Abstract
There are several points of contact between Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886) and Arthur Machen’s The Great God Pan (1894), which recommend the two novels for a joint analysis, not least their reception history.1 When Machen’s The Great God Pan was published in book form by John Lane’s The Bodley Head in 1894, the novel’s favourable reviews were quick to promote it by means of approving comparisons with Stevenson’s runaway success. ‘Since Mr. Stevenson played with the crucibles of science in “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde” we have not encountered a more successful experiment of the sort’, judged the Pall Mall Gazette. ‘[S]ince “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde”’, the Literary World’s reviewer had read ‘nothing so uncanny’. Similarly the Birmingham Post wagered that Machen’s novel would ‘arouse the sort of interest that was created by “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde”’. The most glowing comparison was made by the Glasgow Herald’s reviewer: ‘Nothing more striking or more skilful than this book has been produced in the way of what one may call Borderland fiction since Mr. Stevenson’s indefatigable Brownies gave the world “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde”’. The Great God Pan was also placed in the tradition of Gothic fiction by Edgar Allan Poe, Sheridan Le Fanu and Edward Bulwer-Lytton, yet the most frequent parallels were drawn with Stevenson’s Strange Case, with at least one reviewer (of the Daily Chronicle) suggesting a direct influence: ‘A nightmarish business it is — suggested, seemingly, by “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde” — and capital reading, we should say, for ghouls and vampires in their leisure moments.’2
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Notes
In 1890, Arthur Machen published a short story, ‘The Experiment’, in the magazine The Whirlwind. This was an early version of The Great God Pan’s first chapter. In January 1891, Machen produced ‘The City of Resurrections’ (later the third chapter of his novel) and realised that ‘there were many other chapters to write’ (Arthur Machen, ‘The Great God Pan: Introduction’ (1916), in Machen, The Great God Pan and The Hill of Dreams (Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 2006), pp. 1–8 (6)). In 1894 he managed to jump on the bandwagon of the Decadent Movement and got The Great God Pan published by John Lane and Elkin Mathews in the infamous Keynote Series,
which was also to include such risqué works as George Egerton’s Keynotes (1893) and Discords (1895),
M. P. Shiel’s Prince Zaleski (1895)
and Grant Allen’s The Woman Who Did (1895). Later in his career, Machen decided to downplay his own significance for the movement, reminiscing about ‘those ‘nineties of which I was not even a small part, but no part at all’ (Machen, ‘The Great God Pan: Introduction’, p. 1). This denial of allegiance may have been prompted by the trial of Oscar Wilde, whom Machen had met twice, early in his career, and whose fall arguably constituted the death blow for Decadence
(see Mark Valentine, Arthur Machen (Bridgend: Seren Books, 1995), pp. 20–1).
Qtd in Arthur Machen, The Three Impostors; or, The Transmutations (London: The Bodley Head, 1895), p. 296. When Machen’s second episodic novel The Three Impostors was published in 1895, Lane included in the edition a full list of the Keynote Series and at least one page of selected journalistic praise for each volume (see Machen, Three Impostors, pp. 291–313). This form of self-promotion was common practice in the fin de siècle’s magazine culture. However, John Lane’s advertisement page does not adequately reflect the variety of journalistic responses to the novel. There were at least as many crushing reviews of The Great God Pan as there were eulogies on its merits. Conservative critics frequently read it as the degenerate outcrop of Machen’s ‘diseased brain’
(Harry Quilter, ‘The Gospel of Intensity’, The Contemporary Review 67 (1895), pp. 761–82 (774)). Susan J. Navarette also notes that ‘many of Machen’s reviewers fixed — however sardonically — upon the story’s distinctly physiological and pathological qualities, treating it as though it were a diseased body in need of quarantining’
(Susan J. Navarette, The Shape of Fear: Horror and the Fin-de-Siècle Culture of Decadence (Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky, 1998), p. 195). At least two parodies of The Great God Pan appeared in the periodical press
(see Wesley D. Sweetser, Arthur Machen (New York: Twayne, 1964), p. 200).
Arthur Machen, Hieroglyphics: A Note upon Ecstasy in Literature (London: Martin Secker (1902) 1923), p. 71. Machen’s Hieroglyphics is written as one part of a dialogue conversation with an anonymous interlocutor, whose presence is only implied through Machen’s style of direct address.
