One of the requirements of great fantasy and comic book stories is a great villain. The villain must be as strong as, or even stronger than, the hero to create a compelling conflict in which the hero must use all his or her resolve, cunning and strength to prevail. While the Green Goblin from the first Spiderman film will might not keep company with the likes of Darth Vader or Count Dracula in the villain hall of fame, he he definitely fits the bill of a worthy adversary for Spiderman. What makes him compelling, however, is the allegorical nature of Norman’s struggle against his inner demon. This struggle is instantly familiar as a variation of Dr. Jekyll and Mr Hyde.
In Robert Louis Stevenson’s classic story of Jekyll and Hyde, Dr. Jekyll develops a drug which gives birth to Mr. Hyde, who immediately engages in all manner of nefarious activity including a murder. At first, Mr. Hyde only appears when Dr. Jekyll takes the drug. Gradually, however, Mr. Hyde is able to appear without aid of the drug. Jekyll is less and less in control, and it becomes Jekyll who can only appear with the aid of the drug, rather than the other way around. Supplies of the drug run out and Jekyll and loses all hope of regaining control of himself. He is completely destroyed by Hyde.The similarities with Norman Osborn of Spiderman are striking. When a pentagon official informs Osborn, the CEO of major defense contractor Oscorp, that Oscorp is losing an important contract, Osborn recklessly injects himself with an experimental performance enhancing drug to prove its viability and retain government funding. The unproven drug unleashes an evil persona within him which comes to dominate Osborn and embark on a campaign of revenge against Oscorp’s rivals.
The struggle between these two personas – the old Osborn and the new, evil twin – is wonderfully dramatized as Osborn, looking in a mirror, grapples with the malicious goblin. This scene, by the way, is a superb bit of acting. Defoe’s face switches instantly between the two characters and is utterly convincing. The mirror to which Osborn speaks, of course, symbolizes self-reflection. Who is Osborn? Who is this new person inside of him?
Jekyll and Osborn suffer largely the same fate (with an important difference discussed later). They are both more or less enslaved in their own bodies by the evil persona they have awakened within themselves. Jekyll and Osborn provide a disguise for their evil twins. Hyde retreats behind Jekyll’s respectability as the police investigation closes in on him. Indeed, the name “Hyde” is probably meaningful. Evil often hides in unsuspected places. In a similar way, the Green Goblin retreats behind the face of Norman Osborn.
It is often thought that the story of Jekyll and Hyde is an allegory of good and evil. That is not quite accurate. It is an allegory of humanity and evil. While Mr. Hyde is described as “pure evil,” it does not follow that Dr. Jekyll is pure good. Quite to the contrary, Jekyll bemoans the fact that his is the same man that he always was; “Although I had now two characters as well as two appearances, one was wholly evil, and the other was still the old Henry Jekyll, that incongruous compound of whose reformation and improvement I had already learned to despair (109).”
In the tradition of allegory, Hyde is not so much an individual as he is a dramatization of an abstraction. That is why his face is never described. Stevenson wisely avoided endowing him with facial features and revealed only the most generic physical traits. Evil, in a certain sense, is faceless. It is no one, and yet everyone. Hyde is instead identified by what he does and the feeling that he gives others. One character giving testimony to a policeman about Hyde says, “[a feeling] went down my spine like ice. O, I know it’s not evidence…but a man has his feelings and I give you my bible-word it was Mr. Hyde!” (87).
The Green Goblin is something a little different. He does not represent the abstraction of evil in general. Rather, he is an evil man; he is not abstract or universal, but individual. He is Norman Osborn, as Norman Osborn would be were he completely void of any goodness. Osborn doesn’t struggle against an abstract evil when he speaks with the Green Goblin; he struggles literally against himself.
While Jekyll cannot communicate with Hyde and is not directly aware of what Hyde does when he is in control, Osborn knows exactly what the Green Goblin is doing. Like a feeble conscience, Osborn tries to convince the Green Goblin not to destroy Peter Parker, for example. Any remaining compassion, goodness or restraint is derided as weak and the goblin maintains his dominance.
At the moment of death however, the old Osborn re-emerges and begs Peter not to let his son, Harry, know what he has done. That Osborn has the last word – literally – suggests that redemption from evil is always a possibility. His request of Peter can be taken in several ways. He may wish to preserve his own legacy. He may wish to spare his son the pain and humiliation of knowing what his father was. He may also wish to protect Harry from the fate that he suffered. Of course, all of these things could be at play, but it seems that the anguish on Osborn’s face is not primarily caused by his mortal wound, but by remorse for what he had done. At the moment of his death, the relationship with his son emerges as the most important thing in his life, and his request of Peter seems therefore to be grounded in a desire to protect his son.
This is a much more optimistic view of humanity than the one presented by Jekyll and Hyde. Stevenson, it should be noted, grew up in a strict Calvinist household, and though he was later critical of those beliefs, it is nevertheless easy to see their influence in his writing. Calvinists believe that humanity is so corrupted after the fall, that left to our own devices our will and our reason are no longer strong enough to recognize evil for what it is or to resist it even if we do recognize it. Jekyll is the allegorical dramatization of that belief. Specifically, Jekyll is an image of Adam, whose quest for forbidden knowledge brought evil and death into the world. Jekyll too searched for forbidden knowledge pertaining to good and evil in the creation of his drug. The evil of his own making destroyed him utterly and he has no hope for redemption.
It is worth noting in conclusion that the narrative contexts in which these characters appear is vastly different. The story of Jekyll and Hyde focuses entirely on those two characters. It is plainly allegorical and as such, readers are intended to identify with Jekyll. Where the character of Jekyll darkly suggests that humanity has doomed itself to destruction, Osborn represents one of two alternatives. These alternatives are dramatized when the Green Goblin tempts Spiderman to join him. Spiderman faces a choice which he, like everyone else, has already faced and will face again and again: to act in his own self interest or to act in the interest of other; to act for good or for evil. Rather than forcing empathy with Osborn (as Stevenson forces empathy with Jekyll), the narrative structure of Spiderman optimistically focuses the audience’s attention on the hero, whose character denies the inevitability of evil portrayed by Jekyll and Osborn and instead asserts the dignity of human nature and its ability to resist evil.
