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Demonic Disturbances of Sexual Identity: The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr/s Hyde

1989; Duke University Press; Volume: 23; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.2307/1345579

1945-8509

Janice Doane, Devon Hodges,

Modernist Literature and Criticism

In Victorian cultural myth, as Nina Auerbach has argued brilliantly in and the Demon, woman is insistently imagined as a source of powerful and threatening metamorphic energies. Auerbach contrasts these heroic female demons with diminished male counterparts such as Robert Louis Stevenson's dwarfish Mr. Hyde: Demonic man does not include divinity in his nature, and is thus a poor stunted counterpart to grandly demonic womanhood.' Yet if Victorian womanhood is indeed connected with transformation itself, then sexuality and identity are unlikely to remain the fixed categories that Auerbach's analysis insists upon-nor can Mr. Hyde be directly opposed to a specifically female demon of the Victorian imagination. Stevenson's story, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, is about a collaboration between the masculine and feminine that subverts the identity of each. Written at a time when gender roles were shifting, the story lacks coherent representations of sexuality despite its seeming emphasis on an emphatically male society. Both Stevenson's marriage to a New Woman and his collaborative writing provide dramatic examples of cultural ambivalence about sexual difference and its representation.