Virginia Woolf, Flush

Read this a while ago, but I've been thinking about it. Could connect it to Don Quixote because there's a wonderful parody of a courtship plot--Flush's emotional investment in Miss Barrett, his desire to protect her, and then his conflict over this with Mr. Browning. Flush is definitely a person, because Flush is really a story about feminism and about running away from Stuffy English Authority To Have Fun In Italy. There's something weird about that, though--writing a story about a helpless dog to show how when Miss Barret's father forbids her from paying the ransom on her helpless dog, he's turning her INTO a dog. Her helplessness was already pretty obvious--was it really necessary to do this? But Woolf isn't afraid of being heavy-handed when she wants to be.

It could also talk to Jekyll&Hyde as a story about Nasty Things That Happen in London. And with all my later-18th/early-19th-century novels about Nasty Things Fathers Do To Daughters.

Robert Louis Stevenson: Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde

It turned out to be a very good text for thinking about how the nineteenth-century novel thinks about selfhood. Dr. Jekyll is a nice man, well respected by his fellow doctors and other professional old single men in London (the character who spends a lot of time investigating his 'strange case' is his friend, the lawyer Mr. Utterson). But Jekyll also has strange tendencies that he worries are evil—he has a "certain impatient gaiety of disposition, such as has made the happiness of many, but such as I found it hard to reconcile with my imperious desire to carry my head high, and wear a more than commonly grave countenance before the public" (ed. Emma Lately, 60). There's no way of telling what, actually, Jekyll's "impatient gaiety of disposition" leads him to do, although his singleness, and Victorian paranoia about London's moral and hygienic depravity, suggest that he may have a fondness for whores.

Anyway, his solution, as a doctor, is to find a medicine that will allow him to split his personality into two—when he's Dr. Jekyll, he's overwhelmingly good but also slightly bad; when he takes the drug, he's Mr. Hyde, and he's all bad. (Where does the good disappear to when he does this? Is the new Dr. Jekyll actually ALL good, since Mr. Hyde was ALL bad? The novella won't say, leaves it deliberately open. There are some interesting arguments about Calvinist stuff in here, I think—and Stevenson was raised in Scotland, so he certainly had room and biographical background to make these arguments. But he won't, because he's not from the seventeenth century—poo on him.) Mr. Hyde does several appalling things, like walking directly over a small child in the street when Mr. Utterson meets him for the first time. (It's not clear HOW you just walk over an 8-year-old, but because this is also a horror novel, the unimaginability of this act makes it terrifying.) But Jekyll learns that splitting himself is dangerous—shades of nuclear bomb-making, shades of Voldemort and his horcruxes (although of course the influence goes the other way—but it's what I'm thinking)—because eventually he can't stay Jekyll: he keeps turning involuntarily into Hyde. (It's not clear that Hyde really gets to have much fun when he's in that persona, either—mostly he seems to stay in his room, snapping at the servants, and making himself tea. When he goes out, he just walks over little kids, and once murders an M.P. Where are the whores? Where's the ludicly evil fun that being Hyde was supposed to allow???) Meanwhile, Jekyll/Hyde's building up a tolerance to the drug and needs more and more of it to switch, which is complicated by the fact that he can't get a supply of the precise strain of it he was using when he started all this mess. So on one level, this is just a story about opiate addiction (that was how I read it when I was ten—I'd picked the book up in the library, but understood it as an extension of the D.A.R.E. program). In the end, Jekyll can't hold off turning into Hyde any longer; he fixes himself a beaker of the stuff and is about to drink it, but dies in the process of his transformation.

So what happens to the self? When Jekyll is dead, so is Hyde (and had Hyde died, Jekyll would have to, too). Stevenson isn't going to offer any answers. Instead, I think, he wants to just set up something horrible—gothic—that's self-explanatory up to a certain point, but also has certain gaps in its explanation of things. These gaps are terrible, because they're spots where an explanation of the self should go, and instead there just isn't anything there.

Martin Amis on Other People

Then I read Other People, Martin Amis's weird Nabokovian misogynist metafictional mystery novel. It was supposed to be helpful because it's about a woman who loses her memory, and has to find out who she is. (Turns out she's the thrice-reincarnated Amy Hide, who's been murdered by the same detective twice—when the novel ends, she's just gone back to being a young teenager again. Unfortunately for anyone who wants to read it as a detective novel, there's no way to guess the metempsychosis plot ahead of time—those sorts of things aren't supposed to HAPPEN in realism.) The narration is mostly third person, a close third, who observes Mary Lamb (which is the name the amnesiac Amy gives herself) going around London and not quite knowing what she's doing. Then there are paragraphs of a first person narrator who talks just about Mary/Amy. The point is mostly to be mysterious, I think, but it's hard to get why it's necessary to play all these games in the first place—I don't CARE about Amy Hide, I don't find any of the characters appealing, and I don't really enjoy the jokes Amis wants to make about his characters, which seem to be that they're all insane deluded perverts. Ugh. It was a slightly awful novel.