Frankenstein, Dracula, and some monster films I recently saw [updated]

As it turns out, this year I’ve seen quite a few monster films, mostly based on or inspired by the myths of Frankenstein or Dracula—let’s not get into a debate on whether vampires count as monsters—so I’d better jot down some brief thoughts. 

Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror (1922): Pure monster, no eroticism, no romance. The best Nosferatu film, perhaps the best Dracula film. Orlok’s appearance at the door, Orlok on the ship, Orlok’s shadow on the wall, etc.—the film is full of striking, unforgettable images and Max Schreck remains bone-chilling and sinister after over 100 years. More sinister than Klaus Kinski and Bill Skarsgård.  

Nosferatu (2024): The film focuses on sex and shame, or rather, presents the vampire as an embodiment of sexual desire/ shame/ disgust, which perhaps appeals to fans of monster smut. I don’t like the look of Orlok. I don’t think it’s a good film either. Lily-Rose Depp is impressive but the characters are under-developed, there’s little change in tempo and no sense of pacing, the film feels drawn out.

Dracula (1931): This is another classic, but I don’t like it. Lots of overacting, especially Dwight Frye as Renfield; I don’t even like Bela Lugosi as Dracula (unpopular opinion, I guess?). There are some interesting shots, especially at the castle and the abbey. Can see some influence from Nosferatu. 

Daughters of Darkness (1971): Vampire film, no Dracula connection. Silly film, but Delphine Seyrig is so beautiful and elegant. 

Now that I’ve thought about it, I wonder why I have seen so many Dracula films over the years when I don’t care for horror and didn’t like Bram Stoker’s novel all that much. Off the top of my head: part of Hammer’s Dracula (1958); Brides of Dracula (1960); Count Dracula (1977); Coppola’s Dracula (1992); Nosferatu the Vampyre (1979). 

Frankenstein (1931): Quite different from Mary Shelley’s novel, but it’s an excellent film in its own right. Great cinematography, great production design, great makeup, great performance from Boris Karloff. One of the most visually arresting films in black and white. In a way, the film simplified the story, removing some of the complex ideas about upbringing, education, development, civilisation, etc. but then it gave us the most iconic image of Frankenstein’s monster and solidified the myth—my friend Himadri thinks the film has had more impact on public consciousness than the novel has, and he’s probably right.  

Bride of Frankenstein (1935): Another excellent film by James Whale. I must praise Jack Pierce for not only doing the fantastic makeup for Frankenstein’s monster (Boris Karloff), but also creating the iconic hairstyle for the bride (Elsa Lanchester). 

Young Frankenstein (1974): Not much to do with Mary Shelley’s novel, this is an affectionate pastiche of the Frankenstein films starring Boris Karloff. Gene Wilder and Marty Feldman are wonderful together. A perfect film, very funny, extremely quotable: “It’s Fronkensteen!”, “It’s pronounced Eye-gore”, “What hump?”, “Walk this way”, etc. Did you know Gene Hackman could be so funny? I didn’t. I laughed like a hyena.  

Son of Frankenstein (1939): This film is a sequel to the films by James Whale, but I watched it after Young Frankenstein. It’s quite all right as a film, featuring Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi and Basil Rathbone. However, it suffers in comparison: next to James Whale’s films, Rowland V. Lee’s Son of Frankenstein doesn’t have such striking and iconic images; and I couldn’t watch it without thinking about the jokes and the parody in Young Frankenstein; the inspector in particular is so well-parodied that he seems rather ridiculous in the original. 

Poor Things (2023): Based on a novel by Alasdair Gray, inspired by the Frankenstein myth. As one would expect from Yorgos Lanthimos, it is weird and stylistically interesting, but it’s more disturbing than Frankenstein and the more I’ve thought about it, the more I dislike all the ideas about “feminism” and “female empowerment” in the film. Repugnant, even. 

Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1931): What was in the air that in 1931, Hollywood produced Frankenstein and Dracula and Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde? Stevenson’s novella is my favourite of the three books, but again the film is its own work of art—one of the major changes is the creation of two female characters—and it is a very fine film. Fredric March is very good as Jekyll and Hyde, and I especially like that the film gets right Stevenson’s idea that Jekyll and Hyde are not two sides of the same person—Hyde is the concentration of all the evil and dark impulses in Jekyll. 

Addendum: Adding some more stills so you can see how beautiful the B&W is. 

