Good girl? Bad girl? Fallen girl? Ivy in Jekyll and Hyde

The Victorian stage adaptations of Jekyll and Hyde livened it up by making middle-aged Jekyll a younger, more attractive man, and giving him a fiancee. This carried over into the movies though I’m confident they’d have given him some sort of love interest — it’s what movies do.

The silent films took the next step of giving Hyde a love, or at least a lust interest. In the 1920 Jekyll and Hyde, it’s Barrymore’s lust for the dancer Gina (Nita Naldi) that drives him to become Hyde. That way he can sin without compromising his stainless soul, right? Right?

Wrong. But you knew that.

Gina doesn’t play a large role. Ivy, in the 1932 Fredric March version and the 1941 Spencer Tracy remake, is much more prominent a character, played respectively by Miriam Hopkins and Ingrid Bergman. In both films when Jekyll’s true love is out of his reach, it’s lust for Ivy that inspires him to turn into Hyde.

Ivy is coded as a Bad Girl, the Whore to the fiancee’s Madonna. I’ve seen several descriptions of the film that assume she is a literal sex worker. Despite the fact she ends up Jekyll’s mistress, supported by him, I think that’s debatable.

When Hopkins’ Ivy meets March’s Jekyll, her interest is sex, not cash; March was a handsome leading man and she likes what she sees. When she meets Hyde later, he lets her know he can buy her nice things provided she’s nice to him but he’s a creepy bully and she’s not into it (plus he looks like a literal man-ape). When Hyde makes it clear she doesn’t have a choice (as I posted recently, he’s abusive from the start), she agrees, sealing her doom (as I’ve said before, death is the price for being a bad girl on screen).

The same dynamic happens in the Tracy film, though Bergman’s Ivy comes off more fun-loving and innocent than Hopkins’ Ivy. The production code was a lot tougher on sex in films by 1941 and MGM considered itself a class act; even Ivy’s workplace is cleaner and lighter than in the 1932. Perhaps MGM’s desire to keep Ivy quasi-respectable is why she doesn’t give in to Hyde’s coercion: he pays the manager to fire her, thereby leaving her desperate for a source of support.

It’s true that Ivy in both films becomes Hyde’s mistress. That doesn’t mean she’s selling her body on a regular basis. As City of Eros says, the 19th century lines on prostitution were blurry. For some women it was a day job, for others it was something they turned to occasionally, as a way to pay the rent. Ivy could have been either (though I don’t see her as a full-timer) or it could have been Hyde becoming her lover was the first time she’d traded on sex. Being a kept woman would, for a lot of people, have been a different thing.

Don’t get me wrong, if Ivy was a full-time sex worker she still wouldn’t deserve the abuse and ultimately the murder she suffers. The goal isn’t to judge, it’s simply to analyze.

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