GLR March-April 2026

ESSAY Dr. Jekyll and Victor Frankenstein W ILL B ASHOR

N INETEENTH-CENTURY English society adhered to conventional notions of Christian morality and respectable behavior, but the culture’s stiff upper lip quavered over anxi eties around social, moral, and psychological degeneracy, which provide the context for the horrifying tales of Mary Shelley and Robert Louis Stevenson. These anxieties are personified by the authors’ monsters, whose bodies incorporate fear, desire, and fantasy. Shelley’s Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus (1818), written during the late Georgian period, emerges from a time of social and intellectual upheaval marked by revolutionary ideals and the dawn of modern science, in which emotional repression and anxieties about human nature were already prominent. Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886) was written in the late Victorian era under the queen’s reign of straitlaced civility, by which time these anxieties had hardened into a cultural expectation of emotional restraint and moral rigidity. This historical layering enriches the interpretation of these works, highlighting how Shelley and Stevenson’s mon sters symbolize the complex interplay of progress and repres sion across these transformative periods in English history. believed to stem from the womb ( hystera in ancient Greek), but by the 19th-century doctors recognized similar symptoms in men—such as nervousness, emotional instability, fatigue, and psychosomatic ailments—particularly among men facing in tense social pressures. This expansion reflected broader cultural fears about the destabilization of traditional masculinity in an in dustrializing, imperial Britain. Male hysteria thus became a sub ject where medical discourse and anxieties about gender intersected, marking off certain men perceived as physically or morally weak, and revealing underlying tensions about sexual ity, identity, and social roles. These anxieties about masculinity were not only medical but also social, influencing how men navigated and occupied male-dominated spaces in 19th-century England. Such envi ronments became settings in which male identity, secrecy, and transgressive behavior came together. It is within these male so Will Bashor teaches at the University of the People and lives in Sitges, Spain. His novels include The Bizarre Case of Dr. Grindle and The Bastard Prince of Versailles. Moreover, these anxieties coincide with a rise in purported cases of male hysteria, a diagnosis that emerged as medicine ex panded its understanding of nervous and emotional disorders beyond women to in clude men. Historically, hysteria was pathol ogized primarily as a female condition,

cial spheres—like scientific laboratories—that Shelley and Stevenson’s protagonists operate. In Shelley’s Frankenstein , scientist Victor Frankenstein gives life to a sapient creation that seeks revenge through ter ror and murder when rejected by its creator. In Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde , the respectable doc tor Henry Jekyll develops a serum to help hide his repressed urges, but the drug instead transforms him into the physical in carnation of his angst, Edward Hyde (even his alter ego’s name is a homophone referring to concealment). Importantly, Henry Jekyll was named after Walter Jekyll, a former clergyman and friend of Stevenson who was almost certainly homosexual and who had renounced his ecclesiastical career, spending several years living on the Continent—an experience that suggests he struggled with societal expectations and identity, possibly echo ing the themes of duality and repression found in Stevenson’s novella. Based on the strange behavior of Victor Frankenstein and Dr. Jekyll and their preoccupation with male spaces, readers may question what the protagonists are hiding and whether it might be their sexual orientation. Although it is not possible to “out” the cultural and social restrictions of the time, in which women were relegated to peripheral roles and denied access to scientific or intellectual pursuits. This absence amplifies the emotional and psychological ten sions experienced by Victor Frankenstein and Dr. Jekyll, who navigate their double lives and repressed desires largely in isola tion from meaningful female influence or companionship. The limited presence of women also highlights the homosocial and homoerotic undercurrents in the stories, as male relationships and conflicts occupy center stage, and the protagonists’ struggles un fold within exclusively male spaces. Consequently, the lack of strong female characters not only mirrors 19th-century gender norms but also intensifies the portrayal of masculine anxieties about identity, companionship, and social expectations. While the century’s scientific progress and rapid socioeco nomic change fostered the growth of new urban male spaces— public and semi-public environments dominated by men and often inaccessible to women—these venues could embody both the promise and peril of modernity. From elite gentlemen’s clubs (e.g., The Reform Club, The Athenæum) and scientific any of Shelley or Stevenson’s characters as gay, the stories can be examined to detect the elements of the homoerotic. Moreover, the stories share themes of male duality and the conspicuous absence of strong female char acters, which serves to underscore the pro tagonists’ isolation and the prevalence of male-dominated spheres in both narra tives. The marginalization of women reflects

Based on the strange behavior of Drs. Jekyll and Frankenstein and their preoccupa ti on with male spaces, we may ques ti on what they are hiding...

TheG & LR

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