Contemporaries Stevenson, Doyle and Wilde
Robert Louis Stevenson's role in galvanizing modern literature is being reevaluated after he sank to near-anonymity in the 1950s. The Scotsman's most popular novel was The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, published in 1886. Yesterday, the author Nicholas Frankel listed the novel first among his list of Decadent Writing of the 19th Century in WSJ's Review Section. Frankel describes how the "good" half of the split personality, Dr. Jekyll, "struggles both to deny and to justify the spawning of his criminal alter-ego--is a masterpiece of obfuscation attempting to defend his 'profound duplicity of life'." How did his well received novel influence the work of near contemporaries Arthur Conan Doyle and Oscar Wilde? And how did he mirror the schizophrenia of Victorian London, where the novel was based? Most importantly, can the machinations of turn-of-the-century Britain hold lessons for turn-of-the-millennium developed countries in our war against "terrorists" who may come from our own ranks of citizens?
There are uncomfortable parallels to the strange case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. For instance, right now the movie The Devil's Double is playing starring Dominic Cooper as both Uday Hussein, Saddam Hussein's son, and his chosen body double. Check out an interview with Cooper at http://www.npr.org/2011/08/15/139575261/dominic-cooper-on-becoming-the-devils-double
ReplyDeleteToday on Talk of the Nation in "The Great Body Switch" Neal Conan and Murray Horowitz discussed movies where a person moved into another body. Late in the program, Horowitz brought up The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde:
ReplyDeleteHORWITZ: Oh, man. This is a tough one, Neal, because, I mean there's - we haven't mentioned "Desperately Seeking Susan" and "Mulholland Drive" and some really, really good movies. We didn't mention "The Invisible Man." Well, we did mentioned "The Invisible Man." But one that nobody has mentioned and that has been remade a zillion times, including only 19 years or so or 20 years after the story was written by Robert Louis Stevenson was "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde." It was made in 1908. It was made in - it's scheduled for 2012. So, I mean, it's a very, very important trope, I guess, you'd say or model.
CONAN: And an important contributor to, I guess, psychiatric theory.
HORWITZ: Well, it's - yes. And it's become part of a lexicon. I mean, how many times do we say, oh, he's a real Jekyll and Hyde. It's usually about your boss.
CONAN: We don't have a clip from that movie, Murray.
HORWITZ: Well, I tell you one thing, if you need this - if I had one clip, it wouldn't be on the radio anyway because in the version from 1920, John Barrymore does - go to YouTube or rent a film and see it. John Barrymore does the transformation from Jekyll into Hyde without makeup.
A wonderful archive, thanks to a grant from the Carnegie Trust, is at:
ReplyDeletehttp://www.robert-louis-stevenson.org/
where you can read all of RLS's work and peruse old letters, photos, poems and essays! The site begins with this quote:
"The web, then, or the pattern, a web at once sensuous and logical, an elegant and pregnant texture: that is style, that is the foundation of the art of literature"
David Nightingale gives us a break from political trumpitudes and covers the first 28 years of Robert Louis Stevenson's life on WAMC: http://wamc.org/post/david-nightingale-robert-louis-stevenson-1850-1894
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