Title: Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde: A 'Men's Narrative' of Hysteria and Containment
Author(s): Jane V. Rago
Publication Details: Robert Louis Stevenson, Writer of Boundaries. Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press,
2006.
Source: Short Story Criticism. Ed. Jelena O. Krstovic. Vol. 126. Detroit: Gale. From Literature Resource Center.
Document Type: Critical essay
Bookmark: Bookmark this Document
Full Text: COPYRIGHT 2010 Gale, Cengage Learning
[(essay date 2006) In the following essay, Rago posits that Mr. Hyde exemplifies a disturbing mirror image of the
supposedly civilized, gentlemanly world of Dr. Jekyll, Utterson, and Enfield.]
In Western cultural imagination, Stevenson's Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde has become a metaphor,
almost the very name for the duplicitous self. The categorical tradition of the good/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 a frightful blurring of gender roles
linked to the New Woman, as the degenerate, as an Irish Frankenstein's monster, as an embodiment of the horror of
addiction, and as the atavistic criminal who "passes" as a gentleman. 1 All of these readings of Hyde construct him,
on some level, as something other than Jekyll, or, more specifically, as something other than the gentlemanly
medico-juridico-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" (Stevenson 1886: 8), "the great Dr. Lanyon of Cavendish Square, that citadel of medicine" (15), and
Henry Jekyll, "M.D, D.C.L, LL.D, F.R.S" (14).
Even if Hyde is constructed as the necessarily dark side of the bourgeois professional man, as the other side of the
same coin, there remains a tendency to posit Hyde as fundamentally different, out of control, the anarchist of the city
streets of London.
As the work of these critics suggest, the focus of Stevenson's novella resides in the professional world's attempts to
represent and fix Hyde's identity into a known subject. This attempt to fix Hyde's identity comprises the action of the
text: Utterson, a representative of the social world that seemingly excludes Hyde, skulks about the shadows and fog
of nighttime London, in accord with his private watchword--"If he be Mr. Hyde, I shall be Mr. Seek" (17), so that
Hyde does not create a public scene, understood as a scandal, for Dr. Jekyll. In this chapter, I shall argue that the
transgression of Hyde lies not in his otherness but rather in his sameness. The professional medico-juridicoscientific world of the text is enmeshed in the gentlemanly rituals of authoritative discourse. It is precisely this
discursive regime that Hyde threatens, and this results in a panic of representation and self-implication 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. It is through Hyde's very
condition of possibility, or his relation to writing, that he threatens to disrupt and denaturalize the tenuous practice of
the professional world that maintains an authoritative and unseen gaze, through which they can author-ize deviance
and normativity. What makes Hyde so threatening within this schema is that he is not an atavistic other but rather he
is a gentleman, a part of this very same masculine order of the text. The threat of self-implication that Hyde poses is
the crux of the narrative structure of the text. There exists, on the part of the professional order (personified by
Utterson), at once a paranoid and a cynical response to Hyde: a deliberate misrecognition of Hyde in the various
attempts to interpellate him as "other" that (it is cynically recognized) necessarily must fail (cf. Zizek 1989). This
dialectical reaction is apparent in the frantic attempts to "other" Hyde that fail because they are, on one level, fully
intended to fail, in order to justify ongoing efforts to construct a normative identity.
In late-Victorian London (as elsewhere), this medico-juridico-scientific world relied upon its own perceived
authority to control representations of identity through the dialectically related acts of looking and constructing a
discourse of visual description. The authoritative gaze of this professional world is premised on the authority to
write--and the assumption that the writing subject remains outside the field of vision--relying on its own invisibility
as the default setting of normativity. Hyde defies visual description in the narrative and disrupts 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. This textual hysteria revolves around the threat of interpellation turned back in on
itself and culminates in a crisis of representation through a misrecognition of Hyde and the dislocation of deviance
from his body onto the text. In other words, what is hysterical and deviant about Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde [The
Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde] is not the pathology of Hyde, but the normative ideological practices of
invisibility and silence that enshroud the text.