Charles J. Rzepka, Detective Fiction (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2005), p. 10.
It was easily perceptible to Stevenson’s early readers that he had provided them with a complex parable, without ever being specific about Edward Hyde’s transgressions (see Stephen Arata, ‘Stevenson and Fin-de-Siècle Gothic’, in Penny Fielding (ed.), The Edinburgh Companion to Robert Louis Stevenson (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010), pp. 53–69 (65). Thus, an anonymous article in the Saturday Review stated simply: ‘Mr. Stevenson’s idea, his secret (but a very open secret) is that of the double personality in every man’ ([Anon.], ‘An Unsigned Review, Saturday Review’ (1886), in Paul Maixner (ed.), Robert Louis Stevenson: The Critical Heritage (London et al.: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1981), pp. 199–202 (200)). Even homosexual writers who have been enlisted by modern critics in order to corroborate queer readings of Stevenson’s novel remain very unspecific concerning what Hyde represents for them. John Addington Symonds expressed his admiration for Jekyll and Hyde in a letter to Stevenson thus: ‘The fact is that, viewed as an allegory, it touches one too closely. Most of us at some epoch of our lives have been upon the verge of developing a Mr Hyde’
(John Addington Symonds, ‘Letter to Stevenson on the “Moral Callousness” of Jekyll and Hyde’ (1886), in Maixner (ed.), (Critical Heritage, pp. 210–11). In correspondence with Robert Bridges, Gerard Manley Hopkins corrected his friend’s judgement of Hyde: ‘You are certainly wrong about Hyde being overdrawn: my Hyde is worse’
(Gerard Manley Hopkins, ‘From a Letter to Robert Bridges’ (1886), in Maixner (ed.), Critical Heritage, p. 229). Of course these comments are suggestive in the light of their authors’ sexual orientation, yet taken at face value, they do not speak to a sexualised reading of Stevenson’s novel. In an extended exchange of letters, during which he tried to coax Stevenson into revising Jekyll and Hyde for a later edition, Frederick W. H. Myers was one of the few critics who expressed dissatisfaction with Hyde’s unspecified depravity. ‘Have you not sometimes thought of incarnate evil rather too vaguely?’, he asked Stevenson, suggesting that it were better to represent him ‘not [as] a generalized but a specialized fiend’
(Frederick W. H. Myers, ‘Criticism and Proposed Revisions of Jekyll and Hyde, From Letters to Stevenson’ (1886–7), in Maixner (ed.), (Critical Heritage, pp. 212–19 (215)). However, Stevenson had nothing of it, and when Richard Mansfield’s production of Jekyll and Hyde hit the stages of Victorian Britain in 1887, he objected to the introduction of an erotic relationship to his story: ‘He [Hyde] was not good looking however; and not, great gods! a mere voluptuary. There is no harm in a voluptuary; and none, with my hand on my heart and in the sight of God, none — no harm whatever — in what prurient fools call ‘immorality’. The harm was in Jekyll, because he was a hypocrite — not because he was fond of women; he says so himself; but people are so filled full of folly and inverted lust, that they can think of nothing but sexuality. The hypocrite let out the beast Hyde — who is no more sensual than another, but who is the essence of cruelty and malice, and selfishness and cowardice: and these are the diabolic in man — not this poor wish to have a woman, that they make such a cry about’
(Robert Louis Stevenson, ‘From a Letter to John Paul Bocock’ (1887), in Maixner (ed.), Critical Heritage, pp. 230–1 (231)).
Roger Luckhurst, ‘Introduction’, in Robert Louis Stevenson, Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and Other Tales, ed. Luckhurst (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), pp. vii–xxxii (xxviii).
Robert Louis Stevenson, Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and Other Tales, ed. Roger Luckhurst (Oxford: Oxford University Press (1886) 2006), p. 11. All further references are to this edition and will be given parenthetically in the text. Henry Jekyll is, among other things, Doctor of Medicine (MD, Medicinae Doctor), Doctor of Civil Law (DCL), Doctor of Laws (LL.D., Legum Doctor) and Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS).
