“I have no objection to a death-bed repentance,” observed the visitant.
“Because you disbelieve their efficacy!” Markheim cried.
“I do not say so,” returned the other; “but I look on these things from a different side, and when the life is done my interest falls. The man has lived to serve me, to spread black looks under colour of religion, or to sow tares in the wheat-field, as you do, in a course of weak compliance with desire. Now that he draws so near to his deliverance, he can add but one act of service—to repent, to die smiling, and thus to build up in confidence and hope the more timorous of my surviving followers. I am not so hard a master. Try me. Accept my help. Please yourself in life as you have done hitherto; please yourself more amply, spread your elbows at the board; and when the night begins to fall and the curtains to be drawn, I tell you, for your greater comfort, that you will find it even easy to compound your quarrel with your conscience, and to make a truckling peace with God. I came but now from such a death-bed, and the room was full of sincere mourners, listening to the man’s last words: and when I looked into that face, which had been set as a flint against mercy, I found it smiling with hope.”
“And do you, then, suppose me such a creature?” asked Markheim. “Do you think I have no more generous aspirations than to sin, and sin, and sin, and, at the last, sneak into heaven? My heart rises at the thought. Is this, then, your experience of mankind? or is it because you find me with red hands that you presume such baseness? and is this crime of murder indeed so impious as to dry up the very springs of good?”
“Murder is to me no special category,” replied the other. “All sins are murder, even as all life is war. I behold your race, like starving mariners on a raft, plucking crusts out of the hands of famine and feeding on each other’s lives. I follow sins beyond the moment of their acting; I find in all that the last consequence is death; and to my eyes, the pretty maid who thwarts her mother with such taking graces on a question of a ball, drips no less visibly with human gore than such a murderer as yourself. Do I say that I follow sins? I follow virtues also; they differ not by the thickness of a nail, they are both scythes for the reaping angel of Death. Evil, for which I live, consists not in action but in character. The bad man is dear to me; not the bad act, whose fruits, if we could follow them far enough down the hurtling cataract of the ages, might yet be found more blessed than those of the rarest virtues. And it is not because you have killed a dealer, but because you are Markheim, that I offer to forward your escape.”
“I will lay my heart open to you,” answered Markheim. “This crime on which you find me is my last. On my way to it I have learned many lessons; itself is a lesson, a momentous lesson. Hitherto I have been driven with revolt to what I would not; I was a bond-slave to poverty, driven and scourged. There are robust virtues that can stand in these temptations; mine was not so: I had a thirst of pleasure. But today, and out of this deed, I pluck both warning and riches—both the power and a fresh resolve to be myself. I become in all things a free actor in the world; I begin to see myself all changed, these hands the agents of good, this heart at peace. Something comes over me out of the past; something of what I have dreamed on Sabbath evenings to the sound of the church organ, of what I forecast when I shed tears over noble books, or talked, an innocent child, with my mother. There lies my life; I have wandered a few years, but now I see once more my city of destination.”
“You are to use this money on the Stock Exchange, I think?” remarked the visitor; “and there, if I mistake not, you have already lost some thousands?”
“Ah,” said Markheim, “but this time I have a sure thing.”
“This time, again, you will lose,” replied the visitor quietly.
“Ah, but I keep back the half!” cried Markheim.
“That also you will lose,” said the other.
The sweat started upon Markheim’s brow. “Well, then, what matter?” he exclaimed. “Say it be lost, say I am plunged again in poverty, shall one part of me, and that the worse, continue until the end to override the better? Evil and good run strong in me, haling me both ways. I do not love the one thing, I love all. I can conceive great deeds, renunciations, martyr doms; and though I be fallen to such a crime as murder, pity is no stranger to my thoughts. I pity the poor; who knows their trials better than myself? I pity and help them; I prize love, I love honest laughter; there is no good thing nor true thing on earth but I love it from my heart. And are my vices only to direct my life, and my virtues to lie without effect, like some passive lumber of the mind? Not so; good, also, is a spring of acts.”
