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juushikaTitle: The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde
Author: Robert Lewis Stevenson
Published: New York: Penguin Classics, 1979 (1886)
Rating: 5 of 5
Page Count: 70
Total Page Count: 206,930
Text Number: 613
Read Because: personal enjoyment, paperback from my personal collection
Review: Mr Utterson worries that his friend Mr Jekyll, a doctor of good nature and great skill, is being blackmailed by his apprentice, an uncannily cruel man named Mr Hyde. This holds up surprisingly well, despite that the late reveal of its identities is now no mystery. The gothic atmosphere and short, punchy chapters are engaging, and the relationships between Jekyll and Hyde is more compelling than I expected—largely because it's not what I expected: this is more a story about the necessity and danger of acknowledging the innate evil of all personalities than it is a simple good/evil dichotomy—a subtle, thorny theme nestled within a swift narrative. I was entirely satisfied with this, and recommend it.
Thoughts on source material vs. cultural osmosis/adaptation, originally posted on Tumblr:
Having finally read Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (after recently seeing it adapted in both Once Upon a Time and Penny Dreadful & then remembering I have it on my shelf coinciding with a feeling of "dun wanna" with the next books-in-a-series on my TBR), I have a lot of feelings about adaptation theory? My cultural osmosis of the story was as follows: 1) a man, concerned about the origin/effect of the evil aspects of his nature, 2) on purpose or on accident, 3) invents a serum that 4) separates his personalities into a good gentleman doctor and a bad brute, 5) with the intent of stomping out that evil personality 6) but he loses control over the switches between these personalities and/or is instead defeated by his evil personality.
It never particularly alarmed me that hapless good Jekyll could hardly also be a character willfully switching between good and evil personalities once he had separated them, but the resolution to this conflict is that half of what I knew was wrong: namely, there is no “good” Jekyll–there is Jekyll as composite personality, personalizing evil Hyde:
This distinction is huge. It’s not a story about good vs. evil, but about the evil inherent within all people. The introduction to my text (by Jenni Calder) offers this as the story’s central “ambivalence”:
I love fairy tale retellings; I’m invested in the ways that adaptation can canonize, readdress, and cumulatively define a story. Some of the aspects of this story which had effectively been canonized (as far as my cultural knowledge indicates) are outright wrong–like Hyde’s appearance–in ways that don’t necessarily matter: perhaps a slight, cruel man is more interesting than a monstrous giant as a depiction of evil, the way that Stevenson links deformity to evil makes it no better. But other aspects are wrong in ways that change the story’s entire purpose–specifically the shift from addressing the evil innate within the self to separating the good and evil aspects of a personality.
I wonder if this change originates from whatever cultural or historical elements made the original story so popular or enduring? I certainly think good vs. evil is a more comfortable narrative–also more distinct and therefore maybe easier to retell. But the analysis of evil within the self is more subtle, compelling, and authentic; it’s not comfortable, it’s implicating. That’s the story I’d prefer to see reiterated.
#there may be adaptions that are more faithful to the source material in this regard? wouldn't know & it's honestly not super relevant #it's also not that source material is somehow more valid than reinterpretation #but the way that this central theme has changed in adaptation is huge?? #it's bigger than something like 'does fairy tale character X live or die in retelling' #and more on scale with 'does fairy tale character X exist at all' #(as a sidenote Penny Dreadful's adaptation is way more interesting with source material for context)
Title: The Family Plot
Author: Cherie Priest
Published: New York: Tor, 2016
Rating: 3 of 5
Page Count: 360
Total Page Count: 201,290
Text Number: 614
Read Because: personal enjoyment, ebook borrowed from the Multnomah County Library
Review: When Music City Salvage buys the rights to a Victorian-era estate, they get more than they bargained for: a family of ghosts resides in the old house. This is a haunted house novel that gets a lot of things right. It refuses to engage skepticism, and the time that could be wasted on establishing genre conventions is instead given to a dreamy, surreal ghost story with a slow build and some sincerely haunting moments. Priest has an eye for detail, and here it makes the house and salvage operation come alive. But while the house is a character and a half, the human cast is overwhelmingly prosaic (it took me half the book to tell the male characters apart) and the mystery becomes less compelling the more it's revealed, until the atmosphere is entirely ruined by an overexplained ending and corny final scene. I like the book this could have been, and wish all haunted houses had such a convincing sense of place, but this is ultimately underwhelming and I can't recommend it.
Title: Unexpected Stories
Author: Octavia E. Butler
Published: New York: Open Road, 2014
Rating: 4 of 5
Page Count: 85
Total Page Count: 201,375
Text Number: 615
Read Because: fan of the author/alerted to its existence byambyr, ebook borrowed from the Multnomah County Library
Review: These are two of Butler's early works, written in the 1970s (before her published work) but only published posthumously. As a result, Butler's writing—which is frequently workmanlike—is especially stiff here, most obviously in the action sequences. But these stories are a fascinating insight into the themes Butler would return to throughout her work, and her first efforts to balance speculative worldbuilding, power dynamics, interpersonal relationships, and plot. The effort is occasionally uneven (the end of "A Necessary Being" lags, but its protagonist's complicated situation is reminiscent of Dawn; "Childfinder" is almost so brief as to be abrupt, but its worldbuilding reveals are organic), but is always engaging and thematically successful, and despite their posthumous release these are finished stories. As brief as this collection is, it's a welcome addition to her body of work.
