In his widely cited essay, “The Anatomy of Dr. Jekyll and Mr.
Hyde,” Irving Saposnik notes that, in both audience reception and critical
scholarship of Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr.Hyde,
for “reader and non-reader alike, the crucial item of thematic significance has
been Edward Hyde [,] unquestionably the dominant character.”[1] Striding
through the novel, through London, through Victorian sensibilities and into our
consciousness and our interpretations, the “deformed”[2] Hyde
is the utterly attractive and unknowable “species of the nonspecies”[3] onto
which we place our own “stamping efficacy.”[4] Hyde’s
movement and movability are key to understanding why he remains such an object
of study and fascination. I argue that he is the Derridean noncenter who plays
within and creates play within all the structures that attempt to colonize or
contain him.
Looking at movability in Dr. Jekyll and Mr Hyde, we
see that Hyde is the creature of movement, the creature of play within the
novel--standing in sharp contrast to the more static and rigid others who
inhabit his world. Hyde, on various “adventures”[5] and
“excursions”[6] traverses
the murky London streets: from the remote corner of the city where Enfield
first encounters him, to his house in Soho, or to the areas by the river where
he encounters Sir Danvers Carew. Even when confined to the laboratory at the
end of the novel, Poole tells us that “it will walk all day,sir . . . ay, and
the better part of the night.”[7]
Hyde traverses the class system of Victorian England as
well—interacting with the “unscrupulous”[8] denizens
of Soho but also engaging with more well-to-do inhabitants of the upper middle
classes such as Utterson, Lanyon, and the master of the maid who witnesses him
murder Sir Danvers. Scaling inward, Hyde creeps into the dreams of Utterson,
and corrupts Jekyll’s understanding of his own identity. Even when hiding
inside Jekyll, Hyde is restless, battering away at Jekyll’s consciousness,
“growl[ing] for license”[9] and
“struggling after freedom.”[10] Looking
at the larger structure of the novel itself, Hyde moves, more than any other
character, in and through the story because notably, whether narrated in third
or first-person, Hyde is the only major character whose name
appears in every section/chapter. We can never forget or escape from him.
Hyde’s movement characterizes his desire to play with and within
the world he inhabits. Hyde seeks for meaning not in the “transcendental
signified” of Jekyll (after all, he has “more than a son’s indifference”[11] towards
him) but through his constant exploration and interaction with a multiplicity
of other signifiers. But Hyde, as much as he interacts, is also unknowable and
inscrutable. He passes away “like a stain of breath upon a mirror”[12] and
for as much as he in present in the narration of the novel, he is never the
narrator. Hyde can never be pinned down to a certain code of meaning.
Expanding our gaze into critical scholarship of the novel, we see that Hyde
engenders critical interpretations at the same moment that he resists
them. For every attempt to label him as evil, hypersexual, animal-like,
non-human, etc, opposite or different, and I would say infinite,
interpretations can be argued. Hyde participates then, but does not belong, to
any of the structures that scholars or readers see in or attach to Dr.
Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.
“Younger, lighter, happier” and filled with a “conscious
recklessness,” for “bonds of obligation”[13] Hyde
remains the movable center, or noncenter, of the world he
inhabits, the novel he lives in, and the critical analyses applied to him.
We see in him and through him the “joyous affirmation of the play in the
world”[14] He
is the “other, which is no longer turned toward the origin,” the other who
“affirms play and tries to pass beyond man and humanism.”[15]
What if, as humanists, we followed Hyde’s example and attacked
literature with the same relish, zeal, and disregard for the consequences? We
might end up metaphorically imprisoned for our faults as renegades within the academy, but oh,
how brightly would we burn.
Words: 675
[1] Saposnik, 726
Citation: Saposnik, Irving S. "The Anatomy of Dr. Jekyll
and Mr. Hyde." Studies in English Literature 1500-1900 4th
ser. 11 (1971): 715-31. JSTOR. Web
[2] Stevenson, 35
Citation: Stevenson, Robert
Louis. The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Ed. Martin A.
Danahay. Peterborough, Ont.: Broadview, 2005. Print.
[3] Derrida, 293
Citation: Derrida, Jacques. "Structure, Sign and Play in the
Discourse of Human Sciences." Writing and Difference.
Chicago: University of Chicago, 1978. 278-92. Print.
[4] Stevenson, 81
[5] Stevenson, 84
[6] Stevenson, 83
[7] Stevenson, 66
[8] Stevenson, 82
[9] Stevenson, 88
[10] Stevenson, 86
[11] Stevenson, 86
[12] Stevenson, 83
[13] Stevenson, 80
[14] Derrida, 292
3 comments:
I love that this reading is super grounded in Stevenson’s text. I know that you were playing with a lot of ideas for Derridian readings of Hyde, and the number of moments with Deconstructionist undertones that you located in the novel suggests that the two texts have a lot to say to each other.
I’m uncertain, though, about the idea that Hyde is a noncenter in the novel (or any sign system working in or through it). Despite Hyde’s physical and social mobility, I would suggest (based on the same textual moments quoted here) that he still centers both the structure of the novel and, I would guess, most interpretations of it; put another way, it seems impossible to interpret Jekyll and Hyde without making reference to Hyde. Might the fact that Hyde appears in every section of the novel without narrating any of them actually give him a lot in common with a center, “paradoxically within the structure and outside of it” (Derrida 279)?
I feel like your claim that “Hyde remains the movable center” of the novel provides a more accurate description of his relationship to the novel’s structure, and also raises some interesting implications for Derrida’s argument: what if, instead of thinking of a center that is immovable and outside of the system that it structures, we considered the possibility of a center that moves around within its system by constantly changing its relationships to the system’s various parts?
Hi Megan,
Thank you for your thoughtful comment! I'm glad for the chance to elaborate further on what I was thinking.
I stated that "Hyde remains the movable center, or noncenter" of various structures both inside and outside the novel. In my mind, but perhaps it wasn't made clear, a movable center is the same thing as a noncenter, because if the center is moving, it's never actually in the center of the structure. Derrida says that after the event called the "rupture" (which ironically sounds amazingly like the Christian event known as the "rapture"), "the center had no natural site, that it was not a fixed locus but a function" (280). Thus the center doesn't disappear, it just gains movement, gains function, and hence, it's no longer the center but a "movable center, or noncenter" as I said.
How the center gains movement is its inability to be tied down to any specific meaning . And there is a large amount of play in my use of the word "movement”: It's a sort of slipperiness, an inability to be caught in one place, to be defined by one notion, or to be fitted into one category—the inability to inexorably tie the center to an ultimate meaning (or “transcendental signified.”) That’s why Hyde’s movement and movability is so important. His movability (slipperiness) in critical interpretation is the play which he created by “playing” so keenly in the world inside his novel. If he wasn’t so full of movement (again, my use of the word movement is multi-definitional) in the novel, it would be far easier to fit him into one particular mode of meaning.
And so when you say, “it seems impossible to interpret Jekyll and Hyde without making reference to Hyde,” that’s exactly the point I’m trying to make. Hyde seems to be the main signifier used by critics to try to find meaning in the novel, but the number of interpretations involving Hyde are infinite, the number of signifieds he can be tied to are endless – therefore his “play” is infinite, as the play of a Derridean noncenter is and must be.
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