"Dr Jekyll & Mr Hyde" and the Uncanny in Gothic Literature
In honor of halloween month, let's indulge in gothic archetypes with our favorite sicko Sigmund Freud
I love playing detective. For as long as I can remember, I've been fascinated with enigmas, from the hundredth Agatha Christie novel I was reading (although I can never guess the murderer) to the CW thriller-teen TV show was obsessed with. In the literary field, unravelling the layers of meaning in a book is the most riveting experience for me, and sometimes I find myself mesmerised by the depth of a novel.
To me, a good novel is one that allows multiple and extensive interpretations. One that has several elements whose thematic, aesthetic, philosophical and moral complexity enables endless reflection. As you can see, I actually do like to think. That being so, when I read R. L. Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, I noticed it checked all the boxes since I’m here - 4 months later - not only thinking but writing about it.
If you’ve read the book, you may know that there are many interpretations of it, from homoerotic subtexts to the anxieties of an increasingly globalized England in the 1890s. The plot is rather simple: Henry Jekyll is a very respectable doctor and scientist who finds himself in a difficult situation. Narrated first by Lanyon and Utterson who also act as detectives, they believe a bizarre criminal named Edward Hyde is blackmailing their old friend Jekyll. Mr Hyde is so much the primitive troglodytic criminal type that even his mere presence causes a strong reaction of revulsion in any who encounter him.
Through a shocking letter, we discover in the end that Jekyll and Hyde are the same person: the doctor created a potion that allowed him to transform into someone else - Mr Hyde - so he could relish in “the evil side of his nature” because of an addiction to “unspeakable pleasures”. What such terrible and inescapable pleasures are these, Stevenson never tells us. But the seriousness of the matter is evident, as Jekyll goes so far as to risk his own life in a dangerous experiment to keep indulging in supposedly atrocious activities.
While trying to figure out the mysteries of Jekyll and Hyde, I came across a possible connection between the story and a concept from psychoanalysis created by Ernst Jentsch and later developed by Sigmund Freud named "The Uncanny". As I said before, there are many interpretations of the book and none of them is wrong. So I decided to explain my view through this concept, regarding fear, otherness and “The Double”, and how it all connects with the gothic genre as a whole.
I. What Is The Uncanny?
This psychoanalytic theory I’m applying to the novel comes from Freud’s essay The Uncanny (Des Unheimilich) from 1919. This is one of Freud's strangest essays and it is about a particularly intense experience of strangeness. Hélène Cixous describes The Uncanny as itself uncanny, treating it “less like an essay than like a strange theoretical novel”.
The Uncanny was inspired by another essay by a lesser-known psychiatrist named Ernst Jentsch on a topic that was relatively new, and it revolves around a disturbing story by the romantic writer E. T. A. Hoffmann titled The Sandman. The majority of Freud’s essay is a commentary on Hoffman's story as an exercise in psychological Gothic, compelling Harold Bloom to say that “for once Freud allows himself to be a useful practical critic of an imaginative story”.
Much of the modern critical literature on Gothic is indebted to Freud’s interpretation, for it is not only a theoretical commentary on the power of strangeness but one of the weirdest texts in the Freudian oeuvre. The biggest difference between both psychoanalysts is that Jentsch's thesis states that the uncanny derives from intellectual uncertainty, and Freud’s thesis is that the uncanny derives from repressed childish fears (typical)
One of the earliest psychological investigators of the aesthetic, Edmund Burke, proposed in his essay A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757), that beauty stimulates love, but that the sublime excites horror. While beauty relaxes, the sublime brings tension. In this essay Freud, like Burke, surpasses an idea of aesthetics “restricted to the theory of beauty”, as he puts it, to explore the aesthetics of anxiety. Freud’s goal with The Uncanny is to explore wishful fears.
II. Aspects of The Uncanny and Successful Horror Devices
As a fan of the horror and gothic genre, I think successful terror comes not from jumpscares or ugly bloody demons, but a sensation of eeriness or uneasiness. It’s like feeling confused because you know that "something is wrong with that house/person/doll/dog" and the cause of this feeling is impalpable. Not knowing is the scariest feeling of all.
