It’s been interesting watching my student Sydney Coleman write her senior project on Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. I can’t help but think that Jekyll’s attempts to suppress his inner Hyde, catastrophic though they are, are preferable to how many Americans these days are indulging in their Hyde sides.
Sydney argues that Robert Louis Stevenson captures the psychological effects of trying to live up to an impossible ideal, that of the Victorian gentleman. The internal pressure to do so was so intense—men could feel a deep shame when they had debased thoughts—that split personalities emerged. As Jekyll puts it,
It was on the moral side, and in my own person, that I learned to recognize 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 … It was the curse of mankind that these incongruous faggots were thus bound together –that in the agonized womb of consciousness, these polar twins should continuously be struggling.
Incidentally, Sydney is exploring the same process with women, arguing that Bertha Mason in Jane Eyre represents a split within the Victorian female psyche. In that case, the split is caused by women’s shame at not being perfect angels of the hearth.
Sydney quotes from a graduate student essay written by my son Toby about the ideal that Victorian men aspired to:
The gentleman should be, according to a compilation from various texts, courteous, affable, kind, deferential, temperate, unassuming, clean, pure, considerate, courageous, understanding, inoffensive, unobtrusive, socially adroit, truthful, civil, circumspect, sympathetic, respectful, unaffected and adaptable.
It sounds like the Boy Scout law.
Imagine if we in America today tried to be gentlemen. Maybe members of Congress wouldn’t shout out “You lie!” at one presidential address (Rep. Joe Wilson), walk out in the middle of another one (Rep. Steve Stockman), or publicly state that they “couldn’t stand” being near Obama (Rep. Kerry Bentivolio). Maybe we wouldn’t have Nevada ranchers and basketball owners spouting racism. Maybe the internet wouldn’t be filled with incessant hate speech. Maybe we wouldn’t see waterboarding and ending all gun restrictions and experimenting with new drug cocktails in the execution chamber.
In my British Fantasy course, I recently taught a very disturbing novel by Angela Carter called The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman. Written in 1972 during the counter culture movement, Carter shows what can go wrong when we suspend our inner censors and let our desires run wild. It wasn’t good doing so in the sixties when many on the Left were defying society propriety and it isn’t good today when many on the Right are following suit.
So while it is true that Jekyll should loosen up, I’d welcome even an uptight Jekyll back in our midst. Where is that British reserve and stiff upper lip when you need it? Too often these days, Americans are living up to the 19th century British caricature of us as crass bumpkins (see Dickens’ Martin Chuzzlewit). Mr. Hyde appears to be running the asylum.
