The Failure of Science in Late Victorian Novels

The Failure of Science in Late Victorian Novels:

The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and Dracula

Jaeyong Park

The Graduate School

Yonsei University

July 2011



A Masters Thesis

Submitted to the Department of English

and the Graduate School of Yonsei University

in partial fulfillment of the

requirements for the degree of

Master of Arts

This certifies that the masters thesis of Jaeyong Park is approved.

___________________ Thesis Supervisor: Hyungji Park

___________________ Miseong Woo

___________________ Terence Murphy

The Graduate School Yonsei University

July 2011

감사의 글 (Acknowledgement)

졸고가 완성되기까지 조언과 격려를 아끼지 않고 지켜봐주신 박형지,

우미성, 테리 머피 (Terence Murphy) 세 교수님께 감사드립니다. 몇 가지

주제를 가지고 시작해 뒤늦게 주제를 바꾸기까지 해서 몇 주 늦은

일정으로 말썽스러웠던 연구 과정을 지켜보고 도움을 주셨습니다.

학부-석사 연계과정을 거쳐 긴 듯 짧은 대학원 생활을 하는 동안 옆에

있어준 동료들, 특히 문정아, 박안나, 어경희, 정승아, 현영빈, 또 이향숙

선생님에게도 짧은 감사의 글을 통해 고마움의 표시와 기록을 남깁니다.

논문을 지도해 주시지는 않았지만 학문적 관심과 실천에 많은 영향을 준

세 교수님, 윤혜준, 이석구, 로렌 굿맨 (Loren Goodman) 교수님께도 이

글을 빌어 감사 인사를 드립니다.

무엇보다 어려움 없이 학업을 진행할 수 있도록 아낌없이 지원해준 가족들,

그리고 긴 시간 동안 항상 옆에 있어준 장혜진 양에게 고맙다는 말과 함께

사랑한다는 말을 전하고 싶습니다.

인쇄된 형태 혹은 PDF 파일 형식으로 이 논문을 읽기 시작한 당신에게도

감사를 표합니다. 부디 이 짧은 논문이 당신의 연구에 작으나마 도움이

되었으면 합니다.

2011 년 7 월

박재용

i

Contents

Abstract ……………………………………………………………………….ii

Introduction: Literature, Science, and Late Victorian England ………………1

Chapter I. Jekyll and Hyde: The Strange Case of Self-Experiment of Pharmaceutical Chemical and Its Tragic Result ……………………………..15

Chapter II. Dracula: Helpless Science against the Unknown ………………..41

Conclusion: Inherent Failure of Science as a Mode of Fin de Siècle Anxiety 59

Works Cited ….………………………………………………………………64

국문 요약 …………………………………………………………………….72

ii

Abstract



Jaeyong Park

Department of English

The Graduate School

Yonsei University

The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886) and Dracula

(1897) are two of the novels that still continue their legacy in popular culture,

mostly as stories of horrific monsters often with additional elements of love

stories. On the surface, the two late Victorian novels seem to present

narratives that deal with monsters that are exterminated by their protagonists

towards the end. In reading the two novels, the previous literature mainly

focused on reading repressed desires or social issues of the time in characters

and literary devices of each work, and this view has been a dominant mode of

reading for The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and Dracula.

Written in the late Victorian period when there was a proliferation of

scientific knowledge, the two novels clearly present a number of elements

iii

related to the contemporary science in their use of scientific issues and devices

in their narratives, as well as the way they construct their narratives. More

than merely reflecting and mentioning the scientific discourses of the time, the

two novels suggest a failure of science in resolving their narratives. While

the two novels employ science in various ways, they present the failure of

science in different modes toward the end. The main conflict in each work

turns out to be of failure of scientific method, or a representative case of the

helplessness of science in providing any solution to contain the unknown.

The current thesis aims to provide textual evidences of such notion of

science and its failure in The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and

Dracula, as well as to present the relationship between science and its failure

in the two novels written in the fin de siècle or the late Victorian period in

general. By providing an analysis of science and its failure, this thesis will

provide an alternative ground for reading of novels usually not regarded as

related to the issue of science.

