Eph3mrl-mien - Gabrielle - Tumblr Blog
Thinking about the birth imagery and pregnancy horror themes in Frankenstein and Jekyll and Hyde. How they’re going on opposite directions.
Frankenstein desiring to “birth” through unnatural ways out of spite, out of a need to prove a point. Jekyll being forced to continuously “birth” and simultaneously ”be birthed” as the aftermath of a choice which was to indeed birth the separation of good and evil.
Frankenstein creating an unnatural person, designed and expected to be perfect, through an unnatural conception with no pregnancy. Jekyll becoming an unnatural person that was never conceived, unwittingly made perfectly monstrous, through a process that is described as painful, something being ejected from his subconscious like a womb.
Frankenstein makes the perfect male body which is described as “wrong-looking”, Jekyll gives himself a “wrong”-looking male body which comes with a “wrong” mind to pair.
Creation = pregnancy and birth. Mad scientists are often characterized as fathers, being mostly men- but they’re still being the mother or taking such a role since the creation on itself is their doing- as life, or a distortion of it, or a perversión of its laws, an impossible thing is what they make.
And what more perverted an impossible -in the eyes of cishet society- than a male pregnancy?
One man wants pregnancy, dreams of it- wishes to attain it even though he knows it is impossible and suffers the consequence when a “pregnancy” with no woman ends badly, because he just wishes so; the other fears becoming pregnant, comparing the distress he suffers as he transforms as the “horror of childbirth”, as if he knew, as if he knew what it is like or felt it could be possible after all. Bodies. “Perfect” bodies, “wrong” bodies, pregnancies that end badly, men being metaphorically pregnant. I don’t know what it all could mean, frankly.
I don’t know.
big fan of liars. big fan of characters whose entire existence is a facade. love it when everything's stripped away from them and the lie is the only thing left of their identity. love it when the lines between an act and the truth are blurring. are they even them without the lie? the lie doesn't become the truth per se, but it's now such an intricate part of them it might as well be.
Hiii I am soo normal doctor don’t mind my mental breakdown decor (drawing based on the song Streak of Madness from the musical)
“Stevenson’s story is one which chronicles Jekyll’s self inflicted and protracted destruction of his body and mind in an attempt to rid his life of internal conflict.” Pg 235
(coughing and sputtering) we are so back
Oh Yeah, I forgot I edited these.
I edited these two pictures of Robert Cuccioli from the 1995 First US Tour of Jekyll & Hyde the Musical to be in color back in January.
Rouben Mamoulian: Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1931)
The feeling when you have just found out your theory of multiple personality is true, proven your scientific research by taking a drug that releases the evil side in yourself, felt great pride and joy in your work, laughed at your skeptics, and then your nosy servant interrupts and asks about strange noises.
Rouben Mamoulian: Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1931)
Gorgeous promotional photos of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. [X]
For the original “doomed by the narrative’ couple because you can’t tell me they didn’t have something going on between them
there is something so magical about dr jekyll and mr hyde (1920), john barrymore's hyde being the most accurate i have ever seen (in my opinion) and his doctor jekyll seeming to be in his late 20s (i kind of like the idea of henry being portrayed as a very young doctor, sometimes) with his entire career ahead of him, and his two best friends, who are for once included in an adaptation and they actually have an important role and they're very present in the film which makes it even more special, i truly don't like how most adaptations simply ignore their existence. if i could choose an actor to play henry jekyll in a truly accurate adaptation it would certainly be john barrymore, and i would like the actors who played lanyon and utterson to be in it too cause i really like them. god i love this film so much
not over the fact that Jekyll only cries after having committed bloody murder but straight up dissociates after having traumatized Lanyon…
Honestly i don’t like it when people are like “oh Jekyll is the Good One” because the point is he IS. Complex. He struggles with his addiction with his anger and hatred and with so much shit. He represses stuff and he lies and he is so full of fear. He hurts himself in the most twisted ways he can think of. He believes he’s always being watched. He’s depressed and has an unspecified dissociative disorder that fucks over how he perceives his own humanity and the way he sees himself. He has good intentions, but misguided ones; and there’s arrogance at his core. He is mean, but he is nice, but he is cruel, but he is trying his best and LISTEN Jekyll has got so many layers and he admits that. He says that. So it also kills me when people are like “oh Jekyll is Evil” well. Yes but actually no but actually yes and you Know what? If you try to assign moral alignments to Strange Case characters then you didn’t read the book properly. You’ve missed the point. He deserves a slap in the face and a blanket. He has to get his shit together because if he doesn’t people die. Do you Understand.
