A MEN\'S Narrative OF Histeria AND Containment - Jane Rago PDF

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Riassunto del saggio "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde: A 'Men's Narrative' of Hysteria and Containment" di Jane V. Rago, per il corso di letteratura inglese I tenuto dalla professoressa Di Blasio su "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde" di Stevenson...

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JANE V. RAGO: “Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde- a “Men’s Narrative” of Hysteria and Containment” In Wester cultural imagination, Stevenson’s Strange case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde has become a metaphor for the duplicitous self. The categorical tradition of the goo/bad, normal/ deviant construction of the subject is revealed in the numerous attempts to fix Hyde’s identity. Critics have read Hyde as a figure of perverse violence and male sexuality, as the illicit pleasures of homoeroticism, as an embodiment of the horror of addiction, and as the atavistic (=primitive) criminal who “passes” as a gentleman. All of these readings of Hyde construct him as something other than the gentlemanly medicojuridical-scientific world that comprises the text. This gentlemanly caste is depicted through the respected and professional men in the text: -Utterson, the “protagonist” of the text, is a lawyer; -Enfield, the “well-known man about town”; -Dr Lanyon; -Henry Jekyll. Even if Hyde is constructed as the necessarily dark side of these professional man, as the other side of the same coin, there remains a tendency to posit Hyde as fundamentally different. The focus of Stevenson’s novella resides in the professional world’s attempts to represent and fix Hyde’s identity into a known subject. In the first chapter, the transgression of Hyde lies not in his otherness but rather in his sameness. The professional medico-juridico-scientific world of the text is enmeshed (=invischiato) in the gentlemanly rituals of authoritative discourse. It is precisely this discursive regime that Hyde threatens, and this result in a panic of representation and selfimplication that surrounds the professional world. The problem of Hyde originates for us not in the space of London, nor in the “Story of the door”, but in the sealed and enclosed will of Jekyll that so bothers Utterson. Hyde threatens to disrupt and denaturalize the tenuous practice of the professional world, that maintains an authoritative and unsee gaze, through which they can authorize deviance and normativity. What makes Hyde so threatening within this schema is that he is a gentleman, a part of this very masculine order of the text. The threat of self-implication that Hyde poses is the crux of the narrative structure of the text. In the late-Victorian London, this medico-juridico-scientific world relied upon its own authority to control representation of identity through the acts of looking and constructing a discourse of visual description. Hyde defies (=sfida) visual description in the narrative and disrupts (=sconfigge) the authoritative gaze, so he remains deliberately unspoken; yet there is a discursive explosion that frantically and obsessively tries to fix Hyde’s identity as deviant. So, what is hysterical and deviant in the novel is not the pathology of Hyde, but the normative ideological practices of invisibility and silence that enshroud the text. In Stevenson’s novella, the professional world struggles to maintain its authority through its own controlling invisibility (attempting to see Hyde) and silence (attempting to write Hyde) – negotiating Hyde illustrates this crisis in representation, or how to know Hyde as one of us.

The scene Hyde must be made visible to Utterson so that the latter (=quest’ultimo) may remain invisible to society at large. The very act of seeking to find a deviant body reinforces the myth of the unrepresentability of the normal in the authoritative gaze. Within the narrative, Hyde does invite being seen; he is perpetually observed and curiosity is piqued to know who this monstrous gentleman is. To see Hyde is to position him as other merely by observing, categorizing, and interpellating him into an objective, scientific regime of knowledge. In this manner Utterson can then fantasize about how to represents Hyde to the world. If Hyde’s vague nighttime atrocities became publicly linked to Jekyll, then Utterson would quite literally be placed under scrutiny. All of the “gentlemen” in the text have a vague and unspecified past that threatens scandal. Indeed, shortly after encountering Hyde, Utterson’s thoughts turn away from Hyde’s activities-as-other and towards himself “scared by the thought, Hyde brooded (=rimuginato) awhile on his own past”. Our first encounter with Hyde already positions him not as other but as same. He does not only pass as a gentleman, he is a gentleman, and this is precisely where the anxiety of the text is located: in trying to contain this paradox of Hyde as same. When Enfield describes how Hyde “trampled calmly over”, the language used is of a communal and social identity, “my gentleman”, thus implying that Enfield recognizes Hyde as one of his own. Already Enfield assumes Hyde speaks his own “language” by threatening a scandal; only a gentleman would regard a scandal as a serious threat. Furthermore, although they detest Hyde, the men close about him to protect him from the wild and harpylike women. This is one of only three scenes that involve women; as the wild and beastlike “harpies” they represent the “other” that becomes the means (=motivo) to reintegrate Hyde, as gentleman, into a professional world of gentlemanly power of values.

