SOURCE IDEAS:
“To paint with very broad brush strokes, this stand of literature diversified in the nineteenth Century into a variety of forms such as the ‘Newgate Novel,’ the ‘novel of sensation,” and horror stories, ghost stories and science fiction. Like Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein at the start of the nineteenth Century, Stevenson’s Jekyll and Hyde at its end is therefore concerned not only with the modern theme of interior subjectivity and psychological responsibility, or with medically or socially determinist accounts of criminality such as those dominant Dickens’ later work, but also with an older theme of ‘hellish’ evil, or ‘the slime of the pit’ appearing on earth”(115).
“Like defendants relying on states of absence of mind, double consciousness or possession by the devil, Jeckyll seeks to displace not only his desire but his responsibility onto Hyde, whom he himself then diagnoses as suffering from ‘moral insanity’. But the story also makes swingering moral evaluation…Jekyll describes Hyde as ‘wicked’ and ‘evil,’ as ‘the slime of the pit…that insurgent horror…Hyde resides within Jekyll — and hence represents the ultimate crisis of judgment: the unitary subject split asunder, negating a straightforward attribution of ‘factual’ responsibility; that split also undermines the older discourse of evaluation of character by representing character, too, as ambivalent and as split”(126)
SYNTHESIZING COMMENT/ANALYSIS:
I think these two passages are really interesting, considering some of our lingering questions at the end of the novel and what we should do about the facts of ‘the case’ and make a judgment. I was interested in the first excerpt as it provides some grounding to the novel in general and spoke to some of my thinking around the discourses of the end of the century and looking back on the novels we have read from Shelleys at the beginning of the era to now Stevenson and soon to be Wilde at the end. I thought back to ENG 229, and we looked at what the novel was supposed to achieve, whether it be a moral, didactic model for public consumption or this idea of a sensational, enthralling entertainment where the reader decides what to take from it. We see this shift in the Gothic novel to the interiority of people and a reflection of the advancements of the times, whether scientifically or medically; it starts to complicate this question of what makes a monster or someone ‘hellish.’To continue in the article and look at the idea of criminal responsibility embedded within this Gothic novel, it feels representative of all the confusion surrounding the end of the century and what to make of the ‘progress’ within society when applied to complexities of older judgments of character. We also talked in class about the splitting of responsibility Jekyll makes between himself and Hyde and how difficult it would be for Victorian readers to recognize this criminal responsibility.
QUESTION:
What do we think some of the connections are in our other novels in terms of criminal responsibility or the ability for society to distinguish criminality that perhaps feels more straightforward than in Stevenson’s case, where we see complexities with science, psychology, etc. that people at the time were not sure what to make of. Thinking of our own judgments of criminal behavior or ‘characters’ in past novels like Frankenstein or Jane Eyre, would we have the same uncertainties of judgment that we do here?
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