Time of Rest?
School is done! I mean that was my last class for the MiT program. It's very satisfying to have it be over. Emlyn is here too. So things are on the up and up. I'm feeling lame about still working at 5am for the next two weeks, but look forward to a break after that. Emlyn put in an application to work with me, since our crew is so behind. I just want to be with him. I think they day will be easier with the two of us working together.
I'm spending some time working on the Seminary, and made up a spreadsheet of teachers, wish-list-teachers (like Ron Hutton), and other staff.
I started reading a book about cat behavior so I can better get to know my kittehs.
BTW, here's my final paper on Jekyll and Dr. Faustus. I'm at that phase where I think it's complete crap, even though it's probably pretty good. Enjoy 15 pages of academic dribble. It didn't format the footnotes correctly, and I don't know how to fix it, but they are there at the bottom as end notes now. Good luck!
Jekyll and Faustus: Science, Myth and Consequence for Victorians
The belief in a supernatural source of evil is not necessary; men alone are quite capable of every wickedness.
- Joseph Conrad
Myth, on the contrary, is a language which does not want to die: it wrests from the meanings which give it its sustenance an insidious, degraded survival, it provokes in them an artificial reprieve in which it settles comfortably, it turns them into speaking corpses. - Roland Barthes
It does not happen very often, but occasionally a story will come along that defines a generation. Somehow the themes and characters seem more like our society and ourselves than other tales, and we see deep truths in the story so enfolded, that the unpacking of these truths would take too much explanation. So the simplest, truest mode is the story itself. For myself, I think of Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings and how that film defined my generation the same way that Star Wars defined my parents . The themes become metaphors for what was going on in our lives, and the heroes’ fight on behalf of good in the struggle against evil is somehow fought for all of us. We purged our own ills cathartically-we saved the world vicariously. These stories become myth: they become the cliché as they are retold in other, lesser versions, until the genius of the original is supplanted by a new story as the times change. But the old stories stick with us, and have been with us since the very dawn of humanity. Much can be gained from thinking on the stories of old. For those living in late 18th-century Britain, Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde became a myth in late-Victorian culture which defined, and was defined by, society at large and is based on a tradition of other proto-scientific myths. The myth identifies the struggle as Victorians attempt to come to terms with the things in their world that are problematic, in particular the relation of the body and soul to the material plane, and the consequences of this new mode of thinking. The purpose of this paper is to get a sense of how late-Victorians attempted to come to terms with the themes evident in Stevenson’s novel, and how the discourse of science and morality evolved from other defining myths. These understandings are placed in the context of modern critical discussion to determine how the mythic elements converse with our perceptions of Victorian thought.
Let us first define myth. I do not use it to mean “false” but intend it rather in the sense that Roland Barthes defines it. Put simply, “myth is a type of speech” chosen by history that has a type of social usage and significance for an individual or society (109-10). Furthermore, “mythical speech is made of a material which has already been worked on so as to make it suitable for communication” (110), in other words, a society is not able to conceive of anything beyond its mythology, as Rollo May suggests, but must be based on some older mythology. Unlike the Greeks, who had a strong mythical background, it might seem that modern Western society is bereft of true myth and thus symbolic significance. But we must expand our idea of myth beyond the mere stories of dead religions:
Myth is not art, though it is used in all the arts; it promises more, its methods and functions are different. Myth is a form of expression which reveals a process of thought and feeling-man’s awareness and response to the universe, his fellow men, and his separate being. It is a projection in concrete and dramatic form the fears and desires undiscoverable and inexpressible in any other way. (28)
Critical scholarship generally seeks understanding of myth from ancient sources, often as a way for comprehending bygone civilizations. Though psychologists and others have expanded the scope of myth, its use as literary theory is rarely utilized in Victorian scholarship . But work by Jacques Lacan, with his ideas of the transcendental signified symbols and fragmentation of the human psyche, has demonstrated that mythological interpretations can give insight about the relevance of texts in their society and for modern readers (Bressler 131). In Lacanian thought, “literature has the particular ability to capture jouissance, that is, to call up a brief moment of joy or terror or desire that somehow arises from deep within our unconscious psyche and reminds us of a time of perfect wholeness when we were incapable of differentiating among images from the Real Order. ”
Stevenson’s shilling shocker was published in 1886. It tells the story of Dr. Henry Jekyll, a seemingly good, morally upright citizen separating himself from himself, creating the diabolical Edward Hyde and committing terrible crimes. He uses science as the means of separation, though it is intricately tied with his moral status. This came at a time when religion was being usurped by science as the basis of truth.
Early in the 19th century, science had a relatively compatible relationship with religion . William Paley coined his theory of Natural Theology in 1802, which involved, according to one scholar, “involved moving from the observable and created to the unobservable and uncreated, i.e., God” (Hart). Natural Theology combined observations of the natural world and a belief in the revelation of Christian doctrine to fill in the gap between creator and created. Indeed, for half a century afterwards, scientists (or “natural philosophers”) were often as clergy, and incorporated the latest scientific discoveries into their understanding of the world and of deity (Fyfe) . Several events disrupted this harmonic symbiosis of the two fields, including the political usurpation of science in the 1820’s and 30’s, and Darwin’s Origin of the Species in 1859. In particular, the professionalization of science as a distinct discipline enlarged the gap between the two ideas by the 70’s and 80’s. For me, the nail in the coffin was the publication of two texts: John Draper's History of the Conflict between Religion and Science in 1875, and Andrew White's The Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom in 1876. The latter was expanded as The History of the Warfare in 1896. These two books exasperated the tension between the fields “claiming to show how theology and/or religion had repeatedly constricted the sciences throughout history” (Fyfe). It was not so much a conflict for the professionalized scientific community, but the middle-class were very bothered by these theories. If science and religion were no longer compatible, how could a rational or sensible person embrace one over the other? If science reigns, then what should our morality be? In fact, is there morality under science? As I will explicate further later in this article, as science and religion separated, so did the psyche and the study of the brain. Indeed, one critic’s “discussion occludes the significant ways in which Stevenson’s novella sought to give literary intelligibility to late-Victorian psychological theories of the 1870’s and 1880’s that differed markedly from the psychoanalytic understandings of the drives, as well as the conflict between the conscious and unconscious realms of psychic life. While late-Victorian scientific thought displayed a marked tendency towards biological determinism” (Stiles, 882)
W.B. Yeats said, “Science is the critique of myth” (quoted in May, 25), and in light of the scientific paradigms of Victorian society, it is difficult to imagine that the rational, empowered British population would find themselves yearning for a kind of certainty about their place in the universe that neither understandings in science nor religion could fill:
Discoveries concerning the brain and the mind edged the soul away; Darwin’s theories substituted for the handiwork of God, in all its marvelous and purposeful intricacy and detail and design, in impersonal, bloody and mindless selective process that worked by trial and error….The geologists hammer destroyed one picture of the world as they built another, a picture in which the City of God had no place….And a man without faith, man without hope, was to the mid-Victorian a monstrous aberration, a creature without a place in the Universe. (Morley 102)
And yet science, which is supposed to dispel myth, actually had the opposite effect, and doubt became invasive in the culture. Yet both science and religion dealt in the material realm (103): angels were believed to be quite real , but so was the Devil who was “not demolished by science; science was called upon to explain the Devil: ‘I am under the impression that the devil can exercise his power upon men in no other way than by electro-biology’ it was said in 1872 ” (104). Science and religion reflected each other , two halves of the same whole: one rational and ordered, the other requiring a leap of illogical faith to fulfill an emotional and spiritual need.