Stephen D. Arata links this need to identify Victorian bodies with the discourse of degeneration that was prevalent
toward the end of the nineteenth century. He writes, "because degenerative illness presented itself to the interested
observer as a series of marks and symptoms to be interpreted, certain aggressive forms of reading were required to
make sense of the evidence. The text to be read took many shapes--bodies, cells, cultures, nations, races, historical
periods, as well as works of literature" (Arata 1996: 19). What this discourse of degeneration provided was an
aggressive practice that could mark various bodies as deviant. Yet degenerative illness did not present itself to the
interested observer as "marks and symptoms to be interpreted"--rather these marks and symptoms were constructed
by the very act of aggressive reading. The medico-juridico-scientific networks' expansion of the discourse of
degeneration from aggressively reading bodies to include "works of literature" now allowed for the marks of
deviance to be evinced in language itself.2 The fantasy is that "if imaginative writing was often figured as a product
of disease, that disease was made visible through the hermeneutic expertise of the professional, whose own writing
was untainted by ... various pathologies" (Arata 1996: 20). 3 The perception of the untainted nature of the
professional serves two functions: on one hand, it maintains a naturalizing authority to construct marks of deviance,
and by doing so remaining unrepresented, the invisibility of the "normal," and on the other hand it blurs bodies into
text and text into bodies via rendering language at once the site of disease and the means to contain that very same
disease. 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
According to Kellen Williams (1996: 417), "Utterson's quest is remarkably akin to late nineteenth-century medical
and scientific attempts to give the deviant body and its untoward pleasures what Foucault has described as
'analytical, visible, and permanent reality.'" In other words, Hyde must be made visible to Utterson so that the latter
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.
Although he creeps about at night and can literally disappear (when he becomes Jekyll), he is perpetually observed
and curiosity is piqued to know who this monstrous gentleman is. Starkly illustrating the power of the ideological
gaze of the normative professional, Utterson has a "curiosity to behold the features of the real Mr. Hyde. If he could
but once set eyes on him, he thought the mystery would lighten and perhaps roll altogether away, as was the habit of
mysterious things when well examined" (Stevenson 1886: 17). In desiring to set eyes on Hyde, Utterson is relying
upon the authority of the normative gaze, deliberately positing him as "mysterious" and reinforcing the ideological
fantasy of an authoritative, objective reading of the body. 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 controlling how to represent Hyde to the world--the ultimate act of
containment.
If Hyde's vague nighttime atrocities (whether murder, trampling little girls, or unspecified acts of sexual
excess/perversity) 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 (seeing) Hyde, Utterson's thoughts turn away from Hyde's activities-as-other and toward himself
"scared by the thought, [Utterson] brooded awhile on his own past ... he was humbled to dust by the many ill things
he had done" (20-21). Immediately, Utterson squirms under this self-implication, the awareness that Hyde's actions
reflect his own--Hyde-as-same. Our first encounter with Hyde already positions him not as other but as same--he is a
gentleman, albeit a depraved one, but of the bourgeois male social order nonetheless. Arata makes a similar claim:
"Edward Hyde may not be an image of the upright bourgeois male, but he is decidedly an image of the bourgeois
male" (1995: 238). Arata goes on to say, however, that Hyde is really an atavistic other who "passes" as a gentleman
(1995: 240). Although, in a sense, all identities and nominations, such as "gentleman" and "other" are acts of passing
and performativity, I am suggesting that Hyde does not 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.
Enfield describes how Hyde "trampled calmly over" (Stevenson 1886: 9) a girl in the middle of the night (note that
Enfield is prowling the night streets as well), "But there was one curious circumstance. I had taken a loathing to my
gentleman at first sight" (9, italics mine). The language used is of a communal and social identity, "my gentleman,"
thus implying that Enfield recognizes Hyde as one of his own. The scene continues with Enfield and the doctor
(called in to treat the trampled girl) threatening to "make such a scandal out of this as should make his name stink
from one end of London to the other"; however, "all the time ... we were keeping the women off him as best we
could, for they were as wild as harpies" (10). Already Enfield assumes Hyde speaks his own "language" by
threatening a scandal--only a gentleman, one of Enfield's own social standing, would regard a scandal (literally
being talked about, placed under scrutiny) 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 to reintegrate Hyde, as
gentleman, into a professional world of gentlemanly power and values. Hyde responds to the men's threat of scandal
with "No gentleman but wishes to avoid a scene" (10). With that, the three men retire to a private room to await
dawn in private, away from the public's scrutiny, draw up bank statements in order to pay off the girl's family, and
thus buy silence.