Frankenstein: 

Bride of Frankenstein: 

Son of Frankenstein: 

Weir of Hermiston

Oh the joy and pain of an unfinished work. 
I wonder what Nabokov (would have) thought about Stevenson’s last unfinished work Weir of Hermiston. 
Stevenson’s novel is to me a pleasant surprise. The prose is very much his, with its beauty and rhythm, but the book is unlike Stevenson in a way. Take The Master of Ballantrae for example, for all of its depth of psychology and themes, and its lifelike, complex characters, the book still has adventures, duels, deaths and resurrections, pirates, savages, treasure…, all that may be called the stuff of boys’ fancy. Weir of Hermiston is, for lack of a better word, serious. Or as my friend Himadri put it, Stevenson’s other works are essentially children’s novels, even The Master of Ballantrae, while Weir of Hermiston could have been the one “major full-length novel aimed specifically for an adult readership”. It’s about the relationship between The Lord Justice-Clerk Adam Weir, a harsh judge, and his estranged son Archie Weir, about their different temperament and worldview, and their difference of opinion on capital punishment.
Another surprise is that Stevenson tends to avoid depicting women, but in Weir of Hermiston, not only writes about women, but writes them well. He even writes about love! The older Kirstie is to me the more interesting. By the way, did anyone else in the 19th century write about a middle-aged woman’s love for a young man? I don’t think I’ve come across that before. 
Pity he couldn’t finish the book. 

The 2 brothers in Stevenson's The Master of Ballantrae

After being unable for a while to read fiction, having focused on films and film books for the entire semester, I’m reading again, and have been enjoying Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Master of Ballantrae. I didn’t notice, when picking up the book, that the subtitle was “A Winter’s Tale”. How fitting! It’s a perfect winter break novel. 
The Master of Ballantrae is, in a way, an adventure story, full of blood, war, rivalry, pirates, savages, duels, murders, revenges, storms, deaths and resurrections, spanning over decades and across different continents. The book cannot compare to Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, which is unsurpassable in Stevenson’s oeuvre, but underneath the excitement, fast pace, and dramatic moments of the adventure story, the stuff of boys’ fancy, there is a lot more. The Master of Ballantrae would be a great response to those who see Stevenson as a frivolous writer.  
The novel is about the feud between James Durie, The Master of Ballantrae, and his brother Henry, and its tragic consequences. I don’t write reviews, so you will be disappointed if you expect a plot summary. Wikipedia will suffice. The book is enjoyable for the “adventures”, for the prose, and for the psychology. At the beginning, especially in the eyes of the narrator Ephraim Mackellar, the steward of the Durrisdeer estate and loyal “friend” of Henry, it appears that James (often called Ballantrae or the Master in the text) is evil, and the other brother is good. James is portrayed as a good-looking and dangerous man, well-mannered, calm, deceptively charming, manipulative, narcissistic, and deceitful; he is also greedy, and can be scheming and ruthless. Henry envies his brother—his father’s favourite son, and at the beginning of the story, his other chief fault is pride—he keeps a distance because of pride, refuses to explain himself because of pride, suffers in silence because of pride, proves himself more generous than his brother by paying James unreasonable sums of money and cutting down on expenses in his own family without explanation because of pride…, and thus suffers even more. The narcissistic and manipulative James, who describes himself as having a kingly nature, is an interesting and memorable character, but the proud Henry is an even more fascinating case study. More than the bad brother does, pride and envy, which gradually turns into hatred and bitterness, damage Henry, ruin his life and push everyone away if not for Mackellar’s interventions now and then. Worse, they change his heart. Later on, we find the brothers/ enemies mirroring each other; Henry shares some traits with the man he most hates and despises—rage, resentment, bitterness, vengefulness, cruelty (bordering on sadism), and inability to let go. I haven’t finished the book, but it seems like the kind of rivalry that never ends till both are destroyed. Henry becomes the very thing he hates, and lets darkness triumph.

