Queering the Self: Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde

Abstract

I concluded my last chapter with the statement that “a Barthean acknowledgement of the ‘multidimensionality’ of the text could be considered the sine qua non of queer analysis.” That is true is several ways. Certainly the multidimensionality of the text as it appears on the page (in the case of a literary text) would involve its relationship to both a social context and one of previous literary and nonliterary articulations. That multidimensionality would also include its complicated usage by readers, who may use it as a basis of identification, reaction, or some other response that becomes “textual” in and of itself. Indeed, by opening up dramatically what we mean by “text” the queer insistence on “multidimensionality” takes us immediately to the multifaceted, textually complicated, and contextually involved nature of “selfhood” itself. And that is the textual terrain that the present chapter will examine: how “queer” notions of selfhood might elude definitive representation and yet proliferate nevertheless, and how the tenuous, easily attenuated self is always contextually engaged and yet also possibly resistant.