L2 Littérature britannique
Stevenson CM 3 et 4
F. Garcier
LITERARY GENRES in Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (JH)
JH is a mosaic of literary genres. It combines the features and methods of detective
fiction (detection was not only a distinctive kind of Victorian novel in its own right, but a
quality of all Victorian novels) with those of other modes or sub-genres, such as the fantastic,
sensation, the gothic and allegory.
1. Detective fiction
JH is very close formally to the classic novel of mystery and detection1. Three main
elements make up the basic formula of the detective story:
(1) a mystery: certain key facts are concealed
(2) the story is structured around an inquiry into this mystery, usually with the aid of an
inquirer-protagonist
(3) the concealed facts are made known at the end.
(1)
In JH, the fundamental mystery involves the question of what precisely Hyde’s
relation to Jekyll is. Speculations on this subject are prompted initially by the strange clause
in Jekyll’s will declaring that Hyde shall inherit in the event of Jekyll’s “disappearance or
unexplained absence” (N. 13) Enfield proposes an answer, one that is quite traditional in
detective fiction, only to dismiss it right away: “Blackmail, I suppose.... Though even that,
you know, is far from explaining all.” (N. 10) When Utterson tracks Hyde down and
confronts him, other questions arise: why does Hyde hesitate before showing Utterson his
face (N. 16)? How does Hyde know that Utterson is lying when he alludes to Jekyll as one of
their “common friends” who has described Hyde to Utterson (N. 17)? After the murder of Sir
Danvers Carew, new mysteries keep cropping up: why did Hyde attack the old man? How has
Hyde managed to disappear so completely? How can the resemblances between Hyde’s
handwriting in his letter of farewell and Jekyll’s own script be explained (N. 28)? Why does
Jekyll isolate himself again after a couple of months of active socializing (N. 28-29)? Why
does Jekyll slam his window shut and retreat to his cabinet with “an expression of such abject
terror and despair” (N. 32)? What has Hastie Lanyon seen that brings on his death (N. 29-30)?
Who or what is in Jekyll’s cabinet in “The Last Night”? Has Hyde returned and murdered
Jekyll? Quite in the best tradition of the mystery story, Poole says: “I think there’s been foul
play” (N. 33) “That thing in the mask was never Dr. Jekyll ...; and it is the belief of my heart
that there was murder done.” (N. 36) Practically each encounter with Jekyll or Hyde, each
incident, raises further questions and provokes speculative answers. Detective fiction is the
genre of mystery, delay mechanisms, (false) supposition, and these elements structure
Stevenson’s JH.
(2)
In Stevenson’s time, the tradition of the detective who uses his great powers of reason
to solve the mystery and catch the criminal had come into play (Poe’s Auguste Dupin,
The acknowledged inventor of the detective story is Edgar Allan Poe (“Murders in the Rue Morgue”, 1841), his
English counterpart is Charles Dickens, whose first detective novel was Bleak House (1853). Arthur Conan
Doyle, Stevenson’s contemporary, used the “case study”, common to medicine and law, as the best way to tell a
story. His detective, Sherlock Holmes, and his partner, Dr Watson, use methods of observation and deduction
that closely resemble and combine those of modern diagnostic medicine and police investigation. Doyle’s first
series of stories, A Study in Scarlet, was published in 1887.
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Dickens’s Inspector Bucket in Bleak House, Doyle’s Sherlock Homes). In JH, Utterson is the
detective-hero: it is he who tries to penetrate the mystery represented by Mr Hyde, but he does
not display the rational skills of a Dupin or a Holmes, even if he is, at first, rather confident in
his own powers of observation and deduction: he does not need to be told the name of the
signatory of the check Hyde presented, “because I know it already” (N. 12); he casts himself
in the role of “Mr Seek” (N. 15). However, throughout the novella, Utterson offers dozens of
guesses that prove to be wrong: when Guest compares the handwriting of Dr. Jekyll and Mr.
