Who's the Real You? (The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Part 1)

In Part 1 of our discussion on Robert Louis Stevenson's The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, we welcome editor Caroline Levine to discuss Stevenson's biography; some of the novella's philosophical, scientific, and psychological themes; and how it fits in with other trends in late-nineteenth-century British literature.

Caroline Levine is David and Kathleen Ryan Professor of the Humanities and Professor of English at Cornell University. She has written three books: The Serious Pleasures of Suspense: Victorian Realism and Narrative Doubt (2003), Provoking Democracy: Why We Need the Arts (2007), and Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network (2015). She is the nineteenth-century editor for the Norton Anthology of World Literature.

To learn more or purchase a copy of the Norton Library edition of The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and Other Writings, go to https://seagull.wwnorton.com/JekyllAndHydeNL. 

Learn more about the Norton Library series at https://wwnorton.com/norton-library.

Have questions or suggestions for the podcast? Email us at nortonlibrary@wwnorton.com or find us on Twitter @TNL_WWN.

Episode transcript at https://seagull.wwnorton.com/jekyllandhyde/part1/transcript.

Transcript

[Music] 

[Mark:] You are listening to the Norton Library Podcast, where we explore classic works of literature and philosophy with the leading scholars of the Norton Library, a new series from W.W. Norton that introduces influential texts to a new generation of readers. I'm your host Mark Cirino with Michael Von Canon producing. Today, we present the first of our two episodes devoted to Robert Louis Stevenson's The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Dr. Hyde and other Writings, as we interview its editor Caroline Levine. In part one, we discuss Stevenson's life and career, his friendships, and the society he reacted against. We explore how this novella came to be, how the narrative is structured, and what a Jekyll and Hyde narrative is in the first place. Caroline Levine is David and Kathleen Ryan Professor of the Humanities at Cornell University. She has written three books: The Serious Pleasures of Suspense: Victorian Realism and Narrative, Provoking Democracy: Why We Need the Arts, and Forms: Whole Rhythm Hierarchy Network. She is the 19th century editor for the Norton Anthology of World Literature. Caroline Levine, welcome to the Norton Library Podcast! 

[Caroline:] So great to be here! 

[Mark:] Well, we are so pleased to have you! Why don't we start by talking about Robert Louis Stevenson. Who was he, and what do we need to know about him as we approach Dr. Jekyll and Dr. Hyde? 

[Caroline:] Sure, he has a double life, so it's pretty appropriate to Dr. Jekyll and Dr. Hyde. He grows up in this incredibly stern, pious Presbyterian household in Scotland, and his whole family are these super respectable, kind of repressed and repressive people. As a young man, Stephenson starts really rebelling, and he goes and hangs out in brothels and bars and city neighborhoods, and he's a rebel, so he's not like Dr. Jekyll and Dr. Hyde in the sense that he puts on a respectable appearance. But he's somebody brought up in this really strict religious household, who then hangs out with artists and refuses to abide by respectable rules. As soon as he can, basically, he leaves Edinburgh, where he's grown up. He travels all over the place; he basically never settles down. He's in France, he's in Engl, and he's in the United States, and he ends up—at the very end of his life—settling in Samoa, a small Pacific Island, and really becoming beloved there and being very angry about British colonialism around the world but particularly in Samoa. He’s sick a lot of his life, and he ends up writing Dr. Jekyll and Dr. Hyde while he's in bed—poor guy. But while he wasn’t traveling—and he was kind of famous as a travel writer first—he was sick in bed writing a kind of incredible book about the world. 

[Mark:] Well, he was famous as a travel writer but also as a children’s writer. Isn't that how some of us know Robert Louis Stevenson? 

[Caroline:] Yeah, so Treasure Island, and Kidnapped are just classics of children’s literature. I have to say that I was a little bit of a rebel myself when I was a kid. I refused to read books that were only about boys, so I did not read them as a child [laugher], but part of Stephenson's work is that his books are almost entirely about men, and it's kind of fascinating. He does not have woman characters, and they arise very rarely in his work. 

[Mark:] Is there something in his biography that would explain that? 

[Caroline:] You know, I think this is an interpretation based on especially Dr. Jekyll and Dr. Hyde, but he's really quite critical of the old boys’ club that is running the world. He's actually really interested in giving us access to male power that he's not on board with. You know, women in Dr. Jekyll and Dr. Hyde are all victims. There's something about the way that women suffer in this world of men that, to me, is super interesting. He certainly seems to have had a lot of women acquaintances, and he was very passionately in love with his wife who was an American 10 years older than he was, and she sometimes gave him advice on his work, so I don't think he hated women. 

