The Criminal Aesthetic: Recapturing the Forger at the Fin-de-Siècle

Abstract

While clearly granting the forger a much more central position in its narrative economy than earlier novels, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde nonetheless shows a marked urgency to suppress the forger, to mark him as that “other” counterfeit self and to conceal him within what Elaine Showalter aptly terms “Dr. Jekyll’s closet.” I turn now to two authors whose works allow the forger to come out of the closet, as it were, and take center stage, Thomas Hardy and Oscar Wilde. Hardy’s A Laodicean (1881) and Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891) are remarkably attentive to the typology of the forger operative in earlier fiction, a typology that, as I have shown, persistently envisions the forger as financially and genealogically illegitimate. Like Stevenson, Wilde and Hardy frequently reinscribe this typology to the point of parody, but their highly self-conscious treatment of the forger registers a significant transition of this criminal’s depiction in nineteenth-century narratives, as it serves to overtly question the legitimacy of various social and, indeed, literary fictions themselves.KeywordsMass CulturePure GoldAuthentic IdentityLiterary FictionAuthentic HistoryThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.