Psychological Doubles

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The society of men is Stevenson’s main focus and is evident in the number of ways in which he presents Hyde in terms of society. If Jekyll and Hyde is characterized in Gothic fiction’s exaggerated tones of late-Victorian anxieties concerning deterioration of social status, and the idea of ‘criminal man,’, it invariably situates those concerns in relation to the practices and discourses of lawyers like Gabriel Utterson, doctors like Henry Jekyll and Hastie Lanyon, or even ‘well-known men about town’ like Richard Enfield. The novel in fact asks us to do more than simply register the all-too-apparent marks of Edward Hyde’s ‘degeneracy.’ It also compels us also to examine how those marks come to signify in the first place.
To make his point, Stevenson creates a monster that is both the model of decay, but is also the most sophisticated and the most accepted by his fellows. Arata points out that the split is ...

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his ‘stigmata’ turn out to be troublingly difficult to specify. In fact, no one can accurately describe him. ”He must be deformed somewhere,” asserts Enfield. ”He gives a strong feeling of deformity, though I couldn’t specify the point. He’s an extraordinary-looking man, and yet I really can name nothing out of the way. No, sir . . . I can’t describe him” (DJMH 35-37). That last, nearly oxymoronic formulation of unexpressed deformity, nicely captures the troubled relation between the ‘text’ of Hyde’s body and the interpretive practices used to decipher it. In this way Stevenson underscores how the act ...

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