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Jekyll and Hyde
Feb. 3rd, 2010 01:19 amI have read The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson. I found the telling of it unfamiliar. All the re-tellings I have known concentrate on Jekyll's point of view and a linear plot where things only happen the once. The original has a detective figure, a lawyer in this case, who watches suspicious things and then gets the confession at the end. It's terribly static once you know the twist, so I can see why nothing else does that.
I can't remember specifics of when else I've seen the story. It's one of those pervasive ones that you know without particularly finding out. I know I've got a tiny children's book of it somewhere, but I haven't read that for ages.
It makes me uncomfortable for a couple of its ablist assumptions, that physical deformity is a good symbol for moral deformity, and the mental health issues built in to the premise. It's saying something about the hidden nature of man, the way people present different faces to the world for different purposes, and that everyone is many different people and some grow stronger by exercise. Trouble comes from the nagging familiarity of the narrative if you read it as multiple personality in a medical sense, the whole crazy people do bad things story that keeps getting retold. Put it together and it's moral model at work, doing evil leading dwarfism, to physical deformity, and people being able to tell just by looking, and all of this tangled with depictions of madness. It's depressing. But only if, no, only because disability gets read as a metaphor itself. If it's only saying that exercising evil makes it stronger until your good side fades away then it's saying something that works. Making it a physical fact is fair enough in SF rules. It's just the details that bork it up and make it ugly.
There's too many comments made in moral model mode in the here and now, too much that assumes people somehow deserve or have earned whatever comes to them. Even the ones that think they're about positive thinking and attracting good outcomes have this shadow side where if the world works like that everything that happens is down to thinking and attracting individually. Every flip comment about a particular disliked individual rebounds to stomp the toes of anyone that shares aspects of their condition, and the thought that people might be judging the morals by the accompanying impairment is... well, is enough to make an armour suit sound like a good idea, just for starters. It's such a fundamentally wrong theory though, I don't know how it keeps hold. Maybe it's because people like neat little cause and effects, the feeling of understanding, or maybe it's just the illusion of control - avoid the sin and avoid the problems. Which is bollocks. Stuff happens, and we live with it, is all. Physical 'deformity' has bugger all to do with, well, anything except being physically different. Mental health problems happen to really a lot of people, and neuroatypicality is just one of those things. They don't connect up and point beyond themselves, they're just there.
I got the Vorkosigan Saga GURPS rulebook today. I can read about Miles :-)
Much better version. Just a guy, living with his differences, but with a life all about his choices and skills and getting things done.
He's got two distinct selves as well, but they're both military mad and fiercely loyal to the same people. He fed one to the exclusion of the other too, to his own detriment, but he got it sorted out again.
And then there's Mark... but he uses his too.
Come to think there's a lot of crazy=violent in the pair of them, it's just it's violence to save the world or save hostages or something, so it seems more okay. Hrmmm. Also it's balanced out by a whole hell of a lot of just plain violent people, so it don't seem all causal.
The clones with different experiences bit is so interesting though. I'd be tempted to keep making another one to see how they turned out. Except people clearly should not be experiments... but the first two turned out so interesting, why not make more like them?
... figuring out right action is a teensy complicated...
It appears to be nearly two in the morning. I have class at half two in the afternoon. Probably I should sleep somewhere in the middle.
I can't remember specifics of when else I've seen the story. It's one of those pervasive ones that you know without particularly finding out. I know I've got a tiny children's book of it somewhere, but I haven't read that for ages.
It makes me uncomfortable for a couple of its ablist assumptions, that physical deformity is a good symbol for moral deformity, and the mental health issues built in to the premise. It's saying something about the hidden nature of man, the way people present different faces to the world for different purposes, and that everyone is many different people and some grow stronger by exercise. Trouble comes from the nagging familiarity of the narrative if you read it as multiple personality in a medical sense, the whole crazy people do bad things story that keeps getting retold. Put it together and it's moral model at work, doing evil leading dwarfism, to physical deformity, and people being able to tell just by looking, and all of this tangled with depictions of madness. It's depressing. But only if, no, only because disability gets read as a metaphor itself. If it's only saying that exercising evil makes it stronger until your good side fades away then it's saying something that works. Making it a physical fact is fair enough in SF rules. It's just the details that bork it up and make it ugly.
There's too many comments made in moral model mode in the here and now, too much that assumes people somehow deserve or have earned whatever comes to them. Even the ones that think they're about positive thinking and attracting good outcomes have this shadow side where if the world works like that everything that happens is down to thinking and attracting individually. Every flip comment about a particular disliked individual rebounds to stomp the toes of anyone that shares aspects of their condition, and the thought that people might be judging the morals by the accompanying impairment is... well, is enough to make an armour suit sound like a good idea, just for starters. It's such a fundamentally wrong theory though, I don't know how it keeps hold. Maybe it's because people like neat little cause and effects, the feeling of understanding, or maybe it's just the illusion of control - avoid the sin and avoid the problems. Which is bollocks. Stuff happens, and we live with it, is all. Physical 'deformity' has bugger all to do with, well, anything except being physically different. Mental health problems happen to really a lot of people, and neuroatypicality is just one of those things. They don't connect up and point beyond themselves, they're just there.
I got the Vorkosigan Saga GURPS rulebook today. I can read about Miles :-)
Much better version. Just a guy, living with his differences, but with a life all about his choices and skills and getting things done.
He's got two distinct selves as well, but they're both military mad and fiercely loyal to the same people. He fed one to the exclusion of the other too, to his own detriment, but he got it sorted out again.
And then there's Mark... but he uses his too.
Come to think there's a lot of crazy=violent in the pair of them, it's just it's violence to save the world or save hostages or something, so it seems more okay. Hrmmm. Also it's balanced out by a whole hell of a lot of just plain violent people, so it don't seem all causal.
The clones with different experiences bit is so interesting though. I'd be tempted to keep making another one to see how they turned out. Except people clearly should not be experiments... but the first two turned out so interesting, why not make more like them?
... figuring out right action is a teensy complicated...
It appears to be nearly two in the morning. I have class at half two in the afternoon. Probably I should sleep somewhere in the middle.