Robert Louis Stevenson: Writer of Boundaries

Crossing the Bounds of Single Identity: Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and a Paper in a French Scientific Journal

Crossing the Bounds of Single Identity Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and a Paper in a French Scientific Journal            Commenting on the origins of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Stevenson’s wife suggested that the story evolved first of all from the writer’s fascination with Deacon Brodie, combined with thoughts provoked by an article on psychology in a French periodical: “In the room in Edinburgh occupied by my husband as a child, was a bookcase and a chest of drawers made by the notorious Deacon Brodie—the respectable artisan by day, a burglar at night. . . . Years afterwards my husband was deeply impressed by a paper he read in a French scientific journal on sub-consciousness. This article, combined with his memories of Deacon Brodie, gave the germ of the idea that afterwards developed into the play, was used again in the story of Markheim, and finally in a hectic fever following a hemorrhage of the lungs, culminated in the dream of Jekyll and Hyde” (F. Stevenson : xv, xvi). The purpose of the present chapter is to shed some light on this unidenti fied “paper . . . on sub-consciousness” and the way it might be related to Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Judging by the evidence the most credible conclusion is that such an article simply does not exist: in April , less than eight years after the writing and publication of Jekyll and Hyde, a New Zealand journalist asked Stevenson, “Had you heard of any actual case of double personality before you wrote your book?” and received the answer, “Never,” followed by, “After the book was published I heard of the case of ‘Louis V.,’ the man in the hospital at Rochefort. Mr. Myers sent it to me” (Stevenson ).1 Stevenson’s reply seems to allow no appeal: he had not been “deeply   . Etching by Mirando Haz from Dr. Jekyll Mr. Hyde and Company, privately printed, . Reproduced by kind permission of the artist. impressed” by any such paper, had not even read such a paper, indeed he had never even heard of such a case.2 It is a reply that is clearly in contrast with what Fanny Stevenson wrote in , at a greater distance in time and as a witness rather than the person directly involved. If we add to these considerations the fact that elsewhere her testimony is not totally reliable (later in the preface, for example, she claims that the tale was written in three days and rewritten in another three, while Stevenson tells us that it was written over a space of about six weeks, Ltrs : ), the rules of evidence should oblige us to take Stevenson’s version as the most probable. Fanny could easily have confused an article read afterwards with an one read before, an article about a French psychological case with an article written in French. At this point, like the chapter on “Snakes in Iceland” (“There are no snakes in Iceland”), the present contribution could conclude , the shortest chapter in the book. And yet, the French debate on consciousness and personality (carried on in monographs, lectures, general educated conversation, and papers in scienti fic journals) must still remain a significant part of the cultural context for the writing of Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and deserves further investigation. As a student at Edinburgh University (–), as a member of the Speculative Society (–) and as a member of what we might call the “Fleeming Jenkin circle” (from  to about ), Stevenson would have been exposed to contemporary ideas of nonunitary consciousness and personality . Indeed, his interest in psychological questions is clear: he was even secretary of the Psychological Society of Edinburgh for a short time in  (Ltrs : n), a spiritualist society, it is true (despite its name), yet spiritualists were interested in the same phenomena of apparent changes in consciousness and personality in hypnotic and mediatic trances and in somnambulist states as were more scientific psychologists. In his first published book, An Inland Voyage, Stevenson makes a self-analysis of his feelings of alienation from his body as paddling his canoe becomes automatic, observing that “There was less me and more not-me than I was accustomed to expect” (Stevenson a: ). In “Crabbed Age and Youth” published in the same year he talks of how identity is never fixed: “we cannot even regard ourselves as a constant; in this flux of things, our identity itself seems in...