On Gothic fiction’s consistent concern with the study of physiognomy, see John Graham, ‘Character Description and Meaning in the Romantic Novel’, Studies in Romanticism 5.4 (1966), pp. 208–18
and Robert Mighall, A Geography of Victorian Gothic Fiction: Mapping History’s Nightmares (Oxford: Oxford University Press (1999) 2003), pp. 173–4.
Gordon Hirsch gauges the influence of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818/1832) on Stevenson’s Strange Case and notes a similarity in the vagueness of the respective monsters’ depiction: ‘The double in each book is repulsive, revolting; but in each book it is the impression that counts rather than any particularized physical description’ (Gordon Hirsch, ‘Frankenstein, Detective Fiction, and Jekyll and Hyde’, in Gordon Hirsch and William Veeder (eds), Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde After One Hundred Years (Chicago, IL, and London: University of Chicago Press, 1988), pp. 223–46 (225)).
Edward Hyde’s simian qualities have been frequently noted by critics (see Ed Block, Jr., ‘James Sully, Evolutionist Psychology and Late Victorian Gothic Fiction’, Victorian Studies 25 (1982), pp. 443–67 (456);
R. B. Kershner, ‘Degeneration: The Explanatory Nightmare’, The Georgia Review 40 (1986), pp. 416–44 (439); Mighall, Geography of Victorian Gothic Fiction, pp. 147–8
and Virginia Richter, Literature after Darwin: Human Beasts in Western Fiction, 1859–1939 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), p. 95).
Kelly Hurley, The Gothic Body: Sexuality, Materialism, and Degeneration at the Fin de Siècle (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (1996) 2004), p. 20.
Stephen Arata notes that ‘gentleman’ is the noun most frequently used by the story’s other characters to describe Hyde (see Stephen Arata, Fictions of Loss in the Victorian Fin de Siècle (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 38). The proximity between cultured gentleman and wild animal is also evident in ‘The Carew Murder Case’. The fact that Hyde bashes Sir Danvers with the latter’s own walking cane highlights the uncomfortable proximity between Man and beast, as Cyndy Hendershot observes: ‘The fact that a gentleman’s civilized accessory so easily transforms into a caveman’s club indicates the uneasy closeness between Carew and Hyde’s violent behaviour’
(Cyndy Hendershot, The Animal Within: Masculinity and the Gothic (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press (1998) 2001, p. 111).
My attention was first drawn to Charles Darwin’s notebooks by Daniel Pick’s Faces of Degeneration (see Daniel Pick, Faces of Degeneration: A European Disorder, c.1848–c.1918 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (1989) 1993, (193, n. 52)). They are freely available in the World Wide Web through The Complete Work of Charles Darwin Online (http://darwin-online.org.uk/).
The abundant use of metaphors that liken human beings to their simian ancestors is not unique to Stevenson’s novel, and many other fin-de-siècle fictions engage in a similar way with degeneration. Stevenson’s own tale ‘Olalla’ (1885) is a case in point. While observing Olalla’s simpleton brother, the narrator of Stevenson’s short story notices ‘two characteristics that [he] disliked’: Felipe is ‘of a dusky hue, and inclined to hairyness [sic]’ (Robert Louis Stevenson, ‘Olalla’, in Barry Menikoff, The Complete Stories of Robert Louis Stevenson: Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and Nineteen Other Tales (New York: Modern Library, 2002), pp. 420–57 (423)). And before the heroine’s mother — who is the last representative of an aristocratic family, ‘degenerate both in parts and fortune’ (Stevenson, ‘Olalla’, p. 421) — attacks the convalescent soldier ‘with bestial cries’ (Stevenson, ‘Olalla’, p. 447), he was inclined to enjoy ‘her dull, almost animal neighbourhood’ (Stevenson, ‘Olalla’, p. 432). In this tale, Stevenson makes his concern with degeneration exceedingly obvious: ‘The family blood had been impoverished, perhaps by long inbreeding, which I knew to be a common error among the proud and the exclusive’ (Stevenson, ‘Olalla’, p. 432).
See Roger Luckhurst, The Invention of Telepathy, 1870–1901 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), p. 191.
See Robert Mighall, ‘Diagnosing Jekyll: The Scientific Context to Dr Jekyll’s Experiment and Mr Hyde’s Embodiment’, in Robert Louis Stevenson, The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and Other Tales of Terror, ed. Robert Mighall (London: Penguin, 2002), pp. 145–61 (156).