Prisonhouse of Language Jekyll and Hyde is a men’s narrative. The entire text is an attempt to render the “normal” male invisible and silent so that he may retain the authority of defining what is deviant and other. Since the normal reinforces the very myth of the other, the text attempts to preserve the medico-juridico-scientific codes of invisibility and silence have to fail: thus, erupting in the sexual and the hysterical. In the nineteenth century, the medical gaze primarily located hysteria within the female body. As much as hysteria was eventually acknowledged as affecting both men and women, at the time it was mapped into the woman’s body. For example, observers went to the famous hospital when Charcot presented and commented on the condition of hysterical patients. Interestingly, although he recognised and treated the male hysteric, he never actually used the male hysteric for his staged performances of hysteria. These induced performances, therefore, constructed the female body as that which is always a spectacle, a window to a tortured soul. It is significant, in this regard, that Max Nordau, in Degeneration, posits that most hysterics were actually men. He argues that hysteria id the first step toward degeneration and that the hysteric man shows an “utter inability to resist suggestion, especially when it comes to him via the strong rhetorical patterns of language.” Nordau is linking masculine hysteria to language, as opposed to the body, as seems

to be the case in feminine hysteria. When it came to the degenerate criminal, however, the subject was most often described as atavistic, which implied something other than human. To recognize deviance in Hyde as a gentleman requires knowledge that one should pretend not to have, yet to ignore it is to risk accepting the degenerate into one’s own society. Scattered (=sparpagliato) throughout the narrative is a Hyde who, while visibly described in detail, still defies description. Although his physique is described, there is still some unexplained and unstated vagueness. The act of reading Hyde’s body is dislocated from the physical into the discursive, into a textual hysteria that seeks to contain what it ironically creates. The systematic linking of the aberrant to the ineffable, the unspoken, suggests that what makes Hyde’s unexpressed deformity so scandalous is, precisely, that it remains unexpressed. However, the narrative of the text is driven by an imposed silence of Hyde. To give Hyde his “proper name” (gentleman, self, part of professional world) would be the ultimate scandal. It is not that Hyde cannot be spoken, but that they won’t speak him; they (above all Utterson) deliberately misrecognize him, because to name him would be to re-present themselves as part of this schema of invisibility and silence. In fact, at the end of the first chapter, Utterson and Enfield literally make a pact of silence regarding anything to do with Hyde. The text contains references to and extracts from many authoritative documents: a bank check, letters, a depositional report from a doctor, ecc. These are all official documents that seek to contain and identify Hyde without having to speak Hyde, to do so would be too close to making Hyde visible, and his legibility would serve to implicate Utterson. Hyde, without being spoken, is transferred into the act of writing, he is represented through writing. After witnessing the metamorphosis of Hyde into Jekyll, Lanyon becomes ill. When pressed about the incident, Lanyon insists upon not speaking. Again, there is not an inability to speak Hyde, there is a self-imposed silence to de-articulate him. Lanyon knows the story but will not speak it. A week later, Lanyon dies from the shock of finding himself obliged to identify Hyde as Jekyll, and Utterson receives an envelope. The professional world will not identify Hyde, and so they attempt to transcribe him into a graphic representation that they alone write and they alone read in order to contain his threat of rupture. Ironically, in constructing Hyde, the medico-juridico-scientific world of Utterson threatens to be deconstructed and therefore denaturalized as normative by exposing the perverse relationship patriarchy has with identity....