie it is to imagine somebody just continuing to walk over a little girl's body, and she's kind of the ultimate innocent victim, right? A woman on the streets at that time of night is going to bring to mind a sex worker. So, chances are Stevenson wants to avoid that connotation, but it's also just so eerie to imagine these empty streets where there's nobody and suddenly there's this huge violent conflict. I mean, when Mr. Hyde commits murder later, it's the same. It's this beautiful night where there's nobody on the streets, except for Mr. Hyde and the person he murders and an onlooker. So, again it's a strange version of what urban experience is like. 

[Mark:] Yes, right. So, Stephenson could have chosen a more violent episode, but he actually couldn't have chosen a more violent one because there's something really violent about that, which certainly sets up the violence that is to come. 

[Caroline:] Yes, and I think you're right at kind of unexplained violence, right? The girl has done nothing to him 

[Mark:] Doing it just to do it, right? 

[Caorline:] Just enjoying it. 

[Mark:] So, I want to brazenly nominate a sentence from the novel that's totally unfair to you, Caroline. But just if you have a reaction to this. This is from Chapter 10:  “With every day, and from both sides of my intelligence, the moral and the intellectual, I thus drew steadily nearer to that truth, by whose partial discovery I have been doomed to such a dreadful shipwreck: that man is not truly one, but truly two.” Can you locate that observation for us and how that functions in the novel? 

[Caroline:] This is Dr. Jekyll the scientist, or he's telling us about his scientific interest in trying to figure out what humans are made of, or particularly in this case, man, and I think it’s not wrong to say man; he's interested in men's psyches. In particular one of the things I love about it is that in that sentence he's already split into two. He talks about the moral and the intellectual. Well, so far we've had a different split, which is the moral and the immoral, or the moral & the conscience and the untethered, id, and so we're getting already another splitting. So when he says we're two, it raises the question that the whole novella raises, which is, are we just two, or are we actually one in a bit or are we three, you know? I guess going back to that sentence—“we went in a body to the bank.” That's like five men who are one, so are we actually one? No, but then what are we? 

[Mark:] So, one can be more than one, and more than one can be one. That's fantastic. That's excellent. You mentioned that one of your motives when you're teaching this book is to sort of get them to sort of look at this from a fresh vantage point. Are there any other techniques you would recommend to people teaching this novella? 

[Caroline:] It’s a great text to teach in lots of different ways, and one is that Stevenson was very committed to compact writing, so it stuffs a lot into a small space. So, I find that close reading the most, you know, traditional technique in some ways in literary classrooms, but is also actually very hard to teach is gray with Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde because any given sentence like the one that you just read me is rich with the thematic patterns that are running through the whole text, so I think the danger always with students in the classroom who aren't maybe super into close reading and haven't done a lot of it. It’s that they want to make a simple lesson come out of the book, right? They want it to just be, you know, it's all about how we're split into one and two, and I think if you look on the level of the sentence, it immediately opens up other questions about that the way through. So, I think close reading a sentence and thinking about the logic of one, two, and many can get you all kinds of places, more complex than the simplistic reading. 

[Mark:] Okay, yeah. The value of close reading. That's a good one. Caroline, do you have a hot take, something counterintuitive about Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde that will shock the literary world? 

[Caorline:] I don't have a hot take in the sense that I've learned a lot from other scholars, so part of my reading of the book comes from reading all kinds of other brilliant people who've done great research on it. But I do think that I got increasingly convinced in doing the research for this Norton Library edition that Stephenson is really critical of a particularly masculine culture. That's not what we usually say about him, especially because he's famous for his boys’ adventure novels: Treasure Island and Kidnapped. We don't usually say, “oh, he's really actually a feminist writer.” I mean, I don't think anybody has quite come out and said that, but the fact that the women are victims of violence and are outside of the circle of men that has this power to do tremendous damage feels to me like, “oh, that's actually a perfect model for a kind of critical consciousness,” right?  Stevenson's bringing us inside a social network that's of these elite, wealthy men who protect each other and take care of each other and who don't seem to involve women in any kind of decision-making. And, boy, is that a disaster, right? That's a catastrophe. So, I think my increasing conviction that Stephenson is actually really interested in taking a part, a particular version of masculinity has just gotten more, more, and more to be—I'm more and more persuaded of this.

[Mark:] Yeah, excellent. We also are curious on the Norton Library Podcast how these classic works of literature have been repurposed in different forms? I think for Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde it's a bit of an unwieldy question because, as you mentioned, most people probably are aware of the story from maybe other forms before they sit down and read the novella. Are there some adaptations that are of particular interest to you? 