Hyde and declares them virtually identical, Utterson leaps to the conclusion that Jekyll has
“forge[d] for a murderer” (N. 28). Later, when Poole comes to him to suggest that Hyde has
murdered Jekyll and is now hiding in the laboratory, Utterson dismisses the idea: “What could
induce the murderer to stay? That won’t hold water; it doesn’t commend itself to reason.” (N.
35). And his “plain and natural explanation” when about to break down the door to Jekyll’s
cabinet is quite a mistaken one: “’Your master, Poole, is plainly seized with one of those
maladies that both torture and deform the sufferer; hence the alteration of his voice’”. (N. 36).
When they search for Jekyll’s body in the cabinet and find none, the lawyer, in one of the
book’s most ironic turns, concludes that Jekyll has murdered Hyde and that Jekyll “must be
buried under the flags of the corridor” (N. 39). Utterson’s attempts to find appropriate
answers to the mystery fail, firstly because he is not the right sort of detective but a
professional lawyer desirous to protect those in his social circle by suppressing information if
necessary: “I shouldn’t speak of this note, you know” he says to Guest, N. 28. Then, he also
fails because the mystery he tries to solve is a supernatural one, which waylays natural logic.
Most of the mysteries in the novella would be solved if Utterson knew that Jekyll and Hyde
are not two but one.
(3)
Detective fiction characteristically ends with a retelling of its story from a more
informed point of view. Does JH move towards a final narrative that explains all the
mysteries? The book’s final chapter is supposed to be such a retelling. One indeed gets a full
record of the experiments that led to Jekyll’s transformation into Hyde, and an insight into
man’s duality –or plurality- of selves. But Jekyll’s confession is far from being a point-bypoint explanation of the central mystery, as in detective fiction. Mysteries remain: is it really
Hyde’s voice that, so uncharacteristically, pleads with Utterson before the lawyer breaks the
door: “Utterson,... for God’s sake, have mercy!” (N. 38)? How can Jekyll’s manuscript
survive when the doctor so fears that “Hyde will tear it in pieces” (N. 61) if he becomes aware
of it? Finally, who commits suicide, Jekyll or Hyde? The short answer is Hyde, but
uncertainty persists even beyond the end of a tale whose emphasis, throughout, is on the
problematics of identity (who’s who?) and textuality (who writes what, and why?).
Stevenson’s novella, then, explodes the genre of detective fiction just at that point when it
reaches its most significant stage – the final, well-informed, and intellectually sound
explanation. The investigator, Utterson, vanishes from the end of the book in an unexpected
and inexplicable way: there is no return to the recipient and reader of Jekyll’s confession 2, no
return to the framing third-person narrative. Furthermore, there is no criminal to be found,
since whoever he was –Jekyll or Hyde- is now dead. The last chapter retells the story, in the
manner of detective fiction, but it ends in ambiguities, its mysteries not solved but dissolved.
In other words, the rationalist assumptions of detective fiction are challenged by the fantastic/
gothic elements in the text.
Remember that Utterson starts reading the two « enclosures », i.e. Lanyon’s and Jekyll’s narratives in section 8,
“The Last Night” (N. 41).
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2. Fantastic/ Sensation
The fantastic can be broadly defined as any distortion of vraisemblance, challenging
and destabilizing the known, the natural world. For Tzvetan Todorov, « le fantastique, c’est
l’hésitation éprouvée par un être qui ne connaît que les lois naturelles, face à un événement en
apparence surnaturel. (…) Tout le fantastique est rupture de l’ordre reconnu, irruption de
l’inadmissible au sein de l’inaltérable légalité quotidienne »3. The fantastic is a transgressive
mode, moving between borderlands and boundaries : the boundaries of the conscious and the
unconscious, the rational and the irrational, the « civilized » and the « primitive », the natural
and the supernatural, the normal and the abnormal, the self and the other. It interrogates
established categories, the notions of time and space, perception, reason, the concept of
unified character. It should be noted that all these definitions and aspects of the fantastic apply
readily to JH, if only because its central event - a dual identity embodied in two different
beings - pertains to the supernatural and crosses all the above boundaries.
