An dining hall containing no more or less than the necessities for a comfortable dinner, materializes seemingly out of nothing. Enter Jean-Jacques Rousseau, 18th century counter-enlightenment luminary; Charles Darwin, 19th century naturalist; Karl Marx, 19th century political philosopher; and Sigmund Freud, 20th century neurologist and founder of psychoanalytic theory. No one is alarmed that four influential thinkers whose lifetimes span over two centuries are meeting for an inexplicable dinner as they were in their intellectual prime. The wall lights autonomously dim as the fire roars despite itself, as the scene exits the whirling depth of the insubstantial and enters the tactile, at least for the authors…
ROUSSEAU: I must say this is an awfully exciting development to be the company of you prestigious gentlemen, although I profess my ignorance on the reason for this meeting.
MARX: Is it not obvious? Observe the clash of genres: time travel, high society dinner party, critical analysis to …show more content…
Consider the agitation he evokes in the even-minded residents of the London neighborhood. Consider the, literally, unspeakable vices he embarks on once free from the vestige of Henry Jekyll. Consider finally the magnitude of his ferocity that bursts forth upon the pate of poor Carew and ask yourselFreud: why is such extreme… evil present in Jekyll’s transform? I propose two interpretations. The first is this modern society of London creates a motivation to hide certain moral failings—Jekyll’s urges—of ourselves from public judgement rather than air them and perhaps come to terms with them through communal understanding. So Jekyll’s urges are stopped up, until released through Hyde in spectacular fashion. The second is that all our blundering with instruments and draughts—Jekyll creating his potion—is going against the natural order of things and uncovering monstrous things we were not meant to grapple with,