[Caroline:] Well, I think the fact that it's been adapted a gazillion times is its own fascination, right? Like what is it that keeps its hold on our culture that we want to keep retelling this story? It's just a sign of the afterlife of it is a sign of its uptake, right? People are just thinking and rethinking, constantly playing with this story from children's books to—there's a musical of it, right? So, there's just like all these different forms in media that have taken up this story. You know what fascinates me especially now as we are thinking in our society so much about sexuality is the way in which most versions of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde kind of add women into the plot as heterosexual partners, so they take out all of the implications, the connotations, in the story that there's sexual erotic relations between men going on, and they give Dr. Jekyll a wife or Mr. Hyde a fiancé. And that's just been true through the 20th and into the 21st century now it's not wholly—I mean there's so many, so many adaptations that I can't speak for them because I don't think there's anybody who's seen or read all of them. But it seems so interesting to me that the part of what I think Stevenson is really interested in which is this society of men who rely on protect and are imbricated in each other's lives and keep each other's secrets is not what we have taken up in the 20th and 21st century.

[Mark:] Of all the Cinematic adaptations, is one definitive?

[Caroline:] Gosh, no. I mean there's been several every decade as far as I know. The first one is in 1912, so I don't think that there's a definitive one. A lot of them—I'm kind of mushing them together in my memory which is why I'm definitely not coming up with one for you—but there's been a lot of playing with a sort of atmosphere of London. There's a lot of good cinematography around kind of fog and city lights and that kind of thing, which is, I think, something that a lot of directors love to play with, so I think it's not only the plot but also some of the atmospherics that have drawn film directors in particular. 

[Mark:] And do you hear music when you're reading this novella or teaching it? Anything come to mind? 

[Caroline:] It definitely needs a creepy score. I mean, there's no question about that that it needs your best composer on the creepiness. I don't have a particular song in mind for it, but maybe you do? 

[Mark:] I'm getting a really good nomination from producer Michael Von Canon, who says People Are Strange by The Doors. 

[Caroline:] Oh, that's a great one!

[Mark:] Let's include that; that's great. So, this is one of the rarer Norton Library editions where you include ancillary material from Stevenson's writing career to sort of enhance the main narrative, and I'm wondering, first of all, if you could talk about that strategy, that editorial strategy, and also maybe choose one and explain how it enhances Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde? 

[Caroline:] It was my pleasure to be able to choose a few stories to go along with this one, and I was really fascinated by the fact that Stevenson had written other creepy and ghost stories before Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, so we've included a couple of those. One that's about a body snatcher, so people who would provide dead bodies to medical schools for anatomical education but were often accused of murder and sometimes were murderous. So that's one that kind of is in the background, and Stephenson actually wrote this story about body snatchers and was so creeped out by it himself that he waited to publish it until he needed money because he was afraid.

[Mark:] He did such a good job.

[Caroline:] Yeah, he was afraid to creep everybody out, and then “Markheim,” which is a story that borrows pretty clearly from Dostoevsky, is a much more artistic version of the split self, where somebody feels guilty but also commits a crime. So, he's kind of practicing. You can see him thinking about what is guilt, who are we when we commit crimes, what leads people to murder, for example, right? And how does the rest of our selves respond to that, so he's already working out those questions. They're two great stories. The third one that I included is very different, and I included it on purpose. It's called “The Bottle Imp.” It's after Stevenson wrote his most famous works, and it's not widely known. It's a story that draws on Hawaiian folklore and also German folklore and kind of combines traditions about a bottle which—it's an old story you might know it already, but it's a little like Jekyll and Hyde to us—where you have a precious object but the next you have to sell it, and the next person has to pay less for it. So, by the time you get down to a penny, how do you pay less for the bottle than you have? It’s a creepy story in the sense that there's a kind of terrifying curse on the person who has this bottle, but it shows Stephenson’s experimenting in lots of ways with new kinds of characters and themes. There's a woman character in it, who is an important part of the plot as well as the she's an object of love but also a self-sacrificing and good person, so that's like a Stevenson’s experiment, but also I think what interests me most about it is that it is considered to be the first literary text published in the Samoan language, and Stephenson actually, with the help of a British missionary who knew Samoan, translated it and had it published in a Samoan newspaper. One of the things that he was experimenting with, which is very rare for European writers, is to think about languages from around the world that can think other thoughts right where the language itself doesn't have the same structures, and he's also trying to think about what's universal. You know, what can travel from Germany and Hawaii to Samoa and still be a good story. 

