Headscratchers / Mary Reilly

• Why is Poole so hard on Mary for being in the doctor's company when the doctor requests it?
  • Quite simply because this is Victorian times and Mary is a) female, b) Irish and c) low class. She's supposed to be seen, not heard and have no contact with the master beyond "good morning, sir" and "yes, sir". Poole is also quite old and bound to be even more conservative at the thought of a woman getting ideas above her station.
  • Also remember the cook's story about a place she used to work, where the master sent for a chamber maid every day and she eventually got pregnant. Poole is worried that is where Jekyll and Mary's conversations are headed, and what effect that'll have on the house's reputation if they have to dismiss a maid who ends up pregnant.
• If Mary has been in service since she was twelve, why does she speak out turn and freely go snooping around the house? Shouldn't she know to keep quiet and get on with her work?
  • She does say "this is by far the best place I've worked", which says that Jekyll's house is the only one where she'd be allowed to get away with that kind of behaviour.
  • I get the feeling that Mary is just naturally very rebellious. When she's kept in line, she does what she's told, but if she's given any kind of leeway, she tests the water to see what she can get away with. And the latter half of the Victorian period did lead to the rise of suffragettes and eventual first wave feminism - so Mary is young enough to be enthralled by the idea of feminism and breaking out of the shackles. You can totally see her being a suffragette in a few years time.
• Did Mary's father rape her?
  • It's never shown. There is one flashback where the father tries to be nice when he's drunk and Mary knocks over his bottle of drink by accident. Rather than getting angry like he did when she broke the cup, he says "what am I going to do with you?" and there's a shot of the adult Mary crying in her sleep. So maybe her father did molest her to some degree. Or maybe nothing happened at all.
  • Nothing happened. The flashback is there to contrast with the one where he whipped her and locked her under the stairs. Just like how Mary both hates and is a little attracted to Hyde. The flashback shows that the father could be kind from time to time, and at the funeral he calls out "we had some good times", and since Mary says she doesn't hate her father, it seems to be an especially complicated relationship.
    • If nothing happened makes no sense that she's crying so hard at the remembrance of it.
  • Although if she was raped, that might be why her mother put her into service. As a live-in maid she wouldn't be expected to get married and have her secret discovered...
• What is the significance of the little girl who gets stamped by Hyde?
  • In the book, this is the first indication of Hyde's brutality. It's witnessed by a man called Richard Enfield, and Hyde just beats up the girl because she bumped into him. Basically Hyde has a Hair-Trigger Temper and this poor girl was an unfortunate trigger for it. The 'blood money' is what Enfield forces Hyde to pay to avoid a scandal.