John Addington Symonds-a British essayist, historian and poet-believed, as many children did, that “the devil lived near the doormat, in a dark corner of the passage by my father’s bedroom. I thought that he appeared to me there under the shape of a black shadow, scurrying about upon the ground, with the faintest indication of a swiftly swirling tail” (Morley 104). Symonds was haunted by sickness and depression, and struggled within himself and against society to accept his own homosexuality. In a fit of self-reflection, he wrote to Stevenson saying, “At last I have read Dr. Jekyll. It makes me wonder whether a man has the right to scrutinize ‘the abysmal deeps of personality.’ It is indeed a dreadful book, most dreadful because of a certain moral callousness, a want of sympathy, a shutting out of hope….But it has left such a deeply painful impression on my heart that I do not know how I am ever to turn to it again” (Letters, Symonds, 1886). And yet “The denial of myths…is itself part of our refusal to confront our own reality and that of our society” (original emphasis, May 25).
The demon, once summoned, must be faced to be conquered: “the needed wholeness and homogeneity of individuality by destroying for a time the consciousness of ones set of conflicting impulses, so that when the experimenter pleases his lower instincts can absorb his whole being, and, knowing nothing of restraint from anything above them, manifest themselves in new and quite diabolical activities (Academy, 55)”. While Victorians puzzled the implications of religion in the light of science, the paradox seemed too much to bear. The reasonable answer would be to eradicate one or the other, but as the two were so intimately linked, it seemed an impossibility. Jekyll is the paradox, struggling with the malady of the soul while Hyde is the liberated form. Dr. Jekyll comes along with his seemingly magical formula, which allowed the two problems to split and be examined individually. But, true to form, the paradox was still in place, and negated both Jekyll and his monstrous counterpart. The novel is mythic because it expresses sentiment which the collective culture was deeply immersed. It shows the problem, the dilemma, offers a solution and explores the consequences. In that way, the myth was cathartic, allowing the reader to struggle and come to terms with the cultural problem through the characters, rather than acting it out in their own lives. In true Lacanian form, and indeed, the form of the Victorian novel, the reader identifies their own lack, comes to terms with it, and rejoins society. Readers did indeed come from the novel transformed, “The fact is that, viewed as an allegory, it touches one too closely. Most of us at some epoch of our lives have been on the verge of developing a Mr. Hyde” (Letters, Symonds, 1886). It was easy to look at the story through the lens of morality and “the story was quoted widely in sermons shortly after its publication, usually cited as an example of the dangers of sin and vice” (Jekyll and Hyde Appendix F, 134). The public realizes this story as having meaning for their own lives in the present, and is specifically tied with morality, much as the Faustus tales were when they were penned. Yet the new ideas were uncomfortable. Even James indicates he would be more comfortable if the novella had the feel of a detached myth,
I have some difficulty in accepting the business of the powders, which seems to me too explicit and explanatory. The powders constitute the machinery of the transformation, and it will probably have struck many readers that this uncanny process would be more conceivable (so far as one may speak of the conceivable in such a case), if the author had not made it so definite. (Partial Portraits, James, 171, 1849)
The decision to occultize the information is later echoed in an unsigned letter to The Times in 1886 “We are not going to tell his strange story, though we might well do so, and only excite the curiosity of our readers.”
Others in the society struggled with the novel’s implications as well. One anonymous reporter wrote “though it is more than possible that Mr. Stevenson wrote with no ethical intent, its impressiveness as a parable is equal to its fascination as a work of art” (Academy, 55). The novel gave Victorians a new way to think about science, negotiating the new discoveries with their anxieties of religion, for “Physical and biological Science on a hundred lines is reducing individual freedom to zero, and weakening the sense of responsibility” (Letters, Symonds, 1886). If this were so, then how can a society function and perpetuate liberal ideals for its members?
“Every individual seeks-indeed must seek if he or she is to remain sane-to bring some order and coherence into the stream of sensations, emotions, and ideas entering his or her consciousness from within or without. Each one of us is forced to do deliberately for oneself what in previous ages was done by family, custom, church, and state, namely, form the myths in terms of which we can make some sense of experience” (May, 29). Victorians struggled with their doubt about the true value of living in a progressive and scientific world, and Jekyll and Hyde offered a story which, “accounts for everything on strictly scientific grounds, thought the science can be the science of problematical futurity”. The reader is shown the consequences of attempting to separate the two confusing states of being, but are given no answers about what to do with the future, or how the next paradigm might take shape.
If we recognize that myth must come from older myth, from whence does Stevenson’s frightening allegory of science and the destruction of the soul emerge? I postulate, along with the theories of Rollo May, that the tradition of Faustus stories best symbolize Western societies’ struggle with science. The story of Faustus changes as the science and religious culture change and evolve, and Jekyll and Hyde picks up the trail where Faustus left off.
There were several versions of Faust which coincide with the development of rationalism and science in the Western world. The evolution of the myth relates closely to changes in science and religion. Though outlined more thoroughly in Rollo May’s The Cry for Myth, I will summarize the changes for the purposes of our evaluation. Marlowe wrote The Tragical History of the Life and Death of Doctor Faustus in 1591 which was based on a pamphlet called “The Damnable Life and Deserved Death of Dr. John Faustus”, widely circulated in 1587. The pamphlet is based on a real person, who played magical pranks on his fellow Germans and was punished with an eternity in the fiery brimstone of Hell, brought to graphic detail in traveling morality plays. Marlowe’s character was more complex: bored with his life, he makes a deal with Mephistopheles, a devil, to control both nature and man, becoming Godlike in his power. But the tragedy lies in Faustus’ thoughts of opposing God, rather than his actions. In comparison, Goethe wrote Faust and completed it in 1832 . Instead of a literal Hell, the evil characters, doing evil actions, eventually do something good. “The active deed takes supremacy over other forms of human existence” (237): in other words, the worship of progress, and the power of will, but it is through women and sexual desire that Faust is redeemed and saved. The eternal nature of Woman is the deus ex machine, and May says that “sole patriarchal power is bound to come to grief” (247) .
