NoMark 13 | - Freelance Writer
Apr 05, 2016 | #1
Literature Review
Good academic writing relies upon intention in a way that good fiction does not. They are not wholly alien worlds, of course, but good academic writing from a lack of intention is very rare. However, good fiction may result from any mix of intuitive understanding and studied comprehension of narrative. M. Kellen Williams' chief error in "'Down with the Door, Pool': Designating Deviance in Stevenson's Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde" is ascribing intentions to Stevenson and then drawing meaning from those ascribed intentions rather than from the contents of text.
Sometimes, because academic writers often choose areas of personal interest and affection, they are loathe to indicate shortcomings in a writer. A cycle begins where instead of saying, this writer or text has a flaw here, the writer turns the flaw into an intention and then imbues that flaw with comprehensible narrative meaning. This is made easier by the fact that few academic writers want to admit to the happy accidents that sometimes inform creative writing, one that stems from our cultural tendency to see creative people, especially creative men, as world makers, rather than world reflectors who do not have full control over their creative process.
This is particularly notable when in tway Williams investigates the text's failure to describe the physical presence of Hyde, which she places as a cultural phenomenon relevant to a cultural recoil about the sexual body and describes as silence, though Williams does not say how Hyde's body becomes a more sexual body than others, so it would seem to achieve that in Williams' mind simply by being hideous, a connection rife with implication about Williams but which says little about the text.
Returning to Stevenson's attempts to describe Hyde through the words of other characters. The conflict is first a practical one, how does Stevenson describe two men in the same body as looking credibly different from one another. There are elements of the supernatural to Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, but the world Stevenson creates is clearly intended to be one that feels entirely real to the reader. It is a world the reader can believe in and those who inhabit it have no doubts about. The contemporaneous reader of Dr Jekyll was not imagining a distant future, another planet, or even a far away land. To take a turn at assigning intentions, the story was meant in many ways for people like those who appear in it and for them to believe fully in that world. From here flows the first difficulty, how does the author describe one person in two different ways. This problem remains unsolved more than a hundred years later. Filmic versions of Dr Jekyll rely on prosthetics to a degree that effectively obscures the original text.It is also difficult to imagine a modern text that would even dare to make the same claim, that a man could be unrecognizable to friends without prosthetics or makeup. This leads to the second problem, how to have those in the text see the same man under two circumstances, repeatedly, and not recognize him. Interestingly, it seems that Stevenson's problem is resolved by the characters' problem. If the character first fully recognizes both men and secondly is able to describe them, to put their bodies into descriptive words and narrative language, he must see them fully and therefore recognize them. It is textual credibility on the line and textual credibility is maintained by writing human error into the perceptions of the characters rather than "nameless longings" (425).
That Williams sees suppressed longing as the primary intention of Stevenson's "inability to account for Edward Hyde's body" (415) is an error of degree and framing, rather than some hopeless misunderstanding of the text. That the narrative creates longing in the reader by describing a longing for understanding and language in a character is more elemental and less academic. Williams' text seems to be a longing for the academic and for credibility, in and of itself. It is littered with quotes from other writers and other texts. In fact, the first two pages contain only two sentences that are entirely the author's own words.
Williams also follows the academic style of dismissing interpretations other than his own by diminishing their rigor, wholesale, saying that they gloss over actually matters; naturally what actually matters coincides with what interests her (413). Williams being unwilling to admit attitudes on interest, affection, and whim, on his part, or academic rigor on the part of those who see the text differently, hints at an argument of ownership over the text. Interestingly, it seems to be feminist or perhaps womanist, and queered readings of the text to which she ascribes gloss, and against which she posits herself as serious. This foundation, not surprisingly, leads to a reading of the text in which Williams' primary concern seems to be the eradication of uncertainty. This is particularly disheartening in relations to a text like Dr Jekyll, where uncertainty is so fundamental to the text's ability to have emotional realism both in text and to the reader. In this way, Williams' own text seems to be less about Dr Jekyll and more about herself and giving evidence of what she knows while indicating who she knows through extensive quoting. She asserts certainty while evincing uncertainty through heavily quoted, i.e., borrowed, text that indicates a borrowed authority.
Williams refers to both created and potentially incidental uncertainties in the text as persistent silence (426). This also shows that it is Williams' need for certainty and that the need is so great she cannot hear anything in the absence of certainty. That is how she reads the description of struggle and uncertainty as silence or absence rather than a meaningful presence. In this case, the meaningful presence is of uncertainty and in particular of masculine uncertainty in the narrative. Rather than embracing that masculine uncertainty in the author or in the characters who narrate their own experience, it is Williams who transfers the uncertainty onto Hyde's body referring to "Hyde's indeterminacy" (413). It is important to remember that it is not Hyde who is indeterminate, but those who see him, who describe him, and who know him yet fail to know him, in order to maintain the orderliness of their own thinking. That those who know Hyde and Jekyll are refusing to know them as a way of saving themselves is reiterated by the fact Lanyon dies upon achieving full knowledge and so does the body that Jekyll and Hyde both inhabit. Williams would do well to consider that perhaps there is life and happiness is some measure of uncertainty.
Resources
Williams, M. Kellen. "'Down with the Door, Pool': Designating Deviance in Stevenson's.
"Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde". English Literature in Transition. 412-429.