But the visitant raised his finger. “For six-and-thirty years that you have been in this world,” said he, “through many changes of fortune and varieties of humour, I have watched you steadily fall. Fifteen years ago you would have started at a theft. Three years back you would have blenched at the name of murder. Is there any crime, is there any cruelty or meanness, from which you still recoil?—five years from now I shall detect you in the fact! Downward, downward, lies your way; nor can anything but death avail to stop you.”
“It is true,” Markheim said huskily, “I have in some degree complied with evil. But it is so with all: the very saints, in the mere exercise of living, grow less dainty, and take on the tone of their surroundings.”
“I will propound to you one simple question,” said the other; “and as you answer, I shall read to you your moral horoscope. You have grown in many things more lax; possibly you do right to be so; and at any account, it is the same with all men. But granting that, are you in any one particular, however trifling, more difficult to please with your own conduct, or do you go in all things with a looser rein?”
“In any one?” repeated Markheim, with an anguish of consideration. “No,” he added, with despair, “in none! I have gone down in all.”
“Then,” said the visitor, “content yourself with what you are, for you will never change; and the words of your part on this stage are irrevocably written down.”
Markheim stood for a long while silent, and indeed it was the visitor who first broke the silence. “That being so,” he said, “shall I show you the money?”
“And grace?” cried Markheim.
“Have you not tried it?” returned the other. “Two or three years ago, did I not see you on the platform of revival meetings, and was not your voice the loudest in the hymn?”
“It is true,” said Markheim; “and I see clearly what remains for me by way of duty. I thank you for these lessons from my soul; my eyes are opened, and I behold myself at least for what I am.”
At this moment, the sharp note of the door-bell rang through the house; and the visitant, as though this were some concerted signal for which he had been waiting, changed at once in his demeanour.
“The maid!” he cried. “She has returned, as I forewarned you, and there is now before you one more difficult passage. Her master, you must say, is ill; you must let here in, with an assured but rather serious countenance—no smiles, no overacting, and I promise you success! Once the girl within, and the door closed, the same dexterity that has already rid you of the dealer will relieve you of this last danger in your path. Thenceforward you have the whole evening—the whole night, if needful—to ransack the treasures of the house and to make good your safety. This is help that comes to you with the mask of danger. Up! he cried; ”up, friend; your life hangs trembling in the scales: up, and act!”
Markheim steadily regarded his counsellor. “If I be condemned to evil acts,” he said, “there is still one door of freedom open—I can cease from action. If my life be an ill thing, I can lay it down. Though I be, as you say truly, at the beck of every small temptation, I can yet, by one decisive gesture, place myself beyond the reach of all. My love of good is damned to barrenness; it may, and let it be! But I have still my hatred of evil; and from that, to your galling disappointment, you shall see that I can draw both energy and courage.”
The features of the visitor bega
n to undergo a wonderful and lovely change: they brightened and softened with a tender triumph, and, even as they brightened, faded and dis limned. But Markheim did not pause to watch or understand the transformation. He opened the door and went downstairs very slowly, thinking to himself. His past went soberly before him; he beheld it as it was, ugly and strenuous like a dream, random as chance-medley—a scene of defeat. Life, as he thus reviewed it, tempted him no longer; but on the farther side he perceived a quiet haven for his bark. He paused in the passage, and looked into the shop, where the candle still burned by the dead body. It was strangely silent. Thoughts of the dealer swarmed into his mind, as he stood gazing. And then the bell once more broke out into impatient clamour.
He confronted the maid upon the threshold with something like a smile.
“You had better go for the police,” said he: “I have killed your master.”
Endnotes
1 (p. 18) loathing and fear with which Mr. Utterson regarded him: Utterson’s disgust for Hyde’s physical deformity taps into a flourishing contemporary discourse about evolution, disease, and degeneracy. The new science of evolution had dissolved boundaries between men and monkeys, and later nineteenth-century biologists and criminologists such as Cesare Lombroso began to argue that it was not social but biological differences that distinguished criminals from respectable citizens.