May points out that in all of the Faust myths, “sexual love is a mechanism by which one avoids one’s guilt and sorrow” (230). What then does this say about Jekyll and Hyde, which overtly indicates no sexual love? Perhaps this is informed by the well-discussed notions of Victorian prudery, and the patriarchal way in which women were confined to the realm of the home. Stevenson’s novel, taking place primarily in alley ways, empty streets and the servant and gentleman’s domain (especially breakfast and smoking rooms), doesn’t make room for the domesticating influences of women, forcing our characters to embrace and experience their guilt and sorrow.
As Goethe’s tale sits right in the Victorian age, its themes would be most suitable for our discussion. This philosophical poem centers on life and what life could be. May reads Goethe’s Faust as “a poignant and powerful expression of the myth of our modern age in which people yearn to believe that the God of progress-our great machines, our vast technologies…will have a beneficent effect upon us and will bring vast gains to humanity” (235). In this version, Mephistopheles is a devil which “seeks to do evil but it always turns to good”, demonstrating the optimism of the Enlightenment. Man’s purpose on earth is to strive and do deeds, for sin lies in halting progress. But as science and technology marched progressively forward as the century unfolded, doubt crept in, and in light of these new questions, Victorians was starving for a new myth. Bronislaw Malinowski said that myth
expresses, enhances, and codifies belief; it safeguards and enforces morality; it vouches for the efficiency of ritual and contains practical rules for the guidance of man. Myth is thus a vital ingredient of human civilization; it is not an idle tale, but a hard-worked active force. (quoted in May, 30)
Stevenson’s novel becomes the signifier in which Victorians couched their uncertainties and anxieties about science and morality.
It is certain that Victorian readers experienced jouissance strongly in Jekyll and Hyde. The way that Stevenson’s contemporaries discussed his novella indicates that they struggled with the world the story suggested, and found strong parallels between themselves and the fragmented soul of Dr. Jekyll. Occasionally-though not always explicitly stated-contemporaneous writers identified Faustian themes in Stevenson’s work, which bubbled up through their subconscious. Upon reviewing the stage play version of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, one author describes Hyde as “the face of a being in comparison with whom Quilp had been comely and Mephistopheles had made for righteousness” (Academy, 93-4). The anonymous writer subconsciously or intuitively understands the mythic connection of Faustian elements to the cultural problem, but he also compares it with another literary character which more closely resembles the simpler morality in Marlowe’s own Faust story.
But the late-Victorians needed a more overt discussion of science and morality in their mythology, and Jekyll and Hyde offered the right mixture of both to generate discussion, but “Stevenson was no mere satirist of scientific conventions, however; he clearly endorses particular scientific theories even as he implicitly mocks the rhetoric in which they are couched” (Stiles, 881). Stevenson’s divided characters reflect the divided natures of the Victorian readership. Jekyll remarks that, “All things therefore seemed to point to this; that I was slowly losing hold of my original and better self, and becoming slowly incorporated with my second and worse” (Stevenson 90). Dr. Jekyll is their pious and religious side, having come temporally first, and Hyde is created by science and may be the destruction of the good and moral part of religious experience because “the evil side of my nature…was less robust and less developed than the good which I had just deposed” (83). For Victorians, the desire for upright action under religious terms was couched in Jekyll’s own actions: “Had I approached my discovery in a more noble spirit, had I risked the experiment while under the empire of generous or pious aspirations, all must have been otherwise, and from these agonies of death and birth, I had come forth an angel instead of a fiend” (84). However, the Faustian paradigm of Goethe is not lost, for “the drug had no discriminating action; it was neither diabolical nor divine…”, in other words, progress is the mechanism of the world, but has no inherent moral quality. But the way Jekyll went about his experiments, without thoughts for the moral repercussions was, like Dr. Faustus , “not only a crime, it had been a tragic folly” (94), only instead of being tempted by a devil, Jekyll is tempted by science. Both usurp Gods plan and the natural order of things.
In the end of the novella, Jekyll and Hyde are both destroyed, for the halves of the paradox cannot coexist. It calls for Victorians to find a solution to the separation of science and religion, at least for themselves. I think the story offers up for thought the consequences of progress without God, but others, both then and now, might interpret it differently, and that is part of the mystery of myth-it offers answers while still asking the reader to figure it out for themselves. Its true value lies in the asking of questions.
The form of the novel itself also has social significance. By using the form of “case study”, Stevenson places the novellas rhetoric firmly in the most sensationalistic form of the gothic thriller. Indeed, the purpose of the gothic genre is to emphasis psychological depth, emotion, and interiority, showing mystery and often provoking fear, while, as Mighall suggests, science “attempts to contain fear and offer a rational explanation for all phenomena” (Stiles, 888). But, as Stiles proposes, “the fragmentary, epistolary structure of the Gothic novella…neatly coheres with the traditional components of the case study” (889), so perhaps the two have more in common than initially thought. Anytime a novel attempts to deal with the psychology of human beings, it makes itself ready to be interpreted mythically. Yet the novel itself is fragmented and the same way that science and religion were professionally split. But unlike the two conflicting world-views, the novel paradoxically brings them together through its form only to split them again in Dr. Jekyll. It is interesting to note that, for critics of the time, the novel is praised for “its originality of literary expression” (Academy, 93).
Modern literary critics have begun to see the large scale consequences of Jekyll and Hyde, in particular observing the ways Stevenson may have absorbed contemporaneous scientific thought and processed it through his imagination, and how his novel affected later scientific understandings:
Stevenson’s work does much more than simply reflect the case studies upon which it is loosely based. In fact, Stevenson’s masterpiece creatively intervenes in late-Victorian debates about dual personality and its alleged cause, bilateral brain hemisphere imbalance…Jekyll and Hyde “could well have affected how some clinicians subsequently viewed their cases”. Stiles, 881
This shows how those in the society were trying to process the lessons of Stevenson’s novel. Religion was removed from the conversation. No longer was dual personality an imposition of demonic influences, or a punishment for heresy against God (as it might have been under Marlowe’s Faustian paradigm), for science and religion were no longer “assumed to be twin facets of the same truth” (Fyfe). In fact, as critic Anne Stiles pointed out, scientists at the time believed Stevenson should make his novella less moral and more scientific: “Myers’s [a scientist] comments demonstrate his own familiarity with the case of Felida X…and show that he urged Stevenson to make his novella conform more fully to contemporary scientific accounts of dual and multiple personality” (Stiles, 893). This shows that science informed Stevenson’s novel, but was slightly out of the Lacanian Real Order, and must be in order to be mythic. The double brain is a scientific parallel to the mythical significance of the novel.
