Psychological doubles
Psychological doublesThe Gothic theory of the double is both reductive and powerful. It assumes that we are all playing a role in life; that a raving beast waits within for the chains to loosen or snap. Doubles stories seem to proliferate when people sense an unnegotiable divide between the true self and society, between nature and culture. (Edmunson 48)
Such duality of roles is expressed in terms of split personalities in both The Beast in the Jungle by Henry James (1843-1916) and The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-1894). In these fictional works, the characters are unable to cope with the split.
Stevenson seeks to reproduce the double by way of splitting a personality between accepted roles. In this case, the roles are split between appropriate and inappropriate masculine behavior and are issustrated through the characterizations of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. “Jekyll is an apparently respectable man”, contends Calder (ii), “who contains within him a potential for profound wickedness, released in the shape of Mr. Hyde”. According to Calder (ii) “AJ Symonds, a friend of Robert Stevenson, and many others found this chilling to contemplate.”
The society of men is Stevenson’s main focus and is evident in the number of ways in which he presents Hyde in terms of society. If Jekyll and Hyde is characterized in Gothic fiction’s exaggerated tones of late-Victorian anxieties concerning deterioration of social status, and the idea of ‘criminal man,’, it invariably situates those concerns in relation to the practices and discourses of lawyers like Gabriel Utterson, doctors like Henry Jekyll and Hastie Lanyon, or even ‘well-known men about town’ like Richard Enfield. The novel in fact asks us to do more than simply register the all-too-apparent marks of Edward Hyde’s ‘degeneracy.’ It also compels us also to examine how those marks come to signify in the first place.
To make his point, Stevenson creates a monster that is both the model of decay, but is also the most sophisticated and the most accepted by his fellows. Arata points out that the split is represented in the description of Hyde’s body, which is “an imprint of deformity and decay” (DJMH 84). Utterson, who spends a great deal of time with Hyde originally claims to consider Stevenson’s evolving Victorian male as something to be entirely outside society. “God bless me,” exclaims Utterson, “the man seems hardly human. Something troglodytic, shall we say? . . . or is it the mere radiance of a foul soul that thus transpires through, and transfigures, its clay continent?” (DJMH 40). Utterson’s remark nicely demonstrates how old and new ideas can overlap. He at once draws on familiar Christian imagery of “Hyde’s foul soul transfiguring its clay continent” comments Arata “ and a Lombrosan vocabulary of atavism, with Hyde-as-troglodyte reproducing in his person the infancy of the human species” (Arata 233-234).
Stevenson was interested in refuting the “professionalism” that was inhibiting authorship at the time. This begged the characterization of a monster to refute it (Arata 240). Stevenson does this by foregrounding the interpretive acts by means of which his characters situate and define Hyde. Despite the confident assertions of the novel’s professional men that Hyde is ‘degenerate,’ his ‘stigmata’ turn out to be troublingly difficult to specify. In fact, no one can accurately describe him. ”He must be deformed somewhere,” asserts Enfield. ”He gives a strong feeling of deformity, though I couldn’t specify the point. He’s an extraordinary-looking man, and yet I really can name nothing out of the way. No, sir . . . I can’t describe him” (DJMH 35-37). That last, nearly oxymoronic formulation of unexpressed deformity, nicely captures the troubled relation between the ‘text’ of Hyde’s body and the interpretive practices used to decipher it. In this way Stevenson underscores how the act of interpretation is grounded less in empirical data like the shape of Hyde’s face and the hue of his skin, than in the categories brought upon him.
Stevenson furthers this by making the “image of the upright bourgeois male” (DJMH 49) also the image of violence. Hyde is depicted as an aristocrat, whereas Jekyll is described as a scientist. This split in their personalities points out the dual roles that Stevenson wanted to portray. The creation is inherently of the higher class, but the monstrous side of it. Hyde is more identifiable with this class than is Jekyll. “Indeed, the noun used most often in the story to describe Hyde is not ‘monster’ or ‘villain’ but – ‘gentleman’” (Arata 235). This novel portrays a world which consists of almost exclusively middle-class professional men. Instead of attacking Hyde, these gentlemen more often close ranks around him.
Again, the monster gentleman is expressed in terms of violence. In the original draft, Hyde murders the well-respected Mr. Lemsome, who is the man that Utterson considers “a bad fellow” and “an incurable cad” (DJMH 34). Hyde “…is the scourge of (a bourgeois) God, punishing those who threaten patriarchal code and custom” (Arata 235). Arata observes, “Enfield’s ‘Story of the Door,’ though it begins with Hyde trampling a little girl until she is left ‘screaming on the ground’ (DJMH 31), it concludes with Enfield, the doctor, and the girl’s father breakfasting with Hyde in his chambers (DJMH 32). Recognizing him as one of their own, the men literally encircle Hyde to protect him from harm. ‘And all the time . . . we were keeping the women off him as best we could, for they were as wild as harpies. I never saw a circle of such hateful faces; and there was the man in the middle, . . . frightened too, I could see that’” (DJMH 32). Enfield also tells the story of the beating with animation, in support of patriarchal superiority. Stevenson uses this to underscore the decadence in this stance. His portrayal of the bourgeois male is meant to prove that what appears to be gentlemanly is in fact monstrous.
This is why the gentleman Hyde must be destroyed.
