Michael Kimmel's analysis of the causes of white male violence in his book Angry White Men (2013) paints a portrait of aggrieved white American masculinity that highlights the continuities and divergences between two fictional examples: Mr. Hyde from Robert Louis Stevenson's Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (2015 [1886]) and Tyler Durden from Chuck Palahniuk's novel Fight Club (1996) and David Fincher's film adaptation (1999). The cultural and historical forces that elicited aggressive responses from white males differ in each case, but they are united by an ideology that assumes anger and violence to be integral traits of masculine identity. The commonality between these texts lies in a combination of class, race and gender identifications, particularly that of angry, white, conventional male masculinity. This neo-Gothic genealogy of toxic masculinity can be traced from Mr. Hyde to the election of Donald J. Trump through the link of Tyler Durden and the term “snowflake” which has become the insult of choice for angry white men in the twenty-first century.

The Gothic as a popular literary genre taps into the fears and anxieties of its time, and both Jekyll and Hyde as a late Victorian “shilling shocker” and Fight Club as a neo-Gothic text explore the threat of male violence. In both texts the fear of the loss of male hegemony leads to outbursts of violence against perceived threats from other social groups. Both Mr. Hyde and Tyler Durden (especially when played by Brad Pitt in the film version) are attractive figures for men in that they present violent solutions to a loss of male hegemony and present violence as a response to loss of status. For Dr. Jekyll, Mr. Hyde represents a change of class status as he loses his professional designation as a doctor and becomes a mere “Mister,” while for Durden and members of his club, violence functions as a compensation for the loss of “manly” occupations and their replacement by work in the service sector.

These angry white men also illustrate the differences between two terms that are widely used in masculinities studies, namely, “hegemonic masculinity” and “toxic masculinity.” White, upper-class men are hegemonic in Jekyll and Hyde while women are marginalised.

Laura Mulvey's article ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’ (1975) was widely influential and made the term ‘scopophilia’ central to feminist analyses of cinema. Mulvey argued that scopophilia ‘arises from pleasure in using another person as an object of sexual stimulation through sight’ (2004: 835) and that the cinema especially satisfied a primordial desire to look without being seen, or in other words that it satisfied a voyeuristic urge going back to early childhood. Furthermore, Hollywood films encoded a gendered way of looking at the screen in that ‘the determining male gaze projects its phantasy on to the female figure which is styled accordingly’ (837), so that the images of women satisfied male sexual desire exclusively. Mulvey presented a theoretical model in which the female is the passive object and the male the active bearer of the gaze, drawing on Freudian theory and a feminist critique of phallocentrism. Since the publication of the essay there have been modi-fications and expansions of Mulvey's original insights, such as those by Kaja Silverman and Jane Ussher, who have argued that women play a more active role in looking at images on the screen rather than being merely passive spectators. Ussher, in particular, has argued that the ‘masculine gaze’ is not monolithic and can be resisted and reformulated by female film-makers and viewers (1997: 85–6). In this article I will build on Ussher's argument for reformulation of the ‘masculine gaze’ to examine the way in which film versions of The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde complicate Mulvey's model of scopophilia through scenes that encode a ‘feminine gaze’ that gains pleasure from looking at a desirable image of masculinity in Dr Jekyll at one moment but that is threated by sexual violence from Mr Hyde at the next.

Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde is a particularly apt vehicle for a discussion of scopophilia because the signature moment in any film adaptation of Robert Louis Stevenson's original story is the transformation scene. Jekyll and Hyde also exemplifies the definition of the Gothic genre in Lisa Hopkins's Screening the Gothic in that it depicts a ‘doubling’ that reveals the hidden connections between apparent opposites (2005: xi).

There are two ways to approach the relationship between Dickens's novels and Victorian work, one through his biography and the other through the history of the industrialisation and urbanisation of Britain in the nineteenth century. It is easy to trace the impact of Dickens's early experiences of work as a 12-year-old child at Warren's Blacking in his opposition to child labour and general sympathy for working people, but the restructuring of Britain by the forces of industrialisation and urban growth is equally important in understanding the types of labour that he represents in his various novels. Complicating analysis of the theme of work in Dickens, however, is the tendency in Victorian novels to render labour invisible and to represent it through plots focussing on domestic settings, interpersonal relationships and issues of gender and sexuality.

From the late eighteenth century onwards Britain was transformed from an agricultural to an industrial society as the population moved from the country to industrial cities such as Manchester and Birmingham, or to the economic and political centre of London, seeking better wages if not better living conditions. From 1801 to 1851 the population in the principal towns and cities tripled, resulting, not surprisingly, in appalling overcrowding. London went from 958,803 to 2,362,236 inhabitants in this period, spawning some notorious slum areas and inspiring Dickens's description of Jacob's Island in Oliver Twist.