In conclusion, “either the story was a flash of intuitive psychological research, dashed off in a burst of inspiration; or else it was the product of the most elaborate forethought, fitting together all the parts of an intricate and inscrutable puzzle” (The Times), an idea supported by Stevenson himself. But perhaps the origin doesn’t matter. For Victorians found in Stevenson “something not quite human in your genius” (Letters, Symonds, 1886) and had to wrestle with the issues he raised. It is no wonder, in light of the conflicts in the scientific and religious communities, that late-Victorians struggled with rectifying the two bodies of thought. In light of previous relationships of science and religion explicated in the earlier versions of Faustus, the conflicting nature of Dr. Jekyll represented the fragmentation of the majority of Victorian society. Stevenson’s use of contemporaneous scientific knowledge, funneled through his unsolidified thoughts on morality, may have affected scientific discourse long after his novella was published. To this day, we still say “he’s a regular Jekyll and Hyde” to signify a person with a split personality or a devious side which they hide, and modified versions of the novella continue to resurface in various media . In these ways, it is clear that our postmodern society, some hundred and ten years later, still wrestles with these very themes, awaiting a new myth, a new Dr. Faustus or Dr. Jekyll, to raise the questions our society is too terrified to ask.
Bibliography
Barthes, Roland; Lavers, Annette, trans. Mythologies. Hill and Wang, New York. 1957. 1972.
Bressler, Charles E., Literary Criticism: An Introduction to Theory and Practice. 3rd Edition. Prentice Hall, 2003.
“Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde”. The Academy, No. 849, 11 Aug 1888. The Stage.
Fyfe, Aileen. Van Wyhe, John. “Victorian Science and Religion” modified 11 June, 2002.
Gates, Barbara T. “Nell, Quilp, and Accidental Suicides in Dickens's The Old Curiosity Shop” 2001. University Scholars Programme at the National University of Singapore,
Hart, Thomas E. “The Natural Theology of Paley” 27 February 2002,
James, Henry. Partial Portraits. London, Macmillian, 1894, 169-71.
May, Rollo. The Cry for Myth. W.W. Norton and Co. New York. 1991.
Morley, John. Death, Heaven and the Victorians. University of Pittsburgh Press. Great Britian, 1971.
Muller, Max. “The Philosophy of Mythology,” The Science of Religion. London. 1873.
“New Novels”. The Academy, No. 716, 23 Jan 1886.
Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft. Frankenstein: or, the Modern Prometheus. University of California Press. 1818. 1984.
Stevenson, Robert Louis. The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Bantam Pathfinder Edition, New York. 1886. 1967.
Stiles, Anne. “Robert Louis Stevenson’s Jekyll and Hyde and the Double Brain.” SEL 46. Autumn 2006.
Symonds, John Addington. The Letters of John Addington Symonds, ed. Herman M. Schueller and Robert L. Peters. Detroit, Wayne State University Press, 1967-69. III, 120-121. Letter to Robert Louis Stevenson, 3 March 1886.
Unsigned, The Times, 25 Jan 1886.
Endnotes
“Depend upon it, there is mythology now as there was in the time of Homer, only we do not perceive it, because we ourselves live in the very shadow of it, and because we all shrink from the full meridian light of truth” (Muller, 353)
We still use Freud, of course, as the main source of psychoanalytical criticism, but it has been used effectively by Gilbert and Gubar in their book “The Madwoman in the Attic” (1979) with a feminist twist.
See also Nancy Armstrong’s comments on fragmentation in the Victorian novel in her essay “Feminism, Fiction, and the Promise of Utopia in Dracula”
Real Order: “According to Jacques Lacan, the Real Order is the third stage of psychic development and consists of the physical world, including the material universe and everything in it. It also symbolizes everything a person is not, and therefore objects within the Real Order continually function as symbols of primordial lack, leading to psychic fragmentation” (Bressler, 282).
I recognize that this is a gross over-simplification of the time period, but there is already so much excellent scholarship about 19th-century science and religion that it seemed redundant to explicate it here, but I wanted to give you a sense of the trail of the conflict that I believe had the most influence on the need for new myth.
We might recognize this as intelligent design today.
This idea was supported by sentiments left over from the Romantic era, which prided the intelligence of the heart and of feeling, giving intuition and subjective experience as valid a stance as many sciences (Morley 104).
This was said by Robert Angus in The Great Anti-Christian Delusion of Scripture as quoted in Morely, 126.
And grew out of each other, in the case of Spiritualism.
Indeed, like in the Shelly’s Frankenstein, the audience is too nervous to see the deus ex machina. Shelly avoids the idea all together by having her protagonist “collect the instruments of life around me, that I might infuse a spark of being into the lifeless thing that lay at my feet” (Shelley, 51). The authoress denies the reader the secrets of the transformation which would lead “to your destruction and infallible misery” (47) thus safeguarding the reader from knowledge that would ultimately destroy any who tried to use it, denying Mephistopheles his opportunity to bargain.
Though perhaps this is the wrong word, considering the Victorian common usage. I do not mean to imply that the myth became more refined as time went on. Rather, that the myth responds to the age in which it belongs. But perhaps this is an attempt on my part to deny the Faustian linear thinking and embrace Apollonian ideas instead.
The trail continues with Thomas Mann, who wrote wrote Dr. Faustus in 1947 (May, 218).
I would argue that Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus, published in 1818 is a variation on the myth which guided late-Romantic thinking.
For the purposes of the argument, I am not including any of the queer-theory readings which the majority of Victorians would probably not have read into the text.
“The butler’s theory is that his master has been murdered, and that the murderer is in the room, personating him with a sort of clumsy diabolism” (emphasis mine, Partial Portraits, James, 169, 1849).
Daniel Quilp is a character in Dickens novel “The Old Curiosity Shop” (1841). He is described as “deformed both inside and out” who serves as the barometer of evil for all the characters, and dies by drowning himself.