[Mark:] No, it's not a misogynistic exclusion, like the little girl at the beginning of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, right?

[Caroline:] Yeah, absolutely.

[Mark:] Can you also explain how Samoa came to be? It just seems like a random place to end up for somebody from Scotland. 

[Caroline:] Yeah, it's a good point. I think he really wanted the opposite of uptight Scottish values. He went to Hawaii first, and he had a really wonderful reception in Hawaii. They were very excited to have him there, and he stayed there for a little while. I think he was exploring the South Pacific. I don't know that he meant to actually end his life in Samoa; he was seeing the world, which he loved to do, but he was quite sick. He loved it there in Samoa, and he was very much incorporated into Samoan life, so they gave him the nickname of the storyteller. I don't know how long he would have stayed if he hadn't died of natural causes. 

[Mark:] Are his remains in Samoa? 

[Caroline:] They are, they're on the top of a hill and often visited by tourists. 

[Mark:] Incredible. You mentioned his wife was helpful often in his own composition and editing in process. How does that bear upon the creation of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde? 

[Caroline:] Well, it's one of my favorite stories, although it's also a terrible story for people like me who study writers in the past. Apparently, he wrote the first draft of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde; he read it aloud to his wife, and she said, “well, that's super entertaining. It's a good story, but it's kind of shallow.” And so, what did he do? He threw it into the fire, so we have no idea what the first draft was like, which is maddening [laughter]. We so want to see a writer's process, you know. But on the other hand it was a sign of how much he respected her and also of how seriously he took what I think a lot of readers have taken from Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde—there's a lot of philosophical, scientific, and religious interests in it; it is not a shallow book, so although he published it in a really cheap edition so that it would be sensational and popular, and lots of people could read it, he did take her advice in making sure we were kind of thinking hard, too, while we were reading this exciting plot.

[Mark:] How long did it take him to write it? 

[Caroline:] That's a good question. I don't actually know. it's pretty fast; he was, among other things, a fast writer. 

[Mark:] You mentioned that Stephenson was keen to have this be a commercial success. Was it? 

[Caroline:] It was. it was a huge sensation on both sides of the Atlantic. There was a lot of back and forth across the ocean where British books were read in the United States and Canada and vice versa, and it was an immediate bestseller. Part of it has to do with the cost of the book. He was very clear that he wanted it to be published as what was nicknamed the “shilling shocker.” These were sensational books that only cost a shilling, and a shilling is not a lot of money. It's always hard to do exact comparisons, but it's about the price of a pound of butter in England at the time. It's really the first time that most working-class people in Britain could read. There's a universal education act in 1880 so that everybody gets to go to school. Before that you've got lots of working-class kids who are in factories and in mines, and they're supporting themselves, so they can't go to school. By 1880 you got this huge class of readers, and you've got new technologies of print and paper production so that they're cheap, so ordinary people can afford books and know how to read in large numbers in the 1880s, and that's when Stephenson is writing for this huge new popular audience. 

[Mark:] Were his other books, like Treasure Island and Kidnapped, also commercial successes? 

[Caroline:] Yes, he made use of kind of what was a new phenomenon of niche marketing. Up until about 1850—and I'm speaking very generally; there are exceptions to this, but—like most books are sort of expected to be read by most people who could read. There isn't a set of like, “oh these are books for women, and these are books for men, or whatever.” But in the 1880s and 90s when you get this sudden explosion of print, you get these new magazines like boys’ magazines and ladies’ magazines—this idea that different groups of people want different kinds of reading. And Stephenson was just a huge hit in the world of boys’ literature, and this idea of, you know, kind of making strapping adventurous young men from their reading. 

[Mark:] You mentioned that Stephenson was befriended by artists, and he traveled in kind of artist groups. Who were some of these people, and how did that sort of help his development or both his intellectual development and his artistic development? 

[Caroline:] He was friends with a lot of kind of bohemian—very kind of experimental or Innovative writers and artists. Although we might associate him with popular fiction, he's definitely thinking about sort of like how to innovate and what the new kind of experimental modernist styles are. He's friends with Rodin the sculptor, who he's friends with Henry James, who's, you know, very serious novelist, although also dabbled in ghost stories. He’s friends with lots of people who are on the cutting edge of the arts. One of my favorite stories about him is that he absolutely loved Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky; that was for him one of the great books of all time. Henry James couldn't stand it, and said it was like being ill reading Crime and Punishment; and Stevenson was like, “no, this is the best thing that's ever been written.” So, he's having debates, discussions with other artists and writers about what should you be writing in the 1880s when literature got a whole bunch of new readers when there's all kinds of new experiments in the air, and who's writing what, and he’s definitely in the conversation. 

