Hyding the Subject?: The Antinomies of Masculinity in The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde

Abstract

The story of the story begins with a dream. As the narrative of its origins would have it, the idea for The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde first infected its author's feverish imagination as he wrestled with the tubercular illness that haunted him throughout his adult life. Waking amid the tangled accoutrements of his sick bed, Stevenson purportedly discerned the oneiric lineaments of the tale and in a fit of verbal passion birthed the first incarnation of the monstrous double being Jekyll/Hyde. However, on showing the manuscript to his wife, who seems to have been a rather judgmental woman, Stevenson found that she did not look favorably on his new literary progeny, and so he regrettably consigned his textual newborn to the fire. Yet, fortunately for us, the impecunious writer could not afford to let a good idea go unsold and so Jekyll/Hyde passed through the flames, reincarnated in 1886 in the famous form that we know today.1 It is tempting to view the scene of Stevenson's authorial labor as one of male confinement, in which painful flows of paternal blood and mucous (Stevenson's lungs were hemorrhaging at the time) accompany the narrative's genesis, underscoring the somatic nexus from which this tale of hyperembodiments grows. Such an interpretation might direct our attention to the novel's insistent focus on its male characters as a screen for fears about the failure