Stevenson: No art can successfully compete with life

From "A Humble Remonstrance" (a response to Henry James's "The Art of Fiction") in R. L. Stevenson on Fiction: 

"... No art — to use the daring phrase of Mr. James — can successfully “compete with life”; and the art that seeks to do so is condemned to perish Montibus Aviis. Life goes before us, infinite in complication; attended by the most various and surprising meteors; appealing at once to the eye, to the ear, to the mind — the seat of wonder, to the touch — so thrillingly delicate, and to the belly — so imperious when starved. It combines and employs in its manifestation the method and material, not of one art only, but of all the arts, Music is but an arbitrary trifling with a few of life’s majestic chords; painting is but a shadow of its pageantry of light and colour; literature does but drily indicate that wealth of incident, of moral obligation, of virtue, vice, action, rapture and agony, with which it teems. To “compete with life,” whose sun we cannot look upon, whose passions and diseases waste and slay us — to compete with the flavour of wine, the beauty of the dawn, the scorching of fire, the bitterness of death and separation — here is, indeed, a projected escalade of heaven; here are, indeed, labours for a Hercules in a dress coat, armed with a pen and a dictionary to depict the passions, armed with a tube of superior flake-white to paint the portrait of the insufferable sun. No art is true in this sense: none can “compete with life”: not even history, built indeed of indisputable facts, but these facts robbed of their vivacity and sting; so that even when we read of the sack of a city or the fall of an empire, we are surprised, and justly commend the author’s talent, if our pulse be quickened. And mark, for a last differentia, that this quickening of the pulse is, in almost every case, purely agreeable; that these phantom reproductions of experience, even at their most acute, convey decided pleasure; while experience itself, in the cockpit of life, can torture and slay.
What, then, is the object, what the method, of an art, and what the source of its power? The whole secret is that no art does “compete with life.” Man’s one method, whether he reasons or creates, is to half-shut his eyes against the dazzle and confusion of reality. The arts, like arithmetic and geometry, turn away their eyes from the gross, coloured and mobile nature at our feet, and regard instead a certain figmentary abstraction. Geometry will tell us of a circle, a thing never seen in nature; asked about a green circle or an iron circle, it lays its hand upon its mouth. So with the arts. Painting, ruefully comparing sunshine and flake-white, gives up truth of colour, as it had already given up relief and movement; and instead of vying with nature, arranges a scheme of harmonious tints. Literature, above all in its most typical mood, the mood of narrative, similarly flees the direct challenge and pursues instead an independent and creative aim. So far as it imitates at all, it imitates not life but speech: not the facts of human destiny, but the emphasis and the suppressions with which the human actor tells of them. The real art that dealt with life directly was that of the first men who told their stories round the savage camp-fire. Our art is occupied, and bound to be occupied, not so much in making stories true as in making them typical; not so much in capturing the lineaments of each fact, as in marshalling all of them towards a common end. For the welter of impressions, all forcible but all discreet, which life presents, it substitutes a certain artificial series of impressions, all indeed most feebly represented, but all aiming at the same effect, all eloquent of the same idea, all chiming together like consonant notes in music or like the graduated tints in a good picture. From all its chapters, from all its pages, from all its sentences, the well-written novel echoes and re-echoes its one creative and controlling thought; to this must every incident and character contribute; the style must have been pitched in unison with this; and if there is anywhere a word that looks another way, the book would be stronger, clearer, and (I had almost said) fuller without it. Life is monstrous, infinite, illogical, abrupt and poignant; a work of art, in comparison, is neat, finite, self-contained, rational, flowing and emasculate. Life imposes by brute energy, like inarticulate thunder; art catches the ear, among the far louder noises of experience, like an air artificially made by a discreet musician. A proposition of geometry does not compete with life; and a proposition of geometry is a fair and luminous parallel for a work of art. Both are reasonable, both untrue to the crude fact; both inhere in nature, neither represents it. The novel, which is a work of art, exists, not by its resemblances to life, which are forced and material, as a shoe must still consist of leather, but by its immeasurable difference from life, which is designed and significant, and is both the method and the meaning of the work..."

