Jekyll and Hyde

Jekyll and Hyde

Some Historical Background

Homosexual Panic

“Sexology developed as a (some would now say pseudo-) science in the 19th century. The early sexologists inaugurated a shift in public attitudes from regarding homosexuality as a sin or crime, to treating it as a sickness or congenital abnormality: a shift from the criminal to the pathological model.” (http://www.well.ac.uk/cfol/homosexuality.asp)

For the "nameless offense of great enormity," however, the death penalty remained intact and was regularly enforced: through the first third of the century, men went to the gallows for sexual activity with other men almost every year. When the death penalty was abolished in 1861, it was replaced by life imprisonment. The Criminal Law Amendment Act of 1885, aimed primarily at reducing heterosexual prostitution, once again redefined measures against sodomy, heterosexual and homosexual: an offender convicted of sodomy would receive a minimum of ten years; for "attempted sodomy" an offender could receive ten years maximum; for specifically homosexual "gross indecency," public or private, the sentence was two years with hard labor. (http://www.enotes.com/nineteenth-century-criticism/homosexuality-nineteenth-century-literature)

Oscar Wilde trial : 1895

Some textual moments

"friend and benefactor Edward Hyde“ “a protectorate—one Hyde” (Ch 2)

"Poor Harry Jekyll," he thought, …He was wild when he was young; a long while ago to be sure; but in the law of God, there is no statute of limitations. Ay, it must be that; the ghost of some old sin, the cancer of some concealed disgrace… It turns me cold to think of this creature stealing like a thief to Harry's bedside; poor Harry, what a wakening!” (Ch 2)

“When they had come within speech (which was just under the maid's eyes) the older man bowed and accosted the other with a very pretty manner of politeness. It did not seem as if the subject of his address were of great importance; indeed, from his pointing, it some times appeared as if he were only inquiring his way; but the moon shone on his face as he spoke, and the girl was pleased to watch it, it seemed to breathe such an innocent and old-world kindness of disposition, yet with something high too, as of a well-founded self-content. Presently her eye wandered to the other, and she was surprised to recognise in him a certain Mr. Hyde, who had once visited her master and for whom she had conceived a dislike. He had in his hand a heavy cane, with which he was trifling; but he answered never a word, and seemed to listen with an ill-contained impatience. And then all of a sudden he broke out in a great flame of anger, stamping with his foot, brandishing the cane, and carrying on (as the maid described it) like a madman. The old gentleman took a step back, with the air of one very much surprised and a trifle hurt; and at that Mr. Hyde broke out of all bounds and clubbed him to the earth. And next moment, with ape-like fury, he was trampling his victim under foot and hailing down a storm of blows, under which the bones were audibly shattered and the body jumped upon the roadway. At the horror of these sights and sounds, the maid fainted.

   It was two o'clock when she came to herself and called for the police. The murderer was gone long ago; but there lay his victim in the middle of the lane, incredibly mangled. The stick with which the deed had been done, although it was of some rare and very tough and heavy wood, had broken in the middle under the stress of this insensate cruelty; and one splintered half had rolled in the neighbouring gutter -- the other, without doubt, had been carried away by the murderer.” (Ch 4)

“Well, the child was not much the worse, more frightened, according to the Sawbones; and there you might have supposed would be an end to it. But there was one curious circumstance. I had taken a loathing to my gentleman at first sight. So had the child's family, which was only natural. But the doctor's case was what struck me. He was the usual cut and dry apothecary, of no particular age and colour, with a strong Edinburgh accent and about as emotional as a bagpipe. Well, sir, he was like the rest of us; every time he looked at my prisoner, I saw that Sawbones turn sick and white with desire to kill him. I knew what was in his mind, just as he knew what was in mine; and killing being out of the question, we did the next best. We told the man we could and would make such a scandal out of this as should make his name stink from one end of London to the other. If he had any friends or any credit, we undertook that he should lose them” (Ch 1)

“Mr. Hyde was pale and dwarfish, he gave an impression of deformity without any nameable malformation, he had a displeasing smile, he had borne himself to the lawyer with a sort of murderous mixture of timidity and boldness, and he spoke with a husky, whispering and somewhat broken voice” (Ch 2)

So What?