Prisonhouse of Language
Stephen Heath situates Jekyll and Hyde [The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde] solely in the realm of a
masculine discourse: "Now at the end of the century Stevenson provides a text--perhaps the text--for the
representation of men and sexuality, excluding women and so the sexual and so the hysteria and then finding the
only language it can for what is, therefore, the emergence of the hidden male: the animal, the criminal, perversion.
Perversion is men's narrative and their story" (Heath 1986: 104). Without question, Jekyll and Hyde is a "men's
narrative," but there is no "emergence of the hidden male." In fact 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 against which it must define itself, the text's overt attempts to preserve the
medico-juridico-scientific codes of invisibility and silence have to fail--thus erupting in the sexual and the
hysterical.
Nineteenth-century hysteria was a discursive function within medical texts that was intimately bound up with the
naturalization of the power of the medical gaze. The medical gaze, as one of the many "surface networks of power"
(cf. Foucault 1975), primarily located hysteria within the female body. As much as hysteria was eventually
acknowledged as affecting both men and women, gender asymmetry at the site of representation functioned to map
hysteria onto and in the woman's body. For example, medical professionals, students, and curious observers went to
the famous Tuesday lectures at the Salpetrière hospital when Charcot presented and commented on the condition of
hysterical patients. Interestingly, although Charcot recognized and treated the male hysteric, he never actually used
the male hysteric for his staged performances of hysteria during his thirty-year tenure as a neurologist in Paris.
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 is 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
1892: 29). What is important here is that Nordau is linking masculine hysteria to language, as opposed to the body,
as seems to be the case in feminine hysteria. Implicit, then, in Nordau's description is the sense that through a
discursive regime male hysterics could still be reasoned with. When it came to the degenerate criminal, however, the
subject was most often described as atavistic, which implied something other than human. Hyde, as gentleman,
undermines the putative distinctions between the deviant as object of the scientific gaze and the gentleman-deviant
as a member of the community that marshals the discourse of objective reason with the aim of defending its
prerogatives. 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. Recognition here is trapped, as in the
recognition of the homosexual, ensnared by "the ultimate phrase of knowingness, 'It takes one to know one.'
Interpretive access to the code that renders homosexuality legible may thus carry with it the stigma of too intimate a
relation to the code and machinery of its production. ... Though it can become, therefore, as dangerous to read as to
fail to read homosexuality, homosexuality retains in either case its determining relationship to textuality and the
legibility of signs" (Edelman 1994: 13). Jekyll and Hyde frantically attempts to read Hyde as other in an act of
containment that necessarily produces an overdetermined discourse that seeks--and fails--to interpellate, or visibly
mark, Hyde: it is precisely because he won't be spoken that he must be written. The narrative is an imperfect act of
containment: the text seeks to build a "prisonhouse of language"4 around Hyde and provides him the means to
escape.
Scattered throughout the narrative is a Hyde who, while visibly described in detail, still defies description: "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, but not all of these together could explain the
hitherto unknown disgust, loathing and fear with which Mr Utterson regarded him" (Stevenson 1886: 19). This
passage echoes almost all of the encounters we have with Hyde in that these descriptions are actually a dearticulation of Hyde. Although his physique is described, there is still some unexplained and unstated vagueness-Hyde's signification fails to signify who he is: Utterson fails to utter Hyde. 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.
Williams posits that "the systematic linking of the aberrant to the ineffable, the pathological to the unspoken,
suggests that what makes Hyde's 'unexpressed deformity' so scandalous is, precisely, that it remains 'unexpressed' ...
and will remain a liability only so long as it eludes the proper name" (Williams 1996: 421). However, the narrative
of the text is driven by an imposed silence and the willed de-articulation of Hyde. To give Hyde his "proper name"
(gentleman, self, part of professional world) would be the ultimate scandal, and this is precisely what the text seeks
to contain. 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.
At the end of the first chapter, Utterson and Enfield literally make a pact of silence regarding anything to do with
Hyde: "Mr Utterson sighed deeply, but never said a word ... 'Here is another lesson to say nothing,' said he [Enfield].