Hence, one could say that strangeness, as in something that evokes a perception of otherness which we cannot comprehend, is what we fear most. In the novel, every time Hyde appears in the company of someone, he is described as having a “haunting sense of unexpressed deformity with which the fugitive impressed his beholders”, like everyone who meets him feels revulsion but is rarely able to formulate precisely. We only get a detailed account of his appearance in Lanyon’s narration, and it’s dreadful:
“He was small, as I have said; I was struck besides with the shocking expression of his face, with his remarkable combination of great muscular activity and great apparent debility of constitution [...] This person (who had struck me in what I can only describe as a disgustful curiosity) was dressed in a fashion that would have made an ordinary person laughable; [...] this ludicrous accoutrement was far from moving me to laughter. Rather, as there was something abnormal and misbegotten in the very essence of the creature that now faced me - something seizing, surprising and revolting.”
These characteristics can be summarized in one word: uncanny. There's something unhuman about Hyde that makes one uncomfortable and has a supernatural potential (“supernatural” as in what goes beyond naturalistic causality). Rationally, no matter how weird he is, the brain would still read him as a person. However, his appearance and behaviour make the characters around him question their rationality, allowing irrational thoughts as the existence of fantastical or monstrous beings. The uncanny, then, would be like if our childish fantasies and fears appear more real and true than our rational adult worldviews. The difference is that children’s fairy tales cannot be uncanny, because this genre never asks us to believe that what we are seeing relates in any way to our reality.
Thus, the supernaturalism of the fairy tale does not inspire a sense of the uncanny because there is no conflict of judgement. The same, Freud argues, can be said of the supernatural in Homer or Shakespeare. Hence, the reader adjusts their judgement to the conditions of a writer's fictional reality:
“the souls in Dante's Inferno or the ghostly apparitions in Shakespeare's Hamlet, Macbeth or Julius Caesar may be dark and terrifying but in the end, they are no more uncanny than, say, the serene world of Homer's gods”
In Stevenson’s book, the situation is quite the opposite. The narration being in report form (like a true crime story), intentionally leads our confrontation with someone (or something) like Mr Hyde as a scientific possibility, which is enough to make any reader at least creeped out by the idea:
“Nowadays we no longer believe [in childish fantasies], we have surmounted such ways of thought; but we do not feel quite sure of the new set of beliefs, and the old ones still exist within us, ready to seize upon confirmation.
[...]
The situation is altered as soon as the writer pretends to move into the world of common reality… He takes advantage, as it were, of our supposedly surmounted (or overcome) superstitious-ness; he deceives us into thinking that he is giving us the sober truth, and then, after all, oversteps the bounds of possibility”.
III. The Repressed Self as an Image of Monstrosity
In The Uncanny, Freud tried to convey the idea of “something that was long familiar to the psyche and was estranged from it only through being repressed”, which then he applies to his general theory of the self: what might be hidden within us that suddenly comes to light and frightens us?
The potion created by Jekyll releases the evil side of his nature and he becomes Hyde. Later on, Hyde has come to dominate the pair, and the transformations begin to happen out of the Doctor’s control - now he’s desperately trying to repress it by taking other substances, but it doesn’t work. The only way out for Jekyll is suicide because he cannot contain his wretched alter-ego anymore (who’s out and about committing murder), and ultimately the Doctor is consumed by guilt and regret.
The fact that Hyde gradually takes control of Jekyll and slowly overcomes the Doctor’s conscience is a clear metaphor for what happens if we do not cultivate our virtues. Stevenson is not arguing for complete erasure of the amoral side, because it’s impossible, but rather recognizes the ambivalent nature of human beings, and how the pursuit of balance between the “good” in our personality and the inevitable “evil” is key to having at least a bearable existence.
The main conclusion is that within us is a primitive, violent, and immoral savage, only waiting for an opportunity to escape moral and social restraints. As Jekyll said: “Evil besides had left on that body [Hyde’s] an imprint of deformity and decay”. What motivated Jekyll to pursue this experiment was first and foremost the suffering caused by his repressed wishes. He desperately wanted to break free from himself, specifically from the socially constructed persona of respectable Dr Jekyll. This idea isn’t new. It goes back all the way to greek bacchanals, which inspired another novel that I really love, The Secret History. In it, Donna Tartt wrote: “our own selves make us most unhappy, and that’s why we’re so anxious to lose them, don’t you think?”