The cheval glass scene completes the mirror imagery in Jekyll and Hyde, with the third incident highlighting the cruel irony of Jekyll’s fate. The cheval glass, displaying the hellish glow of the fire while facing heavenward, mocks Jekyll’s statement that the potion is “neither diabolical nor divine.” The mirror appears both diabolical and divine in this moment; the potion, in being merely a chemical mixture and not a magical cure, is too exactly the opposite of the diabolic or divine—it has no power whatsoever over the self. Just as the mirror distorts the laboratory room, failing to accurately reflect Poole’s and Utterson’s images, so has the potion warped Jekyll’s reality, driving him to suicide. What Jekyll has mistaken to be a problem of industrial commodity standardization—an inconsistent batch of chemical salts—actually demonstrates, through his inability to divorce his addictive desires from his otherwise respectable identity, the self’s fundamentally unitary nature. Stevenson positions this basic human truth as the ironic tragedy of Jekyll and Hyde, using addiction to establish that despite discordant desires, on a fundamental level the self is inescapably unitary.
-Jessica Cook, The Unitary Self in Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
In an alternate universe where the classic barbie movies were based off gothic/horror public domain works instead of fairytales
“No, sir, that thing in the mask was never Dr. Jekyll—God knows what it was, but it was never Dr. Jekyll”.
This quote hit me like a ton of bricks on this read. The image of a masked “thing” moving about the room is chilling in itself, but also because. I mean. In a way it’s true. It was never Jekyll. “It”, what’s behind that door, was never the Henry Jekyll that Poole and Utterson knew because that person never existed, and it was never simply Edward Hyde either, it was literally a mask. A thing with a mask. Whether the mask was Jekyll or Hyde, it was a mask. The good doctor was a performance, and the eerie man from Soho was a physical alteration with a fake name… It was never Dr. Jekyll.
"If I am the chief of sinners, I am the chief of sufferers also."
— Dr. Jekyll, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson
Jekyll: Utterson, I have to tell you something... I am Hyde. I made a potion in my laborator-
Utterson: Henry, you can tell me if you're gay, don't make things up
We as a society don’t talk about the “If I am a chief of sinners, I am the chief of sufferers” as often as we should
***Vaguely Implied J&H spoilers***
->
Rather quaint
***Spoilers proper under cut***
I thought I'd made a post about this before but I can't find it on the old blog so maybe it never made it out of my brain?? Anyway Jekyll is so very normal about Utterson.
The repetition of "good" in the Ch 3 quote reads to me either as a genuine strong reaction to how loyal and willing Utterson's comment is about his certainty he can help. Akin to a "you're too good to me" type comment. But it also kind of comes off, as repetition often does, as the speaker convincing themselves of something or refusing to hear otherwise. That's not to say Jekyll doesn't believe Utterson is Good Tm; I think he probably does to an excessive degree, to the point of seeing him as a model of restraint, reliability, trustworthiness... A way of thinking that makes Utterson's dodgy, deceitful behaviour in Ch 2 all the more unsettling.
There's a sense of that fear of how people actually act behind your back, yet the weird desire to see it too, to be sure; Jekyll gets to see Utterson for the first time without Utterson knowing it's him, and Utterson stalks him and lies to his face. That wouldn't be dealt well with by anyone. It's especially wouldn't be dealt well with by a man who is notably just the worst at dealing with multiplicity. It's Utterson's deceit that is the final straw, because it's not only a personal betrayal but a threat to who Jekyll envsions Utterson to be, and thus what he represents.
In that state, the reminder of Utterson's Goodness, the attempt to continue upholding him as Oh So Good and slide anything counter to that off to the side - it's very comforting.
Sooooo original idea (no)
henry jekyll & edward hyde // @screenshotsofdespair
bastard man