[Mark:] Caroline, this is one of those books where even somebody who hasn't read it understands the basic plot that we have a split personality in this man. Is there something about this plot of the split personality in good and evil that Stephenson was drawing on from the culture or from this historical period? Is there a logic to it coming out in 1886, for instance? 

[Caroline:] Yeah, such a great question. One of the things that's fun about reading Stevenson and knowing a bit about the 19th century is how much he's weaving into the plot. You can read different kinds of contexts into it. One of the most interesting and most kind of sobering is that the United Kingdom had just passed a law called the Labouchere Amendment, which was supposed to criminalize any kind of sexual relationships between men, so there's this rising fear about homosexuality at the time and so much of Stephenson's innuendos and suggestions. If you don't know the plot, before you start—which his 19th century readers would not have, right? He's famous to us—or the story is famous to us—but it wouldn't have been in 1887. But people would have definitely guessed that it was a sexual secret, right? These men are hanging out together late at night; one has a key to another one's house; Hyde’s address is Soho, which is right at the heart of the sex trade in London; and there's a lot of talk about appetites and pleasures. Stephenson seems to be, at the very least, building suspense by focusing on the possibility that there's sexual relationships between men that they're trying to hide, but I think, on the other hand, there's also this set of questions about what people's secret appetites are, and there's a whole new interest in sexuality that's emerging at the time, a field called sexology. [It] emerges right at the same time that Stephenson is writing, and it's all about, like what's normal sexuality, and what's deviant, and who gets to say what's natural to a person's desires, and so all of these kinds of questions that we're used to in our own time were just emerging right then. So, that's part of what Stephenson is drawing on. He's also drawing, I think, on just a really long tradition of a question about good and evil—you know, whether humans are we naturally good or evil. But he's putting it in a scientific context to think about how we might—it's partly science fiction, right? This book, although we don't always think about it that way, is about could you, with drugs, turn somebody into somebody else? And what could science do and how much can science push at the limits of what we consider to be human nature or human character? And that's also a debate that's still going on for us but which other writers at the time—certainly the young H.G. Wells is starting to think about those questions right at the same time; they're also thinking about it. 

[Mark:] So modern psychology, modern science, sexology…these are all woven in. Stephenson's engagement with modern psychology are secret desires, are they conscious or unconscious? Would a person—for instance, a reader—in the late 19th century be aware of, let's say, secret desires, or not? 

[Caroline:] Some scholars argue that Freud really learned a lot by reading 19th century novels; that is the idea that we have some unconscious desires that we try to suppress, and we try to keep them even out of our conscious minds because they're dangerous, like aggression, lust, or these kinds of things that maybe we don't want to admit to ourselves. The 19th century novel is actually pretty good at bringing to our attention. Stephenson is writing at the same time as Freud, although Freud will be much more famous later. But they seem to be coming to kind of a similar conclusion. In Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, you have that same experience between a kind of higher consciousness that's able to organize and control the lower consciousness—that's doing all kinds of— that has all kinds of evil appetites. But I think it's super interesting that, in Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Jekyll is aware of his other side. He's aware from the very beginning, so it isn't an unconscious; it's more like an embarrassing consciousness, like a shameful consciousness, which is, I think, super interesting. But also, I think part of what's—I don't know—a little bit different from the Freudian model of oppression is that it's more about the social world—I mean Freud agrees with this, too—the social world teaches us that we have to keep these desires under wraps and under control. 

[Mark:] So we have public and private selves? 

[Caroline: Exactly, exactly. The private self can be perfectly conscious of what it wants; it just is never going to bring it out into public. 

[Mark:] To make this universally applicable to what Stephenson is writing, let's just assume we don't all have evil twins that they're trying to hide. Is it more of a universal interpretation simply to say there are things we hide from the public; they're just not exactly what we present on an everyday basis even if they're not murderous or dastardly diabolical? 

[Caroline:] Yes, I feel like one of the great draws to this story is that so many of us can really relate to it, you know, whether it's like I should not eat an extra cookie but I'm going an extra cookie, too! [laughter] Do I have really shameful desires? Almost all of us have felt that kind of like, you know, in social situations where what you really want to say is not socially acceptable, and so most of us have felt some kind of struggle that way. But I think it's important to always think about what literary studies and other scholars and the humanities have drawn our attention to over the past 30 years, which is that there's very little that's actually universal, so most of what we relate to comes from our own culture and our own cultural context. it's a very dominant theme in sort of British and Anglo-American culture to be split between what you want to say in public and what you don't want to say, but not all cultures kind of share that sense of a split. 