Richard von Krafft-Ebing, Psychopathia Sexualis: With Especial Reference to the Antipathic Sexual Instinct: A Medico-Forensic Study, trans. Franklin S. Klaf (New York: Arcade Publishing (1886) 1998), p. 140.
This escalation of violence can be considered the logical and inevitable outcome of Jekyll’s double life, as David Punter remarks: ‘If it is indeed repression which has produced the Hyde personality, further denial of Hyde’s claims can only result in an ascending scale of violence’ (David Punter, The Literature of Terror: A History of Gothic Fictions from 1765 to the Present Time, vol. 2: The Modern Gothic (London and New York: Longman (1989) 1996), p. 5).
Cesare Lombroso, ‘Introduction’, in Gina Lombroso-Ferrero, Criminal Man: According to the Classification of Cesare Lombroso, intro. Leonard D. Savitz (Montclair, NJ: Patterson Smith (1911) 1972), pp. xi–xx (xv).
See Stephen Jay Gould, The Mismeasure of Man (New York: Norton, 1981), p. 114.
Havelock Ellis, The Criminal (London: Walter Scott, 1901), p. 258.
Another feature of Hyde that points at his status as a degenerate being is his recurrent feminisation (see Hendershot, Animal Within, p. 111). As William Veeder notes: ‘Emasculation […] characterizes Hyde […]. Despite all his “masculine” traits of preternatural strength and animal agility, Hyde is prey to what the late nineteenth century associated particularly with women’ (William Veeder, ‘Children of the Night: Stevenson and Patriarchy’, in Gordon Hirsch and William Veeder (eds), Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde After One Hundred Years (Chicago, IL, and London: University of Chicago Press, 1988), pp. 107–60 (149)). Doctor Lanyon observes how Hyde ‘was wrestling against the approaches of the hysteria’ (49), and Poole remarks to Utterson that he heard Hyde ‘[w]eeping like a woman’ (40) in Jekyll’s laboratory. Hysteria was considered a typically degenerative disease in the nineteenth century and ‘[w]hile it was recognized in men, hysteria carried the stigma of being a humiliatingly female affliction’
(Elaine Showalter, Sexual Anarchy: Gender and Culture at the Fin de Siècle (London: Virago (1991) 1992), pp. 105–6). Elaine Showalter’s study of madness and hysteria is tellingly titled The Female Malady
(see Elaine Showalter, The Female Malady: Women, Madness, and English Culture, 1830–1980 (London: Virago (1985) 1987).
Stephen Heath, ‘Psychopathia Sexualis: Stevenson’s Strange Case’ (1986), in Lyn Pykett (ed.), Reading Fin-de-Siècle Fictions (London: Longman, 1996), pp. 64–79 (75).
A fairly recent example of this critical trend is the intriguing essay ‘Something to Hyde: The “Strange Preference” of Henry Jekyll’, in which Grace Moore claims that ‘[t]he aura of unpleasantness that is loosely associated with Hyde’s countenance marks him out as an onanist’ (Grace Moore, ‘Something to Hyde: The “Strange Preference” of Henry Jekyll’, in Andrew Maunder and Grace Moore (eds), Victorian Crime, Madness and Sensation (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004), pp. 147–61 (154)). A similar idea can be found in Robert Mighall’s earlier writings on Jekyll and Hyde: ‘The suggestion that from a very early age Jekyll had been addicted or a slave to disgraceful pleasures is almost an explicit confession to masturbation, which it would appear sowed the seeds of a later career in “criminal” vice’ (Mighall, ‘Diagnosing Jekyll’, p. 155; more substantially see Mighall, Geography of Victorian Gothic Fiction, pp. 192–5). However, as Mighall is well aware, it is highly problematic to pinpoint Stevenson’s tale to one particular and exclusive meaning. His Strange Case is an immensely suggestive piece of writing that, more often than not, hints at its characters’ hidden actions and motivations without explicitly naming them. In ‘Henry Jekyll’s Full Statement of the Case’, Hyde’s monstrosity is most consistently figured in terms of narcissism and sadism
(see Katherine Bailey Linehan, ‘“Closer Than a Wife”: The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll’s Significant Other’, in William B. Jones, Jr., (ed.), Robert Louis Stevenson Reconsidered: New Critical Perspectives (Jefferson, NC, and London: McFarland, 2003), pp. 85–100 (88)), albeit without any sexual overtones. Of course, sadism is one of Krafft-Ebing’s sexual perversions, yet his Psychopathia Sexualis defines the condition primarily through recourse to its characteristic outbursts of brute violence, rather than any erotic elements. As Gordon Hirsch remarks: ‘Whatever other erotic components Hyde’s acts may have, sadism seems to be the transcendent sin, appropriating to itself all other forms of desire’ (Hirsch, ‘Frankenstein, Detective Fiction, and Jekyll and Hyde’, p. 227). Peter K. Garrett similarly warns of the dangers of reading Stevenson’s Strange Case in strictly sexual terms, as such interpretations tend to disregard the novel’s repeated emphasis on Hyde’s bestial cruelty
(see Peter K. Garrett, Gothic Reflections: Narrative Force in Nineteenth-Century Fiction (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003), p. 118).
