Early in Robert Louis Stevenson’s famous gothic novella, the lawyer Gabriel Utterson reads with offence, indignation and horror the main provision of Dr. Henry Jekyll’s will. In the event of the doctor’s prolonged or unexplained absence, the handwritten legal documents sets out, “Edward Hyde should step into the said Henry Jekyll’s shoes without further delay” (12-13). The image of Hyde stepping into Jekyll’s shoes can be interpreted figuratively, as a metaphor for assuming a different identity or role. However, it is a much more literalinterpretation of the image that informs the current study, which proposes to trace across Stevenson’s novella what happens to the dwarfish, ape-like Hyde when he adopts the techné, that is, the clothing, accoutrements and furnishings, of the late Victorian gentleman.

While some studies of Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde have examined how Hyde embodies Victorian anxieties about atavistic degeneracy, in what follows, the focus is on how the trappings of human civilization actually improve Hyde in specific, socially-approved ways. In this reading, the source of horror is not anxiety over the violent unpredictability of our repressed animal selves but rather the fear that an animal could learn to pass as a human, a social anxiety possible only because of two profound indeterminacies of the late Victorian period: a crisis in the reliability of sartorial codes as markers of class and gender and also a blurring of the ontological boundary between the humans and animals as a result of Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution, first laid out comprehensively in On the Origin of Species (1859).

During the 19thcentury, advances in mass production techniques in the textile and clothing industries radically reduced the cost of fine-lookingclothing, so much so that a member of the middle class, for example, could easily pass as a gentleman. Consequently, Martin Danahay writes, the idea of the gentleman in the late Victorian period was “redefined from a category based on inherited status to one linked to newly acquired capital and thus made an elevated social status theoretically available to anybody with enough money to buy the right clothes” (25). The late nineteenth century in London was also a time of curiosity and anxiety over the constitution of gender and the power of sartorial codes to misrepresent traditional gender roles. Cross-dressing performers, both male and female, enjoyed great success at the time, not just overt travesty performances such as the pantomime dame, but veristic female and male impersonators, such as Vesta Tilley (1864 – 1952) who regularly performed as a refined aristocratic gentleman named “Burlington Bertie.” Outside the theatre, several famous criminal cases of women attempting to pass as men in ordinary, everyday life fascinated all levels of society, at least while their trials lasted. The most famous of these “passing women” was Lois Schwich, a twenty-one year old woman who had passed successfully as a male porter for years, until 1886, the year of the publication of Stevenson’s novella, when she was caught stealing from her employer and her biological gender was revealed. Katie Hindmarch-Watson describes the threat that Schwich’s clothing deception represented: “the passing woman disappeared from view, using her male vantage point to both pass into the privileges of masculinity and undermine the strident cultural rules which kept men and women emphatically separate” (76).The idea that someone could pass as a member of a higher social rank or as the opposite sex destabilized the entire traditional class hierarchy, which depended upon reliable legibility of social status and gender to operate, and threatened the specter of social mobility. Another source of great categorical anxiety was the increasingly blurred species boundary between humans and animals.

Carrie Rohman describes the theory of evolution as “Darwin’s catastrophic blow to human privilege vis-à-vis the species question” (1). She also notes: “Darwin’s insistence that differences between humans and other animals are differences of degree rather than kind radically problematized the traditional humanist abjection of animality” (64). The blurring of boundaries between species was nowhere more fraught than between humans and great apes. For centuries, humans had recognized some connection between humans and apes, based on similar morphologies. The naturalist Carl Linnaeus (1707 – 1778), for example, classified orangutans and humans in the same genus, Homo. Now, however, Darwin’s work provided an objective scientific basis for eliminating the ontological gap between the categories of human and animal. One way that social anxiety over evolution manifested at the time was a rise in belief in atavism, which explained criminality as a reversion by humans to a more primitive or animal state. The Italian criminologist Cesare Lombroso (1835 – 1909), whose theories were gaining traction in England at the time of the novella’s publication, describes the criminal as “an atavistic being who reproduces in the person the ferocious instincts of primitive humanity and the inferior animals” (qtd. in Arata, 34).

InStrange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, Stevenson makes Edward Hyde a site of profound indeterminacy and horror by exploiting bothof the categorical crises – sartorial codes and the species boundary – in two related ways: first, by dramatizing the attempt of a highly animalized human to pass as a gentleman; and also, significantly, by dramatizing Hyde’s actual improvement or evolution as the result of the powerful civilizing effect of the clothes, accoutrements and furnishings that constitute his identity. This reading of the novella uses Judith Butler’s concept of “gender performativity,” adapted to a consideration of species. Butler writes:  “gender is in no way a stable identity performance or locus of agency from which various acts proceed; rather, it is an identity tenuously constituted in time—an identity instituted through a stylized repetition of acts” (“Performative Acts” 519). Gender is performative because it has, “no ontological status apart from the various acts which constitute its reality” (Gender Trouble 185). This is to say, gender identity, and also class and species identity, do not exist before or separate for their ongoing performance. An individual’s identity, thus, is indeterminate and always in flux. Butler’s theoretical framework permits a productive reading of Hyde’s performance of class and species in the novella as both of these conceptual categories, and the hierarchies they reinforced, were also ultimately indeterminate and in flux during the late Victorian period.

