Femme Fatales and Positioning the Ripper in Dr Jekyll and Sister Hyde

Femme Fatales and Positioning the Ripper in Dr Jekyll and Sister Hyde

Much has been made of the way that many portrayals of Jack the Ripper travel upon a familiar narrative path, where the morally questionable prostitutes are rendered helpless by a lone male figure lurking in the dark alleys of 1888 Whitechapel. However, such a construction of the Ripper has resulted in an often reductive perspective on Victorian society, with many films regarding it as divided into either ‘proper’ Victorians who followed the true gender norms of their time, or outliers who instead subverted these very ‘moral’ notions. Roy Ward Baker’s film Dr Jekyll and Sister Hyde (1971) attempts to subvert these ideas by incorporating both the Ripper figure and Robert Louis Stevenson’s gothic characters, both of which have been intertwined in the past. In Dr Jekyll and Sister Hyde, though, Baker goes further by constructing two Rippers – one in the male scientist Dr Jekyll and the other in the female Mrs (or Sister) Hyde. Though the former can be attributed to many tropes that have become associated with the Ripper, the latter challenges not only archetypes of the Whitechapel Murderer but also greater questions of gender and transgression within Victorian society. Indeed, Hyde’s methods of greater autonomy within a patriarchal society bring to mind Slavoj Zizek’s notions of the femme fatale. This article will therefore argue how Baker’s film, through its portrayal of both Jekyll and Hyde, exhibits a greater willingness to challenge old notions of Victorian gender politics. Furthermore, it will show how these two ‘Rippers’ symbolize various fears and anxieties about the Victorian society and of the Ripper in particular.

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