Author: Robert Lewis Stevenson
Published: New York: Penguin Classics, 1979 (1886)
Rating: 5 of 5
Page Count: 70
Total Page Count: 206,930
Text Number: 613
Read Because: personal enjoyment, paperback from my personal collection
Review: Mr Utterson worries that his friend Mr Jekyll, a doctor of good nature and great skill, is being blackmailed by his apprentice, an uncannily cruel man named Mr Hyde. This holds up surprisingly well, despite that the late reveal of its identities is now no mystery. The gothic atmosphere and short, punchy chapters are engaging, and the relationships between Jekyll and Hyde is more compelling than I expected—largely because it's not what I expected: this is more a story about the necessity and danger of acknowledging the innate evil of all personalities than it is a simple good/evil dichotomy—a subtle, thorny theme nestled within a swift narrative. I was entirely satisfied with this, and recommend it.
Thoughts on source material vs. cultural osmosis/adaptation, originally posted on Tumblr:
Having finally read Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (after recently seeing it adapted in both Once Upon a Time and Penny Dreadful & then remembering I have it on my shelf coinciding with a feeling of "dun wanna" with the next books-in-a-series on my TBR), I have a lot of feelings about adaptation theory? My cultural osmosis of the story was as follows: 1) a man, concerned about the origin/effect of the evil aspects of his nature, 2) on purpose or on accident, 3) invents a serum that 4) separates his personalities into a good gentleman doctor and a bad brute, 5) with the intent of stomping out that evil personality 6) but he loses control over the switches between these personalities and/or is instead defeated by his evil personality.
It never particularly alarmed me that hapless good Jekyll could hardly also be a character willfully switching between good and evil personalities once he had separated them, but the resolution to this conflict is that half of what I knew was wrong: namely, there is no “good” Jekyll–there is Jekyll as composite personality, personalizing evil Hyde:
Hence, although I had now two characters as well as two appearances, one was wholly evil, and the other was still the old Henry Jekyll, that incongruous compound of whose reformation and improvement I had already learned to despair.
This distinction is huge. It’s not a story about good vs. evil, but about the evil inherent within all people. The introduction to my text (by Jenni Calder) offers this as the story’s central “ambivalence”:
Stevenson suggest that evil is potentially more powerful than good, and if we allow it to come into the open we are in effect allowing it to conquer. But in order to understand evil and to oppose it we must examine it.
I love fairy tale retellings; I’m invested in the ways that adaptation can canonize, readdress, and cumulatively define a story. Some of the aspects of this story which had effectively been canonized (as far as my cultural knowledge indicates) are outright wrong–like Hyde’s appearance–in ways that don’t necessarily matter: perhaps a slight, cruel man is more interesting than a monstrous giant as a depiction of evil, the way that Stevenson links deformity to evil makes it no better. But other aspects are wrong in ways that change the story’s entire purpose–specifically the shift from addressing the evil innate within the self to separating the good and evil aspects of a personality.
I wonder if this change originates from whatever cultural or historical elements made the original story so popular or enduring? I certainly think good vs. evil is a more comfortable narrative–also more distinct and therefore maybe easier to retell. But the analysis of evil within the self is more subtle, compelling, and authentic; it’s not comfortable, it’s implicating. That’s the story I’d prefer to see reiterated.
#there may be adaptions that are more faithful to the source material in this regard? wouldn't know & it's honestly not super relevant #it's also not that source material is somehow more valid than reinterpretation #but the way that this central theme has changed in adaptation is huge?? #it's bigger than something like 'does fairy tale character X live or die in retelling' #and more on scale with 'does fairy tale character X exist at all' #(as a sidenote Penny Dreadful's adaptation is way more interesting with source material for context)
Title: The Family Plot
Author: Cherie Priest
Published: New York: Tor, 2016
Rating: 3 of 5
Page Count: 360
Total Page Count: 201,290
Text Number: 614
Read Because: personal enjoyment, ebook borrowed from the Multnomah County Library
Review: When Music City Salvage buys the rights to a Victorian-era estate, they get more than they bargained for: a family of ghosts resides in the old house. This is a haunted house novel that gets a lot of things right. It refuses to engage skepticism, and the time that could be wasted on establishing genre conventions is instead given to a dreamy, surreal ghost story with a slow build and some sincerely haunting moments. Priest has an eye for detail, and here it makes the house and salvage operation come alive. But while the house is a character and a half, the human cast is overwhelmingly prosaic (it took me half the book to tell the male characters apart) and the mystery becomes less compelling the more it's revealed, until the atmosphere is entirely ruined by an overexplained ending and corny final scene. I like the book this could have been, and wish all haunted houses had such a convincing sense of place, but this is ultimately underwhelming and I can't recommend it.
Title: Unexpected Stories
Author: Octavia E. Butler
Published: New York: Open Road, 2014
Rating: 4 of 5
Page Count: 85
Total Page Count: 201,375
Text Number: 615
Read Because: fan of the author/alerted to its existence by
ambyr, ebook borrowed from the Multnomah County LibraryReview: These are two of Butler's early works, written in the 1970s (before her published work) but only published posthumously. As a result, Butler's writing—which is frequently workmanlike—is especially stiff here, most obviously in the action sequences. But these stories are a fascinating insight into the themes Butler would return to throughout her work, and her first efforts to balance speculative worldbuilding, power dynamics, interpersonal relationships, and plot. The effort is occasionally uneven (the end of "A Necessary Being" lags, but its protagonist's complicated situation is reminiscent of Dawn; "Childfinder" is almost so brief as to be abrupt, but its worldbuilding reveals are organic), but is always engaging and thematically successful, and despite their posthumous release these are finished stories. As brief as this collection is, it's a welcome addition to her body of work.