'I am ashamed of my long tongue. Let us make a bargain never to refer to this again.' 'With all my heart,' said the
lawyer. 'I shake hands on that, Richard'" (Stevenson 1886: 13). This passage sets up the entire text's attempt at
silence. Paradoxically, the novel is, of course, about Hyde. In an attempt to negotiate this pact of silence with the
anxious need to identify Hyde, the spoken becomes displaced into the written forms that comprise the narrative. The
text contains references to and extracts from many authoritative documents: a bank check, letters, a depositional
report by a doctor, a self-observation case-study, a fragment of a newspaper account, and entries from a book of
experiments. These are all official documents that seek to contain and identify Hyde and therefore silence "the
arbitrary and tenuous nature of the relationship between any signified and signifier" (Edelman 1994: 8) without
having to speak Hyde. To do so would be too close to making Hyde visible, and his legibility would serve to
interpellate/implicate Utterson. So in attempting to write Hyde in the "official" discourse of the homosocial world
(akin to the official criminal confessions of Havelock Ellis, the official sexual confessions of the medical profession,
the official bankruptcy notices of the economic world, and so on) Hyde-as-other "is made to bear the stigma of
writing or textuality as his identity ... by a masculinist culture eager to preserve the authority of its own self-identity
through the institution of homographesis" (Edelman 1994: 16).
This moment of de-articulated anxiety is specifically located in the move from what is (not) said to what is written-Hyde, in not being spoken, is transferred into the act of writing, the act of representation through writing. After
witnessing the metamorphosis of Hyde into Jekyll, Lanyon becomes ill. When pressed about the incident, Lanyon
insists upon not speaking: "'I wish to see or hear no more of Dr Jekyll ... Some day, Utterson, after I am dead, you
may perhaps come to learn the right and wrong of this. I cannot tell you'" (Stevenson 1886: 36, italics mine). Again,
there is not an inability to speak Hyde, there is a self-imposed silence to dearticulate 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
(the ultimate self-implication), and Utterson receives an envelope "addressed by the hand and sealed with the seal of
his dead friend. 'PRIVATE: for the hands of J. G. Utterson ALONE and in the case of his predecease to be destroyed
unread'" (37). Inside is a written confession, and a duplicate copy of Jekyll's will, to be opened only on the condition
of Jekyll's disappearance. The professional world will not identify (speak) 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.
This cordons Hyde inside a legitimate written form; the will and the confession are sealed around the subject of
Hyde.
The embedded silence and invisibility of the text maintain such an ideological hold that these documents are lethal-they can only be read after the author has died or disappeared; in other words, after the author is out of reach of
Hyde's contagion. The hysterical attempts to perform and maintain normative identities occlude a reading that posits
Hyde strictly as other. Lanyon's illness verges on the hysteria that is constantly below the surface and yet must be
seen as a crisis of representation that must be disarticulated from the body and onto the text. What is hysterical is
this wild compulsion performed by the male professional to see and be unseen, to be silent and yet to write
profusely, to create a paradox that then must be contained in an effort to name the other that renders the self
invisible and therefore natural, normal, and unrepresentable. Ironically, in constructing Hyde, the medico-juridicoscientific world of Utterson threatens to be deconstructed and therefore denaturalized as normative by exposing the
perverse relationship patriarchy has with identity--controlling textual representations of sexuality while remaining
invisible itself, as ultimately un-represented.
Notes
1. Veeder 1988, Williams 1996, Doane and Hodges 1998, Davidson 1995, Hirsch 1988, Wright 1994, and Arata
1995, respectively.
2. Perhaps the most striking and famous example of this would be Max Nordau's seemingly all-inclusive work,
Entartung of 1892 (Degeneration, 1895), wherein entire literary movements are indicative of degeneration and
deviance through their linguistic structure alone.
3. What is relevant here is that Arata's remarks liken the literary critic, as a professional, to the doctor, the lawyer,
etc. through a sense of the "professional"--the homosocial order of the time that was imbued with authority.
4. To borrow the title of one of Fredric Jameson's early works, The Prisonhouse of Language (1972).
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Source Citation
Rago, Jane V. "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde: A 'Men's Narrative' of Hysteria and Containment." Robert Louis Stevenson,
Writer of Boundaries. Ed. Richard Ambrosini and Richard Dury. Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press,
2006. 275-285. Rpt. in Short Story Criticism. Ed. Jelena O. Krstovic. Vol. 126. Detroit: Gale, 2010. Literature
Resource Center. Web. 28 Feb. 2011.
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