I recently read Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde in the excellent Norton Critical Edition (2021), edited by Deborah Lutz, after reading the review of the new Stevenson biography (Storyteller, Leo Damrosch, Yale University Press, 2025) in The New York Times in September 2025, which considers it to be his masterpiece.
I’m not sure I ever read it in French translation as a teenager, but who doesn’t know the story of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde? Reading Stevenson’s text directly, without even glancing at the introduction, I sense a strong homosexual undertone.
For example, this account, reported by a maid, describes a scene on a deserted street that she observes from her window – it resembles a sexual encounter gone wrong:
She became aware of an aged and beautiful gentleman with white hair, drawing near along the lane; and advancing to meet him, another and very small gentleman, to whom at first she paid less attention. When they had come within speech (which was just under the maid’s eyes) the older man bowed and accosted the other with a very pretty manner of politeness. It did not seem as if the subject of his address were of great importance; indeed, from his pointing, it sometimes appeared as if he were only inquiring his way; but the moon shone on his face as he spoke, and the girl was pleased to watch it, it seemed to breathe such an innocent and old-world kindness of dis-position, yet with something high too, as of a well-founded self-content. Presently her eye wandered to the other, and she was surprised to recognise in him a certain Mr. Hyde, who had once visited her master and for whom she had conceived a dislike. He had in his hand a heavy cane, with which he was trifling; but he answered never a word, and seemed to listen with an ill-contained impatience. And then all of a sudden he broke out in a great flame of anger, stamping with his foot, brandishing the cane, and carrying on (as the maid described it) like a madman. The old gentleman took a step back, with the air of one very much surprised and a trifle hurt; and at that Mr. Hyde broke out of all bounds and clubbed him to the earth. And next moment, with ape-like fury, he was trampling his victim under foot, and hailing down a storm of blows, under which the bones were audibly shattered and the body jumped upon the roadway. At the horror of these sights and sounds, the maid fainted.
And here is what I read in the introduction:
Just before Stevenson began writing Jekyll and Hyde, the artist John Singer Sargent painter him pacing in the Skerryvore dining room, Fanny sitting in a chair in a diaphanous dress and scarf. Men who gathered round him found his attractions almost mesmeric. Stevenson possessed, said one “more than any man I ever met, the power of making other men fall in love with him.” There is no proof that Stevenson ever had sex with men, and his relationship with Fanny remained close, if complicated. But his biographer Claire Harman notes that his dress and gestures echoed those of “Uranians” or “inverts” – that is, homosexuals. A homosocialism permeates Jekyll and Hyde, as it does many of his stories. In a world of bachelor men and their close circle of male clubs, women are excluded entirely. This was never exactly Stevenson’s own way, but his intimacy with his male friends remained a grounding center of his identity. After Jekyll and Hyde was published, some of Stevenson’s gay contemporaries found it alarming. One way of reading Jekyll’s unspecified desires, so overwhelming that he must act on them, but so shameful that he turns himself into a different person to do it, could include sex with other men.’ Stevenson’s friend John Addington Symonds, who struggled to suppress his own homosexual urges – longings considered sinful, degrading, and against nature to most of his contemporaries – wrote Stevenson that the story appalled him. It “touches one too closely,” he said, “most of us at some epoch of our lives have been upon the verge of developing a Mr. Hyde.”
And in Storyteller, in the chapter dedicated to Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde:
These eruptions of violence apparently struck Hollywood screenwriters as not sensational enough, and they inaugurated a tradition of reading Jekyll and Hyde as a story of sexual predation in the London underworld. The movie versions have been described as “smoky with sex in the interpolated orgy scenes.” Recent criticism has seized upon hints in surviving drafts of the story— the original draft underwent a lot of revision to elaborate on this interpretation. In one version Jekyll says, “From a very early age I became in secret the slave of disgraceful pleasures,” and in another, “I became in secret the slave of certain appetites. Some readers suspected that this meant sexual misbehavior; Gerard Manley Hopkins suggested to a friend that “the trampling scene is perhaps a convention: he was thinking of something unsuitable for fiction. Hopkins no doubt meant that the appetites were homosexual. Louis’s Davos friend Symonds, a painfully closeted homosexual, did apply Jekyll and Hyde to himself in that way:
“It makes me wonder whether a man has a right so to scrutinize “the abysmal deeps of personality.” It is indeed a dreadful book, most dreadful because of a certain moral callousness, a want of sympathy, a shutting out of hope. The art is burning and intense. As a piece of literary work, this seems to me the finest you have done in all that regards style, invention, psychological analysis, exquisite fitting of parts, and admirable employment of motives to realize the abnormal. But it has left such a deeply painful impression on my heart that I do not know how I am ever to turn to it again. The fact is that viewed as an allegory it touches one too closely. Most of us at some part of our lives have been upon the verge of developing a Mr. Hyde.”
Louis own view was that although such interpretations weren’t necessarily mistaken – his story is an open-ended myth – they were reductive. He told one correspondent, “People are so filled full of folly and inverted lust that they can think of nothing but sexuality. The hypocrite let out the beast Hyde who is no more sexual than another, but who is the essence of cruelty and malice, and selfishness and cowardice: and these are the diabolic in man – not this poor wish to have a woman that they make such a cry about.”When Louis replied to Symonds he made clear what he thought was important: “Jekyll is a dreadful thing, I own; but the only thing I feel dreadful about is that damned old business of the war in the members. This time it came out; I hope it will stay in, in future?” The reference is to the dualism preached by St. Paul. “I see another law in my members, warring against the law of my mind, and bringing me into captivity to the law of sin which is in my members.” That was no occasional or exceptional state, but the constant condition of the human race. In the King James translation “members” means the entire body, not just the sexual parts.
