The Presence of Jacques Lacan\u27s Mirror Stage and Gaze in Robert Louis Stevenson\u27s Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and in Rouben Mamoulian\u27s 1931 Film

For many years, theorists have turned to popular movies and books to help interpret the difficult principles of Jacques Lacan. However, one story that has gotten very little attention is Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and its derivative body of film adaptations. Both the novella and Rouben Mamoulian’s 1931 film are a small part of an intertextual body of work which contains scenes that play out the Lacanian principles of the mirror stage and the gaze very well. Since art imitates life, an in depth exploration of the way that these scenes play out can illuminate how Lacan’s abstract theories might look in the real life formation of identity and in male/female relations