Although Tar initially refuses Rob’s offer of junk, Lily convinces him to try some by saying that he would “miss the chance of feeling better than anyone else in the whole world”. Lily is saying that heroin is the best thing in the whole world and Tar starts to believe her. She shows her approval of him by saying “You’re magic! You’re terrific!” Lily calls herself “Auntie Lily” as if she is much older than Tar and Gemma, and acts as if she knows everything; she thinks that she is old enough to decide for herself what to do and what not to do. Lily says that she is “another girl, from another planet” as if the usual laws do not apply to her. After a while Gemma begins to talk like Lily, act like Lily, she wants to be Lily. “Like Lily said,” says Gemma about taking the heroin. “She thinks that whatever Lily is thinking is fantastic” comments Tar.
Gemma couldn’t take drugs or “have a life” at home. She had restrictions, someone to preserve her from destruction. “She’ll have to learn” said Mr. Brogan after Gemma didn’t come home for a night. Now, away from home, she is all on her own with no one to tell her what to do and what not to do. It is her choice. Right at the beginning of the novel Gemma is presented to us as the “most bored person she [Gemma] knew”. So she tries to lighten her life up, make it more exciting and thrilling. Gemma needs to be free and she wants to show everyone, especially her parents, how free and independent she really is. “One day, maybe I’ll tell them just to watch their [her parent’s] faces”. Gemma feels that she is much more respected and people listen to her problems. This is completely opposite to her life with her parents. They have enough problems themselves and no time for their daughter. They just drink and argue.
David’s case is a bit different, but not a lot. His situation at home is worse. His dad beats him regularly. “He’d been beaten up by his dad for the nth time”. When he comes home his parents are usually “dead drunk” and this makes Tar think that he is not respected by his parents and they give a bad example to him. His dad blames him for doing “ [mum’s] work and encouraging her to drink” so when Tar runs away from home he feels free like Gemma but he also learns about the life of the streets and he sees people doing drugs. “There are always drugs about so you tend always to take them”. This quote shows that Tar and all the junkies are weak. Lily plays an important role in Tar becoming a junkie. She admires him by calling him “the Titanium man” and telling him that he is a “strong” man. Also it is easier for Lily to take drugs with someone than on her own; that is why she gives some to Gemma and Gemma convinces Tar to try. “Go on, try it, it won’t hurt”, “it just feels good”. Tar is a bit more careful, he needs more convincing but finally he asks himself “What did I have to lose” and sniffs the heroin. He did it for Gemma because he loved her and he wanted her to be happy. “Once you get a low opinion of yourself you’ve had it”. That is why all the characters take drugs. They are not respected, and not treated as they want to be by their parents.
The immediate effects are the most attractive part of drug taking to the characters and to which they want to return again and again. In “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde” Dr. Jekyll “with a strong glow of courage” drank the potion. He was not horrified when he became “tenfold more wicked” rather it “delighted me like wine”. It is never enough for Dr. Jekyll and religion does not provide satisfaction for him: “the hard law of life which lies at the root of religion”. He is playing God. Straight after he drank the potion “the most racking pangs succeeded and a horror of the spirit that can not be exceeded at the hour of birth or death”. After a few seconds Dr. Jekyll [already Mr. Hyde] felt “something indescribably new, incredibly sweet, I felt younger, lighter and happier in body”. Dr. Jekyll very much liked the new feelings which he had because they were new and so pleasurable. If he is a new person everything inside is new for him. He is feeling more proud of himself and much more free, “an innocent freedom of the soul”. It is a drug so it made him forget about the “bonds of obligation” and feel completely happy. The stuff he drank “delighted him like wine”, so he knew the taste of good wine. Dr. Jekyll noticed that he had “lost stature”. Usually good things are described as big and mighty so when Dr. Jekyll drank the chemical he let out the evil side of his character which is usually described as small and he became smaller not only in size but in personality as well.