Reading Dracula: obstacles

Wish I could say, after some time's silence, "Back from [some fascinating city]", but can't. I've been busy, that's all- sunbathing, working, watching films, catching up with fb, following a murder case in VN, dealing with some problems (lots of things happened, and there was a creep)... In spare time I read a Tolstoy short story collection, and Flaubert's 3 Tales, just didn't write about them. As you can see, Effi Briest has been put aside.
I'm reading Dracula at the moment.
One cannot have a "fresh" reading of Dracula, everyone knowing something about it. The same goes with Frankenstein or Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, both of which I read earlier this year. The feeling is strange- the consciousness that I'm reading for the 1st time a very famous and influential book, the expectation of finding it as good as it is said to be, the wish to compare it to the preconceptions created by popular culture. Sometimes they turn out to be misconceptions. Take Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, discussed here, here and here- Jekyll and Hyde are not 2 beings in the same body, 1 good, 1 evil, and Hyde is actually smaller than Jekyll. Or Frankenstein, discussed here, here, here, here and here, Frankenstein is the scientist, not the monster, but Frankenstein is a monster, and the experiment is in fact not a failed experiment as people suggest.
Luckily my so-called knowledge of these 3 books comes from who knows where, not from film adaptations (if I've watched one, I've forgotten it). Tom at Wuthering Expectations once wrote "How many first-time readers miss the actual story on the page in front of them while looking around for Igor and the pitchfork-wielding peasants and "Puttin' on the Ritz"?" That isn't my problem here. My problem is something else.
Look at the 1st chapter of Dracula. Bram Stoker uses lots of details and images to create a horrifying atmosphere:
- A dog howling all night under window.
- Queer dreams.
- People's looks of fear, and whispers ("Satan", "hell", "witch" and "werewolf" or "vampire").
- St George's Day.
- The sign of the cross, a charm or guard against the evil eye.
- The gift of a crucifix.
- The prevalence of goitre.
- Peasant's cart with long, snake-like vertebra.
- Dark firs that stand out against the snow.
- Great masses of greyness.
- Steep hills, ghost-like clouds.
- The driver's haste, and fellow passengers' excitement.
- Dracula's man, who has "a hard-looking mouth, with very red lips and sharp-looking teeth, as white as ivory", and strong, cold hands.
- Feeling that the calèche goes over and over the same ground.
- A dog howling, "a long, agonised wailing, as if from fear", followed by several other dogs.
- Wolves.
- Horses trembling, snorting and screaming with fright.
- A heavy cloud passing across the face of the moon; darkness.
He causes fear and builds up tension and prepares readers for greater horror ahead. Foreshadowing device. Victorian readers didn't know what was coming, they were scared and their imagination was filled with possibilities and they tried to guess what was going on and what was going to happen next and were eager to find out. I have a faint idea. To Victorian readers, Dracula is only a name, which they take and accept neutrally. To me, the name carries with it so many associations and images, the name is tinted, and tainted. I'm reading it, but at the same time, I find myself looking for something.
Let's see how it goes. 

Vladimir Nabokov's lecture on Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde

From "Lectures on Literature"*.

1/ Nabokov dismisses the interpretations of this book as a mystery story (which, to him, is "the very negation of style", conventional literature), a detective story (as a detective story, it is lame), a parable or an allegory ("tasteless"). He quotes Stephen Gwynn, that it's "a fable that lies nearer to poetry than to ordinary prose fiction".

2/ The names Jekyll and Hyde, according to Nabokov, are of Scandinavian origin: Hyde comes from the Anglo-Saxon "hyd", which is the Danish "hide", "a haven"; Jekyll comes from the Danish name Jökulle, meaning "an icicle".
Then he goes on to mock "Not knowing these simple derivations one would be apt to find all kinds of symbolic meanings, especially in Hyde, the most obvious being that Hyde is a kind of hiding place for Dr Jekyll, in whom the jocular doctor and the killer are combined."
Is there anything wrong in seeing the word "hide" in Hyde and "kill" in Jekyll?
I'm not sure about "hyd", "hide" and "Jökulle". The last word is particularly curious, because the Danish alphabet doesn't have "ö", only the Swedish alphabet does.
Note: according to the notes in my copy of "Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde", the name Jekyll is meant to be pronounced like "jee-kill", not /ˈdʒɛk(ə)l/ as OED says. 

3/ I'm glad to discover that Nabokov's view on Jekyll is quite similar to mine, but of course he expresses it a lot better:
"Is Jekyll good? No, he is a composite being, a mixture of good and bad, a preparation consisting of a 99% solution of Jekyllite and 1% of Hyde [...] Jekyll's morals are poor from the Victorian point of view. He is a hypocritical creature carefully concealing his little sins. He is vindictive, never forgiving Dr Lanyon with whom he disagrees in scientific matters. He is foolhardy. Hyde is mingled with him, within him."
To make it clearer: "Jekyll is not really transformed into Hyde but projects a concentrate of pure evil that becomes Hyde, who is smaller than Jekyll, a big man, to indicate the larger amount of good that Jekyll possesses".
According to "the popular notions about this seldom read book" (to use Nabokov's words), Jekyll and Hyde are 2 separate beings that exist within 1 person, good and evil, but that isn't the case.