Sensation novels, commonly called “shockers”, have complicated plots, concerned with
terror, mystery, suspense, deception, disguise, persecution. Their style is hyperbolic, their
purposes are to make the flesh creep, to give shocks to the nervous system, to destroy
conventional moralities, to appeal to the reader’s animal instincts. Sensation in fiction
confronts taboos, is associated with excess, extravagance, extremes (of vice and virtue). Ex.
The Carew murder case is a display of cruelty for cruelty’s sake, so shocking that the maid
faints (N. 22). Violence, cruelty, the loss of one’s senses are standard ingredients of the
sensation novel.
3. Gothic
The heyday of gothic fiction in England occurred between the 1760s and the 1820s.
Among the best-known gothic romances were Horace Walpole’s Castle of Otranto (1764),
Ann Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794) and The Italian (1797), Matthew Lewis’s
The Monk (1796), Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) and Charles Maturin’s Melmoth the
Wanderer (1820). All of those novels share a preoccupation with the monstrous and the
supernatural, and make frequent use of dreams, visions, hallucinations, metamorphoses of
various kinds. Gothic fictions seek to arouse in their readers feelings of fear, horror and terror,
by producing monsters: spectres, demons, corpses, skeletons, ghosts, evil aristocrats, mad
scientists, criminals, and the monstrous double signifying duplicity and evil nature. Gothic
texts encourage excessive emotions, promote vice and violence, give free reign to selfish
ambitions and sexual desires (hence their proximity to sensationalism). They subvert the
prescriptions of law and the codes on which good behaviour and social propriety rest (hence
their proximity to the fantastic).
Originally, the word referred to the ornamental excesses of Gothic architecture in the
late Middle Ages (gargoyles, spires, arches, vaults, grotesques) and was connected with
superstition, Inquisition, catholicism, all kinds of awful power and metaphysical force beyond
rational knowledge. In the 19th century, the modern city, its dark, labyrinthine streets, its bleak
passageways and prowling criminals replaced the castles and villains of medieval Gothic. In
JH, Hyde’s Soho environment perceived by Mr Utterson with the fog shrouding it is a good
example of “urban gothic” (N. 23).
In 19th century Gothic fiction, science is called upon to fabricate monsters: electricity in
Frankenstein, biochemistry in JH, where it is clear that the trick is done with chemicals
(“drug”, “potion”, “powder” are telltale clues). Those man-made monsters “condense as many
3
Tzvetan Todorov, Introduction à la littérature fantastique (Paris : Seuil, 1970) p. 29-31.
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fear-producing traits as possible into one body” (N. 130)4: fears related to race, gender,
sexuality, identity, foreigness; fears of the repressed psychic powers in the individual; fears of
the threat that contact with the social underworld and with uncivilized mankind elsewhere
might represent to Victorian values, to Englishness and to imperial order5. Those
subconscious fears, typical of gothic fiction, were reinforced by actual late-Victorian fears
about untraceable murderers such as Jack the Ripper (who operated in the Whitechapel area
of London in 1888). In a letter to Will H. Low, Stevenson himself referred to Mr Hyde as “a
gothic gnome .... [that] came out of a deep mine”6, presumably from the unfathomable depths
of his own imagination, or/and from the repressed desires and impulses which went
unrecognized by the mind under the pressure of self-censorship and Victorian morality.
In JH, Jekyll describes Hyde as “pure evil” morally and physically7: “ evil had left on
that body an imprint of deformity and decay” (N. 51). The vastness and extravagant
omnipresence of the semantic field of “deformity” (including all forms of deviancy from the
norm), the numerous recurrences of “evil” (as adjective and noun), “Satan” and “demon”
exhibit the gothic excesses of Stevenson’s writing. So does the emphasis put upon Jekyll’s
“(to say the least) undignified pleasures” ( N. 52), which are never specified (“to say the
least” is to say nothing at all!) but are left open to the worst suggestions of transgression. In
characteristic gothic fashion, Stevenson plays heavily with the feelings of horror and
terror8: to make sure that his reader will experience them, he generalizes the instant aversion
that Hyde inspires to people of all kinds and stations in life (Enfield, Lanyon, Utterson, even
the “cut and dry apothecary ... as emotional as a bagpipe” in Enfield’s report (N. 9)). Gothic
terror stems as much from the intensity of that universal loathing as from the inability of all
narrators to express what they find so offensive in Hyde’s appearance. The half-spoken or the
unspeakable 1) is more expressive of terror than an accurate description; 2) merges with the
fantastic, the genre of uncertainty and hesitancy (between vraisemblance and the unreal).