Judith Halberstam, Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters (Durham: Duke University Press, 1995), p. 71.
Michael Davis, ‘Incongruous Compounds: Re-reading Jekyll and Hyde and Late-Victorian Psychology’, Journal of Victorian Culture 11.2 (2006), pp. 207–25 (211).
Elaine Showalter interprets these reactions as ‘suggestive of the almost hysterical homophobia of the late nineteenth century’ (Showalter, Sexual Anarchy, p. 112). It is of course conceivable that Stevenson’s Strange Case would have resonated strongly with Oscar Wilde and other members of the emerging homosexual subculture at the fin de siècle, as Nils Clausson wagers (see Nils Clausson, ‘Culture and Corruption: Paterian Self-development Versus Gothic Degeneration in Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray’, Papers on Language and Literature 39 (2003), pp. 339–64 (349)). Indeed, Wilde and other prominent homosexuals such as John Addington Symonds commented favourably on Stevenson’s success, yet without ever giving so much as the slightest hint to their recognition of homosexual undertones in the novel (see Luckhurst, ‘Introduction’, p. xxvii). Intriguingly, but coincidentally, the novel was published in January 1886, the same month in which the Criminal Law Amendment Act went into effect (see Clausson, ‘Culture and Corruption’, p. 351; Showalter, Sexual Anarchy, p. 106). However, queer readings that treat Stevenson’s novel as ‘a fable of fin-de-siècle homosexual panic’ (Showalter, Sexual Anarchy, p. 107) require a certain leap of faith in the affective impact of late-Victorian gender legislation. In his ‘Introduction’ to the Oxford World’s Classics edition of Jekyll and Hyde, Roger Luckhurst draws attention to the fact that there is no real evidence for a sudden upsurge in ‘homosexual panic’ after the implementation of the Criminal Law Amendment Act (see Luckhurst, ‘Introduction’, p. xxviii). These considerations in mind, it is problematic to speculate that Jekyll and Hyde’s first readers ‘might have thought initially that it was a novel[,] not about two men in one body, but about two bodies in one bed’
(Wayne Koestenbaum, ‘The Shadow on the Bed: Dr. Jekyll, Mr. Hyde, and the Labouchère Amendment’, Critical Matrix 4.1 (1988), pp. 31–55 (53)), as Wayne Koestenbaum does in an influential queer article.
See Sigmund Freud, ‘The Uncanny’, in Freud, The Uncanny, ed. Hugh Haughton, trans. David McLintock (London and New York: Penguin (1919) 2003), pp. 123–62 (124).
Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex, intro. Adrian Desmond and James Moore (London: Penguin (1871) 2004) p. 689.
Chris Baldick, In Frankenstein’s Shadow: Myth, Monstrosity, and Nineteenth-Century Writing (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press and Clarendon Press, 1987), p. 145.
Arthur Machen, The Great God Pan and The Hill of Dreams (Mineola, NY: Dover Publications (1894; 1907) 2006), p. 24. All further references are to this edition and are given parenthetically in the text.
