Upside Down
Page 37
And that works for us, too.
Conclusion
For an author, tropes are part of the toolbox. They make it easier to connect readers and watchers with the story they have crafted — as long as the tropes are not overused.
For a reader, tropes help us get into the story quicker and become comfortable with the characters, plot, and setting. They call to mind the things we’ve read or seen before in a good way. It’s almost like a secret between us and the author. We can think to ourselves, “Oh, I see what you’re doing there … and I like it!”
Sometimes, not all the time, we recognize these things for what they are — a trope. And that can break us out of the story, ruin the fun of discovery, which is bad.
What’s better?
When an author takes a trope and gives it just a little spin, not so much that we can’t still feel that warm sense of familiarity, but just far enough that we’re pleasantly surprised, even shocked and a little uncomfortable. Where we sit back and say, “Whoa!”[15] in our best Keanu impression.
Look at the books you’ve read over the past year, or the past five years, or ten and beyond. Thumb through the older titles and compare them to the newer ones. How have your tastes changed? What do you find redundant or derivative, and what really grabs ahold of you and won’t let go?
Do they include some version of the hero’s journey? Is there an orphan with a destiny?
Those are the kinds of stories we want. That we crave. Because they challenge us, but not so far we can’t follow.
They evoke emotions inside of us, and that is the very best kind of writing.
Works Cited
The Amazing Spider-Man. Stan Lee, Steve Ditko, Creators. Ongoing comic book character, debuted in Amazing Fantasy #15, 1962.
Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice. Zach Snyder, Director. DC Comics, Legendary Pictures and Syncopy Films, and distributed by Warner Bros. Pictures, 2016.
Brontë, Charlotte. Jane Eyre: An Autobiography. Smith, Elder & Co. of London, 1847.
Buffy The Vampire Slayer. Joss Whedon, Creator. The WB, 1997.
Cable, aka Nathan Summers, 1st appearance in Uncanny X-Men #201, Chris Claremont, Louise Simonson & Rob Liefeld, Creator(s), Marvel Comics, 1986.
Campbell, Joseph. The Hero with a Thousand Faces, Pantheon Books, 1949.
Collins, Suzanne. The Hunger Games. Scholastic Press, 2008.
Dickens, Charles. Oliver Twist. Penguin Classics; Reissue edition, 2003.
Elliott, Kate. Crown of Stars (series). DAW Books, 1998.
Grimm, Brothers. Grimms’ Fairy Tales, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, 1812.
Jordan, Robert. The Eye of the World. Tor Fantasy, 1990.
Mallory, Thomas. Le Morte D’Arthur. Oxford University Press, 1998.
Man of Steel. Zach Snyder, Director. DC Comics, Legendary Pictures and Syncopy Films, and distributed by Warner Bros. Pictures, 2013.
Martin, George R.R. A Game of Thrones. Bantam, 1996.
Marvel Comics Cinematic Universe (MCU). Marvel Studios, 2008.
Rowling, JK. Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone New York: Scholastic, 1998.
Star Trek: The Original Series. Gene Roddenberry, Creator. NBC Television, 1966.
Star Wars: A New Hope. George Lucas, Writer/Director. Feature Film, 1977.
Star Wars: The Force Awakens. JJ Abrams, Producer/Director. Feature film, 2015.
Superman. Jerry Siegal, Joe Shuster, Creators. Ongoing comic book character, debuted in Action Comics #1, 1938.
Tolkien, J.R.R. The Lord of the Rings (series). Del Rey (Collection, The Hobbit, The Fellowship of the Ring, The Two Towers & The Return of the King), 2012.
Various. The King James Bible. Oxford University Press, 2005.
Williams, Tad. Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn (series). DAW Books, 1988.
Footnotes
[1] Trope: The Chosen One / Orphaned Child with a Destiny, TVTropes.org, http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/TheChosenOne
[2] Trope: The Evil Stepmother, TVTropes.org, http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/WickedStepmother
[3] Trope: The Wicked Witch / Old Crone, TVTropes.org, http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/WickedWitch
[4] Trope: The Handsome Prince, TVTropes.org, http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/PrinceCharming
[5] Trope: Red Shirt, TVTropes.org, http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/RedShirt
[6] Trope: Death by Sex, TVTropes.org, http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/DeathBySex
[7] Trope: Drugs are Bad, TVTropes.org, http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/DrugsAreBad
[8] Trope: Don’t Go into the Woods, TVTropes.org, http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/DontGoInTheWoods
[9] Trope: Evil Boyfriend, TVTropes.org, http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/BastardBoyfriend
[10] Trope: The Hero’s Journey, Wikipedia.org, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monomyth
[11] Trope: Temporal Paradox, TVTropes.org, http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/TemporalParadox
[12] Trope: Back from the Dead, TVTropes.org, http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/BackFromTheDead
[13] Trope: Alternate Universe, TVTropes.org, http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/AlternateUniverse
[14] Trope: Fantasy Tropes, Wikipedia.org, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fantasy_tropes
[15] Trope: Whoa!, Keanu Reeves, TVTropes.org, http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Creator/KeanuReeves
FRACTURED SOULS:
The Evolution of the Gothic Double from Stevenson to King
Lucy A. Snyder
The “Gothic double” is a literary character trope most readers are familiar with, even if the term itself is unfamiliar: it embodies the idea of a personality divided between good and evil. Robert Louis Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde are not the first examples of the Gothic double (Strengell), but they’re one of the most enduring and influential examples in literature. Consequently, Mr. Hyde has become firmly embedded in literature and pop culture as a classic fiend as recognizable as Count Dracula or Frankenstein’s monster. But without the upstanding Dr. Jekyll as his alter ego and tragic foil, Hyde as a character would lack impact. Much of what fascinates readers about these dual characters is the tension between good and evil, sanity and sociopathy, gentility and debasement.
