How Psychoanalysis Theory and Queer Theory Can Be Used to Read "Strange Case of Dr Jekyll & Mr Hyde"
- veritybrownpoetry
- Mar 18, 2022
- 10 min read
An essay by Verity Brown
Literary theories are the backbone of any text analysis in the field of literature and media. Though many of these theories – such as Queer Theory, which I will be using to evaluate Strange Case of Dr Jekyll & Mr Hyde - were written before the era of modernity, texts and the theories used to dissect their meaning do “not exist in some realm of thought, but in a world of institutional structures and political forces.” (Scholes, 1985) This means that theories developed after the fact are absolutely applicable in retrospection. “An author can die, but the text they have written can remain and still be understood” (Seymour, 2018) beyond the intention of its creator – this is the death of the author, in multiple understandings. Though the classic lens through which one would read this text by R.L. Stevenson is most often the Psychoanalysis Theory, based on the life works of Sigmund Freud, I believe that Queer Theory is also highly useful and poignantly details the opinions of the audience to whom the tale was presented. Victorian era sensibility relied heavily on a rigid societal conformity to a cisgender, heteronormative façade, in which only the heaviest of euphemism would suffice in speaking of taboos – of which the 19th century British were in no short supply. While sex was considered unspeakable, it was far from ignored, and with the use of “authorized vocabulary”, “the proliferation of specific pleasures and the multiplication of disparate sexualities” was in fact ably explored in the hypothesis of Foucault’s view that the nineteenth century was repressed not in sexual activity, but in its brazen verbalisation of the topic. (Foucault, 1976)
Psychoanalysis Theory is the premier analytic focus one would assume when reading Strange Case of Dr Jekyll & Mr Hyde as it lends itself brilliantly to the text. The most famous trope of the story being that the two title characters are in fact one and the same entices all in the field of psychology, or anyone with an interest in the human psyche, and it would likely be deemed that the split personality of the character was worthy of investigation, subsequently becoming “bound to the idea of multiple personality” (McNally, 2007) in the field of study going forward. Utilizing psychoanalysis would enable a reader of this text to more accurately interpret the reasoning behind such a severe mental divergence in a single character, as well as understanding the metaphorical messages communicated through the polarisation of the mind between the id and the super-ego. (Freud, 1919) I believe that it was Robert Louis Stevenson’s intent that the metaphor within the greatly disturbing presentation of duality between Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde was so abhorrent to read of, that his metaphor was also hence one that would disturb the reader. A taboo at the time of its penning, this text could easily be interpreted as presenting the Victorian reader with the inner turmoil of a homosexual man in a devoutly heteronormative world; and that is where Queer Theory would be engaged.
The queer eye has more often been cast over this text than one might expect – and though Stevenson himself was inspired by a nightmare he had while in bed with his lover, Frances (rumoured to be a domineering wife, “wilful and predatory” (Miller, 2009) in her nature) – he was also surrounded by writers and young men of the Savile Club who were far more likely rumoured to be fonder of the ‘company of men’. It was Andrew Lang who noted in his reflections on Stevenson that he’d “possessed, more than any man I ever met, the power of making other men fall in love with him.” (Lang, 1903) Oscar Wilde – a fellow writer also working in Stevenson’s era – was put on trial for ‘gross indecency’ relating to homosexual acts only nine years after the publication of Strange Case of Dr Jekyll & Mr Hyde. In fact, it is my opinion that life imitated art in the trial of Wilde and Taylor, who were tried together on 20th April 1895. The Telegraph of that date of issue was parroted by the Illustrated Police News; it described Wilde’s homosexual acts as an “episode of moral damage of the most offensive and repulsive kind as any single individual could well cause.” (Illustrated Police News, 1895) This statement – an enlightening insight of the initial audience of Strange Case of Dr Jekyll & Mr Hyde – can hence be noted to be as repulsed by the act of homosexuality as Mr. Utterson is repulsed by Mr. Hyde within the novella. This then is why through reading the text and utilising Queer Theory in doing so, one could easily come to the conclusion that there is more to the binary of Jekyll and Hyde’s characters than merely a literal split persona. After all, it is left as late as possible by Stevenson to reveal that the two men are in fact only one man, which would have a reader at odds with the strange behaviour, and perhaps even leaping to other conclusions about the relationship between Jekyll and Hyde. Wilde even coined the term “Bunburying” to describe the term in The Importance of Being Earnest to describe “the posing and double lives to which homosexuals were accustomed.” (Gagnier, 1987)