Monstrosity, deformity is the hallmark of the gothic narrative itself, as if the monsters
it creates reflected upon its form:
-the ending: Typically gothic narratives are incomplete, unfinished, or unresolved. In a gothic
story, to organize, complete or resolve the narrative would be to escape the nightmare of the
gothic world. More commonly, the gothic narrative ends with the victory of the powers of
darkness.
-the narrative structure: Like Wilkie Collins in The Woman in White (1860), Stevenson uses a
series of narrators, giving each his view of the story, but the successive accounts in no way
amount to a completed version nor to a “full” statement of the complex “case”. The overall
effect is one of disconnected, ill-fitting parts, working against each other rather than together,
towards disintegration rather than integration. The narrative ellipses, the unsaid, the unspoken,
the hidden, act upon the narrative in a parasitic, underhand way, just as the repressed, the
“foreign body” does in the psyche9.
4. Allegory
Allegory (Greek etymology: “speaking otherwise”) develops two coherent meanings, a
conceptual or abstract one running parallel to a more concrete, figurative one. The concrete,
4
Judith Halberstam, « An Introduction to Gothic Monstrosity » N. 128-131.
J. Halberstam stresses that Freud identified the repressed itself as a foreign body within the psyche. N. 129.
6
Letter of 2 January 1886. N. 82.
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One might see there an expression of faith in physiognomy, i.e. reading character in external appearance, in the
physical delineation of character.
8
Horror refers to a feeling of great shock, dislike, disgust at something directly experienced by the senses. Terror
is a feeling of extreme fear, the fear of something that might happen in specific circumstances.
9
J. Halberstam stresses that Freud identified the repressed itself as a foreign body within the psyche. N. 129.
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the visual, is endowed with metaphysical or abstract significance (ex. George Orwell’s
Animal Farm, where pigs behave and speak like men, and utter some odd truths as “All
creatures are created equal, but some are more equal than others” to ridicule totalitarian
regimes (1945)). An allegory, to be effective, must make the analogy drawn between the two
meanings transparent without being didactic. The reader should be able to elucidate the moral
purpose by himself, while enjoying the sensationalism of the “shilling shocker”, in JH’s case.
“To teach by pleasing” is what an allegory aims to do. To the “pleasing” purpose all the
“sensational” genres and sub-genres surveyed in the preceding paragraphs – detective fiction,
ends: 1) it brings to light the contaminating power of Evil embodied in Hyde as in every man;
2) it chronicles the process of destruction which Dr Jekyll’s hubris (exaggerated pride) and
imprudence have brought upon himself.
The spectre of a wild beast in man10 recurs in several late 19th century novels: Oscar
Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891), H. G. Wells’s The Island of Dr. Moreau (1896),
Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897) and, of course, Stevenson’s JH. All these tales dramatize the
degenerationist fears that arose from late 19th century evolutionary thought (Darwin, among
others): the fear that evolution was not a simple progressive process but a partly regressive
one, was indeed the consequence of progress, the result and symptom of over-civilization, of
urban modernity; the fear that inside every civilized man lay a savage waiting to reclaim him.
Moreover, Stevenson’s Presbyterian upbringing in Scotland had impressed upon him an
anxiety about sin and damnation. According to Protestant doctrine, all men are born in sin.
Only God, having foreknowledge of time, can know which men and women are to be saved,
and which are to be eternally damned. From this arises the doctrine of predestination: a man’s
fate after his death is already decided at his birth, and only his conscience can allow him to
acquire the certainty of being predestined to salvation (see letter to Edward Purcell, N. 83).
