The Stain on the Mirror: Pauline Reflections in The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde

Abstract

[H]e saw Paul coming, a man small in size, bald-headed, bandy-legged, well-built, with eyebrows meeting, rather long-nosed, full of grace. For sometimes he looked like a man, and sometimes he had the countenance of an angel.--The Acts of Paul and Thecla [W]e cannot even regard ourselves as a constant; in this flux of things, our identity itself seems in a perpetual variation; and not infrequently we find our own disguise the strangest in the masquerade.--Robert Louis Stevenson, Virginibus Puerisque The Strangest Disguise Modern thinkers, from Rene Descartes onward, have often had what can seem like a clear-eyed view of themselves. Viewing the human mind as the of nature, as Richard Rorty puts it, they have included in its reflective field their own pristine images. Descartes thought his self-reflection clear enough to serve as the foundation of an entire philosophical system: was the one thing that could not be doubted, and thus was launched modern philosophy. Immanuel Kant, too, found in the perusal of his own mind sufficient clarity to limn out the entire architecture of reason, drawing on no other source. In the preface to the first edition of Critique of Pure Reason, he wrote that have to deal with nothing save reason and its pure thinking; and to obtain complete knowledge of these, there is no need to go far afield, since come upon them in my own self (10). Subsequently, of course, Friedrich Nietzsche took a Darwinian hammer to the looking glass, arguing that the Cartesian I was only a supposition, an assertion (171). Karl Marx went on to breathe the powers of nature and culture onto the mirror of self-representation, pointing to the real-world conditions under which human consciousness is produced: Consciousness can never be anything else than conscious existence, and the existence of men is their actual life-process (169). The story continues with Sigmund Freud's insistence that self-representation is superficial, Jacques Lacan's claim that it is an effect of language, and Luce Irigaray's perception that it is distorted by gendered conceptions. Given their barrage of damaging blows aimed at the mirror of self-consciousness, such post-Kantian thinkers have shown us an image of ourselves that is unlike both the visual awareness of our appearance and the imagination's projection of our identity. However, the chastening of Descartes' and Kant's self-images, and the breaking of their vainglorious mirrors, did not require much besides a careful reading of St. Paul. Robert Louis Stevenson was, perhaps, among the first to recognize this, or at least the first to encode that recognition in fictional form. In that most Pauline of tales, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, he explores subjectivity in a way that both echoes Paul's text and brings to light the puzzling fecundity of the self. This essay attempts to set up a series of reflections between the texts of Stevenson and St. Paul in order to create an image of the Christian subject. In the process of discovering this image, another reflection is produced--the inversion of William James's account of conversion in The Varieties of Religious Experience. He describes the process as one of the reunification of a divided subject: To be converted, to be regenerated, to receive grace, to experience religion, to gain an assurance [...] are so many phrases which denote the process, gradual or sudden, by which a hitherto divided, and consciously wrong[,] inferior[,] and unhappy, becomes unified and consciously right[,] superior[,] and happy, in consequence of its firmer hold upon religious realities. (189) The subject of Christian conversion that emerges from my exploration moves in the opposite direction--toward the splitting, or disaggregation, of the self. It is precisely this fracturing within the self, and the echoes of St. Paul that can be detected in its delineation, that make Jekyll and Hyde an instructive narrative in the consideration of Christian subjectivity. …