4/ Nabokov draws the house:
https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhOKVYLpPDrCqU3wWkQnZ7uRjUbtIXu0wccFAhcq_SXZz-j2O9NTEM0suixvsDpRXgAcRmKVKh8GMnVYIUaRblXyfsiJ-2xjGV8Z7AbSzLwRdGhx7xT0q6nikU_P-3YynqOu1mzHZOjkNE/s1600/Jekyll+House.jpg
(or rather, it's a student's drawing, with his alterations).
"Just as Jekyll is a mixture of good and bad, so Jekyll's dwelling place is also a mixture, a very neat symbol, a very neat representation of the Jekyll and Hyde relationship."

5/ "Stevenson's artistic purpose was to make "a fantastic drama pass in the presence of plain sensible men" in an atmosphere familiar to the readers of Dickens, in the setting of London's bleak fog, of solemn elderly gentlemen drinking old port, of ugly faced houses, of family lawyers and devoted butlers, of anonymous vices thriving somewhere behind the solemn square on which Jekyll lives, and of cold mornings and of hansom cabs."
Now Nabokov points that out, the setting seems familiar, even conventional. But of course the tale isn't conventional. This book is great because it's strange and well-written and also because it is many things at once and beyond them all: mystery novel, Gothic novel, detective story, fable, allegory, doppelgänger literature, popular/ sensational fiction, etc. 

6/ Interestingly enough, Nabokov also likes and draws attention to a passage I've just pointed out in the earlier post: the chocolate-coloured pall scene.

7/ Speaking of alliteration, he quotes Stevenson:
"It used to be a piece of good advice to all young writers to avoid alliteration; and the advice was sound, in so far as it prevented daubing. None the less for that, was it abominable nonsense, and the mere raving of those blindest of the blind who will not see. The beauty of the contents of a phrase, or of a sentence, depends implicitly upon alliteration and upon assonance. The vowel demands to be repeated; the consonant demands to be repeated; and both cry aloud to be perpetually varied. You may follow the adventures of a letter through any passage that has particularly pleased you; find it, perhaps, denied a while, to tantalise the ear; find it fired again at you in a whole broadside; or find it pass into congenerous sounds, one liquid or labial melting away into another. And you will find another and much stranger circumstance. Literature is written by and for two senses: a sort of internal ear, quick to perceive 'unheard melodies'; and the eye, which directs the pen and deciphers the printed phrase."
And adds "and let me add as a reader, the internal eye visualizes its color and meaning".
Let me paste here a few more words by Stevenson:
"Each phrase in literature is built of sounds, as each phrase in music consists of notes. One sound suggests, echoes, demands, and harmonises with another; and the art of rightly using these concordances is the final art in literature."
Really, Stevenson plays a lot with sounds:
E.g: "the bless seems hardly human! Something troglodytic, shall we say? or can it be the old story of Dr Fell? or is it the mere radiance of a foul soul that thus transpires through, and transfigures, its clay continent? [...] I read Satan's signature upon a face, it is on that of your new friend."
You can find it even in the 1st line:
"Mr Utterson the lawyer was a man of a rugged countenance, that was never lighted by a smile; cold, scanty and embarrassed in discourse; backward in sentiment; lean, long, dusty, dreary, and yet somehow lovable."

