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.

Copperfield: Or Only Seventy-Eight More to Go...

Still reading Copperfield, which I'm still enjoying but now have started resenting, too. (It's Long. LONG.) Listening to it streamed from Libri Vox, read by people with good voices. The chapter in which David/Trotwood goes with Steerforth to the theater is wonderful. D/T is drunk, having had Steerforth and his college friends to dinner in his new apartment. He buys too much wine, and then drinks a lot of it, hoping that Steerforth's friends will like him and stop thinking he's very young (which he is). Steerforth's friends are themselves insecure about their youth, though, because one of them keeps referring to himself as "a man." That is, he doesn't use the first-person, just speaks of himself in third. For (a non-Dickensian) example: "A man has got to speak about himself in the third person when he isn't quite comfortable with who he is, and means to display his insecurity in the most affected way possible."

But David/Trotwood is drunk, and at the theater, and doesn't know who or where he is after a while. Before getting there, he (the narrator) had been describing the dinner and the drunkenness and the state of the wine bottles in the usual first-person past-tense, but after a while these pronouns shift into a hazy "someone" (like "someone was vomiting in a corner"), and then finally says, "someone was me." But he goes on describing himself like this, from the outside, like Steerforth's vaguely unpleasant friend "a man." All of which works incredibly well when they're at the theater, and D/T is behaving very drunk in the box during the intermission (and after the intermission, although he doesn't seem to realize it and doesn't understand why everyone keeps shushing him), and the "someone" becomes frighteningly distant—especially frightening because his foster-sister Agnes is there in the box, too, and seems embarrassed to recognize him, as though he really IS someone else.

Later D/T has a melodramatic and very self-pitying hangover, and is ashamed about this transgression of personality. The "someone" has already accomplished the othering before D/T realizes it, though—we were getting it from the first "someone" (it is almost too obvious when the narrator identifies D/T as the someone), and so we're wrapped up in the little moebius-strip of D/T's/the narrator's understanding of himself, and when this understanding takes place.