Hyde Fails to Pass

In Stevenson’s novella, when Hyde is first incarnated by Jekyll’s chemistry, he is not fully formed. Jekyll describes him as “less robust and less developed than the good [side] which I had just deposed” (80). Hyde is notably slighter than Jekyll, variously described as: “dwarfish” (19), a “very small gentleman” (27), “particularly small” (30) and “so much smaller, slighter and younger than Henry Jekyll” (80). Hyde is physically distinguished in animal terms. He is “troglodytic” (19), a “monkey” (57) and his gait and behavior are characterized more ape than human. He has “an odd, light footstep” (17), his steps fall “lightly and oddly, with a certain swing” (59). He has a “savage laugh” (19), screams with “animal terror” (59-60), expresses “ape-like fury” (28), does “ape-like tricks” (96) and has “ape-like spite” (97). Jekyll is Hyde’s “more upright twin” (77), placing Hyde firmly behind him in evolutionary terms. There seems little doubt Stevenson intended for Hyde, who conceals an “animal within” (91), to be read as the embodiment of humanity’s animal side. Yet when the animal Hyde wears the clothes of a gentleman, he can pass as a gentleman, such is the power of Victorian clothing codes to constitute the performance of class identity. Utterson’s companion, Richard Enfield, upon encountering Hyde, refers to him with ease, as “my gentleman,” even after Hyde has trampled a young girl “like some damned Juggernaut” (6). That Hyde retains his status as gentleman in the wake of ungentlemanly conduct demonstrates the power of clothing to perform class. Hyde’s performance of class, however, works only at a careful distance (at least at the start of the novella). When Enfield comes close enough to see Hyde’s face, he experiences extreme cognitive dissonance, between Hyde’s gentlemanly attire and his obviously animal body. Enfield is simply unable to describe Hyde. More significantly, he unable to explain this incapacity: “There is something wrong about his appearance; something displeasing; something downright detestable. I never saw a man I so disliked, and yet I scarce know why. He must be deformed somewhere; he gives a strong feeling of deformity, although I couldn’t specify the point” (10). Utterson later experiences the same inexplicable incapacity:  “[Hyde] gave an impression of deformity without any nameable malformation” (19). The mismatch between Hyde’s gentlemanly attire and his animal body results in an irresolvable aporia. Victorians at this time would have been familiar with imagery of animals wearing clothes, from soap advertisements or from performances in menageries, where chimpanzees and orangutans “ate with table utensils, sipped tea from cups, and slept under blankets” (Ritvo 31). But such spectacles were for entertainment and, like theatrical cross-dressing performances, clearly framed as impersonation. Hyde, on the other hand, is trying to passas a gentleman. He wishes his performance to be believed.  His human clothing therefore conceals his animal body but leaves a dissonant remainder to those unaware of the underlying deception. Interestingly, when “Great White Hunter” Paul du Chaillu (1831 – 1903) encountered a gorilla in Africa for the first time, and attempted to decode its uncanny combination of human and animal qualities, like Enfield and Utterson, he was also lost for words. Of the great ape, he wrote: “no description can exceed the horror of its appearance” (Sorenson 683).

InStrange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, the dissonance that Hyde’s identity performance engenders is sometimes so profound, it causes physical reactions in his observers – Enfield breaks out in a sweat (6) – and inspires irrational hatred and a desire to do him violent harm. Enfield takes a “loathing to my gentleman at first sight” (7), while the city doctor arriving on the scene of the trampled girl “[turned] sick and white with desire to kill [Hyde]” (7). An encounter with Hyde, in person or merely by report, leaves a person wracked by indeterminacy. Utterson, for example, is thrown into epistemological and ontological crisis. Sleep provides “little ease to his toiling mind, toiling in mere darkness and besieged by questions” (15). He can no longer rely upon a person’s clothes or their body accurately to reflect the identity of their wearer, but he cannot understand why: “And still the figure had no face by which he might know it; even in his dreams, it had no face, or one that baffled him and melted before his eyes” (16). Stevenson establishes the importance of legible bodies to Victorian society by deploying several clearly legible bodies across the narrative: “you could see by his looks” that Jekyll has a warm affection for Utterson” (23); Poole’s “appearance amply bore out his words” (50); Dr. Lanyon “had his death-warrant written legibly on his face” (41) and so on. Mr. Hyde’s body is clearly not one of them. Yet.