[Mark:] Just one other question about this point, and I hope I'm not carving this up too thinly, but I think in the 21st century if you have a secret self and a public self, you kind of think that the secret self is your true self, but in Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, is that inverted, or are they equivalent? Who is the real person in that twinning? 

[Caroline:] Yeah, I love that question. I think Stephenson's really thinking about it. In one of my favorite moments, Dr. Jekyll says, “You know I'm not a hypocrite. It's not that I want to do one thing and appear another; it's that I actually have two pieces of myself.” They're both real, and I find that really fascinating because I think we do sometimes in our culture say people are naturally selfish. The Victorians did not agree with that; many of them would have said people are naturally good or drawn to good. What Stevenson is saying is, no, we're all both; we have both things going on inside us, and they're both real, so it's worth thinking about how we know what's really basic to ourselves, and where we get those ideas from. I think often we don't even necessarily know that we're getting them from culture. We're getting them from books we read, from whatever religion we practice, right? [It] has ideas about where good and evil live in ourselves, and psychology has ideas about it, and evolution has ideas about it. We're constantly trying to figure that out. 

[Mark:] Is there any evidence—I'm thinking of like yin yang, where yang has a dot of yin, and vice versa? Is Jekyll purely Jekyll without any highness and vice versa? Are they really like lightness and darkness? Is it that binary as you put it? 

[Caroline:] Stephenson seems to undo the binary as the plot goes on. They start out being really separate, but then they get closer and closer and closer, and they can't then—there's a moment when Jekyll totally loses control over whether he's Hyde or Jekyll, and so he keeps trying to assert the scientific self and be like, “oh, if I just can get the right drug, I can I can go back to being in control. He also ends up increasing the dose, which I think is super interesting because it seems to be addiction, right? There's a lot of language in there that sounds like addiction, like “I’ve got to have the drug!” and “I'm getting used to it!” So, I have to bring it up and so you could think about the ways in which an addict also becomes somebody else, under the influence of drugs. But I do think that Stephenson is maybe more asking the question than telling us about whether we're two selves or whether we're really one with two parts because he likes to blur distinctions, and it's one of my favorite parts of the novella that, whenever there's a reference to urban space—and there's a lot that about setting in this novel, which is  super interesting—he'll blur the boundaries so you'll be on a dingy street with a beautiful house, or you'll be in a beautiful house on a dingy street, and then you're not quite sure where one house starts and another one ends, and Mr. Enfield realizes at some point he's just surprised to understand Dr. Jekyll's front door: the door that starts the story are front-back entrance to the same house, and so like, are they two people or are they the same space? And if you think about yourself spatially, which I think we do, we're like, oh, I have this, you know, higher consciousness and lower one, right? You're using spatial metaphors to describe who you are. It's kind of like the unconscious of the conscious mind; or the savage and aggressive mind or constantly being like too close to the civilized and more controlled mindset. Even in the space of London everything is getting all jumbled together. 

[Mark:] Yeah, your introduction points out a lot of those dualities and how Stevenson manipulates it. I thought that was just a fascinating observation. Another thing that your introduction discusses or places Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde in as a work of literary fiction is the Victorian era. What does that mean by this is a Victorian novel? Is this a typically Victorian novel, or is it just happened to be published in 1886? How would you gauge that? 

[Caroline:] it is, I think, a really good example of a late Victorian novel. For those of us who study and teach Victorian literature, we might think about Charles Dickens or Charlotte Brontë, or George Elliot as kind of consummate Victorians. They're all a good couple of generations before Stevenson, so the earlier period is kind of the height of the British Empire; Britain feels very confident of its own superiority to the rest of the world. They're also carrying out a lot of violent conquests of the rest of the world, which Stevenson was very opposed to. But by the end of the century, they start to be more troubled, like what if Victorian culture isn't what a British culture is, isn't like the height of civilization? And scientists in particular kind of starting to point out that this idea that the British are civilized and these other parts of the world are savage isn't really true, like we all have animal parts to ourselves, and Darwin, whose Origin of Species is published in 1859, really rocks the Victorian world with this idea that maybe we're humans are not special: we're not distinctive, we're not even the highest beings, we're just sort of accidents of evolution, and we're animals, really—primarily we're animals. And the writers of the period really grapple with this, and they grapple with the idea what gets called degeneration—the idea that if you could reach kind of some height of civilization, you could either find inside that these other more “savage characteristics”—that's their terms, not mine. I don't believe in savagery and civilization; that's Victorian terms—or maybe Britain could be on the downslope, like maybe you could hit the height of civilization and then start degenerating, so a lot of the novels at the end of the 19th century are really concerned about this kind of question of what civilization is and how stable and solid it is. 

