Becoming Mrs. Hyde: Adaptation and Feminist Violence in Evan Placey's Jekyll & Hyde

• Published in: New England theatre journal 2023-01, Vol.34, p.69-85
• Main Author: Zapkin, Phillip
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Adaptation; Blogs; Dramatists; Females; Feminism; Fiction; Gender; Institutionalization; LGBTQ people; Literary characters; Novellas; Physicians; Placey, Evan; Police; Stevenson, Robert Louis (1850-1894); Transgender persons; Violence; Women
• ISSN: 1050-9720

[...]within a year of the novellas r886 publication, Richard Mansfield was starring as Jekyll and Hyde in a New York stage production, which then opened in London in r888, only weeks before Jack the Rippers killing spree began. Enfield tells Utterson about seeing Hyde trample a girl, then Enfield and another man restrained a group of women trying to attack Hyde in retribution.9 Next, we learn that a nameless maid servant witnessed the murder of Sir Danvers Carew (about which more will be said later).10 The recounting of her testimony is the most sustained attention any female character gets in the entire novella, and she is largely instrumental, merely providing the report without being developed as a character in her own right.11 Around Hyde's Soho home, Utterson sees a group of anonymous women drinking in taverns, then meets Hyde's unsavoury landlady.12 There are passing references to the terror of Jekyll's female servants when the suspect Hyde is secreted in Jekyll's lab.13 Then the final reference to any woman in the novel is when Jekyll devotes two sentences to noting that Hyde randomly struck a woman for no other reason than that she offered him a box of matches.14 Not a single one of these women is given a name, and none appears for more than two pages (in the Broadview Press edition). In his version, Henry Jekyll is dead, poisoned by his unsuccessful formula, and his widow Harriet is denied the support of the Royal Society of Scientists to carry on his work because of her gender.21 However, she finishes her late husband's experiment and transforms into Flossie Hyde,22 who frequents taverns, drinks liquor, hangs around with gay men, has sex with whom she pleases, and eventually murders a police officer named Michael Rose.23 Act One ends and Act Two begins with Florence Monroe, a twenty-first century author of Flossie Hyde fan-fiction, arrested for the death of Rose, whom we'd just seen Hyde murder.24 This Act break marks a temporal shift to modern times-though Hyde's Victorian Eondon bleeds through in an interwoven second Act-with Monroe accused by the police of masterminding Fembot, a violent group of feminist terrorists, whose actions she co-ordinates and orders through blog posts.25 Monroe initially denies involvement, but, when it is too late for the police to stop a planned attack coordinated alongside a Women's March, Monroe reveals she has in-fact been running Fembot. Among other crimes, Monroe planned the murders of Irish-Catholic doctors wh