And Victor Frankenstein.
In thinking, in particular of “Jekyll and Hyde” the musical, and “Mary Reilly”, a film starring Julia Roberts and John Malkovitch from the maids point of view.
I'm spending some time working on the Seminary, and made up a spreadsheet of teachers, wish-list-teachers (like Ron Hutton), and other staff.
I started reading a book about cat behavior so I can better get to know my kittehs.
BTW, here's my final paper on Jekyll and Dr. Faustus. I'm at that phase where I think it's complete crap, even though it's probably pretty good. Enjoy 15 pages of academic dribble. It didn't format the footnotes correctly, and I don't know how to fix it, but they are there at the bottom as end notes now. Good luck!
Jekyll and Faustus: Science, Myth and Consequence for Victorians
The belief in a supernatural source of evil is not necessary; men alone are quite capable of every wickedness.
- Joseph Conrad
Myth, on the contrary, is a language which does not want to die: it wrests from the meanings which give it its sustenance an insidious, degraded survival, it provokes in them an artificial reprieve in which it settles comfortably, it turns them into speaking corpses. - Roland Barthes
It does not happen very often, but occasionally a story will come along that defines a generation. Somehow the themes and characters seem more like our society and ourselves than other tales, and we see deep truths in the story so enfolded, that the unpacking of these truths would take too much explanation. So the simplest, truest mode is the story itself. For myself, I think of Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings and how that film defined my generation the same way that Star Wars defined my parents . The themes become metaphors for what was going on in our lives, and the heroes’ fight on behalf of good in the struggle against evil is somehow fought for all of us. We purged our own ills cathartically-we saved the world vicariously. These stories become myth: they become the cliché as they are retold in other, lesser versions, until the genius of the original is supplanted by a new story as the times change. But the old stories stick with us, and have been with us since the very dawn of humanity. Much can be gained from thinking on the stories of old. For those living in late 18th-century Britain, Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde became a myth in late-Victorian culture which defined, and was defined by, society at large and is based on a tradition of other proto-scientific myths. The myth identifies the struggle as Victorians attempt to come to terms with the things in their world that are problematic, in particular the relation of the body and soul to the material plane, and the consequences of this new mode of thinking. The purpose of this paper is to get a sense of how late-Victorians attempted to come to terms with the themes evident in Stevenson’s novel, and how the discourse of science and morality evolved from other defining myths. These understandings are placed in the context of modern critical discussion to determine how the mythic elements converse with our perceptions of Victorian thought.
Let us first define myth. I do not use it to mean “false” but intend it rather in the sense that Roland Barthes defines it. Put simply, “myth is a type of speech” chosen by history that has a type of social usage and significance for an individual or society (109-10). Furthermore, “mythical speech is made of a material which has already been worked on so as to make it suitable for communication” (110), in other words, a society is not able to conceive of anything beyond its mythology, as Rollo May suggests, but must be based on some older mythology. Unlike the Greeks, who had a strong mythical background, it might seem that modern Western society is bereft of true myth and thus symbolic significance. But we must expand our idea of myth beyond the mere stories of dead religions:
Myth is not art, though it is used in all the arts; it promises more, its methods and functions are different. Myth is a form of expression which reveals a process of thought and feeling-man’s awareness and response to the universe, his fellow men, and his separate being. It is a projection in concrete and dramatic form the fears and desires undiscoverable and inexpressible in any other way. (28)
Critical scholarship generally seeks understanding of myth from ancient sources, often as a way for comprehending bygone civilizations. Though psychologists and others have expanded the scope of myth, its use as literary theory is rarely utilized in Victorian scholarship . But work by Jacques Lacan, with his ideas of the transcendental signified symbols and fragmentation of the human psyche, has demonstrated that mythological interpretations can give insight about the relevance of texts in their society and for modern readers (Bressler 131). In Lacanian thought, “literature has the particular ability to capture jouissance, that is, to call up a brief moment of joy or terror or desire that somehow arises from deep within our unconscious psyche and reminds us of a time of perfect wholeness when we were incapable of differentiating among images from the Real Order. ”
Stevenson’s shilling shocker was published in 1886. It tells the story of Dr. Henry Jekyll, a seemingly good, morally upright citizen separating himself from himself, creating the diabolical Edward Hyde and committing terrible crimes. He uses science as the means of separation, though it is intricately tied with his moral status. This came at a time when religion was being usurped by science as the basis of truth.
Early in the 19th century, science had a relatively compatible relationship with religion . William Paley coined his theory of Natural Theology in 1802, which involved, according to one scholar, “involved moving from the observable and created to the unobservable and uncreated, i.e., God” (Hart). Natural Theology combined observations of the natural world and a belief in the revelation of Christian doctrine to fill in the gap between creator and created. Indeed, for half a century afterwards, scientists (or “natural philosophers”) were often as clergy, and incorporated the latest scientific discoveries into their understanding of the world and of deity (Fyfe) . Several events disrupted this harmonic symbiosis of the two fields, including the political usurpation of science in the 1820’s and 30’s, and Darwin’s Origin of the Species in 1859. In particular, the professionalization of science as a distinct discipline enlarged the gap between the two ideas by the 70’s and 80’s. For me, the nail in the coffin was the publication of two texts: John Draper's History of the Conflict between Religion and Science in 1875, and Andrew White's The Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom in 1876. The latter was expanded as The History of the Warfare in 1896. These two books exasperated the tension between the fields “claiming to show how theology and/or religion had repeatedly constricted the sciences throughout history” (Fyfe). It was not so much a conflict for the professionalized scientific community, but the middle-class were very bothered by these theories. If science and religion were no longer compatible, how could a rational or sensible person embrace one over the other? If science reigns, then what should our morality be? In fact, is there morality under science? As I will explicate further later in this article, as science and religion separated, so did the psyche and the study of the brain. Indeed, one critic’s “discussion occludes the significant ways in which Stevenson’s novella sought to give literary intelligibility to late-Victorian psychological theories of the 1870’s and 1880’s that differed markedly from the psychoanalytic understandings of the drives, as well as the conflict between the conscious and unconscious realms of psychic life. While late-Victorian scientific thought displayed a marked tendency towards biological determinism” (Stiles, 882)
W.B. Yeats said, “Science is the critique of myth” (quoted in May, 25), and in light of the scientific paradigms of Victorian society, it is difficult to imagine that the rational, empowered British population would find themselves yearning for a kind of certainty about their place in the universe that neither understandings in science nor religion could fill:
Discoveries concerning the brain and the mind edged the soul away; Darwin’s theories substituted for the handiwork of God, in all its marvelous and purposeful intricacy and detail and design, in impersonal, bloody and mindless selective process that worked by trial and error….The geologists hammer destroyed one picture of the world as they built another, a picture in which the City of God had no place….And a man without faith, man without hope, was to the mid-Victorian a monstrous aberration, a creature without a place in the Universe. (Morley 102)
And yet science, which is supposed to dispel myth, actually had the opposite effect, and doubt became invasive in the culture. Yet both science and religion dealt in the material realm (103): angels were believed to be quite real , but so was the Devil who was “not demolished by science; science was called upon to explain the Devil: ‘I am under the impression that the devil can exercise his power upon men in no other way than by electro-biology’ it was said in 1872 ” (104). Science and religion reflected each other , two halves of the same whole: one rational and ordered, the other requiring a leap of illogical faith to fulfill an emotional and spiritual need.