In “Junk” both Tar and Gemma are naïve in their own way. “I was waiting for the lights to start twinkling or something, but nothing happened, I had some more but still nothing happened.” Gemma is extremely impatient. She is waiting for an immediate effect after eating the Hash cookies. That is also why she starts taking drugs. She can’t waste her time studying and becoming a person and only then enjoying life. She needs it now, immediately. Heroin offers her an easy solution which she obviously likes. Some time later Gemma saw Tar but he was a bit strange “His face seemed to be stretching out and it looked as if his teeth were escaping out of his mouth and his eyes rolling around”. The hash cookies begin to affect Gemma, she is having hallucinations. They also make her hungry. “I started stuffing more salad”. After a while she begins to feel “horrible”. “My head was still spinning faster and faster”, “like someone was stirring my stomach with an electric spoon faster and faster”, “things were creeping out of sight”. Gemma was not “enjoying it all that much”. Later on in the book after experiencing more drugs she talks differently. “Drugs are just part of life; they make you feel good they take you to another planet”. Lily also talks about her coming “from another planet” so Gemma is very influenced by Lily. “Smack makes it all distant, it’s not real anymore”. Junk hides the reality from which characters who take drugs want to escape in both books. They do not like the real world they need an easy life without any problems. Drugs offer an easy and a weak answer, with no need for thinking. The experience that Tar gets after taking heroin is a strange one because the drug does not actually give him any particular physical feeling. Instead there is a mental sense of release from obligations and things that are pressuring him, for example his dad beating him and his parents being alcoholics. “All that crap – about Gemma leaving me, about Mum and Dad, about leaving home.” All the problems leave. “All the negative stuff. All the pain … It just floated away from me, I just floated away from it … up and away.” Heroin gives the taker no physical effect it just emancipates him from the pressures and responsibilities of his life. “I didn’t feel incredibly wonderful or anything, but it was all gone. “All the hurt.” “I felt I was just beginning to learn how to live.” Tar does not realise that he is learning how to die. After Tar’s first hit he becomes addicted and it starts a trail of problems that eventually ruin his life. All the characters are enjoying drugs and a sense of freedom at first not thinking about the consequences.
Although the drugs give a sensation of release at first they eventually cause long-term problems. The characters in Junk who use heroin become more and more addicted to junk because their bodies become used to the amount that they use and they need more for each hit to get the same effect. This dependence on drugs changes the users physically and mentally. Lily is a prime example of being physically and mentally changed. “All the veins in her arms and behind her knees have gone where she’s poked around with the needle so much.” Lily does so much smack that she has no veins left in regular places that she starts injecting in between her breasts. “She injects into the veins between her breasts…I’ve seen her sitting with the baby on the breast poking about to find a vein.” Lily doesn’t even stop taking heroin for the sake of her baby because she is so far gone. Melvin Burgess stresses the image of “Madonna and Child” but in a sick and twisted manner. Instead of a pure and Christian image of a mother and child, seeming like the Virgin Mary and Jesus, it is an appalling display of decadence.
Even though the characters in Junk are completely hooked, they think that they are in control of the junk taking. The effect of taking heroin has blocked any sense of reality. They do not realise how impossible the task of giving up really is. You get “cold turkey” it’s terrible. “sweating this horrid yellow that stung and aching, my teeth with this toothache that kept jumping from tooth to tooth” , “bones are trying to break themselves up in your body”, “the thud of it went right through my spine I thought it was going to snap in twenty pieces” says Tar. These are all the effects of coming down from heroin. Tar never thought about it before his first hit. To prove to themselves that they are in control they plan a trip to the country to have a week off heroin. But Rob undermines this trip straight away. “I had a little package in my pocket no one knew about.” Even though the whole trip is meant to get everyone off smack for a bit it ends in disaster. Tar has a lot of trouble coming down and will go to any length to get some heroin to ease the pain. No matter how much will power they have to stop taking smack, the power it has over them is too great. Drug taking is no longer about a release from problems, it is about not being able to live a day without heroin. It just gets worse and worse. Gemma complains, “He lies, he cheats. He pinches my money. Just helps himself out of my purse. He nicks our stash.” Tar is so addicted that he will steal from his best friend just to get a hit. “He’s a bastard.” Tar has changed so much from what he was before he took heroin. Gemma his best friend hates him because of his change in personality. When Emily Brogan comes to see her daughter in hospital she is horrified. Gemma looks like “my [Mrs. Brogan’s] mother, my own mother. An old woman”. Meanwhile, Tar has given up: “I don’t believe in anything any more. I don’t believe in me. I don’t believe in my friends. I don’t believe in Gemma”. Tar is letting himself down a great deal by saying these words. “I am just a junkie, just a junkie…” says Tar.