So what Jekyll does is conceive a way where he can completely separate from his mundane self, and liberate what is repressed inside. Interesting to note that not necessarily what would be revealed is a cursed version of the self. The Doctor in his confession letter states:
“the drug had no discriminating action; it was neither diabolical nor divine; it but shook the doors of the prisonhouse of my disposition; and like the captives of Philippi, that which stood within ran forth”
The uncanny, then, is associated with moments when an author, fictional character or reader experiences the rescue of the primitive in an apparently modern and secular context. Yet, according to Freud, this is also a remnant from the forsaken psych of childhood, carrying the Gothic imprint of man’s earliest terrors and desires.
IV. Psychoanalysis and the Gothic Genre
Another element of the uncanny is the sense of simultaneous familiarity and unfamiliarity. The word “unheimlich” can also be understood as “unhomely/unfamiliar”, and it’s a concept very common in gothic literature, for example, when a character perceives a strangeness in something or someone which was common or “familiar” before. In Hyde’s case, familiarity is his primarily human form, and unfamiliarity is his primitive, bestial mannerisms, leading to a sentiment of uneasiness and questions as to what is real.
Numerous horror tropes use this device, i.e., the strangeness aroused by almost-human figures, like the fear of clowns, dolls, wax figures, ghosts, mirrors, and the most important one for our thesis: The Double, which I will discuss next.
As I mentioned earlier, Freud and Jentsch both used as an example of “the uncanny” Hoffman’s horror tale The Sandman, which portrays an automaton girl and a recurring theme of faces without eyes, approaching the uncanny from two sides: with the automaton, we have an almost (but not quite) human machine, while the eyeless faces capture something at first comforting and familiar as a human face and turn it into something gruesome by removing the eyes.
Speaking of eyeless faces, I (and probably you too) instantly remembered the movie Coraline, which to me is the perfect definition of what uncanny is. In it, the namesake protagonist discovers a secret door in her house, which takes her to a place that is a copy of her own neighbourhood (like the upside-down in Stranger Things). This duplicated world is populated by “clones” of her family and neighbours, and everything is pretty much the same except for one thing: they all have buttons for eyes. At first, Coraline is not exactly afraid of them, but she thinks they’re weird, and the strangeness it provokes in the spectator is a result of this quasi-human situation, causing the feeling of it all being “uncanny”. It’s the precise example of something being “familiar” and “unfamiliar” at the same time.
At first glance, one observes the tropes that combine the gothic and the uncanny: the unnatural traits of quasi-human beings, automatism, and the duplication of reality. In all of them, the demonic or "unheimlich" encounters could be read as encounters between the "repressed" and the familiar or "heimlich" life of their protagonists (like Coraline's encounter with a reality produced by a resentful inner desire for her family to be different). As to the repetition element, in his essay, Freud says that “unintentional return” may produce “the same feeling of helplessness, the same sense of the uncanny”
Hoffmann’s psychological reimagination of Gothic motifs had a wide influence, notably upon such American gothic writers as Washington Irving, Nathaniel Hawthorne and Edgar Allan Poe. Recounting dreams, doubles, and insanity is a signature of the author, which has attracted much psychoanalytic reading. Aside from Freud’s and Jentsch's, Die Elixire des Teufels influenced Carl Jung’s theory of archetypes.
The Gothic genre relies on uncanny elements (repetition, animism, automatism, uncertainty etc.) so it can successfully excite the feelings of the reader (or spectator). In order to achieve this goal, the writer needs to have a good comprehension of human psyché, since what we fear and what makes us uneasy is completely based on that area of our nature. Good horror goes beyond mere fright, it shatters the foundations of reality and makes us lay awake at night - thinking.
V. The Double
The book ends with a statement from Dr Jekyll, in which he says “I learned to recognise the thorough and primitive duality of man; I saw that, of the two natures that contended in the field of my consciousness, even if I could rightly be said to be either, it was only because I was radically both”. The revelation that we were dealing with Jekyll’s alter ego - dealing with a double - implies, among other things, that this duplication of the self is actually a symbol of self-estrangement.
