The Red Baize Door in The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde

Abstract

AMONG the many semiotically charged doors, doorways, and doorkeys in Stevenson’s novel there are three references to a ‘red baize door’ that stands between the derelict operating theatre of Dr Jekyll’s predecessor, the surgeon Dr Denman, and the ‘cabinet’ or private office in which Jekyll performs most of his transformations and where, as Mr Hyde, he makes his last stand.1 To early readers of the novel, the associations of this door and its cloth covering would have been somewhat richer than for most modern readers. Baize is a kind of felt that is best-known nowadays as the fabric on billiard tables, but beginning in the eighteenth century it was also used as a covering for certain doors, specifically the traditional ‘green baize door’ that separated the domain of servants from the public areas of any house grand enough to support the distinction.2 This baize door (usually green but found in other colours as well) was synecdochic for all upstairs/downstairs class dichotomies, but the cloth covering also had a practical effect in that it muffled impolite noises, such as banging pots in the kitchen, and supposedly controlled unwelcome aromas of cleaning and cooking as well. Stevenson no doubt emphasized the baize covering on the door to Jekyll’s cabinet as a way of evoking the powerful social/psychological metaphor of the green baize door, which separates polite and public from what is base, hidden, and bodily; probably, Jekyll’s door is red rather than green to indicate its distinguishable practical function (it separates the public, body-oriented surgical theatre from the private, chemical/mental realm of Jekyll’s cabinet), and perhaps also to identify it as a sort of symbolic fleshly portal. When the butler Poole and lawyer Utterson join in breaking down the red baize door near the end of the story they symbolically perform a violent surgical operation, exposing and killing both Jekyll and Hyde.