8/ I wrote the depravity of Hyde was vague, unspecified.
Nabokov says "Stevenson gives us the specific, lifelike description of events by humdrum London gentlemen, but contrasting with this are the unspecified, vague, but ominous allusions to pleasures and dreadful vices somewhere behind the scenes. [...] If we are really being told "never mind what the evil was- just believe it was something very bad", then we might feel ourselves cheated and bullied. We could feel cheated by vagueness in the most interesting part of the story because its setting is so matter of fact and realistic".
This, to him, is a problem "It was safer for the artist not to be specific and to leave the pleasures of Jekyll undescribed. But does not this safety, this easy way, does it not denote a certain weakness in the artist? I think it does."
I do like Stevenson to make it clearer, but this is not necessarily a weakness. London is covered in fog, the vices are also covered in fog, and darkness, and the ambiguity makes the story complex, fascinating, open to interpretation. Hyde is a secret, he goes into the house through the back door, the mystery isn't revealed to anyone but Dr Lanyon until Jekyll's suicide, it is all a secret from the beginning to the end, even after the end. This might be a deliberate artistic choice rather than an evasion. Also, not saying what the vices are also makes them worse than they actually are.
Nabokov mentions the suggestion that they refer to homosexuality, which he doesn't dismiss as tasteless or impossible, even if he says "this Victorian reticence prompts the modern reader to grope for conclusions that perhaps Stevenson never intended to be groped for". Then he remarks "In any case, the good reader cannot be quite satisfied with the mist surrounding Jekyll's adventures. And this is especially irritating since Hyde's adventures, likewise anonymous, are supposed to be monstrous exaggerations of Jekyll's wayward whims."
Indeed, what have Jekyll and Hyde done?
"Now the only thing that we do guess about Hyde's pleasures is that they are sadistic- he enjoys the infliction of pain".
And that's the worst part, a lot worse than the other excesses.

9/ Quoting Stephen Gwynn, Nabokov points out "the monkish pattern" of the book: Jekyll, Utterson, Enfield and Poole are bachelors, and women have hardly any part in the action.

10/ In the last part of the lecture, Nabokov writes about Stevenson's last moments, of which I was ignorant. 
"What, has my face changed? There is a curious thematical link between this last episode in Stevenson's life and the fateful transformations in his most wonderful book". 


*: 
http://thelittlewhiteattic.blogspot.com/2014/01/vladimir-nabokovs-lecture-on-mansfield.html
http://thelittlewhiteattic.blogspot.com/2014/01/vladimir-nabokovs-lecture-on-madame.html

Jekyll and Hyde- look at these descriptions

This book is terribly well-written.
Look at this:

"It was by this time about nine in the morning, and the first fog of the season. A great chocolate-coloured pall lowered over heaven, but the wind was continually charging and routing these embattled vapours; so that as the cab crawled from street to street, Mr. Utterson beheld a marvellous number of degrees and hues of twilight; for here it would be dark like the back-end of evening; and there would be a glow of a rich, lurid brown, like the light of some strange conflagration; and here, for a moment, the fog would be quite broken up, and a haggard shaft of daylight would glance in between the swirling wreaths. The dismal quarter of Soho seen under these changing glimpses, with its muddy ways, and slatternly passengers, and its lamps, which had never been extinguished or had been kindled afresh to combat this mournful re-invasion of darkness, seemed, in the lawyer's eyes, like a district of some city in a nightmare."

This is the scene after the murder (which, by the way, happens under the full moon, the sky is cloudless, the window of the witness brilliantly lit by the moonlight), Utterson and inspector Newcomen go to Soho looking for Hyde. 

"As the cab drew up before the address indicated, the fog lifted a little and showed him a dingy street, a gin palace, a low French eating-house, a shop for the retail of penny numbers and twopenny salads, many ragged children huddled in the doorways, and many women of different nationalities passing out, key in hand, to have a morning glass; and the next moment the fog settled down again upon that part, as brown as umber, and cut him off from his blackguardly surroundings. This was the home of Henry Jekyll's favourite; of a man who was heir to a quarter of a million sterling." 

Now look at this scene, where Poole (Jekyll's butler) thinks there is some "foul play" and asks Utterson to go with him to Jekyll's house. 

"It was a wild, cold, seasonable night of March, with a pale moon, lying on her back as though the wind had tilted her, and a flying wrack of the most diaphanous and lawny texture. The wind made talking difficult, and flecked the blood into the face. It seemed to have swept the streets unusually bare of passengers, besides; for Mr. Utterson thought he had never seen that part of London so deserted. He could have wished it otherwise; never in his life had he been conscious of so sharp a wish to see and touch his fellow-creatures; for struggle as he might, there was borne in upon his mind a crushing anticipation of calamity. The square, when they got there, was all full of wind and dust, and the thin trees in the garden were lashing themselves along the railing."

That's just so good. 
No comments now, no analysis. I just want to draw attention to these passages and those phrases. 


