The New Haven Public Schools English 1 curriculum includes a literary analysis unit that examines multiple stories treating the same theme. The idea is for students to consider how one theme can be shaped into many different forms. We explore the choices each author makes and how these choices affect an audience’s perception of the characters and of the messages of the story. One challenge of this unit is student tendency to focus on plot differences among the stories. My goal is for my students to think beyond the surface; I want to challenge them to consider the way authors style characters, the reliability of the narrator, the effect of the style in which the story is told, and why the author chose to tell the story in this way.
Refocusing this unit on adaptation analysis will allow me to meet this challenge, as well as to push my students to higher order thinking. I have realized that rather than using entirely different stories, I could base the unit on various adaptations of one classic story. Since plot points would be similar, my students would not as easily fall into the trap of fixating on plot. The focus would shift to the different ways in which this one particular story is told, allowing us to more deeply explore the effects of style and genre.
Exploring the theory of adaptation, I recognize another challenge that I face with my students. The essays in James Naremore’s
Film Adaptation
1
speak of the need to move adaptation analysis beyond issues of fidelity to the source text. This inadequate analysis is exactly what traps my students when we watch films; they cannot overcome their need to obsessively critique what the movie adaptation leaves out, and thus, more interesting questions go unasked. This is yet another symptom of my students’ hyper-focus on plot. I am hopeful that explicitly teaching different approaches to adaptation analysis will help my students grow into more critical readers of both film and literature. Perhaps by learning to probe more deeply into film adaptations, my students will also improve their abilities to dissect original texts.
The idea for my unit comes from a reference in a contemporary young adult novel that I teach to my English 1 classes.
Bottled Up
by Jaye Murray details the life of a troubled and apathetic young teen, who happens to be reading
Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
in his English class. As the book develops and the main character is forced to confront his problems, he begins to relate the themes of
Jekyll and Hyde
to his own life. Though my students are always curious about
Jekyll and Hyde
, I have never done more than give them a brief summary of the story. But I have now realized that Jaye Murray’s allusion to Stevenson’s novel holds the key to crafting a more comprehensive and challenging unit.
Stevenson’s
Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
, first published in 1886, emphasizes the repression that Henry Jekyll subjects himself to. His experiment begins with his attempt to sever the baser qualities of his nature – the desires and characteristics that defy generally accepted rules of behavior and traditional Victorian values. The result is the creation of a monster that embodies these very desires. As Jekyll literally loses his own identity to Mr. Hyde, we see a symbolic representation of the consequences of repression. When we deny aspects of our true selves, our desires become perverted and result in destructive behaviors.
Jekyll’s struggle is not one that is unique to Victorian society; all societies have standards that not everyone quite meets. This fact has interesting implications for a story that has birthed countless adaptations in the one hundred thirty years since it was written. What Jekyll needs to repress and the consequences of that repression are influenced by the historical and cultural contexts of each adaptation. These thoughts have inspired me to analyze different adaptations of the
Jekyll and Hyde
story for the ways in which they incorporate and characterize repression.
Throughout the unit, we will study Robert Louis Stevenson’s original,
Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
, Rouben Mamoulian’s 1931 film, Victor Fleming’s 1941 film, Frank Wildhorn’s
Jekyll and Hyde: The Musical
, and the novel,
Bottled Up
, by Jaye Murray.
The unit will thoroughly examine relevant portions of each text, with a focus on the concepts of identity, deviant (or “undesirable”) behavior, and societal restriction of individual expression. We will explore the socio-historical contexts of each text to gain a deeper understanding of their respective characters. This approach will raise interesting questions about the fears and social conventions of the time period within which each adaptation was created. How did Victorian values and fears influence the original story? What changes are visible in post-Freudian film adaptations? What modern preoccupations influence Jaye Murray’s portrayal of the “Hyde” character in her novel? Working through these questions will help my students to move beyond plot-based considerations and more fully analyze the effects of each author/director’s stylistic choices.
I will also build in time at the end of the unit to relate our discussion to today’s political climate and the plight of marginalized groups. Just as Jekyll’s self-imposed repression has dangerous consequences, silencing someone’s identity ultimately results in destruction – a loss of that person’s true self, but also of everything that person could have offered to the community and the world had they not been oppressed. This will be an important part of the learning that takes place during this unit. Students must discover what kinds of repression our current society demands, evaluate the consequences of those repressions, and ask themselves what they can do as citizens of this community to right some of the world’s injustices.