[Mark:] So the title of that piece is “The Bottle Imp.” What does he mean by imp? Because I'm thinking of Edgar Allen Poe's Imp of the Perverse, and maybe Poe and Stevenson would have been kissing cousin in this regard, but what is imp? 

[Caroline:] Yes, the Imp actually, this gets us back to Jekyll and Hyde, kind of lives inside the bottle. There's an evil demon inside the bottle, and he will give you— I say he; I think he's a he—he will give you whatever you want, but then you have to sell on the bottle, or you'll be cursed. So, the Imp is an imp [laugher], and very—I mean, Stephenson definitely read Poe and was a big fan, so it might be an exactly an illusion that you're supposed to pick up on. 

[Mark:] So, is that consistent with the notion the Jekyll-and-Hyde notion that there's a little spirit in us, a little instinct or impulse, and it could be good, or it could be bad? 

[Caroline:] Yes, I love that reading, and in in a sense the two main characters in “The Bottle Imp” are both good. They're both generous, kind people. But you can't completely separate yourself from Evil; this is the problem. And desire, which is one of the things that Keawe, the main character, has is in Stephenson’s always connected to the possibility of doing bad, right? We can't not have desire, right? That's part of who we are, even if we just include a desire to read a good book, right? Which is what Stephenson is providing for us. We're none of us free of desire. 

[Mark:] There's the moment in “The Bottle Imp” where Keawe is talking about the house: “But with the house I am saddled, and I may as well take the good along with the evil.” So, is this throughout Stephenson's career that you have this good and bad, and, you know, we started our first episode when you said Stephenson had quarrels with organized religion and with parental strictures and so forth, so good and evil are those psychological terms to Stephenson, or are they social? How do we summarize all of this? 

[Caroline:] Yeah, what a great question. I think you're right. I think it goes back to Stephenson's childhood, when good and evil were kind of—I was going to say beaten into him. I don't know if he was actually beaten, but there was a really clear division between those two in the culture of his household, and he spent the rest of his life trying to think about that, right? What is good, and what is evil? Are we able to get away from Evil? It was, you know, for Stephenson the idea of original sin would have been very much part of his childhood training, right? To think about what it's like to be born sinful, so what does that mean? Can you ever get away from it? Can you repress it completely? Does it mean that humans are, like even beyond a religious context, as you say, like psychologically or scientifically made up of these different impulses? So, he's reading widely, and he's thinking with all these other people and all these other disciplines. I think he's as…I was going to say confused—he's not confused; he's as searching as you and I might be. He doesn't know the answer, but he's trying to figure it out, and all of his writing gives us some sense of how complicated that question is. If you think about sort of the classic struggle between good and evil being a relatively simple story, like, you know, Star Wars is the one that comes to mind: something where you have like the good forces and the evil forces. Stephenson really won't let us sit comfortably with those separations. 

[Mark:] Does Stephenson expect us to have any empathy for Mr. Hyde or people who are “evil” or “bad”? Can we read it now and say, well, “there's somebody who's artificially created, and he can't help it, and we have explanations for this”? Are we more empathetic in the 21st century, or is this really a binary as you might have outlined it? 

[Caroline:] I think he goes to some trouble in the story to make it hard to sympathize with Hyde. I think if we stood back from it, we might be able to, as you just did, kind of create a—and I think other people who've adapted it have sometimes done that, have made him more sympathetic, but he's never appealing [laughter]. 

[Mark:] That little girl, you know, that's not something easy to empathize with, that little running down that little girl. 

[Caroline:] And if we ever had his version of events, which we never do, of sort of what those appetites and pleasures are early on. So, we start with the brutal killing of the little girl. We don't start with him thinking, you know, “Ouf, I just like another glass of wine with dinner or something that you and I could relate to.” He never gives us that, so we just get the ugliness of Hyde.

[Mark:] Caroline Levine, thank you so much for coming on the Norton Library Podcast to discuss your edition of Robert Louis Stevenson's The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and Other Writings. Thanks so much, Caroline.

[Caroline:] It's been so much fun, thank you, Mark.

[Mark:] The Norton Library edition of Robert Louis Stevenson's The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and Other Writings, edited by Caroline Levine, is available now in paperback and e-book. Check out the links in the description to this episode for ordering options and more information about the Norton Library, including the full catalog of titles.