By the way, check out this article about Jekyll and Hyde: 
http://www.tor.com/blogs/2012/06/what-everybody-gets-wrong-about-jekyll-and-hyde
(Hyde doesn't exist, "Jekyll did not create a potion to remove the evil parts of his nature. He made a potion that allowed him express his urges without feeling guilty and without any consequences besmirching his good name", we never get Hyde's point of view, Jekyll always think of himself as Jekyll even when being Hyde and knows exactly what's going on, Jekyll wants to do all the things he does as Hyde and revels in this freedom, etc.) 
Not saying that I agree with everything, but it's interesting. 

Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde

Who gave me the idea, before I read Robert Louis Stevenson's book, that Jekyll represented good and Hyde represented evil? 
I've just read Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. Here are paragraphs, sentences, phrases describing Hyde:
- Tramples over a little girl, ignores her screams, and walks away.
- "It wasn't like a man; it was like some damned Juggernaut. I gave a view-halloa, took to my heels, collared my gentleman, and brought him back to where there was already quite a group about the screaming child. He was perfectly cool and made no resistance, but gave me one look, so ugly that it brought out the sweat on me like running." 
- "He is not easy to describe. There is something wrong with his appearance; something displeasing, something downright detestable. I never saw a man I so disliked, and yet I scarce know why. He must be deformed somewhere; he gives a strong feeling of deformity, although I couldn't specify the point. He's an extraordinary-looking man, and yet I really can name nothing out of the way." 
- "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; all these were points against him, but not all of these together could explain the hitherto unknown disgust, loathing, and fear with which Mr. Utterson regarded him."
- "the bless seems hardly human! Something troglodytic, shall we say? or can it be the old story of Dr Fell? or is it the mere radiance of a foul soul that thus transpires through, and transfigures, its clay continent? [...] I read Satan's signature upon a face, it is on that of your new friend." 
- Beats a man (Danvers Carew) to death.
- Liked by nobody.
- "the body of a self-destroyer". 
- Fills a pious work with "startling blasphemies". 
- "He was small, as I have said; I was struck besides with the shocking expression of his face, with his remarkable combination of great muscular activity and great apparent debility of constitution, and—last but not least— with the odd, subjective disturbance caused by his neighbourhood. This bore some resemblance to incipient rigour, and was accompanied by a marked sinking of the pulse. At the time, I set it down to some idiosyncratic, personal distaste, and merely wondered at the acuteness of the symptoms; but I have since had reason to believe the cause to lie much deeper in the nature of man, and to turn on some nobler hinge than the principle of hatred.
This person (who had thus, from the first moment of his entrance, struck in me what I can only describe as a disgustful curiosity) was dressed in a fashion that would have made an ordinary person laughable [...] Rather, as there was something abnormal and misbegotten in the very essence of the creature that now faced me— something seizing, surprising, and revolting—this fresh disparity seemed but to fit in with and to reinforce it; so that to my interest in the man's nature and character, there was added a curiosity as to his origin, his life, his fortune and status in the world." 
- "a heady recklessness, a current of disordered sensual images running like a mill-race in my fancy, a solution of the bonds of obligation". 
- "more wicked, tenfold more wicked, sold a slave to my original evil". 
- "Even as good shone upon the countenance of the one, evil was written broadly and plainly on the face of the other. Evil besides (which I must still believe to be the lethal side of man) had left on that body an imprint of deformity and decay." 
- "pure evil". 
- "The pleasures" are "undignified" and "turn towards the monstrous". 
- "vicarious depravity". 
- "This familiar that I called out of my own soul, and sent forth alone to do his good pleasure, was a being inherently malign and villainous; his every act and thought centred on self; drinking pleasure with bestial avidity from any degree of torture to another; relentless like a man of stone." 
- "brutish, physical insensibility". 
- "My devil had been long caged, he came out roaring. I was conscious, even when I took the draught, of a more unbridled, a more furious propensity to ill." 
- "the scene of these excesses". 
- "lust of evil". 
- "the crowd of hideous images and sounds". 
- "a greater boldness, a contempt of danger, a solution of the bonds of obligation". 
- "the common quarry of mankind, hunted, houseless, a known murderer, thrall to the gallows". 
- Has nothing human; has nothing in him but fear and hatred. 
- Smites a woman who offers him a box of lights. 
- "something not only hellish but inorganic". 
- Burns letters and destroys the father's portrait. 

