ABSTRACT HENRY JEKYLL, SHERLOCK HOLMES, AND DORIAN GRAY: NARRATIVE POLITICS AND THE REPRESENTATION OF CHARACTER IN LATE VICTORIAN GOTHIC ROMANCE By Benjamin Daniel O’Dell This thesis explores the function of iconic literary characters in late-Victorian gothic romance as expressed through the contemporary debates they embody as narrative types. Chapter 1 examines the paradoxical position of the Victorian gentleman’s public identity through a reading of Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Chapter 2 analyzes the relationship between Sherlock Holmes’s position on the social periphery and the tale of imperial corruption he exposes in Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Sign of Four. Chapter 3 discusses the dandy’s ambiguous moral state as a product of economic and cultural changes among wealthier residents in London’s West End that were connected to debates about their group’s role in relation to charity, consumerism, and culture. These findings suggest characters that are often read as personifying complex literary aspirations may also be approached productively as vessels that are capable of addressing difficult issues on innocuous terms. HENRY JEKYLL, SHERLOCK HOLMES, AND DORIAN GRAY: NARRATIVE POLITICS AND THE REPRESENTATION OF CHARACTER IN LATE VICTORIAN GOTHIC ROMANCE A Thesis Submitted to the Faculty of Miami University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts Department of English by Benjamin Daniel O’Dell Miami University Oxford, Ohio 2008 Advisor__________________________ Susan Morgan Reader___________________________ Mary Jean Corbett Reader___________________________ Madelyn Detloff Introduction: The Function of Character in Late‐Victorian Gothic Romance ............................................... 1 Chapter One: Incidents and Letters, A Crisis of Publicity in Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde ....................................................................................................................................... 8 Characterizing the City ............................................................................................................................ 13 Private Identities in the Public Realm ..................................................................................................... 24 Conclusion ............................................................................................................................................... 32 Chapter Two: Performing the Imperial Abject, The Ethics of Cocaine in Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Sign of Four ............................................................................................................................................................. 36 A Rumor of War ...................................................................................................................................... 40 Positioning Holmes ................................................................................................................................. 46 Performing the Imperial Abject .............................................................................................................. 55 Conclusion ............................................................................................................................................... 61 Chapter Three: “How Different it Was With Material Things!” Consumer Culture and Social Responsibility in Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray ........................................................................ 64 Picturing Dorian Gray .............................................................................................................................. 66 A World of Things .................................................................................................................................... 71 Picturing the East End ............................................................................................................................. 77 Conclusion ............................................................................................................................................... 85 Afterword .................................................................................................................................................... 86 Works Cited ................................................................................................................................................. 88 ii DEDICATION To my parents, for their guidance, Mike West, for the education, and William Lane, for the inspiration. I am truly grateful for all. iii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I am grateful to Susan Morgan, my thesis advisor, for her clarity, enthusiasm, and vision throughout the writing process. I would also like to thank my committee members Mary Jean Corbett and Madelyn Detloff. Miami University’s English Department has been extremely generous in granting me the time and space necessary to complete this project in a reasonable fashion. I am also thankful for friends and family who have provided countless hours of inspiration and emotional support throughout the completion of this project and, without whom, none of this would be possible. iv Introduction: The Function of Character in Late-Victorian Gothic Romance The doctor, the detective, and the dandy. I begin with these terms because they not only represent three iconic “professions” or social types in the Victorian fin de siècle but because they are synonymous with three prominent literary figures: Henry Jekyll, Sherlock Holmes, and Dorian Gray. Such characters abound in English writing during the final years of the nineteenth century. This is a thesis about their composition and the debates they allow literary narratives to explore. Throughout the chapters that follow, I argue that late-Victorian gothic romance presented the conditions for a shift in the conception of how character works. During this period, the creation of prominent literary personae came to rely less on the personality of their fictional identities and more on their ability to stand in for and elicit reactions to complex social, political, and economic debates. By this I do not mean that these characters are “flat” in the sense E.M. Forster proposes when he states in Aspects of the Novel (1927) that such characters are, in their purest form, “constructed round a single idea or quality.”1 What I mean is rather that the specific manner in which these characters are composed has been directed in such a way so as to deny the evolution of emotional, intellectual, and moral traits in favor of a narrative approach that employs fictional identity as a location for the representation of important social questions. In the final decades of the nineteenth century, character, I suggest, provides a particularly important site for writers to construct difficult arguments. Examining fictional identities with an eye for their manner of composition may provide a useful framework for mapping the narrative politics that inform the relationship between late-Victorian gothic romance and the historical moment it seeks to depict. I approach this study well aware that the critical reception of Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886), Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Sign of Four (1890), and Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891) is extensive. The body of scholarly writing pertaining to these novels not only suggests that they represent three of the most discussed works of English literature from the 1880s and 90s but confirms that they have proven extremely competent in their ability to engender widely varying and highly innovative methods 1 See E.M. Forster, Aspects of the Novel. (1927; rpt. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1954) 103-104. 1 of interpretation. I begin this study aware of this heritage, admiring of it, but wanting to approach these texts in a different way. The terms for current discussions of Victorian romance, gothic or otherwise, a genre that includes not only these novels but also work from Henry Rider Haggard, Bram Stoker, Rudyard Kipling, and Joseph Conrad, range from studies concentrating on the extremely local, which tackle the psychological and sexual impulses and fantasies that these narratives explore, to more global readings that generally locate each novel’s position within the larger discourses of gender, Empire, and class. In the first category, Elaine Showalter, Stephen Arata, and Rachel Bowlby have used the pathologization of literary identities to draw upon a connection between these texts and the individuating dilemmas that inform their production, employing the Gothic’s valorization of the individual to identify a common preoccupation with accompanying issues of cultural purity and health.2 In much the same way, the relation between fictional London and its historical counterpart in the second category has provided a theoretical basis for scholars such as Joseph McLaughlin and Simon Joyce to give shape and coherence to the landscapes upon which these narratives take place, uniting fictional structures with the Victorian public sphere to configure fin-de-siècle London as a space that is both physically and rhetorically uncontrollable in the alterations it produces between individuals, groups, and their environments.3 The common ground between these approaches undoubtedly rests upon the assumption that these novels are not isolated works of popular fiction but in fact rich cultural documents