2 (p. 26) first fog of the season: London’s notoriously heavy fogs were caused by pollution due to smoke and sulfur dioxide from coal fires. The gaslit street lamps introduced early in the nineteenth century did little to combat the effects of fog.
3 (p. 59) “transcendental medicine”: In framing their disagreement, Jekyll invokes against Lanyon’s modern scientific arguments an older tradition that goes back to the alchemist Paracelsus and beyond, in which the human body is understood not as a mechanical entity but as a coalescence of spiritual and occult forces.
4 (p. 206) I shall here designate by the letter K: In Edinburgh in 1827 and 1828, two Irish-born men, William Burke and William Hare, killed at least fifteen people and sold the corpses of their victims to a surgeon named Robert Knox, who used the bodies for dissection in his school of anatomy. When the murderers’ crimes were discovered, Hare turned king’s evidence and testified against Burke, who was tried, found guilty, executed, and then publicly dissected. Burke claimed to his death that Knox knew nothing about the crimes, but popular sentiment implicated him in the murders.
Inspired by The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and Other Stories
Immediately upon the publication of Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. jekyll and Mr. Hyde in 1886, people wanted to see it. A stage adaptation opened on May 9, 1887, in Boston, starring the preeminent theater actor Richard Mansfield. The role was a career-defining one for Mansfield, and the public’s enjoyment of the play became deeply associated with the performance of the male lead.
With the mushrooming popularity of film in the early twentieth century, more than a dozen adaptations of Stevenson’s classic were quickly produced. But it wasn’t until 1920, with Paramount’s spectacular movie depiction of Dr. , jekyll and Mr. Hyde, directed by John Stuart Robertson, that the dominance of an actor of Mansfield’s caliber was captured on film. With the celebrated John Barrymore cast in the duplicitous lead, Robertson’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde is considered the definitive silent version of Stevenson’s thriller. Atmospheric and creepy, Robertson’s film is laden with careful detail; one distinctive feature is the look of Mr. Hyde—long, sinewy fingers and an elongated, pointed head—reminiscent of the vampire in the classic Nosferatu. But Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde is ultimately a vehicle for Barrymore’s talents. The props and special effects pale in comparison with Barrymore’s “flawless performance,” as the New York Times described it; specifically, by distorting and disfiguring his face by expression alone, Barrymore achieves the effect of transforming his very nature from respectable to despicable. Indeed, his onscreen metamorphosis has served as the inspiration for many a subsequent movie transformation, whether a man changing into a werewolf or Dracula’s teeth growing long and feral at the prospect of new blood. Resplendent with visual detail and Barrymore’s tour de-force acting, Robertson’s Dr. jekyll and Mr. Hyde is a landmark of the silent-film era.
The first sound adaptation of Stevenson’s classic—and arguably the most successful—is Rouben Mamoulian’s 1931 Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. In it Mamoulian (The Mark of Zorro) makes the claim that man’s evil side stems wholly from lust. Fredric March plays Jekyll and Hyde, and his portrayal is inspired by a dark sexuality, much of which was later censored (and then restored). The film’s brilliance lies in the ability of Mamoulian and March to generate sympathy for Jekyll while tackling potentially scandalous content. A master of technique and style, Mamoulian conveys the twin psychologies of Jekyll and Hyde through montage, dissolves, the relatively new technology of sound dynamics, and, perhaps most crucially, a large number of subjective, point-of-view shots draping the edges of the frame in fog and shadow.
The film opens with Jekyll holding a piano recital before an esteemed audience. The constant point-of-view shots during Jekyll’s performance establish in viewers of the film an immediate affinity with and compassion for Jekyll, laying the groundwork for the audience’s heartbreak at his later transformation. With the change into Mr. Hyde, March’s features turn simian and monstrously toothy. The actor makes the two selves play out on his face throughout the film in a way that powerfully conveys Jekyll’s anxiety and pathetic disintegration and Hyde’s grotesque animalism and perversity.