Susan J. Navarette shows how, in this scene, Machen fictionalises contemporary findings in evolutionary biology, most notably those of Thomas Henry Huxley (see Navarette, Shape of Fear, pp. 178–201). In his essay ‘On the Physical Basis of Life’, Huxley attempted to convince his readers that ‘there is some one kind of matter which is common to all living beings, and that their endless diversities are bound together by a physical, as well as an ideal, unity’ (Thomas Henry Huxley, ‘On the Physical Basis of Life’ (1869), in Laura Otis (ed.), Literature and Science in the Nineteenth Century: An Anthology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), pp. 273–6 (273)).
As Paul Fox observes, ‘it is human nature and the nature of man’s existence that tends to be investigated in [Machen’s] mysteries’ (Paul Fox, ‘Eureka in Yellow: The Art of Detection in Arthur Machen’s Keynote Mysteries’, Clues 25.1 (2006), pp. 58–69 (59)), regardless of how deeply his novels seem to be concerned with the mythical past.
Fred Botting, Gothic (London: Routledge, 1996), p. 143.
S. T. Joshi, The Weird Tale: Arthur Machen, Lord Dunsany, Algernon Blackwood, M. R. James, Ambrose Bierce, H. P. Lovecraft (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1990), p. 21.
Havelock Ellis, Studies in the Psychology of Sex, vol. 1 (New York: Random House, 1936) p. 151. The standard text of Ellis’s Studies in the Psychology of Sex is the two-volume edition published by Random House in 1936. It contains all seven original volumes of Ellis’s studies. The relevant passages quoted here (are from Ellis’s Analysis of the Sexual Impulse; Love and Pain; The Sexual Impulse in Women, which originally constituted Volume 2 of Studies in the Psychology of Sex and was first published in 1903.
Two Scandinavian psychologists describe the sensation experienced by practitioners of asphyxiation in the following manner: ‘The effect of asphyxia is euphoric, like pleasant dizziness and stimulation, which enhances the sexual pleasure associated with masturbation and orgasm’ (Sune M. Innala and Kurt E. Ernulf, ‘Asphyxiophilia in Scandinavia’, Archives of Sexual Behaviour 18.3 (1989), pp. 181–9 (181–2)). Interestingly, when Lord Argentine returns from Mrs Beaumont’s dinner invitation, the valet notices a minuscule change in his master: ‘[H]e thought [Argentine] appeared a little excited when he came home, but he confessed that the alteration in his manner was very slight, hardly noticeable, indeed’ (46).
See Karin Temmerman and Julien Quackelbeen, ‘Auto-Erotic Asphyxia from Phenomenology to Psychoanalysis’, The letter: Lacanian Perspectives on Psychoanalysis 8 (1996), pp. 42–60 (53). Unfortunately, it proved impossible to trace any primary sources to verify the existence of such a club. All sources that refer to this institution reference other secondary material. The earliest mention seems to have been made by Magnus Hirschfeld, the renowned German sexologist of the first half of the twentieth century.
The German sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld draws attention to the problems involved in the diagnosis of auto-strangulation: ‘Furthermore, experience shows that the fetishism of pressure on the skin, which finds expression in the indentation of the body’s surface, frequently appears in a narcissistic-autistic manner. It is not immaterial to know this, as apparent murders and suicides have repeatedly been clarified as unhappy accidents which occurred in the process of strange acts of self-bondage’ (Translation by S. K.). The German original reads: ‘Die Erfahrung zeigt weiter, daß der Hautdruckfetishismus [sic], der in dem Einpressen der Körperoberfläche seinen Ausdruck findet, oft auch narzistisch-autistisch auftritt. Dies zu wissen ist nicht unwesentlich, weil sich scheinbare Morde und Selbstmorde wiederholt als unglückliche Zufälle aufklärten, die sich bei Vornahme seltsamer Selbsteinschnürungen ereignet hatten’ (Magnus Hirschfeld, Geschlechtskunde, vol. 2: Folgen und Forderungen (Stuttgart: Julius Püttmann, 1928), p. 129.)