Hyde is the embodiment of the evil contained in Jekyll’s soul. Jekyll thought that he
could separate his “two characters” (N. 52), have them go their separate ways, thus 1) freely
indulging his inclination for pleasure as Hyde, while 2) freeing the honorable Dr Jekyll from
the malign influence of his baser instincts and from the “hard law of life” (N. 48). But this is
mere delusion: Hyde becomes another being, more and more powerful, more and more evil as
he pursues only his own pleasure and satisfaction, regardless of others, contemptuous of
social and moral rules. Evil thrives when it is not restrained by a moral conscience. What
takes place is exactly the reverse of what Jekyll thought at the beginning: the voluntary
change into Hyde becomes involuntary, and Jekyll realizes that “[he] was losing hold of [his]
original and better self, and becoming slowly incorporated with [his] second and worse.” (N.
55). The moral lesson he learns too late is that man must dwell in uncomfortable but
necessary harmony with his multiple selves and strive to keep his worse parts in check.
Jekyll’s does not admit that it was his selfishness and moral cowardice that released the
horrible personification of his hidden drives. He tries to present his experiments as prompted
by legitimate scientific concerns (his interest in “the mystic and the transcendental” N. 48),
thus finding excuses, which the reader should view only as explanations. He is caught in his
self-woven net of duplicity, and though he denies being “a hypocrite” (“though so profound a
double-dealer, I was in no sense a hypocrite; both sides of me were in dead earnest” N. 48),
his plan is clearly to preserve the respectable façade of Dr Jekyll while indulging shamelessly
in “irregularities” (48) as Mr Hyde. In this respect, JH can be seen as a moral allegory about
Victorian hypocrisy11, which conjures up the dark underside of the repressed, sterile world of
the male professionals (doctors, scientists, lawyers) who form Jekyll’s circle.
“The unchaining of the wild beast in man” is a phrase from Max Nordau’s Degeneration (1895). Max Nordau
was an influential late nineteenth-century German cultural critic.
11
On Victorian hypocrisy, see Walter Houghton’s essay, N. 146-149.
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5. A cautionary tale
The novella warns its readers against the dangers to one’s soul of the “sins” or
“iniquities” committed both by Dr Jekyll as an overreaching scientist and by his amoral
double, Hyde. It is to be noted that, even though Jekyll never really endorses responsibility for
Hyde’s crimes, the religious vocabulary of sin, damnation and penitence, along with biblical
images12, invade the novella from the moment Dr Jekyll loses control of his worse self and
confronts retribution, punishment: “If I am the chief of sinners, I am the chief of sufferers
also.” (N. 30), “the ugly face of my iniquity stared into my soul” (N. 57), “the fall seemed
natural” (N. 58).
That JH gave a good warning to its readers and taught the right kind of morality is
proved by its being quoted in pulpits and used by clergymen for their sermons:
“The account that the writer gave [idle and morbid people] was metaphysically and
morally true. He told them, which was true of moral nature, that it was a duality; that
there was a higher nature within them and a lower nature; that by power of will they
could, if they would, surrender their higher natures to their lower natures; and that if
they did that too frequently, return was impossible, and that all would be left of them of
the higher nature was the capacity for remorse.” (Rev. Dr. Nicholson, N. 103).
Rev. Dr. Nicholson’s reading definitely privileges the allegory over the sensation story, to the
extent that it entirely denies its value as a “shilling shocker” (103) and sees it only as a
parable. Indeed, this is a total reversal of the history of JH’s composition, since the
allegorization was incorporated later, at Fanny Stevenson’s request (N. 78); morevoer it is a
complete misintepretation of the genre since it suppresses the figurative narrative to retain
only the moral lesson of the allegory.
Concl.
There are so many genres and sub-genres interfused in the story that the novella could
be regarded as a palimpsest in which the basic form of the gothic thriller is overwritten by the
patterns of the detective story, the gothic fantasy, science-fiction and, to impart some sort of
moral guidance to the palimpsest, allegory.
12
See footnotes in Norton Edition p. 48-57.
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