The tension of that duality goes deeper and is more complex than good versus evil: it intersects with issues of class, race, ability, and gender. Hyde revels in underclass debaucheries that are far beneath the upstanding Dr. Jekyll. Further, he is repeatedly described as “ape-like,” a loaded description with negative connotations towards nonwhite races. The 1931 movie adaptation directed by Rouben Mamoulian deliberately gave Hyde African features, clearly playing on his white audience’s fear of blacks (Eaton 143). American feminist literary critic Elaine Showalter argues that The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde is “a story about communities of men” in which “the romance of Jekyll and Hyde is conveyed instead through men’s names, men’s bodies, and men’s psyches.” (Showalter 108)
The classist, racist, and patriarchal subtext of Stevenson’s novella cried out to be subverted and updated by modern authors. Author Steven King accomplished just such a subversion and modernization of Jekyll and Hyde with his characters Odetta Holmes and Detta Walker in his second volume of The Dark Tower series, The Drawing of the Three, and in doing so he added new complexities to the fractured soul trope that the Jekyll/Hyde characters have come to represent. Because King’s novel series is considered to be a modern classic, his evolution of this character trope can therefore serve as a craft model to other writers who are seeking to accomplish similar evolutions in their own creative work. But to understand why King’s characters represent such an interesting modernization and subversion of Jekyll and Hyde, we first have to dig deeper into Stevenson’s original characters.
Mr. Hyde: Id Made Flesh
Portrayals of Mr. Hyde evolved considerably in 20th and 21st centuries. To most
modern moviegoers, Mr. Hyde is the Victorian progenitor of The Hulk: a powerful, violent, unrestrained incarnation of pure id. To fans of Steven Moffat’s BBC miniseries Jekyll, Hyde is a sexy, sociopathic Superman. The modern Hyde is a fiend of monstrous proportion, perhaps not physically, but he’s certainly no diminutive, Gollum-like creature.
Except, in the original text, he’s exactly that:
“Mr. Hyde was pale and dwarfish, he gave an impression of deformity without any nameable malformation, he had a displeasing smile, he had borne himself to the lawyer with a sort of murderous mixture of timidity and boldness, and he spoke with a husky, whispering and somewhat broken voice ...” (Stevenson 16)
Hyde’s youth and tiny physical stature — he’s so small he’s swimming in Jekyll’s clothes after his transformation — is a surprise to many modern readers. And so is Hyde’s demeanor, since he has none of the wicked charisma that Moffat and other filmmakers have imbued him with on screen. The other characters in Stevenson’s novella find Hyde utterly repellent; he’s as dangerous as a rabid sewer rat, and the only person in the whole of London he seems capable of seducing is Dr. Jekyll.
Hyde’s characterization makes perfect sense from a metaphoric standpoint, and many readers will intuit it well before Stevenson offers an explanation late in the story. Hyde is small because the evil in Dr. Jekyll is initially just a small part of his personality, and he’s young because the exploration of wickedness that he represents is a new experience to the handsome, upstanding doctor.
However, Hyde unfortunately represents a distasteful trope: the use of physical deformity and ugliness to signify evil and moral turpitude. That particular trope is both creakingly ancient and presents a toxic mix of ableism, classism, and victim-blaming and posits that if a person is disfigured, he or she must have done something bad to deserve it; this notion ignores the reality that the possessors of unattractive faces often got their scars from a life of having been forced to work dangerous, body-breaking jobs that (despite the societal necessity of the work) don’t pay enough for niceties such as plastic surgery and tooth repair. The idea that upstanding citizens could somehow recognize the rapists, thieves, and murderers among them because miscreants all have misshapen features is a comforting lie. The people who’ve done the most harm to the rest of humanity have often had great hair and million-dollar smiles.