John Addington Symonds-a British essayist, historian and poet-believed, as many children did, that “the devil lived near the doormat, in a dark corner of the passage by my father’s bedroom. I thought that he appeared to me there under the shape of a black shadow, scurrying about upon the ground, with the faintest indication of a swiftly swirling tail” (Morley 104). Symonds was haunted by sickness and depression, and struggled within himself and against society to accept his own homosexuality. In a fit of self-reflection, he wrote to Stevenson saying, “At last I have read Dr. Jekyll. It makes me wonder whether a man has the right to scrutinize ‘the abysmal deeps of personality.’ It is indeed a dreadful book, most dreadful because of a certain moral callousness, a want of sympathy, a shutting out of hope….But it has left such a deeply painful impression on my heart that I do not know how I am ever to turn to it again” (Letters, Symonds, 1886). And yet “The denial of myths…is itself part of our refusal to confront our own reality and that of our society” (original emphasis, May 25).
The demon, once summoned, must be faced to be conquered: “the needed wholeness and homogeneity of individuality by destroying for a time the consciousness of ones set of conflicting impulses, so that when the experimenter pleases his lower instincts can absorb his whole being, and, knowing nothing of restraint from anything above them, manifest themselves in new and quite diabolical activities (Academy, 55)”. While Victorians puzzled the implications of religion in the light of science, the paradox seemed too much to bear. The reasonable answer would be to eradicate one or the other, but as the two were so intimately linked, it seemed an impossibility. Jekyll is the paradox, struggling with the malady of the soul while Hyde is the liberated form. Dr. Jekyll comes along with his seemingly magical formula, which allowed the two problems to split and be examined individually. But, true to form, the paradox was still in place, and negated both Jekyll and his monstrous counterpart. The novel is mythic because it expresses sentiment which the collective culture was deeply immersed. It shows the problem, the dilemma, offers a solution and explores the consequences. In that way, the myth was cathartic, allowing the reader to struggle and come to terms with the cultural problem through the characters, rather than acting it out in their own lives. In true Lacanian form, and indeed, the form of the Victorian novel, the reader identifies their own lack, comes to terms with it, and rejoins society. Readers did indeed come from the novel transformed, “The fact is that, viewed as an allegory, it touches one too closely. Most of us at some epoch of our lives have been on the verge of developing a Mr. Hyde” (Letters, Symonds, 1886). It was easy to look at the story through the lens of morality and “the story was quoted widely in sermons shortly after its publication, usually cited as an example of the dangers of sin and vice” (Jekyll and Hyde Appendix F, 134). The public realizes this story as having meaning for their own lives in the present, and is specifically tied with morality, much as the Faustus tales were when they were penned. Yet the new ideas were uncomfortable. Even James indicates he would be more comfortable if the novella had the feel of a detached myth,
I have some difficulty in accepting the business of the powders, which seems to me too explicit and explanatory. The powders constitute the machinery of the transformation, and it will probably have struck many readers that this uncanny process would be more conceivable (so far as one may speak of the conceivable in such a case), if the author had not made it so definite. (Partial Portraits, James, 171, 1849)
The decision to occultize the information is later echoed in an unsigned letter to The Times in 1886 “We are not going to tell his strange story, though we might well do so, and only excite the curiosity of our readers.”
Others in the society struggled with the novel’s implications as well. One anonymous reporter wrote “though it is more than possible that Mr. Stevenson wrote with no ethical intent, its impressiveness as a parable is equal to its fascination as a work of art” (Academy, 55). The novel gave Victorians a new way to think about science, negotiating the new discoveries with their anxieties of religion, for “Physical and biological Science on a hundred lines is reducing individual freedom to zero, and weakening the sense of responsibility” (Letters, Symonds, 1886). If this were so, then how can a society function and perpetuate liberal ideals for its members?
“Every individual seeks-indeed must seek if he or she is to remain sane-to bring some order and coherence into the stream of sensations, emotions, and ideas entering his or her consciousness from within or without. Each one of us is forced to do deliberately for oneself what in previous ages was done by family, custom, church, and state, namely, form the myths in terms of which we can make some sense of experience” (May, 29). Victorians struggled with their doubt about the true value of living in a progressive and scientific world, and Jekyll and Hyde offered a story which, “accounts for everything on strictly scientific grounds, thought the science can be the science of problematical futurity”. The reader is shown the consequences of attempting to separate the two confusing states of being, but are given no answers about what to do with the future, or how the next paradigm might take shape.
If we recognize that myth must come from older myth, from whence does Stevenson’s frightening allegory of science and the destruction of the soul emerge? I postulate, along with the theories of Rollo May, that the tradition of Faustus stories best symbolize Western societies’ struggle with science. The story of Faustus changes as the science and religious culture change and evolve, and Jekyll and Hyde picks up the trail where Faustus left off.
There were several versions of Faust which coincide with the development of rationalism and science in the Western world. The evolution of the myth relates closely to changes in science and religion. Though outlined more thoroughly in Rollo May’s The Cry for Myth, I will summarize the changes for the purposes of our evaluation. Marlowe wrote The Tragical History of the Life and Death of Doctor Faustus in 1591 which was based on a pamphlet called “The Damnable Life and Deserved Death of Dr. John Faustus”, widely circulated in 1587. The pamphlet is based on a real person, who played magical pranks on his fellow Germans and was punished with an eternity in the fiery brimstone of Hell, brought to graphic detail in traveling morality plays. Marlowe’s character was more complex: bored with his life, he makes a deal with Mephistopheles, a devil, to control both nature and man, becoming Godlike in his power. But the tragedy lies in Faustus’ thoughts of opposing God, rather than his actions. In comparison, Goethe wrote Faust and completed it in 1832 . Instead of a literal Hell, the evil characters, doing evil actions, eventually do something good. “The active deed takes supremacy over other forms of human existence” (237): in other words, the worship of progress, and the power of will, but it is through women and sexual desire that Faust is redeemed and saved. The eternal nature of Woman is the deus ex machine, and May says that “sole patriarchal power is bound to come to grief” (247) .
