CHARACTER CRISIS: HEGEMONIC NEGOTIATIONS IN ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON'SSTRANGE CASE OF DR. JEKYLL AND MR. HYDE

Abstract

GOTHIC FICTIONS IN THE LATE VICTORIAN era presented the conditions for a shift in the conception of how character works. During this period, the creation of prominent literary personae such as Jekyll and Hyde, Sherlock Holmes, and Dorian Gray came to rely less on the personality of their fictional identities and more on their ability to stand in for and elicit reactions to complex social, political, and economic debates. By this I do not mean that these characters are "flat" in the sense E. M. Forster proposes when he states in Aspects of the Novel (1927) that such characters are, in their purest form, "constructed round a single idea or quality" (103-04). What I mean is rather that the specific manner in which these characters are composed has been directed in such a way so as to deny the evolution of emotional, intellectual, and moral traits in favor of a narrative approach that employs fictional identity as a location for the representation of important social questions. In the final decades of the nineteenth century, character, I suggest, provides a particularly important site for writers to construct difficult arguments. Along the same lines, the reevaluation of character in the late Victorian era also entailed a reassessment of the concept as a collection of features marking members of certain social and economic classes. To take a case in point, the late nineteenth-century ideal of the Victorian gentleman met its decline as a result of political and social unrest when the growing socialist movement that began in the 1870s tarnished the integrity of economic powers. Skepticism-and, in the case of the Black Monday riots that took place in Hyde Park on February 8 th , 1886, insubordination-towards the economic hierarchy forced England's class system to maintain itself through the incorporation of dissent as it reinforced its ranks to weather the social upheaval that spanned the 1880s. Images of bourgeois corruption were a common staple of late Victorian public discourse, assuming prominence not merely in the pamphlets and speeches commonly found in radical activity, but also in popular novels such as Anthony Trollope's The Way We Live Now (1875) and the daily writing of W. T. Stead for the Pall Mall Gazette.