tagging @origami-butterfly bc i think you'll be interested at least
So some posts about women in The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and it's adaptations have been going around, so I thought I'd give my two cents that no one asked for.
In the original novella there is one important female character I can think of- The girl Hyde tramples. I have not seen any J&H movies or adaptations, unless you count the four episodes of Once Upon a Time that had a (bad) J&H plotline, but i have a decent impression of how most adaptations treat the women they add in.
First of all, I don't think adding women to Jekyll & Hyde is necessary. It speaks to the attitudes of the time that more women are not in the original book, but the book as a whole is inextricably linked with the attitudes of the time, and separating the culture from the novel serves to strip away much of its meaning. Perhaps casting the butler Poole as a woman, or even making Lanyon a woman could be reasonable ways of putting a little more diversity into screen/stage adaptations, but the novel does not even pass the 'two men talk to each other about something that isn't a man' test.
A piece of media does not need to pass the Bechdel test to be good, or interesting. Frankenstein, J&H, Les Mis, Dracula (iirc), and the Christian Bible are all, to my knowledge, things that do not pass the Bechdel test. They are not less valuable for that.
Many J&H adaptations add a love interest to be killed or spurned by Hyde, or a sex worker to be raped or killed to display how evil he is. I hope I need not say that adding a woman to your story just for her to be fridged to say something about a male character is FAR more sexist and hard to watch than a piece of media that just happens to have a lack of women.
At it's heart, Jekyll and Hyde is a story that needs few characters to be told. There is, of course, Dr Jekyll himself, his alter ego Hyde, Utterson, the lawyer turned detective, Lanyon, and Poole. Any other people that show up in the story are unimportant except for what they say about the main characters (pretty common in fiction. the family that dies at the beginning of the hero's journey is not important in and of themselves). The girl that is trampled by Hyde is there to set up how Enfield met him, and tell the audience how evil he is. The old man who is trampled is there to shock the audience and Utterson, and reveal a new depth to Hyde's cruelty. Now, there's something to be said for the fact that the old man is named while the little girl is not.
While pieces that are less adaptations and more inspired by J&H have far more freedom in what they add and what they omit- The Glass Scientists comic, for instance- adaptations that aim to bring the book to stage or screen should actually read the book before deciding what should take place. I would say that adding a love interest not only is unnecessary, but in fact actively harms the effectiveness of any J&H adaptations. Jekyll and Hyde is simply not about that. It is not a love story, (except, you could argue, the love for Jekyll that drives Utterson to become more invested in his hunt for Hyde) and trying to make it a romance interferes with the point and themes of the story, just like switching the perspective from Utterson to Jekyll messes up the story.
The reason why so many adaptation of Jekyll and Hyde fail to capture the essence of the original novel, is that none of the people in charge of them seem to understand the novel at all. They don't understand why Gabriel Utterson is not only not boring, but why he is the lens through with Stevenson chose to tell the story. They don't understand that Hyde is not a separate person, or an evil second personality, or anything else, but that he IS Jekyll, and Jekyll is him (which is an interesting point about humanity's unwillingness to accept the presence of evil inside of ourselves but i don't think most screenwriters are doing that on purpose). And they don't understand why, to put it simply, the Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde does not need the addition of a love interest, and in fact is better for the lack of one.