May points out that in all of the Faust myths, “sexual love is a mechanism by which one avoids one’s guilt and sorrow” (230). What then does this say about Jekyll and Hyde, which overtly indicates no sexual love? Perhaps this is informed by the well-discussed notions of Victorian prudery, and the patriarchal way in which women were confined to the realm of the home. Stevenson’s novel, taking place primarily in alley ways, empty streets and the servant and gentleman’s domain (especially breakfast and smoking rooms), doesn’t make room for the domesticating influences of women, forcing our characters to embrace and experience their guilt and sorrow.
As Goethe’s tale sits right in the Victorian age, its themes would be most suitable for our discussion. This philosophical poem centers on life and what life could be. May reads Goethe’s Faust as “a poignant and powerful expression of the myth of our modern age in which people yearn to believe that the God of progress-our great machines, our vast technologies…will have a beneficent effect upon us and will bring vast gains to humanity” (235). In this version, Mephistopheles is a devil which “seeks to do evil but it always turns to good”, demonstrating the optimism of the Enlightenment. Man’s purpose on earth is to strive and do deeds, for sin lies in halting progress. But as science and technology marched progressively forward as the century unfolded, doubt crept in, and in light of these new questions, Victorians was starving for a new myth. Bronislaw Malinowski said that myth
expresses, enhances, and codifies belief; it safeguards and enforces morality; it vouches for the efficiency of ritual and contains practical rules for the guidance of man. Myth is thus a vital ingredient of human civilization; it is not an idle tale, but a hard-worked active force. (quoted in May, 30)
Stevenson’s novel becomes the signifier in which Victorians couched their uncertainties and anxieties about science and morality.
It is certain that Victorian readers experienced jouissance strongly in Jekyll and Hyde. The way that Stevenson’s contemporaries discussed his novella indicates that they struggled with the world the story suggested, and found strong parallels between themselves and the fragmented soul of Dr. Jekyll. Occasionally-though not always explicitly stated-contemporaneous writers identified Faustian themes in Stevenson’s work, which bubbled up through their subconscious. Upon reviewing the stage play version of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, one author describes Hyde as “the face of a being in comparison with whom Quilp had been comely and Mephistopheles had made for righteousness” (Academy, 93-4). The anonymous writer subconsciously or intuitively understands the mythic connection of Faustian elements to the cultural problem, but he also compares it with another literary character which more closely resembles the simpler morality in Marlowe’s own Faust story.
But the late-Victorians needed a more overt discussion of science and morality in their mythology, and Jekyll and Hyde offered the right mixture of both to generate discussion, but “Stevenson was no mere satirist of scientific conventions, however; he clearly endorses particular scientific theories even as he implicitly mocks the rhetoric in which they are couched” (Stiles, 881). Stevenson’s divided characters reflect the divided natures of the Victorian readership. Jekyll remarks that, “All things therefore seemed to point to this; that I was slowly losing hold of my original and better self, and becoming slowly incorporated with my second and worse” (Stevenson 90). Dr. Jekyll is their pious and religious side, having come temporally first, and Hyde is created by science and may be the destruction of the good and moral part of religious experience because “the evil side of my nature…was less robust and less developed than the good which I had just deposed” (83). For Victorians, the desire for upright action under religious terms was couched in Jekyll’s own actions: “Had I approached my discovery in a more noble spirit, had I risked the experiment while under the empire of generous or pious aspirations, all must have been otherwise, and from these agonies of death and birth, I had come forth an angel instead of a fiend” (84). However, the Faustian paradigm of Goethe is not lost, for “the drug had no discriminating action; it was neither diabolical nor divine…”, in other words, progress is the mechanism of the world, but has no inherent moral quality. But the way Jekyll went about his experiments, without thoughts for the moral repercussions was, like Dr. Faustus , “not only a crime, it had been a tragic folly” (94), only instead of being tempted by a devil, Jekyll is tempted by science. Both usurp Gods plan and the natural order of things.
In the end of the novella, Jekyll and Hyde are both destroyed, for the halves of the paradox cannot coexist. It calls for Victorians to find a solution to the separation of science and religion, at least for themselves. I think the story offers up for thought the consequences of progress without God, but others, both then and now, might interpret it differently, and that is part of the mystery of myth-it offers answers while still asking the reader to figure it out for themselves. Its true value lies in the asking of questions.
The form of the novel itself also has social significance. By using the form of “case study”, Stevenson places the novellas rhetoric firmly in the most sensationalistic form of the gothic thriller. Indeed, the purpose of the gothic genre is to emphasis psychological depth, emotion, and interiority, showing mystery and often provoking fear, while, as Mighall suggests, science “attempts to contain fear and offer a rational explanation for all phenomena” (Stiles, 888). But, as Stiles proposes, “the fragmentary, epistolary structure of the Gothic novella…neatly coheres with the traditional components of the case study” (889), so perhaps the two have more in common than initially thought. Anytime a novel attempts to deal with the psychology of human beings, it makes itself ready to be interpreted mythically. Yet the novel itself is fragmented and the same way that science and religion were professionally split. But unlike the two conflicting world-views, the novel paradoxically brings them together through its form only to split them again in Dr. Jekyll. It is interesting to note that, for critics of the time, the novel is praised for “its originality of literary expression” (Academy, 93).
Modern literary critics have begun to see the large scale consequences of Jekyll and Hyde, in particular observing the ways Stevenson may have absorbed contemporaneous scientific thought and processed it through his imagination, and how his novel affected later scientific understandings:
Stevenson’s work does much more than simply reflect the case studies upon which it is loosely based. In fact, Stevenson’s masterpiece creatively intervenes in late-Victorian debates about dual personality and its alleged cause, bilateral brain hemisphere imbalance…Jekyll and Hyde “could well have affected how some clinicians subsequently viewed their cases”. Stiles, 881
This shows how those in the society were trying to process the lessons of Stevenson’s novel. Religion was removed from the conversation. No longer was dual personality an imposition of demonic influences, or a punishment for heresy against God (as it might have been under Marlowe’s Faustian paradigm), for science and religion were no longer “assumed to be twin facets of the same truth” (Fyfe). In fact, as critic Anne Stiles pointed out, scientists at the time believed Stevenson should make his novella less moral and more scientific: “Myers’s [a scientist] comments demonstrate his own familiarity with the case of Felida X…and show that he urged Stevenson to make his novella conform more fully to contemporary scientific accounts of dual and multiple personality” (Stiles, 893). This shows that science informed Stevenson’s novel, but was slightly out of the Lacanian Real Order, and must be in order to be mythic. The double brain is a scientific parallel to the mythical significance of the novel.
