GLR March-April 2026

Shelley and Stevenson’s works be longed to an era when social class deter mined upward mobility and financial prosperity. Englishmen were expected to be respectable husbands, providers, and protectors. But if they were seen as weak, they were judged inferior in a so ciety in which male hysteria was in creasingly diagnosed. Because Victor and Dr. Jekyll frequently exhibit the af fliction’s unmanly symptoms—includ ing melancholy, depression, and sickly appearances—their monsters can be seen as an expression of their masculine insecurities. In this reading, Victor represses ho mosocial or homoerotic yearnings that cannot be fulfilled due to social pro scription and his privileged status. He reacts by creating a soulmate or double being to compensate for this prohibi tion. In one instance, he explains his in tense yearning for such companionship to his sister Margaret: “But I have one want which I have never yet been able

Fredric March as Jekyll and Hyde in 1931’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.

to satisfy; and the absence of the object of which I now feel as a most severe evil. I have no friend, Margaret: when I am glow ing with the enthusiasm of success, there will be none to par ticipate in my joy; if I am assailed by disappointment, no one will endeavour to sustain me in dejection.” But the compan ionship desired is not that of a female: “I desire the company of a man who could sympathise with me; whose eyes would reply to mine. You may deem me romantic, my dear sister, but I bitterly feel the want of a friend. I have no one near me, gen tle yet courageous, possessed of a cultivated as well as of a ca pacious mind, whose tastes are like my own, to approve or amend my plans.” Victor is aware of his own hysteria, oppressed with a “slow fever” every night and “nervous to a most painful degree.” Such a need for a double being is also found when the hyster ical Dr. Jekyll carries on horrific nighttime activities in the body of Mr. Hyde. Such hysteria can also be seen as an expression of homosocial or homosexual anxiety during a period when no terminology existed for such a sexual identity. (While the term “homosexual” had been coined in Germany in 1868, it was not in general usage until the early 20th century.) Moreover, the men in Dr. Jekyll’s male space find Mr. Hyde abhorrent, viewed with “disgust, loathing and fear”—just as they might view a morally debased individual such as a homo sexual. One recalls in the text: “there was something queer about that gentleman—something that gave a man a turn.” Dr. Jekyll also suffers from hysteria, telling his friends that he is “very low.” A friend confirms the illness, finding the doctor “looking deathly sick.” Both protagonists can be considered “queer” not only be cause they exist outside normative heterosexual frameworks— evidenced by the near absence of marital or sexual relationships in the narratives—but also because “queer” here signals a broader challenge to the era’s norms of gender, sexuality, and

societies to theaters, coffeehouses, commercial arcades, and even private laboratories, such spaces reflected industrial pros perity, imperial confidence, and male social power. Yet they also nurtured secrecy, alternative masculinities, and activities deemed morally suspect, from clandestine sexual encounters to unchecked scientific experimentation. In Frankenstein and Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde , the protagonists emerge from and operate within this male urban sphere, their transgressive pursuits mirroring contemporary anxieties about shifting sexual and familial roles—anxieties that were fre quently pathologized as “male hysteria.” When Victor and Dr. Jekyll create their monsters, they ex perience a temporary reprieve from their hysteria. For Dr. Jekyll, the sensation is almost orgasmic: The most racking pangs succeeded: a grinding in the bones, deadly nausea, and a horror of the spirit that cannot be exceeded at the hour of birth or death. Then these agonies began swiftly to subside, and I came to myself as if out of a great sickness. There was something strange in my sensations, something indescrib ably new and, from its very novelty, incredibly sweet. I felt younger, lighter, happier in body; within I was conscious of a heady recklessness, a current of disordered sensual images run ning like a millrace in my fancy, a solution of the bonds of obli gation, an unknown but not an innocent freedom of the soul. The same sense of relief from Victor’s hysteria is euphoric when he creates his monster and perceives his new soul mate as al most perfect and worthy of praising to God: “I saw the dull yel low eye of the creature open; it breathed hard, and a convulsive motion agitated its limbs. How can I describe my emotions at this catastrophe, or how delineate the wretch whom with such infinite pains and care I had endeavoured to form? His limbs were in proportion, and I had selected his features as beautiful. Beautiful!—Great God!” March–April 2026

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