See Park Elliott Dietz, ‘Recurrent Discovery of Autoerotic Asphyxia’, in Robert R. Hazelwood et al. (eds), Autoerotic Fatalities (Lexington, MA, and Toronto, ON: D. C. Heath, 1983), pp. 13–44 (15–19). Kočwara’s case is described in an anonymous eighteenth-century publication entitled Modern Propensities, or an Essay on the Art of Strangling. The term ‘Kočwaraism’ has been suggested as an alternative to ‘autoerotic asphyxiation’. Large excerpts from the pamphlet Modern Propensities are reprinted in Dietz, ‘Autoerotic Asphyxia’, pp. 13–44.
The most extensive description of erotic asphyxiation in literature occurs in the works of the Marquis de Sade, whose books Havelock Ellis labelled ‘a sort of encyclopedia of sexual perversions, an eighteenth century Psychopathia Sexualis’ (Ellis, Studies in the Psychology of Sex, p. 107). In de Sade’s novel Justine (1791), which was written at almost exactly the same time as Casanova’s memoirs, the proto-sadist Roland introduces his prisoner Thérèse to the erotic effects of strangulation: ‘This torture is sweeter than you may imagine’, says Roland; ‘you will only approach death by unspeakably pleasurable sensations; the pressure this noose will bring to bear upon your nervous system will set fire to the organs of voluptuousness; the effect is certain’ (Marquis de Sade, Justine, Philosophy in the Bedroom and Other Writings (New York: Grove Press, 1990), p. 675, emphasis added). Roland continues: ‘[W]ere all the people who were condemned to this torture to know in what an intoxication of joy it makes one die, less terrified by this retribution for their crimes, they would commit them more often and with much greater self-assurance’ (Sade, Justine, p. 675). Machen’s research for his translation of Casanova’s memoirs must have led him to read de Sade’s oeuvre, even though there is no direct biographical evidence for this assumption.
Robert Herrick, The Poetical Works of Robert Herrick, ed. L. C. Martin (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1963), pp. 278–9.
Tabitha Sparks, The Doctor in the Victorian Novel: Family Practices (Farnham and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2009), p. 123.
All of the novels treated in the two subsequent chapters locate the horror of degeneration and deviance in the proximity or even the heart of London’s West End. Franco Moretti has created a map of London that shows the location of criminal activity in Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories. Moretti notes a remarkable concentration of crime in Doyle’s detective fiction similar to that of our novels: ‘A small cluster of crimes in the City, a few more here and there; but the epicentre is clearly in the West End. The working class areas lying south of the Thames, so prominent in [his] first two novels [A Study in Scarlet (1887) and The Sign of Four (1890)] […] have practically disappeared; and as for the East End, Holmes goes there precisely once in fifty-six stories’ (Franco Moretti, Atlas of the European Novel, 1800–1900 (London and New York: Verso, 1998), p. 134). The East End was naturally perceived as ‘outcast’ territory so that the location of crime and deviance in the Western part of the metropolis seemed to hold the promise of more terrifying effects for the writers of Gothic and detective fiction.
Mary C. King, ‘Digging for Darwin: Bitter Wisdom in The Picture of Dorian Gray and “The Critic as Artist”’, Irish Studies Review 12 (2004), pp. 315–27 (322).
On the link between the Baudlairean figure of the flâneur and the amateur detective in The Great God Pan, see Sage Leslie-McCarthy, ‘Chance Encounters: The Detective as “Expert” in Arthur Machen’s The Great God Pan’, Australasian Journal of Victorian Studies 13.1 (2009), pp. 35–45 (37–9).
In ‘A Chapter on Dreams’ (1888), Stevenson explained his motivations for writing Jekyll and Hyde thus: ‘I had long been trying to write a story on this subject, to find a body, a vehicle, for that strong sense of man’s double being which must at times come in upon and overwhelm the mind of every thinking creature’ (Robert Louis Stevenson, ‘A Chapter on Dreams’ (1888), in Stevenson, Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and Other Tales, ed. Roger Luckhurst (Oxford: Oxford University Press (1886) 2006), pp. 151–61 (159–60).
See Glen Montag, ‘Architectural Renderings of the Jekyll/Hyde House’, in Robert Louis Stevenson, The Essential Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde, ed. Leonard Wolf (New York: ibooks, 2005) pp. 249–51.
See Jürgen Link, Versuch über den Normalismus: Wie Normalität produziert wird (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht (1997) 2006), p. 55.