Returning to the psychoanalytic perspective, the split persona of Jekyll and Hyde – one, the “sunshine” compared to the “black secret” of Hyde, (whose name is even a homophone of the word ‘hide’) – could be interpreted as the guilty conscience, (Westerink, 2005) an expression of “moral turpitude” repressed by its owner due to a societal stigma and fear of reprisal; socially, morally, and legally. As it comes out that Hyde is in fact the transformed doppelganger of Jekyll’s innermost “evil” before Lanyon, his “soul sickened at it”. His fear of the law when embodied in Hyde is clear upon his arrival to Lanyon, as “there was a policeman not far off, advancing with his bull’s eye open, and at the sight, I thought my visitor started and made greater haste.” The threat of being unveiled at the door of a male companion in the night, contrasts greatly with his initial crime of trampling a girl in the street – and in this act, Hyde does not shy away from his guilt, and even pays off his victims’ family unabashedly with a cheque. However, the one crime he could be accused of – and one which money would be of no assistance in – is homosexuality. This clearly affects Hyde so deeply as to affect his very character, for his character is a walking analogy of the indecent act of homosexuality (contextual to the Victorian reader) with a secret too repulsive to the reader to overtly state aloud, and so the eyes of all others end up finding Hyde “disagreeable”, his presence a “disgustful curiousity” and a taboo, bringing “incipient rigor” (goosebumps) to the skin of those around him by mere existence.
Even the description in the text of the Soho door, the ‘back door’ to which Hyde enters Jekyll’s home, is one of a repulsive nature, and though Utterson attempts to look the other way, proverbially, “the more it looks like Queer Street, the less I ask,” it is “what they call good” that most would have engaged in Blackmail, “an honest man paying through the nose for the capers of his youth.” Homosexuality and blackmail were inherently linked in the period in which the text was written; in section 11 of the Criminal Law Amendment Act, 1885 (the year Stevenson wrote Strange Case of Dr Jekyll & Mr Hyde) “gross indecency” was implicitly detailed and defined as a criminal activity. Wilde himself was the most famous of those being blackmailed for such capers – an arm around a Parisian waiter (Illustrated Police News, 1895) and a subsequent letter from a lover’s father calling him a “posing sodomite” (Queensbury, 1895) – and this is what led to a conviction. He was not alone, and before the writing of the novella in question was the 1871 case of two transvestites charged with “conspiring and inciting persons to commit an unnatural offence,”; and an indictment then followed of Lord Arthur Clinton, among others, but Clinton ended up killing himself before the trial. Hence among other double entendre such as “Jekyll’s private cabinet is most conveniently entered,” the “place with the door” – described as “blistered and disdained” – is noted as “Blackmail House” and is a classic metaphor for the anus in euphemistic language, and in Freud’s dreamwork analysis was commonly identified as such. (Freud, 1908)
It is notable however that despite the negative connotations engaged around the presence of Hyde, there are wild disparities in his description: from a man of “short stature” to a “Juggernaut”. Jekyll describes Hyde as “an ugly idol” – the juxtaposition of hideousness assigned to imagery usually associated with worship. It is clear that Hyde is both a displeasure to behold, whilst also so “natural and human”, “lighter, happier in body”— an analogy for the societal fear of giving in to temptation that would be both guilt-ridden and satisfying in its pure form of hedonism. In both appearance and action, this embodies “the uncanny” as defined by Freud and separated into the id, the ego, and the super-ego. Hyde represented within Utterson’s dream as a creature: “it had no face, or one that baffled him and melted before his eyes.” The faceless man reminiscent of Freud’s essay: “loss of the eyes as fear of castration” – the fear of reprisal, of domination over the id by the ego, and the weak veneer of society’s thin line being cast aside, perhaps, by the temptation of the desires of the flesh – “evil eye as manifestation of uncanny; super-ego as double, and self-observation.” (Freud, 1919) In plainer terms, Utterson – representative of the common sensibility of social norms – is fearful of what he sees in Jekyll and Hyde’s relationship (unknowing until the penultimate chapter that they are one and the same person) will also infect his own subconscious, and the consequences of such may also affect him. He dreams often, and of “this creature stealing like a thief to Harry’s bedside” – when perhaps were he to undo the dreamwork, Utterson fears, “the danger of it…if Jekyll will only let me.” Stevenson’s text incites questioning of the self, as well as the motives behind our acts, our repressive natures, and our repulsion to the uncanny – when in the mirror observed properly, it is “a livelier image of the spirit, more express and single, than the imperfect and divided countenance” that is the split personality of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde as twain. When Hyde takes over, it is the end of “the life of that unhappy Henry Jekyll” in perhaps more ways than one.
