Robert Louis Stevenson: Writer of Boundaries

Pious Works: Aesthetics, Ethics, and the Modern Individual in Robert Louis Stevenson's Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde

Pious Works Aesthetics, Ethics, and the Modern Individual in Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde         .       On  May , Jean-Nicolas-Arthur Rimbaud—Charleville malcontent, budding anarchist, future Communard, poet of precocious talent, and not yet seventeen—corresponded with his old schoolmaster Georges Izambard . In what has become known as the “seer” letter, Rimbaud set out his manifesto for modern poetry claiming “Je est un autre” [“I is another,” “I is somebody else”]. Graham Robb, in his authoritative study of Rimbaud, observes that the statement that “has often been treated as a poetic E = mc2” (Robb : ). Rimbaud’s equation is clearly provocative, and as a result has been read in many different ways, “from the banal to the fantastic ” as Robb goes on to point out. It certainly attempts to challenge the assumption of a coherent and autonomous individual identity in Western thought, one that can be traced back to Descartes’ “Cogito ergo sum” from that seminal document for modernity Discourse on Method (), an equation that continues to provoke debate among philosophers and critical theorists in the twenty-first century. For the purposes of the present essay, Rimbaud’s statement is important for the way it disturbs the prevailing concept of the sincerity of the lyric in nineteenth-century British poetry. As a result it also problematizes meditations on the seemingly insoluble connection between art and ethics that critical writing of the century strives to sustain. Significantly enough, Rimbaud’s equation also evokes the theme of doubleness that haunts cultural representation in nineteenth century Britain, one that is evoked in dynamic if problematic ways in fin   . Etching by Mirando Haz from Dr. Jekyll Mr. Hyde and Company, privately printed, . Reproduced by kind permission of the artist. de siècle writing, and in particular Robert Louis Stevenson’s classic tale of “I” being “somebody else,” Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (). Arguably, it is the Romantic poet William Wordsworth, in his preface to the second edition of Lyrical Ballads (), who first attempts to establish and consolidate a connection between ethics and aesthetics for nineteenth-century culture in Britain. His vision of a coherent and morally instructive culture is one that—whether we agree with it or not—still remains resonant today, regardless of developments in critical theory in the academy from the mid-twentieth century onward. Wordsworth claims that “the human mind is capable of being excited without the application of gross and violent stimulants, and he must have a very faint perception of its beauty and dignity who does not know this” (Wordsworth : ). For Wordsworth, culture needs to have an ethical dimension; but he sees the modern reader’s mind reduced to a “savage torpor” because “the increasing accumulation of men in cities, where the uniformity of their occupations produces a craving for extraordinary incident, which the rapid communication of intelligence hourly gratifies. To this tendency of life and manners the literature and theatrical exhibitions of the country have conformed themselves. The invaluable works of our elder writers (I had almost said the works of Shakespeare and Milton) are driven into neglect by frantic novels, sickly and stupid German tragedies, and deluges of idle and extravagant stories in verse” (). This statement can come across as the grumblings of a conservative, provincial, little-Englander: it seems to be nostalgic for a “Golden Age” of English Literature (offering the talismans of Shakespeare and Milton), it laments urbanization over “natural” life and bewails the influence of technology on the modern world. In effect, for culture to have both an aesthetic and ethical value it should be “natural,” incorporating “the spontaneous overflow of powerful emotions” as Wordsworth famously put it (). In effect it is possible to argue, as Neil Sammells does, that the equation “nature plus culture equals an ethical life” turns the interaction between all three into “a kind of moral gymnasium” (Sammells : ). However, it is often easy to overlook how important Wordsworth’s words are in establishing a correspondence between aesthetics and ethics; and it is in the correlation between the two that his vision becomes interesting with regard to this debate. What Wordsworth suggests is that modern culture is affected by a malaise, and one that is not only “sickly,” if not “stupid ,” but intrinsically “evil” (Wordsworth : ). In effect he posits a series of boundaries, based upon doubling, that haunt cultural criticism Walker...