eating cucumbers without permission...

Notes on gothic fiction and Stevenson’s “The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde”.

“Gothic” as “barbaric” or “savage”; it brought to mind the sack of Rome, which to those who idolized the classical period was equivalent to the downfall of civilization.

Walpole’s obsession with the medieval period — and his faux-Gothic house — led to the association with fiction. His terrible, terrible book “The Castle of Otranto” is considered the first gothic novel, and established many of the genre’s conventions (e.g., a haunted castle and a dark mystery). Manfred trying to force an engagement to his dead son’s fiancée therefore the first example of sexual transgression in a gothic work.

Ann Radcliffe (who could actually write!) brought the form much greater success. Gothic fiction was actually the first bestselling genre, thanks to a high rate of literacy, a newly high level of print distribution, and unsurprisingly popular plots featuring middle class idiots thrown into extraordinary situations. And, of course, there was the sex.

Matthew Lewis’s “The Monk”, for example, with its obsession with transgressive sexual content, set the tone for much gothic fiction since. Vampire fictions are the most obviously sensual, but sexuality (especially transgressive sexuality) is an important aspect of the genre as a whole. As an aside, I’m glad to have someone I can blame for Laurell “I write vampire pornography, ‘K?” Hamilton.

Jekyll & Hyde

Has a dark atmosphere: eerie, with lots of twilight.

The reader isn’t afraid of meeting Hyde in the street and being beaten to death; rather, what’s dreaded is an attack from within. Hyde could be you. (Cue ominous music.) Reminds me a little of the Id-monster in “Forbidden Planet”. Stevenson would’ve been thinking of “soul”, however, not “psyche”; psychoanalysis wasn’t yet in vogue.

Obvious interpretation sees Hyde as primal urges, oppressed by social conscience. Hyde is Jekyll in a Hobbesian state of nature, though the “nasty, brutish and short” comment applies to his appearance as well as his lifespan. Repression is unconscious; this oppression is conscious squelching.

Is this a sociopolitical comment on the bourgeoisie? Rich’s interpretation pitches Hyde as the impinging lower classes, starting to think above their station. Others pointed out the strong non-malignant presence of the servants, so this doesn’t seem likely. Hyde could represent a criminal class, removed from society as a whole.

Interesting to note that we don’t actually know what Hyde does, save beating a man to death and trampling a child. Odd that the calm trampling of the child is the more viscerally offensive act: what kind of person doesn’t stop to comfort a hurt child? Maybe it’s just that we’re inured to crimes of passion, but calmness is always pure evil Hannibal Lecter-style sociopathy.

The drug interpretation (which might be dismissed as an unlikely projection of a contemporary obsession) seems more likely with the new research suggesting Stevenson was overdosing on hallucinogens scant weeks before writing the story.