Though they are revealed eventually to be one and the same person, the implication is here that Jekyll is more tempted by his true nature over any other being – “I was accustomed to sleeping in the body of Edward Hyde.” So much that they are one and not two, with the same innate core desire, and Stevenson only combines them to embody a problematic emblem of his world. The penalisation of those who engaged in homosexuality and bisexuality (Showalter, 1992) was unfair as previously mentioned in the case of Wilde and Lord Clinton – and Jekyll is afeared to become his darker self and lose retention on his façade – which he eventually does. It could hence be interpreted in the Chapter 10 – Henry Jekyll’s full statement on the case – that the homosexual encounter under the influence of his ‘drugs’ finally catches him off guard: “the hand which I now saw…in the yellow light of a mid-London morning, lying half shut on the bedclothes…was the hand of Edward Hyde”; “Sunk as I was in the mere stupidity of wonder, before terror woke up in my breast” – the fear of their discovery by the servants, and Bradshaw “stared and drew back at seeing Mr. Hyde at such an hour” it is clear that the carelessness on Jekyll’s part has now implicated him in his crime of super-ego. This passage is highly implicit of the illicit nature of a homosexual encounter within the context of the Victorian fin-de-siècle attitude, of course, but also the dark consequences that then almost at once follow as Jekyll succumbs to the will of Hyde. The id submits to the super-ego, and is lost to shame in his committal to end his life because of its discovery. This alternative interpretation is possibly the most likely intended by Stevenson due to the influence of the society in which he lived; but it was Stevenson’s notion to ‘run away’ to Samoa – perhaps he was too subtly inferring that for Jekyll to be truly happy, he should end his current life, and begin a new one with Hyde outside of the realms of Victorian societal expectation?
The blurring of the lines between these solutions is disputable because Victorians had no problem voicing proposal of murder and suicide. Murder is easily proposed as a potential crime of Hyde unto Jekyll, Lanyon “supposing Dr. Jekyll to have been murdered” and is not a difficult subject broached between he and Poole; yet earlier on it is Utterson who wonders, “I thought it was madness… and now I begin to fear it is disgrace.” Could this allusion on Stevenson’s part be to the unspeakable of Victorian sensibilities: the “world of perversion” (Foucault, 1976) that in the 19th century was a catch-all for any sexual behaviours outside the marriage of a man and a woman.
Utilizing both the psychoanalytic and queer perspectives at once, we could easily draw a conclusion Stevenson is criticising the well precedented price of an upstanding man of notoriety and piety in the face of homosexual encounters. To Stevenson, death – suicide, in fact – is an unacceptable payment for the freedom from being “the slave of certain appetites.” A man such as Stevenson, who according to Claire Harmon, was “a man with an insatiable appetite for attention and affection” (Harmon, 2005) could not possibly be opposed to the idea that sexual repression should be up for discussion within his society. As Foucault argued later, Victorian society was in no way opposed to debate on sex – they merely preferred to speak of it through their code of poetry and interpretive literary expressions. Therefore, this novella, as decoded by psychoanalytic theory into the realms of queer narrative, can be interpreted with ease as a lament to the loss of good men, not to their homoerotic sins, but to their desires simply to conform to a society in which they are not welcome. In turn, it is also presenting a coded solution to those who would wish to escape its clutches and choose a path of happiness over the captivity of the conformist mentality that was their civilised prison.
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