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The Monsters, the Men, and the Spaces Between in the Island of Doctor Moreau and Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde

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The Monsters, the Men, and the Spaces Between in the Island of Doctor Moreau and Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde The Monsters, the Men, and the Spaces Between in The Island of Doctor Moreau and Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde by Herman Adriaan Venter Dissertation submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree Magister Artium in the Department of English at the UNIVERSITY OF PRETORIA FACULTY OF HUMANITIES SUPERVISOR: Dr I. Noomé CO-SUPERVISOR: Prof. M. Brown December 2017 UNIVERSITY OF PRETORIA FACULTY OF HUMANITIES RESEARCH PROPOSAL & ETHICS COMMITTEE Declaration Full name : Herman Adriaan Venter Student Number : 29147035 Degree/Qualification: MA (English) Title of thesis: The Monsters, the Men, and the Spaces Between in The Island of Doctor Moreau and Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde I declare that this thesis is my own original work. Where secondary material is used, this has been carefully acknowledged and referenced in accordance with university requirements. I understand what plagiarism is and am aware of university policy and implications in this regard. _____________________________ ______________ SIGNATURE DATE ResPEthics Documentation NE 46/04 05/2004 i Acknowledgements I would like to thank my supervisor, Professor Molly Brown, for cracking the whip when it was needed but also for inspiring me to persevere when times were tough. I will be eternally grateful to my mistress, Carole Godfrey, for her hard work, patience, and for believing in me when I was unable to believe in myself. Without her this dissertation would have remained forever liminal. Sine quibus non ii Abstract In this dissertation I explore the dynamics of how the definition of the human is established and subsequently challenged in both H.G. Wells’s The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896) and R.L. Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886). Late nineteenth-century Europe was a time and place where an exploration of the definition of what it means to be human was particularly uncomfortable. The structures that upheld the then accepted conceptions of the human were under assault by new scientific discourses such as Darwinist theories of evolution, criminal anthropology and degenerationism. I show how the anxieties that these discourses inspired are reflected in the texts, and also examine how the communities in the texts act to reinforce the collapsing definition of what it means to be human. Victorian efforts to resolve this crisis of identity were mainly rooted in attempts to classify the natural world and to find or create some form of stable categorical distinction between the ‘human’ and the Other, or the not-human. The nature of the Other varied widely but manifested in terms of species, race, gender and class, to name but a few categories. The mechanisms through which humans, both as individuals and as communities, created and maintained their ‘humanity’ is examined through the use of theories of the liminal, from Anton van Gennep ([1909] 1960) to Homi Bhabha (1994). The reasons for the fear of the liminal characters are explored through Julia Kristeva’s (1982) notion of the abject – a phenomenon which arises in a confusion of the boundaries and distinctions between the subject and the object, the Self and the Other. Using Jeffrey Jerome Cohen’s (1996) ‘Monster Theory’, I examine what the texts reveal about the society in which the authors were writing and what the appeal or horror of each monster’s particular type of liminality might have been for contemporary readers. In my conclusion I show that the fears and anxieties in Wells’s and Stevenson’s texts are still extant today. The monsters in the texts reflect changing conceptions of what it means to be human. By examining the nature of the fear that these monsters inspire, one can better understand both the readers of the time and the origins of the modern understanding of what it means to be human, what it means to be Other, and the realisation that, ultimately, perhaps we all exist somewhere betwixt and between. Key words: Abject iii Anton van Gennep binary opposition Charles Darwin degenerationism H.G.Wells Homi Bhabha J.J. Cohen Julia Kristeva Kelly Hurley liminal monster R.L. Stevenson Sandor Klapcsik speculative fiction Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde The Island of Doctor Moreau Victor Turner Victorian iv Contents Declaration .................................................................................................................................. i Acknowledgements .................................................................................................................... ii Abstract .................................................................................................................................... iii Chapter 1: Introduction .............................................................................................................. 1 Summaries of the texts and reactions to them ....................................................................... 1 The urge to classify: keeping the Other at bay ...................................................................... 8 Darwin: The great blow to human vanity ............................................................................ 12 The in-between and how to describe it ................................................................................ 14 Understanding how we react to monsters and why we should understand our reactions .... 24 Chapter 2: ‘Being the very model of a modern major genus’: the ideal as opposed to the Other .......................................................................................................... 28 The definition of the ideal is a definition of the human ....................................................... 28 The ideal human is a male (and masculine) human ............................................................. 30 The ideal man is an Englishman .......................................................................................... 31 The ideal Englishman is a gentleman .................................................................................. 33 The ideal gentleman acts like one ........................................................................................ 35 [Aside] An outcast figure serves a purpose ......................................................................... 38 Animal is Other to human .................................................................................................... 39 Female (and feminine) is Other to man ............................................................................... 41 Black is Other to White........................................................................................................ 42 The everyman is Other to the gentleman ............................................................................. 44 An un-genteel man is an Other ............................................................................................ 46 Chapter 3: ‘I know the scientific names of beings animalculous’ – but what are you? The monstrous non-human Other threatens the ideal/Other binary ...................... 52 Hyde threatens the human/animal division .......................................................................... 59 v The beastfolk threaten the human/animal division .............................................................. 66 Chapter 4: ‘I’ve a pretty taste for paradox’: The monstrous human Other threatens the ideal/Other binary ........................................................................................... 86 Hyde threatens the masculine/feminine division ................................................................. 86 The beastfolk threaten the masculine/feminine division ..................................................... 94 The beastfolk threaten racial boundaries ........................................................................... 100 Hyde threatens racial boundaries ....................................................................................... 104 The collapse of notions of class and propriety on Moreau’s island ................................... 109 The collapse of notions of class and propriety in Jekyll’s London .................................... 118 Death devours all divisions ................................................................................................ 126 Chapter 5: Conclusion, or ‘They’re plucky and adventury, but are these novels only relevant to the nineteenth century?’ ............................................................ 131 References .............................................................................................................................. 137 vi List of Figures Figure 1: Original understanding of liminality ........................................................................ 14 Figure 2: Klapcsik’s view of liminality ................................................................................... 21 vii Chapter 1: Introduction ‘It’s ill to loose the bands that God decreed to bind’ (Stevenson, [1886] 1962:2). These ominous words form the first line of the epigraph1 to R.L. Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde.2 The narrative of Jekyll and Hyde is famously concerned with the disintegration of the bands that hold together Dr Jekyll’s psychic unity, but it is also about Jekyll’s desire to loosen the bands of societal obligation placed on him as a Victorian gentleman. The line from Stevenson’s epigraph could be read as a presentiment of the catastrophe that will result from Jekyll’s efforts to escape the social
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