Dr. Jekyll: Tall, Handsome, and Complicit
Stevenson’s Henry Jekyll was born into wealth and good health, and as his career as a physician of good repute progressed, he found it harder and harder to reconcile his public face with his private desires:
“It was thus rather the exacting nature of my aspirations than any particular degradation in my faults that made me what I was, and, with even a deeper trench than in the majority of men, severed in me those provinces of good and ill which divide and compound man’s dual nature. ...
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.” (Stevenson 77-78)
His interest in exploring that dual nature soon became an obsession and he began to conduct laboratory experiments to compound a drug that would let him fully experience his suppressed side. He takes the draught, and despite a physically arduous transformation, is thrilled when he becomes Hyde:
“I knew myself, at the first breath of this new life, to be more wicked, tenfold more wicked, sold a slave to my original evil; and the thought, in that moment, braced and delighted me like wine.” (Stevenson 79)
And like an alcoholic, Jekyll becomes addicted to turning into Hyde despite the crimes he commits:
“Henry Jekyll stood at times aghast before the acts of Edward Hyde; but the situation was apart from ordinary laws, and insidiously relaxed the grasp of conscience. It was Hyde, after all, and Hyde alone, that was guilty. Jekyll was no worse; he woke again to his good qualities seemingly unimpaired; he would even make haste, where it was possible, to undo the evil done by Hyde. And thus his conscience slumbered.” (Stevenson 82)
As time passes, Jekyll no longer needs to take the drug to become Hyde, but instead to keep from spontaneously turning into him. Final disaster strikes when he runs out of the ingredients he needs to make his draught, and, faced with becoming Hyde permanently and living as a hunted sociopath, Jekyll chooses to commit suicide.
The story of Dr. Jekyll is a clear morality tale: if a man chooses to indulge his baser desires, eventually he will become a slave to them. “Eventually” is key here, though; Dr. Jekyll is a man of great wealth and privilege and he’s able to leverage his power to successfully dodge responsibility for the crimes he commits under Hyde’s disguise for quite some time. A man of lesser means would not have had the resources to come up with the transformational drug nor stage the many cover-ups and cleanups that Hyde’s behavior demanded. Socially, Dr. Jekyll is largely immune to comeuppance from external forces; he is driven largely by his own conscience and fears.
The events of the novella imply that despite his written confession, his male peers will discreetly cover for him, thus preserving his public reputation as a gentleman after his death: “I would say nothing of this paper. If your master has fled or is dead, we may at least save his credit” (Stevenson 63). Upper-class white male privilege has lasting rewards in Jekyll’s world.
Odetta Holmes: A Model Minority
Readers of Stephen King’s The Drawing of the Three encounter a pair of fractured souls reminiscent of Jekyll and Hyde: Odetta Holmes and Detta Walker. Much of the narrative of the book focuses on the other protagonists’ efforts to cope with and subdue dangerous, profane Detta while they try to save polite, loveable Odetta.
Odetta shares some traits with Dr. Jekyll but is a departure from and subversion of his character in other ways. She is the daughter of an African-American dentist who makes a small fortune after patenting a capping process that became popular and makes an even greater fortune by founding Holmes Dental Industries with his newfound capital (King 196). Odetta has only known her family as wealthy and privileged (or at least as far as their skin color will allow them to experience privilege in America). She knows that before her father earned his fortune, her parents suffered and witnessed terrible racial violence, but he steadfastly refuses to speak of it:
“(T)o him, she realized, the past — those relatives, those red dirt roads, those stores, those dirt floor cabins with glassless windows ungraced by a single simple curtsey of a curtain, those incidents of hurt and harassment, those neighbor children who went dressed in smocks which had begun life as flour sacks — all of that was for him buried away like dead teeth beneath perfect blinding white caps. He would not speak, perhaps could not, had perhaps willingly afflicted himself with a selective amnesia; the capped teeth was their life in the Greymarl Apartments on Central Park South.” (King 197)
Odetta’s father clearly expects her to be a good daughter, and she serves that role as best she can. She is educated and well-mannered; because of her poise and reserve she is often judged as uppity and a bit bitchy by white men such as her future lover Eddie Dean (King 199). She wears tasteful, expensive clothes. And she tries to further the welfare of less fortunate African Americans by working as a civil rights activist.
In a fundamental way, Odetta embodies the behavioral and social pressures many upper- and middle-class African Americans experience. In his essay “The Rise of Respectability Politics,” political scientist Fredrick C. Harris writes:
“(It) started as a philosophy promulgated by black elites to “uplift the race” by correcting the “bad” traits of the black poor ... Even though respectability evolved as an elite ideology, it operates as common sense in most quarters of black America. Indeed, it even has its own lexicon. The word “ghetto,” for instance, which a generation ago was used to describe poor, segregated neighborhoods, is now used to characterize the “unacceptable” behavi
or of black people who live anywhere from a housing project to an affluent suburb. Economic power is a needed development, of course, and one that can be used to leverage political power. But the politics of respectability has been portrayed as an emancipatory strategy to the neglect of discussions about structural forces that hinder the mobility of the black poor and working class.”