Evil, evil, evil. I get the idea. Brutish, depraved, inhuman, wicked, etc. But it's general. Vague. There are a few actions and incidents that are more specific, but still vague. E.g Hyde tramples over a girl. What does that mean? The word "trample" seems odd. Then he attacks a man to death. Why? What have they been doing before that? What did Carew say to him? And why does he strike the woman? It's not even clear that she's holding a box of lights ("Once a woman spoke to him, offering, I think, a box of lights"). Let's just say that there need no reasons, because after all Hyde's pure evil, without a conscience, why does he need a reason to assault someone. More important is what Hyde does when he is Hyde, what the pleasures are. Violence, drinking, sexual excesses. I'm pondering over the suggestion that they refer to homosexuality.
Of course, Stevenson doesn't have to be very specific. The ambiguity makes the text richer, more fascinating, open to interpretation. 

OK, forget about Hyde for a moment. Look at Jekyll: 
- "He was wild when he was young; a long while ago to be sure; but in the law of God, there is no statute of limitations. Ay, it must be that; the ghost of some old sin, the cancer of some concealed disgrace: punishment coming, pede claudo, years after memory has forgotten and self-love condoned the fault."
- "Now that that evil influence had been withdrawn, a new life began for Dr. Jekyll. He came out of his seclusion, renewed relations with his friends, became once more their familiar guest and entertainer; and whilst he had always been known for charities, he was now no less distinguished for religion. He was busy, he was much in the open air, he did good; his face seemed to open and brighten, as if with an inward consciousness of service..."
- "the worst of my faults was a certain impatient gaiety of disposition, such as has made the happiness of many, but such as I found it hard to reconcile with my imperious desire to carry my head high, and wear a more than commonly grave countenance before the public. Hence it came about that I concealed my pleasures; and that when I reached years of reflection, and began to look round me and take stock of my progress and position in the world, I stood already committed to a profound duplicity of life. Many a man would have even blazoned such irregularities as I was guilty of; but from the high views that I had set before me, I regarded and hid them with an almost morbid sense of shame. " 
- "a double-dealer" but not "a hypocrite", according to himself. 
- "a life of effort, virtue and control". 
- "Jekyll (who was composite) now with the most sensitive apprehensions, now with a greedy gusto, projected and shared in the pleasures and adventures of Hyde; but Hyde was indifferent to Jekyll [...] To cast in my lot with Jekyll, was to die to those appetites which I had long secretly indulged and had of late begun to pamper." 
- Addicted to being Hyde. 
- "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." 
- "As the acuteness of this remorse began to die away, it was succeeded by a sense of joy", because Hyde doesn't really exist. 
- "restrictions of natural life", "renunciation". 
- "I resolved in my future conduct to redeem the past; and I can say with honesty that my resolve was fruitful of some good. You know yourself how earnestly in the last months of last year, I laboured to relieve suffering; you know that much was done for others, and that the days passed quietly, almost happily for myself. Nor can I truly say that I wearied of this beneficent and innocent life; I think instead that I daily enjoyed it more completely; but I was still cursed with my duality of purpose; and as the first edge of my penitence wore off, the lower side of me, so long indulged, so recently chained down, began to growl for licence."
- "wealthy, beloved". 

Here, again, the details are left out. What are the pleasures, for instance? What does Utterson mean by saying that Jekyll was wild? More importantly, the goodness of Jekyll is also vague. There is nothing about his goodness, his positive traits, virtues, qualities... Well we know that he's friendly, respected, beloved, but that means nothing. We know that he does charities, but that doesn't mean he's good; actually the quotes above show that he needs to care about his progress and position in the world, and does charities also to ease his conscience, which in his youth enables him to commit to his duplicity of life and which later helps him accept the actions of Hyde, which he does his best to separate from his Jekyll self, even though Jekyll shares in the pleasures and excitement. Read all of the passages above- it appears that Jekyll isn't truly good, he just conforms to the conventions and expectations of society, wears a mask, presents his respectable side to others, hides his pleasures and dark activities from others. He lives a double life. To himself, being Jekyll and rejecting Hyde is a restriction, a renunciation- when Hyde goes too far, Jekyll has a bad conscience, but feels a sense of joy because for the time being, Hyde can hide and doesn't have to be held accountable for his crime, and doing charities afterwards is just a way of making up for his bad deeds and feeling better about himself. 
Jekyll therefore isn't good. This side only symbolises conformity, renunciation, repression, the social man, the civilised man, or, it is hard to resist, the consciousness.