Hyde Evolves

Given the growing popularity of atavism as a theory of criminality, it is easy to imagine discerning readers of the novella seeing Hyde’s animality as an externalization of his physical and moral degeneracy, that is, a regressive devolution to a baser animal state. This interpretation becomes increasingly appropriate as Hyde’s depraved acts multiply and rise to bloody murder. However, Stephen Arata observes that, despite Hyde’s violent actions, in some ways, he is actually improving. For Arata, this is a main source of horror in the work: “not that the professional man is transformed into an atavistic criminal, but that the atavist learns to pass as a gentleman” (39). Although Hyde was born “less developed” than Jekyll, he soon begins to grow. As Jekyll observes:  “That part of me which I had the power of projecting, had lately been much exercised and nourished; it had seemed to me of late as though the body of Edward Hyde had grown in stature, as though (when I wore that form) I were conscious of a more generous tide of blood” (85-86). But Hyde also evolves intellectually, culturally and emotionally, and his identity as a gentleman is consolidated by the stylized repetition of gentlemanly acts and use of techné. For example, while Jekyll, in anticipation of vice, furnished Hyde’s apartment in Soho, Hyde adds a “good painting” (32), evidence of his refining taste in art, and keeps a fine wine cabinet. Utterson ascribes the tasteful painting to Jekyll, “who was much of a connoisseur” (32). However, in a debate about Hyde with a reader of the novella, Stevenson insisted Hyde himself bought the painting (Arata 35). Hyde also appears to learn from the murder of Sir Danvers Carew. As Jekyll writes: “Hyde in danger of his life was a creature new to me; shaken with inordinate anger, stung to the pitch of murder, lusting to inflict pain. Yet the creature was astute; mastered his fury with great effort of the will” (Stevenson 93). Hyde has learned from his encounter with Carew to control his violent impulses.

Hyde also develops deeply felt emotions other than anger and fear, such as sadness. Poole tells Utterson outside the sealed cabinet: “Once I heard it weeping!” He compares Hyde to a “lost soul” and experiences empathy for Hyde: “I came away with that upon my heart, that I could have wept too” (59). Dr. Lanyon also empathizes with Hyde and expresses “a curiosity as to his origin, his life, his fortune and status in the world.” Hyde is no longer anathema to humankind but relatable. In fact, after Hyde grabs at Lanyon impatiently, the doctor attempts consciously to improve Hyde’s manners by modeling good behavior:“‘Come, sir,’ said I. ‘You forget that I have not yet the pleasure of your acquaintance. Be seated, if you please.’ And I showed him an example, and sat down myself in my customary seat.”Hyde, in turn, responds with relative grace and humility: “‘I beg your pardon, Dr. Lanyon,’ he replied civilly enough. ‘What you say is very well founded; and my impatience has shown its heels to my politeness’” (71). It can also be argued that Hyde, in his final moments, before Poole and Utterson break open the door of the cabinet, has also developed a sense of guilt or, at least, personal accountability. His final exclamation—“Utterson, for God’s sake, have mercy!”—constitutes an earnest plea to be spared just punishment for his acts (59). Hyde’s most ennobling evolutionary advance, however, is the manner of his death.

After Poole breaks down the door of the cabinet, the tableau within suggests strongly that Hyde took his own life by eating a poisonous chemical. The novella later establishes that Hyde’s suicide was honorable, the nobler of two outcomes imagined by Jekyll at the conclusion of his “Full statement”: “Will Hyde die upon the scaffold? or will he find courage to release himself at the last moment?” (97) Hyde, the “damned Juggernaut” that trampled a young girl and murdered Sir Danvers Carew has evolved a sense of accountability and chosen bravely to end his own life rather than prolong his inevitable doom. His surroundings, his techné, especially his accoutrements and arrangement of furniture by the fireside paint a picture of quiet introspection: “the easy-chair was drawn cozily up, and the tea things stood ready to the sitter’s elbow, the very sugar in the cup” (62). Also, despite Jekyll’s expressed fears, Hyde does not destroy his “Full Statement,” which lay in plain view all this while, “uppermost” on the business desk. Hyde has no desire to conceal the truth of what has passed and his part in it. Little of the cabinet’s mise en scènesuggests the violent, animal Hyde. In fact, it seems more appropriate to Utterson, who spends his repressed evenings, piously hunched over the fireplace. As Arata notes, Hyde “comes eventually to embody the very repressions Jekyll struggles to throw off” (39).