William Greenslade, Degeneration, Culture, and the Novel, 1880–1940 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. 84. Enfield is the only ‘non-professional’ gentleman in the story, and Sir Danvers Carew belongs to the upper class and holds a seat in the House of Lords.
Even though Paul Goetsch overstates when he claims that ‘[a]ll the bachelor gentlemen in the story lead double lives, and seek pleasure in odd places and at odd times’ (Paul Goetsch, ‘The Savage Within: Evolutionary Theory, Anthropology and the Unconscious in Fin-de-siècle Literature’, in Anne-Julia Zwierlein (ed.), Unmapped Countries: Biological Visions in Nineteenth Century Literature and Culture (London: Anthem Press, 2005), pp. 95–106 (101)), it is true that almost all characters in Stevenson’s novel struggle to sustain a façade of respectability. Stephen Arata puts it more cautiously: ‘The story is filled with men for whom respectability acts as a lid screwed down tight over sometimes illicit, sometimes just vaguely shameful, desires’ (Arata, ‘Stevenson and Fin-de-Siècle Gothic’, p. 67).
Ever since its publication, critics have noted the conspicuous absence of women in Stevenson’s story. Thus, Henry James remarked in 1888: ‘There is something almost impertinent in the way […] in which Mr. Stevenson achieves his best effects without the aid of the ladies, and “Dr. Jekyll” is a capital example of his heartless independence’ (Henry James, ‘From “Robert Louis Stevenson”, Century Magazine’ (1888), in Maixner (ed.), Critical Heritage (pp. 290–311 (308)). In 1895, the critic Alice Brown perplexedly stated that ‘Mr. Stevenson […] is a boy who has no mind to play with girls’ (Brown qtd in Showalter, Sexual Anarchy, p. 108). This dearth of female protagonists has not failed to intrigue critics up to the present day (see Baldick, In Frankenstein’s Shadow, p. 144; Heath, ‘Psychopathia Sexualis’, pp. 66–7; Hurley, Gothic Body, p. 199; Showalter, Sexual Anarchy, p. 107; Veeder, ‘Children of the Night’, p. 107). All of the main characters in Jekyll and Hyde are bachelors who seem to show no interest whatsoever in the opposite sex. Of course, this lack of female characters has fuelled much of the queer criticism on Jekyll and Hyde. Bearing in mind that marital monogamy was part of the gentlemanly ideal of the nineteenth century, one could argue that Stevenson’s depiction of an all-male environment suggests yet another form of deviance.
Richard Dury, ‘Strange Language of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde’, Journal of Stevenson Studies 2 (2005), pp. 33–50 (44).
Christine Persak, ‘Spencer’s Doctrine and Mr. Hyde: Moral Evolution in Stevenson’s Strange Case’, The Victorian Newsletter 86 (1994), pp. 13–18 (15). Persak reads Hyde’s character through
Herbert Spencer’s First Principles (1862) and Principles of Psychology (2 vols.: 1870; 1880). In her opinion, Jekyll’s double shows ‘those primitive aggressive tendencies which had been necessary for selfpreservation in the pre-social state’ (Persak, ‘Spencer’s Doctrine and Mr. Hyde’, p. 14).
Andrew Smith, Victorian Demons: Medicine, Masculinity and the Gothic at the Fin de Siècle (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004), pp. 6–7.
Rudyard Kipling, The Mark of the Beast and Other Horror Tales, ed. S. T. Joshi (Mineola, NY: Dover Publications (1890) 2000), p. 71.
Qtd in Richard Ellmann, Oscar Wilde (London: Penguin, 1988), p. 386, n.
Ellmann, Oscar Wilde, p. 386. Matt Cook makes a similar observation: ‘Statutes against homosexual activity had legislated these other criminals [blackmailers] into existence’ (Matt Cook, London and the Culture of Homosexuality, 1885–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), p. 65).
Carson qtd in Merlin Holland, Irish Peacock & Scarlet Marquess: The Real Trial of Oscar Wilde (London and New York: Fourth Estate, 2004), p. 120.
Qtd in Matt Cook, London and the Culture of Homosexuality, 1885–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), p. 65.
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Karschay, S. (2015). Detecting the Degenerate: Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and Arthur Machen’s The Great God Pan . In: Degeneration, Normativity and the Gothic at the Fin de Siècle. Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137450333_3
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