Homosociality as a Form of Community

Loss of Community

Now that that evil influence had been withdrawn, a new life began for Dr. Jekyll. He came out of his seclusion, renewed relations with his friends, became once more their familiar guest and entertainer; and whilst he had always been known for charities, he was now no less distinguished for religion. He was busy, he was much in the open air, he did good; his face seemed to open and brighten, as if with an inward consciousness of service; and for more than two months, the doctor was at peace. (Chapter 6)

The homosocial bond here is drawn as one that normalizes society and serves it—we could read Jekyll’s struggle here as trying to grasp on to a dying mode of civic engagement that he cannot hold on to

“once the secularization of terms [about homosexuality] began to make ‘the homosexual’ available as a descriptive category of lived experience, what had happened was not only that the terms of a newly effective minority oppression had been set, but that a new and immensely potent tool had become available for the manipulation of every form of power that was refracted through the gender system…homophobia per se not necessary but some form of leverage over channels of bonding b/w male pairs was—and needed to have power through unpredictability and instability of how it ‘regulated’” (Sedgwick Between Men 87-88)

“This resulted in a kind of paranoid masculine culture, where the space “between men” might shift uncertainly between homosocial fraternal bonds and masked homosexual desire. In a series of brilliant readings of works by Herman Melville, Oscar Wilde, and Henry James, barely conceivable desires took shape in narratives of “homosexual panic.” In Between Men, Sedgwick had argued that the Gothic romance repeatedly articulated this panic in stories where men were persecuted by their doubles—from James Hogg’s Confessions of a Justified Sinner (1824) to Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886) and Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890).” (Roger Luckhurst http://www.depauw.edu/sfs/abstracts/a109.htm)

What, then, is the "Allegory?"

Apocryphally, Stevenson’s wife read the first draft, told him he was trying to write a story that was really an allegory and he burned it

What is the allegory?

Simply it could be about homosexuality or more generalized “sexual pathology” and the hidden lives it forces (back to Jack the Ripper—why this was a touchstone “monstrous” for late Victorians)

More complexly, the issue about sexuality may be a “front” for concerns about how men could function together in groups/as societal forces in the face of rising urban dislocation, power of women (powerful by absence), effeminancy and invalidation of old models (again Jack the Ripper might relate well here—insistence that Ripper was “high class” individual driven to madness, attacking working class, commodified women in a largely immigrant area)

Might even take it back to Darwin (“ape like fury” (47), “masked thing like a monkey” (68), “his face became suddenly black” (80) “the hand which I now saw, clearly enough, in the yellow light of a mid-London morning, lying half shut on the bedclothes, was lean, corder, knuckly, of a dusky pallor and thickly shaded with a swart growth of hair” (88) “ape-like tricks” (96) “ape-like spite” (97)) and the issues of Moreau: how do we define the bounds of civilization and a workable community?

Nietzsche's habitual association of Wagner's sentimentality with drugs and addiction, for instance, of Wagners "narcotic art" (Ecce, 92)

with the "poison" (Ecce, 61) of a "hashish world" of "strange, heavy, enveloping vapors" {Will, 555), comes out of the late nineteenth-century

reclassification of opiate-related ingestion behaviors that had previously been at worst considered bad habits, under the new medicalizing aegis of

addictions and the corresponding new social entity of drug subcultures— developments that both paralleled and entangled the new developments in

homo/heterosexual definition. So Nietzsche says of the "total aberration of the instinct" that can attract young German men to Wagners art, "one piece of anti-nature downright compels a second" (Ecce, 91-92). In The Picture of Dorian Gray as in, for instance, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, drug addiction is both a camouflage and an expression for the dynamics of same-sex desire and its prohibition: both books begin by looking like stories of erotic tensions between men, and end up as cautionary tales of solitary substance abusers. The two new taxonomies of the addict and the homosexual condense many of the same issues for late nineteenth century culture: the old antisodomitic opposition between something called nature and that which is contra naturam blends with a treacherous apparent seamlessness into a new opposition between substances that are

natural (e.g., "food") and those that are artificial (e.g., "drugs"); and hence into the characteristic twentieth-century way of problematizing

almost every issue of will, dividing desires themselves between the natural,

called "needs," and the artificial, called "addictions." It seems as though the reifying classification of certain particular, palpable substances

as unnatural in their (artificially stimulating) relation to "natural" desire must necessarily throw into question the naturalness of any desire