In conclusion, “either the story was a flash of intuitive psychological research, dashed off in a burst of inspiration; or else it was the product of the most elaborate forethought, fitting together all the parts of an intricate and inscrutable puzzle” (The Times), an idea supported by Stevenson himself. But perhaps the origin doesn’t matter. For Victorians found in Stevenson “something not quite human in your genius” (Letters, Symonds, 1886) and had to wrestle with the issues he raised. It is no wonder, in light of the conflicts in the scientific and religious communities, that late-Victorians struggled with rectifying the two bodies of thought. In light of previous relationships of science and religion explicated in the earlier versions of Faustus, the conflicting nature of Dr. Jekyll represented the fragmentation of the majority of Victorian society. Stevenson’s use of contemporaneous scientific knowledge, funneled through his unsolidified thoughts on morality, may have affected scientific discourse long after his novella was published. To this day, we still say “he’s a regular Jekyll and Hyde” to signify a person with a split personality or a devious side which they hide, and modified versions of the novella continue to resurface in various media . In these ways, it is clear that our postmodern society, some hundred and ten years later, still wrestles with these very themes, awaiting a new myth, a new Dr. Faustus or Dr. Jekyll, to raise the questions our society is too terrified to ask.
Bibliography
Barthes, Roland; Lavers, Annette, trans. Mythologies. Hill and Wang, New York. 1957. 1972.
Bressler, Charles E., Literary Criticism: An Introduction to Theory and Practice. 3rd Edition. Prentice Hall, 2003.
“Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde”. The Academy, No. 849, 11 Aug 1888. The Stage.
Fyfe, Aileen. Van Wyhe, John. “Victorian Science and Religion” modified 11 June, 2002.
Gates, Barbara T. “Nell, Quilp, and Accidental Suicides in Dickens's The Old Curiosity Shop” 2001. University Scholars Programme at the National University of Singapore,
Hart, Thomas E. “The Natural Theology of Paley” 27 February 2002,
James, Henry. Partial Portraits. London, Macmillian, 1894, 169-71.
May, Rollo. The Cry for Myth. W.W. Norton and Co. New York. 1991.
Morley, John. Death, Heaven and the Victorians. University of Pittsburgh Press. Great Britian, 1971.
Muller, Max. “The Philosophy of Mythology,” The Science of Religion. London. 1873.
“New Novels”. The Academy, No. 716, 23 Jan 1886.
Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft. Frankenstein: or, the Modern Prometheus. University of California Press. 1818. 1984.
Stevenson, Robert Louis. The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Bantam Pathfinder Edition, New York. 1886. 1967.
Stiles, Anne. “Robert Louis Stevenson’s Jekyll and Hyde and the Double Brain.” SEL 46. Autumn 2006.
Symonds, John Addington. The Letters of John Addington Symonds, ed. Herman M. Schueller and Robert L. Peters. Detroit, Wayne State University Press, 1967-69. III, 120-121. Letter to Robert Louis Stevenson, 3 March 1886.
Unsigned, The Times, 25 Jan 1886.
Endnotes
“Depend upon it, there is mythology now as there was in the time of Homer, only we do not perceive it, because we ourselves live in the very shadow of it, and because we all shrink from the full meridian light of truth” (Muller, 353)
We still use Freud, of course, as the main source of psychoanalytical criticism, but it has been used effectively by Gilbert and Gubar in their book “The Madwoman in the Attic” (1979) with a feminist twist.
See also Nancy Armstrong’s comments on fragmentation in the Victorian novel in her essay “Feminism, Fiction, and the Promise of Utopia in Dracula”
Real Order: “According to Jacques Lacan, the Real Order is the third stage of psychic development and consists of the physical world, including the material universe and everything in it. It also symbolizes everything a person is not, and therefore objects within the Real Order continually function as symbols of primordial lack, leading to psychic fragmentation” (Bressler, 282).
I recognize that this is a gross over-simplification of the time period, but there is already so much excellent scholarship about 19th-century science and religion that it seemed redundant to explicate it here, but I wanted to give you a sense of the trail of the conflict that I believe had the most influence on the need for new myth.
We might recognize this as intelligent design today.
This idea was supported by sentiments left over from the Romantic era, which prided the intelligence of the heart and of feeling, giving intuition and subjective experience as valid a stance as many sciences (Morley 104).
This was said by Robert Angus in The Great Anti-Christian Delusion of Scripture as quoted in Morely, 126.
And grew out of each other, in the case of Spiritualism.
Indeed, like in the Shelly’s Frankenstein, the audience is too nervous to see the deus ex machina. Shelly avoids the idea all together by having her protagonist “collect the instruments of life around me, that I might infuse a spark of being into the lifeless thing that lay at my feet” (Shelley, 51). The authoress denies the reader the secrets of the transformation which would lead “to your destruction and infallible misery” (47) thus safeguarding the reader from knowledge that would ultimately destroy any who tried to use it, denying Mephistopheles his opportunity to bargain.
Though perhaps this is the wrong word, considering the Victorian common usage. I do not mean to imply that the myth became more refined as time went on. Rather, that the myth responds to the age in which it belongs. But perhaps this is an attempt on my part to deny the Faustian linear thinking and embrace Apollonian ideas instead.
The trail continues with Thomas Mann, who wrote wrote Dr. Faustus in 1947 (May, 218).
I would argue that Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus, published in 1818 is a variation on the myth which guided late-Romantic thinking.
For the purposes of the argument, I am not including any of the queer-theory readings which the majority of Victorians would probably not have read into the text.
“The butler’s theory is that his master has been murdered, and that the murderer is in the room, personating him with a sort of clumsy diabolism” (emphasis mine, Partial Portraits, James, 169, 1849).
Daniel Quilp is a character in Dickens novel “The Old Curiosity Shop” (1841). He is described as “deformed both inside and out” who serves as the barometer of evil for all the characters, and dies by drowning himself.
And Victor Frankenstein.
In thinking, in particular of “Jekyll and Hyde” the musical, and “Mary Reilly”, a film starring Julia Roberts and John Malkovitch from the maids point of view.