[Mark:] Isn't Mr. Hyde described in Darwinian terms at times? 

[Caroline:] Yeah, it's one of the other themes that Stephenson weaves through the plot, which I think is so brilliant along with sexology, psychology, and science. Hyde is apelike, sometimes called “apelike” and “troglodyte,” so this notion that he comes from an earlier moment in history where before evolution has produced these more advanced human beings. But what's cool about it and cool about the way Stephenson thinks about that is that it's actually inside the civilized person, right? It's not a temporal division anymore. It's not a before-and-after. It's not, “oh, look at those people who live in these remote places who aren't as civilized as we are; it's like, “oh, we British people, we're the ones who have these animal characteristics inside us.” So, the idea that these are the really powerful people in society—these are the lawyers and the doctors and the professional men who run society like Dr. Jekyll—are people who have savagery inside them. To my mind what one of the things Stephenson is doing is using a kind of Darwinian logic to undo an imperial idea of British superiority and civilization. 

[Mark:] Caroline, we haven't really talked about the Gothic. Does this book qualify? Or, because it kind of takes place in everyday society, does it qualify? 

[Caroline:] Yeah, the history of the Gothic is a great story, and it kind of starts in the late 18th century where writers start experimenting with ghosts and supernatural themes, and they usually set their fiction in faraway places time, so like in Renaissance Italy or medieval France they'll set these kind of ghost stories and put them at a removed—

[Mark:] Gotta be a castle involved somewhere, right? 

[Carolinne:] A castle, and usually a woman trapped in the castle—an innocent girl trapped in the castle, and a man who is out to violate her or in some way entrap her. But by the middle of the 19th century there are all these Gothic themes that are incorporated into sort of more realistic fiction. Jane Eyre has borrowed a tremendous amount from the Gothic but is in a contemporary realist setting. By the time you get to the end of the 19th century, I think, the Gothic has kind of woven into a lot of what people are writing that kind of question about what ghostly is, what from-another-world is, where we draw the line between what's realistic and what's supernatural. I think it definitely counts. I do think it's noteworthy that Stephenson draws so much on science, so it's like a cross between Gothic and science fiction in certain ways, which is also true of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein back in 1818, so it's not the first time that those are mixed together, but I definitely think he's drawing on that. 

[Mark:] The last thing that I would like to ask you about with regards to the composition of the novel itself is. I'm interested in the chapters, and the chapter titles which got me thinking about the way that he structures it, and it's almost like these chapters are each kind of a self-contained narrative in and of themselves. What do you observe about the way Stevenson’s architecture of this story? 

[Caroline:] The title of the whole thing is the Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and the story itself seems to draw on both medical and legal cases for its structure, so you get not one continuous narration but a series of documents. Some of them are legal, some of them are scientific; you get all kinds of papers and testimonies, so there's a way in which it's mimicking a kind of either medical or legal case and putting bits and pieces together to add up to a whole, like a diagnosis or guilty verdict, and you could see it as both of those things by the end—both medical and legal. But I think my favorite part of it is that it opens with the title “The Story of the Door,” as if the whole book is going to be about a door, and in some sense it is, right? It's a door between inside somebody, between their two parts, but you don't know that yet, so you think, “well, why am I reading a story about a door?”

[Mark:] The portal that you go into.

[Caroline:] Yest, It’s a portal. 

[Mark:] And then that last chapter: “The Statement.” 

[Caroline:] Yes, this is Dr. Jekyll's confession, but it's also a whole life story. He starts from the very beginning, so it's almost as though you get all the way inside the text, and then there you are, and you start all over at the beginning, which is uh kind of interesting, but then also one of the famous things that scholars have pointed out about the novel is that it gets further and further inside the truth, not just in terms of the documents that it reaches but also spatially, so you first start out in the anti-room of Dr. Jekyll's house after seeing the door, then you go inside, and then you get inside the laboratory, and then you get inside his room, and then inside the room are these documents, and then you have to open the documents, so it's like a movement inside spatially, which is also a movement towards knowledge. 

[Mark:] Caroline Levine, thank you so much for joining us on the Norton Library Podcast and discussing your new edition of Robert Louis Stevenson's The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and Other Writings. Thanks, Caroline! 

[Caroline:] Thank you, Mark! 

[Mark:] The Norton Library edition of Robert Louis Stevenson's The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and Other Writings edited by Caroline Levine is available now in paperback and e-book. Check out the links in the description to this episode for ordering options and more information about the Norton Library, including the full catalog of titles.