(Wilde: "Anything becomes a pleasure if one does it too often"),so that Nietzsche's hypostatization of Will "itself," for example, would necessarily

be part of the same historical process as the nineteenth-century isolation of addiction "itself." Inexorably, from this grid of overlapping classifications —a purported taxonomic system that in fact does no more than chisel a historically specific point of stress into the unresolved issue

of voluntarity —almost no individual practice in our culture by now remains exempt. The development of recent thought related to food is a good example: the concept of addiction to food led necessarily to that of addiction to dieting and in turn to that of addiction to exercise: each assertion of will made voluntarity itself appear problematical in a new

area, with the consequence that that assertion of will itself came to appear

addictive. (In fact, there has recently been a spate of journalism asserting

that antiaddiction programs such as Alcoholics Anonymous and others

modeled on it are addictive.) Some of the current self-help literature is

explicit by now in saying that every extant form of behavior, desire,

relationship, and consumption in our culture can accurately be described

as addictive. Such a formulation does not, however, seem to lead these

analysts to the perception that "addiction" names a counter-structure

always internal to the ethicizing hypostatization of "voluntarity"; instead,

it drives ever more blindly their compulsion to isolate some new space of

the purely voluntary.

Homosociality

Homosociality

At its most basic, homosociality simply names same-sex relationships as opposed to opposite sex relationships. It does not necessarily denote any sort of sexual activity.

Homosocial Moments in J&H

No doubt the feat was easy to Mr. Utterson; for he was undemonstrative at the best, and even his friendship seemed to be founded in a similar catholicity of good-nature. It is the mark of a modest man to accept his friendly circle ready-made from the hands of opportunity; and that was the lawyer's way. His friends were those of his own blood or those whom he had known the longest; his affections, like ivy, were the growth of time, they implied no aptness in the object (Ch 1)

“This was a hearty, healthy, dapper, red-faced gentleman, with a shock of hair prematurely white, and a boisterous and decided manner. At sight of Mr. Utterson, he sprang up from his chair and welcomed him with both hands. The geniality, as was the way of the man, was somewhat theatrical to the eye; but it reposed on genuine feeling. For these two were old friends, old mates both at school and college, both thorough respectors of themselves and of each other, and what does not always follow, men who thoroughly enjoyed each other's company.” (Ch 2)

"Dear Lanyon, -- You are one of my oldest friends; and although we may have differed at times on scientific questions, I cannot remember, at least on my side, any break in our affection. There was never a day when, if you had said to me, `Jekyll, my life, my honour, my reason, depend upon you,' I would not have sacrificed my left hand to help you. Lanyon my life, my honour, my reason, are all at your mercy; if you fail me to-night, I am lost. (Ch 9)

“After supper at the Trap, Elliot and I lay together on the long morocco sofa. He put his dear strong arms round me & his face against mine. Chat, not very well, sat near the fire ... WJ in the big red chair close to our sofa. We kept calling for Chat, & finally he was lifted on to us, nestling in between Elliot and me. My arms were round him, and Elliot’s were round him and me. Chat liked our both breathing in his ears. We kept on repeating this. All things must end. “

(Future Lord Eshton’s Diary 1868)

I miss you, and mourn for you, and walk the Streets alone – often at night,

besides I fall asleep in tears, for your dear face, yet not one word comes

back to me from that silent West. If it is finished, tell me, and I will raise

the lid to my box of Phantoms, and lay one more love in; but if it lives and

beats still, still lives and beats for me, then say so, and I will strike the

strings to one more strain of happiness before I die. (Emily Dickinson to Female Friend Jan 1855, 315)

Prior to the nineteenth century, there was no such thing as a "homosexual identity." There were homosexual activities, which were viewed with varying amounts of stricture, but that was not the same as being a homosexual.

This is very foreign to our way of thinking, in which a homosexual activity is an essential part of identity. One way of understanding this is that sodomy, the act, was a sin, but so were lots of other things. This actually opened up a large variety of ways in which men might relate to each other that today would be considered very sexual, but were seen as simply ways of being part of a masculine society then.