The extent of Hyde’s evolution can be discerned from the absence, in the later chapters, of the cognitive dissonance that Hyde’s identity performance previously elicited. Dr. Lanyon experiences no confusion when describing Hyde’s face: “I was struck besides by the shocking expression on his face, with his remarkable combination of great muscular activity and great apparent debility of constitution” (70). It is not an attractive sketch, but Lanyon does not have difficulty finding the words to draw it. When Utterson and Poole encounter Hyde’s body in the cabinet, they “drew near on tiptoe, turned it on its back and beheld the face of Edward Hyde. … The cords of his face still moved with the semblance of life, but life was quite gone” (60). Like Lanyon, Utterson has no difficulty describing Hyde’s appearance. In the end, he is clearly legible, as society demands: “Utterson knewhe was looking at the body of a self-destroyer” (60; emphasis added).

Conclusion

InStrange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, Stevenson exploited as a source of horror certain prevailing late Victorian indeterminacies over clothing codes and the species boundary. He dramatized the threat of an animal closing the ontological gap that segregated the categories of human and animal, which was essential to maintaining important ideological taxonomies and social hierarchies. That Hyde’s dissonance has resolved by the end of the story suggests he has bridged that ontological gap. He has evolved physically and intellectually from a dissonant void that repelled description to a definite form that can be comprehended, circumscribed and recuperated by a Victorian gentleman. Hyde becomes a gentleman but only by the complete abjection of his animality. And his reward is confinement, the trappings of professional repression and death. This prompts one final question: if Hyde’s indeterminacy was a main source of horror in the novella, then does the resolution of the dissonance between his human clothing and animal body suggests an end to his embodied indeterminacy and a premature end to the horror of the novella?  Stevenson’s specific treatment of the ending of the narrative suggests otherwise.

Hyde has clearly been punished for his transgressions, an ending required by late Victorian gothic fiction. Mario Ortiz-Robles describes Victorian readers as being “invested in spectacularly staging the permeability or porosity of the border that separates human and non-human, only then to restore that border with all the force of an overdetermined prohibition” (20). While Stevenson seems to subscribe to this narrative requirement, the two chapters that follow Hyde’s death—first-person witness accounts by Dr. Lanyon and Jekyll himself—undermine any ultimate sense of closure by offering an ending but not a conclusion. On the final page of the novella, Jekyll ends his “Full Statement” with a strongly conclusive tone: “Here then, as I lay down the pen and proceed to seal up my confession, I bring the life of that unhappy Henry Jekyll to an end.” But in the line immediately preceding, Jekyll observes that “what is to follow concerns another than myself” (97). This line reminds the reader that Jekyll’s “death” is not Hyde’s death and that Hyde lives on past the end of Jekyll’s “Full Statement,” which is to say, beyond the end of the book. Final closure is denied and indeterminacy restored. Some readers might notice that the narrative ended without returning to the third person narrative of the protagonist Utterson, to see his reaction after reading Lanyon and Jekyll’s disturbing accounts. This omission is especially noticeable given the fatal reaction Dr. Lanyon experienced when he learned Jekyll’s secret: “My life is shaken to its roots. … I feel that my days are numbered, and that I must die; and yet I will die incredulous” (74).  In this manner, at the end of the novella, the reader is left to imagine Utterson’s utter horror while Hyde persists, his earlier death a thing of the past. Hyde, thus, ends the narrative both dead and alive, one final categorical indeterminacy (and source of horror) to ensure the story remains with the reader long after the book has been put down.

Works Cited

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Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble. Routledge, 1990.

—. “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory.” Theatre Journal, vol. 40, no. 4, 1988, pp. 519-531.

Danahay, Martin. “Dr. Jekyll’s Two Bodies.” Nineteenth-Century Contexts, vol. 35, no. 1, 2013, pp. 23-40.

Hindmarch-Watson, Katie. “Lois Schwich, the Female Errand Boy: Narratives of Female Cross-Dressing in Late-Victorian London.” Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, vol. 14, no. 1, 2008, pp. 69-98.

Ortiz-Robles, Mario. “Liminanimal.” European Journal of English Studies, vol. 19, no. 1, 2015, pp. 10-23.

Ritvo, Harriet. The Animal Estate. Harvard University Press, 1989.

Rohman, Carrie. Stalking the Subject: Modernism and the Animal. Columbia University Press, 2009.

Senelick, Lawrence. “The Evolution of the Male Impersonator on the Nineteenth-Century Popular Stage.” Essays in Theatre, vol. 1, no. 1, 1982, pp. 31-44.

Shannon, Brent. The Cut of His Coat: Men, Dress, and Consumer Culture in Britain, 1860-1914. Ohio University Press, 2006.

Sorenson, John. Ape, Kindle Ed., Reaktion Books, 2009.

Stevenson, Robert Louis. Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. 1886. First Vintage Classics, 1991.