The long-term effects on Dr Jekyll are a lot more extreme compared with the characters in Junk because Dr Jekyll eventually dies because of his addiction. In the end he takes so much of the narcotic that he changes into Mr Hyde without taking the drug at all. “I was stepping leisurely across the court after breakfast, drinking the chill of the air with pleasure, when I was seized again with those indescribable sensations that heralded the change.” Dr Jekyll has taken the drug so much that instead of him being in control of the drug, the drug is in control of him. Dr. Jekyll has already lost his identity: he “stole through the corridors”, “a stranger in my own house”. These quotes represent Dr. Jekyll like a thief and a stranger in a place he knows very well. At one point in the story Mr Utterson and Mr Enfield are taking a walk and they happen to walk past Dr Jekyll’s house and they see him looking through a window. “Dr Jekyll, looking deadly sick.” The drugs are making a young healthy man look near death. “Like some disconsolate prisoner.” He also seems to be a prisoner in his own home. When Mr Hyde goes to Dr Lanyon’s home for the drug to turn him back to Dr Jekyll he is in a state of desperation. He fears being captured by the police and being recognized. “Have you got it?” he cried. “Have you got it?” And so lively was his impatience that he even laid his hand upon my arm and sought to shake me.” He is so desperate for the drug that he becomes physical. “At the sight of the contents, he uttered one loud sob of such immense relief that I sat petrified.” But when he sees the drug he is immensely relieved. In the film of “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde” Dr. Jekyll had to give up his wife so drug taking harms not only him but others as well.
The way in which Stevenson creates a sense of place, ties into the idea of good and bad being separated in a very subtle manner. The way that he juxtaposes Jekyll’s two residences brings to light the extreme depravity of Mr Hyde. Jekyll’s normal social appearance is respectable and decent. This is reflected by his home in Mayfair, “Which wore a great air of wealth and comfort.” However beneath his respectable appearance he has “Irregularities”, which would spell ruin to his image if known to the public. The rear of his house is on the back streets of Soho where he can escape into London’s underworld, and in Soho itself he has another residence where Mr Hyde resides and recuperates from a night of evil doings. “The dismal quarter of Soho” is appropriately metaphorical for Mr. Hyde.
Dandelions are the main image which keep reappearing in Junk. Tar is drawn to the dandelions and their beauty. “I had an idea for a painting. A dandelion, just one huge bright dandelion. The background was all black and the dandelion was all the bright yellows and oranges, every petal a long yellow triangle.” This is like the “Golden Age” for Gemma and Tar, when they are free from their old lives but have not yet met smack. The dandelion represents the innocence of Tar and Gemma before they are enticed by Lily into a post lapsarian life from taking drugs. In the Hindu version of Bible (Midrash) Lily was the first woman. So she is the beginning of drug taking and she makes other people be like her. Before Tar falls into his world of drug taking and sin the world is bright and beautiful. “The daffodils were still out, there were trees in bloom”. “There is a big tall tree at the end of it [garden] that hangs right over the road”. This passage represents Eden with a tree of knowledge. “Tar was sitting there on a milk crate by the bonfire staring up at a tree. He was crying”. At this moment Tar accepts that there will be a ‘fall’ where he knows he will take drugs. Once Tar becomes addicted to heroin the dandelion moves over for the junk. “You never even do anything to that sodding dandelion any more.” Tar used to be enthusiastic about dandelions; they symbolised a sign of affection between him Gemma. But now there is no space for dandelions just junk.
Lily is presented to us as a snake. She talks like a snake, she acts like a snake and she thinks like a snake. “It might be called Smith’s or Scholl’s or Singh’s” says Lily. The‘s’ sound, the sibilant sound, is like hissing of a snake. In “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde” Mr. Hyde “shrank back with a hissing intake of the breath”. The evil part of Dr. Jekyll tempts the good part to take the drug and return to the evil part just like the snake in the Bible tempts Adam and Eve to eat the apple from the “tree of knowledge”. “She smiled like a snake” when she sniffed the heroin.
By the end of both of these books it is clear to the reader that in both stories, the characters have been punished for what the have done. The bible features in both of the stories as a beginning for the characters and represents their innocence. But it also features in their decent from their innocence into decadence.