“The terrors suffered by Hyde during his final days arise in part from his surroundings: the very symbols of bourgeois respectability that he exists to repudiate do him in. On the other hand, he seems to feel bizarrely at home in these surroundings. If for instance we ask who set the table for tea on this final night, the answer has to be Hyde and not Jekyll, since Utterson and Poole, prior to breaking in the door, agree that they have heard only Hyde’s voice and Hyde’s ‘patient’ footsteps from within the room that evening” (DJMH 68-69).
In the end, it is Jekyll that is blasphemous (DJMH 71).
While Stevenson is aware of his monster, Henry James makes only May aware of the beast that resides in Marcher. In this way, Marcher never has to take responsibility for the beast in him. This is done through a typical construct is of the nurturing woman who sacrifices at her own expense.
In The Beast in the Jungle, May Bartram gives Marcher this support. He constantly goes over and over in his mind her graces. He says of her, "There was that in his situation, no doubt, that disposed him too much to see her as a mere confidant, taking all her light for him from the fact--the fact only--of her interest in his predicament; from her mercy, sympathy, seriousness, her consent not to regard him as the funniest of the funny" (BIJ 544). He continues, "...her price for him was just in her giving him this constant sense of his being admirably spared...." (BIJ 544). In other words, she is written in to spare him the horror of discovering the beast within him. She does it so well, that "...she had in fact a wonderful way of making it seem, as such, the secret of her own life too. That was in fine how he so constantly felt her as allowing for him..." (BIJ 545).
This is why James never has May explain the beast to Marcher, although she knows it, understands it, lives with it to her death. She never asks him to face it while she is with him. Edmunson writes that “the unfortunate heroine” is not meant to “break free” of the beast (Edmunson 48). She is meant to sustain the man by ignoring the monster.
Richard Hocks said of James’ fiction that it “at once reinvents the very genre of ‘double’ literature and simultaneously condenses rich and multitudinous levels of meaning into an economy of form" (in Thompson 192). For example, Marcher finds in May a mirror image of himself. He writes:
“Their attempted supposition of reasons for their not having met but showed how little they knew of each other. There came in fact a moment when Marcher felt a positive pang. It was vain to pretend she was an old friend, for all she would have suited him…. He was really almost reaching out in imagination – as against time—for something that would do…. They would separate, and now for no second or no third chance . . . the link was so
odd ...” (BIJ 539).
The link between the two can be perceived as both Marcher’s partial cognition of the beast in him, or as the link between the beast and its partner. “Above all she as in the secret of the difference between the forms he went through” (BIJ 545-546).
This is very similar to the link between Hyde and Jekyll, but it is also the link for all of us between what we display in public and what we hide. The commotion caused within is actually another dimension of the beast. Will the beast remain hidden? Or will it finally emerge? This type of suspenseful narrative takes our inchoate fear about what will happen to us in the future and attaches it to a coherent, suspenseful narrative that will probably achieve some resolution. With that resolution, anxiety is discharged--at least for a while. In the short story, the anxiety released is the anxiety over “telling a complex story about yourself, a story that might entail reflections on economic injustice and sexism, or on your own laziness, selfishness or brutality” (Edmunson 48).
However, there are points of healthy and unhealthy coexistence with the beast. For example, personality disorder syndrome (PDS) is a condition very much like the characters in these two stories. First proposed by H. J. Eysenck in 1967, Eysenck categorized these two sides of us, generally in terms of the difference between our public and privates selves, as two independent dimensions known as extroversion-introversion and neuroticism-stability (184). Eysnck’s work was followed by a number of studies, but Schwartz proposed in 1975 that there are combinations of personalities that promote a high level of arousal, the highest being the combination of introversion and neuroticism in the private sphere (Dr. Jekyll) which may be exhibited as extroversion and stability in the public sphere (Mr. Hyde). The public person is well-liked, but is really an introverted time bomb waiting to explode (Marcher). In this case, Schwartz found the person could believe that “no passion had ever touched him” (BIJ 564) when in fact, when he acts, will make the kill with precision, as do both Marcher and Mr. Hyde (Perry 54).
This represents a beast lurking within all of us, getting more and more anxious and waiting to pounce. However, for most, the beast has healthy outlets. While James’ beast finally recognizes itself, it is too late. He cannot stop the beast because he has recognized it too late. And while Stevenson’s beast recognizes himself throughout, he will also kill the offending double to survive.
Works Cited
Arata, Stephen D. “The Sedulous Ape: Atavism,
Professionalism, and Stevenson's ‘Jekyll and
Hyde.’” Vol. 37 No. 2. (1995): Spring,
pp. 233-256.
Calder, J. Introduction Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by R.L.
Stevenson. New York: Penguin: 1979.
Edmunson, Mark. “American Gothic.” Civilization,
Vol. 3 (1996): May 1, pp. 48.
Eysenck, H. J. The Biological Basis of Personality.
Springfield, IL: CCT Pub., 1967.
James, Henry. “The Beast in the Jungle.” In The
Harper American Literature. Vol. 2. McQuade, Donald, et al. New York: Harper, 1987.
Perry, Patrick. “Personality Disorders: Coping with
the borderline.” Saturday Evening Post, Vol. 269. (1997): July 17, pp. 44-53.
Schwartz, S. “Individual Differences In Cognition:
Some Relationships Between Personality And
Memory.” Journal of Research in Personality,
Vol. 9. (1975), pp. 217-225.
Stevenson, Robert L. The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll
and Mr. Hyde. New York: Penguin: 1979.
Thompson, Terry. “James’s ‘The Jolly Corner.’” The
Explicator, Vol. 56. (1998): June 22,
pp. 192-195.