The archetype of The Double would continue as a literary obsession long into the 19th century, with Shelley's Frankenstein, Poe’s William Wilson, Dostoevsky’s The Double, Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray and more subtle works like Brontë's Jane Eyre. Literary critic Karl Miller claims that “the strange figure of the double stands at the start of that cultivation of uncertainty by which the literature of the modern world has come to be distinguished”.
There are similar mirror structures of the “heimlich/familiar” and the “unheimlich/unfamiliar” that could be perceived in the aforementioned Gothic works. In Stevenson’s book, doubles appear everywhere: Jekyll and Hyde, Utterson and Enfield, Utterson and Lanyon, Poole and Utterson. This notion of repetition and parallels, when taken to the psychological sphere, conveys the following idea of The Double and its aspects, according to Freud:
“[...] the spontaneous transmission of mental processes from one of these persons to the other – what we would call telepathy – so that the one becomes co-owner of the other's knowledge, emotions and experience. Moreover, a person may identify himself with another and so become unsure of his true self; or he may substitute the other's self for his own. The self may thus be duplicated, divided and interchanged. Finally, there is the constant recurrence of the same thing, the repetition of the same facial features, the same characters, the same destinies, the same misdeeds, even the same names, through successive generations.”
Alluding to Otto Rank's Der Doppelganger (1914) which suggested The Double as a psychic splitting of the self in order to have a kind of insurance against the fear of death, the essay goes on to give the idea of The Double a central place in the whole experience of modern selfhood:
“[The Double’s] uncanny quality can surely derive only from the fact that the double is a creation that belongs to a primitive phase in our mental development, a phase that we have surmounted, in which it admittedly had a more benign significance. The double has become an object of terror, just as the gods become demons after the collapse of their cult [in modern society]”
Tracing The Double to “a primitive phase in our mental development”, and the uncanniness it evokes to a repetition of childhood fantasies or beliefs surviving from an earlier stage of mental development, which have been discarded or repressed, is similar to the description of Mr Hyde as animalistic and violent, which resembles the uncivilized and primitive impulses of man. Furthermore, the unease of the book comes not just from the supernaturalism of The Double but from the ambiguity of the dynamic between the pair.
Diverging a bit from Rank, Freud claims that when the modern rational individual surmounted the childish primitive phase, the meaning of The Double changed: having once been an assurance of immortality as Rank proposed, it becomes the uncanny announcer of death.
Personally, I find the archetype of The Double incredibly interesting, not only for all the technical reasons we just saw but because I think this creepy je ne sais quoi produced by the uncanniness of such tropes is the most intelligent form of horror. Facing a version of yourself that you can’t control or recognize, releasing a hidden part of you that the world is not supposed to see, it’s a dreadful vulnerability, emotional and psychologically speaking. While reading something like this we may feel uncomfortable on a deeper level, by imagining our “evil” self creeping within: What would happen if we took Jekyll’s potion? Who would emerge?
VI. Finale
It is important to say that although The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde is rich in material for psychological analysis, this does not determine the final reading of the novel. On the contrary, such richness places the book in an atmosphere of various subjective conceptions, without having to conform to a single final explanation. Likewise, the brilliance of the novel in purely literary terms is this ambiguity between multiple possibilities: the story doesn’t offer a resolution to the mystery in the end.
Jekyll’s confession of also being Mr Hyde brings the fantastical into the world of the possible, as it implants supernatural hypothesis in the mundane, a device commonly employed in late Victorian Gothic fiction. Human beings don’t appreciate having their beliefs shattered, we don’t like to question our reality, and that’s exactly what Stevenson - successfully - does.
In the famous preface of The Picture of Dorian Gray, Wilde writes about “the rage of Caliban seeing his own face in a glass”. In Stevenson’s novel, it’s not rage that one feels when looking in the mirror, but fear. Stevenson compels us to imagine our Double, our Mr Hyde, raising questions about our own identities.
The appeal of novels like this is how much we can discover in the process of understanding the book in front of us, even things about ourselves. The eternal quest for meaning allows the proliferation of amusing discussions and perspectives around the novel. Fran Lebowitz once said that “a book is not a mirror, is a door” and as much as I agree with her 99% of the time, I think one could argue that The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde can work as a mirror, even if it’s a distorting one.