The Subject of Sexuality in Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and Bram Stokers Essay

The Subject of Sexuality in Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and Bram Stokers Dracula - Essay Example The relationship of Hyde to Jekyll portrays remarkably the relationship between pleasure and power. If Jekyll embodies power, Hyde embodies the pleasure disallowed and still created by the powerful elite. Hyde is inhibited, concealed, and still he emerges from the longing or urges of the decent and highly regarded Jekyll. By summoning Hyde from the inexplicable core of his own longing, Jekyll builds a link to his depravity, or, a sexuality that is repressed and brutal, that forces depravity upon several actions that he methodically detaches from himself (Stevenson 2006). Hating his own self for his hidden lusts, Jekyll falls back on science to discover the path towards power and pleasure, suppression and excesses. The twofold identity divided between decency and lust distinguishes power as the capacity to be completely both. Hyde represents sexuality as debasement and depravity. Jekyll gives life to Hyde by ingesting the correct concoction of substances. Hyde, therefore, is a medical result, or, a by-product of chemical trial. Jekyll is the character that ‘wrapped the sexual body in its embrace’ (Halberstam 1995, 69). Jekyll, through chemical experimentation, generates a vicious entity and afterwards he struggles to suppress it and control it. This representation of sexuality in Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde depicts several Victorian values. Audiences immediately associated the two characters of Dr. Jekyll to the ‘double standard’ social order of that period; double standard, because it was a period of contrasting principles—usually regarding sexuality above all. ... Hyde depicts several Victorian values. Audiences immediately associated the two characters of Dr. Jekyll to the ‘double standard’ social order of that period; double standard, because it was a period of contrasting principles—usually regarding sexuality above all. The common attitude towards it was extremely strict and suppressive, but at the same time obscene materials and harlotry flourished (Halberstam 1995, 69-70). Thus, when the author narrated about Hyde’s wicked acts, without in fact bringing them up, audiences associated that immediately to sexuality. By changing the focus on this form of sexuality, a frequently talked about theme of the author’s original narrative becomes ensnared into contemporary analyses: a large number of intellectuals today infer a hidden allusion to homosexuality in his fiction. Clues are scattered all over the narrative. First of all, there is virtually an absence of female characters in the novel. In addition, the du al self that Dr. Jekyll had to create can be understood as the widespread core immorality homosexuals at the time had to confront. Homosexual relationships at the time the story was written were established as illegal and an evil doing (Hogle 2002). Jekyll’s blend of reproductive features reflects the medical portrayals of ‘homosexuals’ who are making their presence more felt than ever before (Cooper 2010, 75): This perverse sexuality appears spontaneously, without external cause, with the development of sexual life, as an individual manifestation of an abnormal form of the vita sexualis, and then has the force of a congenital phenomenon; or it develops upon a sexuality the beginning of which was normal, as a result of very definite injurious influences, and thus appears as an acquired anomaly. Upon what