March’s portrayal of Hyde arrived onscreen the same year as Universal’s Dracula and Frankenstein, but Hyde was the scar iest monster of all, his jilted sociopathy hitting much closer to home than the situations of the other two protagonists. His performance (some moviegoers believed his part was played by two actors) won him an Oscar for Best Actor. The Academy also nominated the film for Best Cinematography and Best Screenplay.
In 1941 director Victor Fleming (The Wizard of Oz, Gone with the Wind) oversaw a production of Jekyll and Hyde that declares there is no evil in the world, only insanity—good gone horribly mad. Fleming’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde stars Spencer Tracy as the Samaritan scientist dedicated to proving this theory; Tracy is supported by Ingrid Bergman as the loose barmaid and Lana Turner as his virtuous fiancée. Fleming punctuates Jekyll’s transformation into Hyde with a disturbing and sexually suggestive dream sequence, which provides some of the film’s finest moments. But overall this movie seems polite rather than provocative, especially when compared to Mamoulian’s 1931 version.
Widely spoofed, Stevenson’s Jekyll and Hyde story has enjoyed many cinematic parodies—notable among them Dr. Pyckle and Mr. Pride (1925), starring Stan Laurel; the inevitable Abbott and Costello Meet Dr. jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1953); Jerry Lewis’s The Nutty Professor (1963); and the gender-bending Dr. Jekyll and Ms. Hyde (1995).
Valerie Martin’s 1990 novel Mary Reilly, the story of Jekyll and Hyde told from the point of view of an Irish chamber-maid, was made into a 1996 film directed by Stephen Frears (Dangerous Liaisons). A foggy gloominess pervades the picture, providing a slow, oozing pace and lending to the principal players—Julia Roberts as Mary Reilly and John Malkovich as Jekyll/Hyde—a color-drained, ghostly pallor. As the story unfolds we learn that Reilly was abused by her father yet refuses to hate him for it. This complex emotional response on the part of his maid draws Jekyll to her, as his own personality becomes increasingly complex and potentially unlovable. This unique version of the story confuses the good-versus-evil dichotomy of previous adaptations. By positioning Reilly-who falls in love with both Jekyll and Hyde—as the storyteller, the qualities and flaws of the pure and lofty Jekyll and of the animalistic Hyde come to the surface. Indeed, in Mary Reilly the figures of Jekyll and Hyde complete each other, and together constitute the recipe for human nature.
Jekyll and Hyde are not the only Stevenson characters to be transported into film. �
��The Body-Snatcher” was made into a “golden age” monsterfest, The Body Snatcher, in 1945, starring Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi. And “The Suicide Club” has inspired several adaptations, including one produced by horror-film legend Roger Corman in 2000.
Comments Questions
In this section, we aim to provide the reader with an array of persibectives on the text, as well as questions that challenge those perspectives. The commentary has been culled from sources as diverse as reviews contemporaneous with the work, letters written by the author, literary criticism of later generations, and appreciations written throughout history. Following the commentary, a series of questions seeks to filter Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and Other Stories through a variety of points of view and bring about a richer understanding of these enduring works.
COMMENTS
HENRY JAMES
Is “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde” a work of high philosophic intention, or simply the most ingenious and irresponsible of fictions? It has the stamp of a really imaginative production, that we may take it in different ways, but I suppose it would be called the most serious of the author’s tales. It deals with the relation of the baser parts of man to his nobler—of the capacity for evil that exists in the most generous natures, and it expresses these things in a fable which is a wonderfully happy invention. The subject is endlessly interesting, and rich in all sorts of provocation, and Mr. Stevenson is to be congratulated on having touched the core of it. I may do him injustice, but it is, however, here, not the profundity of the idea which strikes me so much as the art of the presentation—the extremely successful form. There is a genuine feeling for the perpetual moral question, a fresh sense of the difficulty of being good and the brutishness of being bad, but what there is above all is a singular ability in holding the interest. I confess that that, to my sense, is the most edifying thing in the short, rapid, concentrated story, which is really a masterpiece of concision.
Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and Other Stories (Barnes & Noble Classi Page 28