Class 3 - The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde PDF

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Summer 2018
Professor: Dimitri ...

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The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson Robert Louis Stevenson (1850 – 1894):  A Scottish author, but lived all over the world  Very successful in his lifetime, known today mostly for Treasure Island (1883) and Jekyll and Hyde (1886) Cultural Impact:  The novella was extremely successful upon its publication  In 1887, a year after publication, the first stage version by Thomas Russell Sullivan opened in Boston. It went on to tour Britain and ran for 20 years (longer than Cats on Broadway)  There have been well over 100 film versions dating all the way back to 1908 Narrative Structure:  The story is broken up into three narrative sections  The first is third person, where we get an external account of Jekyll and Hyde described from several different viewpoints, starting with the “story of the door” told by Enfield  This introduces the mystery or detective structure of the story  There is a mystery established with lots of physical clues (the handwriting, the will, the broken key) but their meaning is uncertain  The novella then concludes with two first-person narratives: first Lanyon’s followed by Jekyll’s “full statement of the case” Evolution:  Charles Darwin (1809-1882)  On the Origin of Species (1859)  The Descent of Man (1871)  By bringing humanity closer to the animal kingdom, evolution undermined the privileged superiority that humanity had bestowed upon itself The Doppelganger:  One of the features of the late-Victorian gothic stories was a fascination with the notion of the divided self or doppelganger (spectral double, evil twin)  Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Grey (1891) also exhibits this preoccupation with the fractured self (it was directly influenced by Jekyll and Hyde)  The double is a manifestation of a personality split (this is an influential early example of the psychological notion of the split personality)  The doppelganger is used to illustrate the psychological terror and the real danger of this divided, schizophrenic self Sigmund Freud:  Austrian psychiatrist (1856-1939)  Creator of psychoanalysis: looking at dreams, childhood memories, etc. as clues to a patient’s subconscious and keys to solving a patient’s current problems  He applied his ideas to society as well as individuals Some Key Ideas and Terms from Freud:  Id / Ego / Superego – Picture these like the cartoon staple of a person with a devil on one shoulder and an angel on the other  The Id desires pleasure only (the devil)  The Superego reminds us of what’s “right” or moral (the angel)

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The Ego is the conscious, decision-making self in the middle

“The Uncanny” (1919):  A classic essay by Sigmund Freud  Unheimliche  Heimlich means homey or familiar, but it can also mean concealed or secret, and thus the opposite of familiar  The uncanny is at once strange and strangely familiar  For Freud, the uncanny represents the process of repression A Return of the Repressed:  For Freud, the uncanny is “that species of the frightening that goes back to what was once wellknow and had long been familiar”  The uncanny is something which ought to have remained hidden but has come to light  It is a return of the repressed, of the primal desires of the Id that have been buried into the unconscious  We might see Hyde as a kind of uncanny Id monster. He’s all desire, with no concern for consequences or prohibitions Henry Jekyll’s Full Statement of the Case:  As Jekyll relates in his written statement to Utterson, his early life was characterized by a conflict between his moral sense of good – and the reputation that resulted from this – and the enjoyable commission of certain “pleasures” which seemed to contradict and threaten both his moral goodness and his esteemed place in society (55-56)  It is this “duplicity of life” that Jekyll strives to cast off in his creation of Hyde, the figure to whom he can ascribe all of his “undignified” desires and tendencies (59, 60) “Man’s dual nature” (55)  Jekyll thinks that he has found a perfect formula for satisfying his baser drives  However, by indulging them so totally in the persona of Hyde, his own identity is eventually overtaken by Hyde  While Hyde begins as Jekyll’s mask, Jekyll ends up as Hyde’s mask – what he puts on to escape pursuit  But they are both still the same person Jekyll/Hyde, Hyde/Jekyll:  Jekyll discovers that he cannot separate his dual nature  As Jekyll, he retains the “undignified” appetites of Hyde  Interestingly, Hyde retains aspects of Jekyll, such as concern for social reputation  While the story is about duality, it ultimately collapses popular dichotomies, such as assumptions about class divisions Jekyll the Ripper:  When the “Jack the Ripper” murders began, the killer was initially compared to Hyde in the press  The assumption was that, given the horrific nature of the crimes, the killer must be some savage, low-class, uncivilised barbarian  However, as the murders continued, the press began to speculate that the killer could be a “respectable” member of society leading a double life A City of Secrets:  The London presented in the novella is nearly always “drowned” in fog

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Many of the characters conceal things from each other: o Jekyll hides his experiments from friends and colleagues o Richard Enfield at first hides Jekyll’s identity from Utterson o Utterson hides information from the police There are many mysteries that are never explained This is a world where everyone has something to “hyde”

Blackmail House:  Note all the references to blackmail in the story: o Enfield blackmails Hyde by threatening to create a scandal (8) o After Hyde pays him with Jekyll’s cheque, Enfield and Utterson conclude that Hyde is blackmailing Jekyll (9) o Utterson decides to investigate what Hyde has on Jekyll, not to expose Hyde but rather to protect Jekyll’s reputation o He fears that Hyde represents some dark secret from Jekyll’s past (17) Sexual Anxieties:  This era saw a loosening of moral and sexual codes that generated an attendant anxiety regarding sexual deviance and disease  Syphilis reached epidemic proportions in the 1890s  Recall Enfield and Utterson’s belief that Jekyll is being blackmailed by Hyde  Homosexuality and blackmail have a strong association in this period  The law criminalizing homosexual intercourse was passed in 1885 (the year the story was written; lasted until 1967)  This law was often called the “Blackmailers’ Charter” Boundaries of the Civilized:  The literary critic David Punter contends that the Gothic is marked by an “awareness that as we discover more about the psyche, we become less and less certain that it is, or even can be, ‘under control’  Punter identifies the “boundaries of the civilized” as a key concern preoccupying the consciousness of texts like The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde  In periods of cultural insecurity, when there are fears of regression and degeneration, the longing for strict border controls around the definition of gender, sexuality, race, class, nationality, and criminality becomes especially intense...