This essay discusses the representation of Victorian ideologies and interpellation in Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. By utilising Louis Althusser’s theories of ideology and interpellation, in combination with a critical understanding of Victorian ideologies as introduced by Rosemary Jann and Jihay Park, this essay aims to analyse the characters’ representation of and submission versus the resistance to these ideologies. Additionally, by analysing whether the characters conform to the Victorian ideologies, introduced by Jann and Park, this essay proposes that non-conformity to ruling ideologies suggests resistance to interpellation, which is what constitutes a bad subject. This analysis lends itself to the discussion of how Althusser’s theories may be used in literary analyses, as well as to the discussion, initiated by Judith Butler, of whether an individual’s deviation from interpellation is possible. This essay argues that Dr. Henry Jekyll and Mr. Gabriel Utterson represent ideological functions by conforming to the Victorian ideologies, which constitute them as submitting to interpellation as good subjects. However, Mr. Edward Hyde’s non-conformity to Victorian ideologies constitutes him as resisting interpellation as a bad subject.

No description available.

Mémoire numérisé par la Division de la gestion de documents et des archives de l'Université de Montréal

This thesis is concerned with the importance of the gaze in fin-de-siecle Gothic. One of the ways in which the importance of the gaze manifests itself is in the central role of the onlooker like Enfield, Utterson or Lanyon in Robert Louis Stevenson's Stange case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886), Prendick In H.G. Well's Island of Dr Moreau (1896), or Harker in Bram Stoker's Dracula (1897). As their appelation suggests, Wells's Beast Men confound the distinction between the human and the animal, which is also the case with 'Beast Men' like Hyde and Dracula. A central concern of the thisis is the perceptual drama that is involved in looking at the spectacle of the monstrous body, for excample, as the onlooker struggles to get to grips with the challenge to representation posed by these 'Beast Men'.

For many years, theorists have turned to popular movies and books to help interpret the difficult principles of Jacques Lacan. However, one story that has gotten very little attention is Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and its derivative body of film adaptations. Both the novella and Rouben Mamoulian’s 1931 film are a small part of an intertextual body of work which contains scenes that play out the Lacanian principles of the mirror stage and the gaze very well. Since art imitates life, an in depth exploration of the way that these scenes play out can illuminate how Lacan’s abstract theories might look in the real life formation of identity and in male/female relations.

No description available.

Literature and medicine are not usually seen as related disciplines, but scholars have already begun producing fruitful scholarship regarding historical and aesthetic interactions between them. This thesis adds to that scholarship by examining medicine and literature in nineteenth-century Britain. More specifically, Thomas De Quincey's Confessions of an English Opium-Eater and Robert Louis Stevenson's Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde both use nineteenth-century medical case conventions to tell their stories. Furthermore, because both works deal with addiction, divided selves, and the power that physical substances can have on morality and character, these two works provide an excellent comparison coming 65 years apart. As such, they are a great point from which to begin looking more closely at how the interactions between medicine and literature evolved during the nineteenth-century in Britain. This thesis examines the role that "scientific" discourse has played in medicine and literature as interpretive disciplines, the rhetorical techniques and innovations surrounding the intersection of the two disciplines, and the authority that each discipline derived by implicitly borrowing ideological assumptions and textual forms from the other. Confessions is a wonderful example of a Romantic, autobiographical text that clearly uses the medical case study conventions; in fact, De Quincey was often cited in the years following the publication of Confessions as an authority on opium and its uses. By the time Jekyll and Hyde was published, however, a work like Confessions could no longer hold its own in medical debates. The professional institutions of medicine and literature had changed too much. Hence, by analyzing these two works side-by-side, I intend to illustrate different narrative approaches to similar issues at the beginning and end of the century. More importantly, I hope to use these texts in conjunction with specific medical case histories to discuss each text's reliance on interdisciplinary authority.

At first glance, Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde is a tale that reinforces binaries. One of these is the self/other binary that is central to David Hume's and Adam Smith's theories of sympathy that conceive of a self imaginatively identifying and experiencing fellow-feeling for an other. However, this notion is complicated because Jekyll and Hyde are the same person. Further, many critics argue that Stevenson actually challenges binary thinking. While Hume and Smith do not challenge the self/other binary in connection with sympathy, trauma theory critics do challenge a self/other binary that lies at the heart of sympathy: the victim/perpetrator binary. Noted trauma theorist Dominick LaCapra develops a method of empathizing called empathic unsettlement where a secondary witness listens with empathy to a victim's traumatic witness while recognizing the difference of his or her position as a witness. He argues that perpetrators may also warrant understanding, but this understanding does not come through empathy. However, one of the hallmarks of empathic unsettlement is that it does not neatly resolve or replace traumatic narratives. Therefore, I argue that empathic unsettlement could also be a useful method for allowing a perpetrator to witness. While practicing empathic unsettlement for a perpetrator may not be worth the risk in real life, performing a thought experiment in literature can test how using empathy might provide a better way to theorize perpetration. Using two witnesses who attempt to practice empathic unsettlement for Jekyll and Hyde, Dr. Hastie Lanyon (who fails), and Mr. Gabriel John Utterson (who succeeds), I will show how empathic unsettlement could be used for both a victim and perpetrator to tease out the complexities of assessing a traumatic situation.

No description available.

M.A. (English) / Victorian studies is a field much-studied and, during the century that has passed since the end of Queen Victoria‘s reign, literary criticism on the subject has been extensive. In the main, however, criticism has tended to focus on the protagonists of Victorian novels, whether to argue that their journeys are immoral, or represent a warning against immorality, or to examine their behaviour and so arrive at conclusions regarding identity. Through a close reading of Oscar Wilde‘s The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891), Robert Louis Stevenson‘s The Strange Case of Doctor Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886), and Bram Stoker‘s Dracula (1897), and by focussing on the reactions and responses of Victorian society (as the texts represent it) to the novel‘s transgressive characters rather than on those characters themselves (as has been the trend) this dissertation moves away from readings of duality and moral judgment and towards a greater understanding of the intricacies of late-Victorian society itself. In addition, and through this process, this dissertation interrogates the bifurcated and contradictory nature of the Victorian moral structure and destabilizes the binary oppositions of character judgment that were so fundamental in its creation. Furthermore, through a discussion of the historical context of the text‘s chosen for this study, this dissertation challenges the formulation and authenticity of Victorian morality by considering the manner in which power informed the behaviour and decisions of middle-class Victorians at the turn of the century. To this end, I will consider how the philosophies of Friedrich Nietzsche, especially those pertaining to power and morality, are invaluable in problematizing the binary system of categorization that so dominated the late-Victorian cultural space. Finally, I argue that the texts I have elected to study represent a climate of unrest and dissatisfaction with the Victorian moral climate at the fin de siècle (or turn of the century) and that they are instrumental in our understanding of that moral climate and the subsequent changes to it.