Key Words: science, history of science, technology, narrative, 19th century,

Victorian novel, fin de siècle, science fiction

1

Introduction: Literature, Science, and Late Victorian England

In 1882, Matthew Arnold, a British poet and cultural critic, gave a

lecture titled “Literature and Science” at Cambridge University. In the

lecture, he proposed to his audience that

I am going to ask whether the present movement for ousting letters

from their old predominance in education, and for transferring the

predominance in education to the natural sciences, whether this brisk

and flourishing movement ought to prevail, and whether it is likely

that in the end it really will prevail. (Arnold 739)

The lecture was given as a response to another lecture given two years ago by

his colleague Thomas Huxley at the opening of Sir Josiah Mason's Science

College in Birmingham. In his lecture titled “Science and Culture,” Huxley

as a biologist criticized literary education that had been focused on classics,

commenting that the “distinctive character of our own times lies in the vast

and constantly increasing part which is played by natural knowledge” (Huxley

166) while the Humanists merely focus on the classical education as if the

nineteenth century was “still in the age of Renaissance” (Huxley 165).

Although the debate between Matthew Arnold and Thomas Huxley

2

focused primarily on the issue of education, it provides us with the

problematic relationship between literature and science in the late-Victorian

period and the Victorian era in general. Before Arnold and Huxley’s debate,

earlier Victorian texts also dealt with the issue of literature and science as

modes of education. An Address to Men of Science (1821), written by

Richard Carlile, is one example of such texts. As in the latter case of Huxley,

Carlile asserts the need to emphasize science in educating children, instead of

“torturing their minds with metaphysical and incomprehensible dogmas about

religion, of which they can form no one idea but that of apparent absurdity and

contradiction” (Carlile 4).

In fact, the terms science and scientist were relatively new to the

English language at the time. In the opening chapter of An Address to Men of

Science (1821), Carlile addresses his potential readers to be “confined to those

Philosophers, who study and practice the sciences of Chemistry and

Astronomy” (Carlile 3). He never uses the word “scientist” in this writing.

The term later appeared in March 1834 issue of the Quarterly Review, when

William Whewell, a co-founder and president of the British Association for the

Advancement of Science, briefly used the term in a book review. Six years

later, he made the suggestion again in his Philosophy of Inductive Science

(1840), stating that “We need very much a name to describe a cultivator of

3

science in general” (qtd. in Beer 39).

The usage of the words “science” and “scientist” suggests a

meaningful change in the perception of science in the nineteenth century.

According to the Corpus of Historical American English, the number of

appearance of the term “science” in 1810s is 82, which increases more than 10

times in the following decade, and reach 3113 in the 1870s. The frequency

of the term “science” and “scientist” calculated by Google’s Ngram Viewer,

which contains both American and British corpora, also shows significant

changes in the frequency of the words in the corpora (fig.1).

Fig. 1. Google’s Ngram View result on “science” and “scientist” between year 1800 and

1900 with smoothing of 3.1

One thing that should be noted here is that there is a huge gap between

1 Google Ngram Viewer. 17 June 2011 <http://ngrams.googlelabs.com/graph?content=science%2C+scientist&year_start=1800&year_end=1900&corpus=0&smoothing=3>

4

the frequency of “science” and “scientist” in nineteenth century English

corpus. As shown in the above Ngram graph, the term “scientist” was rarely

used throughout the nineteenth century. COHA data also suggest that it has

no entry of “scientist” before 1856, when only one appearance of the word is

counted, followed by 3 in the next decade. Within the COHA data, there are

total of 195 appearances of the word “scientist” in the nineteenth, while there

are 246 appearances in the first decade of 1900s.

The gap of the frequency of “science” and “scientist” gives insight to

the reception of science during the Victorian era. It can be inferred from the

above quantitative data that science was emerging as an important part of

society, yet generally remained outside of institutionalization and

professionalization. The use of the word “science” as “natural and physical

science” was recorded as early as 1867 in the OED. On the word “scientist,”

it cites William Whewell’s short review in Quarterly Review in 1834 as the

first source for the word.

On the relationship between literature and science in the Victorian

period in general, George Levine’s comment on Charles Darwin’s On the

Origin of Species may provide a useful insight: “It struck me that the most

important Victorian writer was not Dickens, nor George Eliot, nor Tennyson

nor John Stuart Mill, but Darwin himself. It depends, of course, on what one

5

means by ‘important’, but no sense of that word can exclude a best-seller like

On the Origin of Species” (Levine 91). It is indeed true that Darwin

employed traditional narrative devices as well as allusions to literary classics

in his work (Kucich 217). At the same time, literary works such as George

Eliot’s Middlemarch (1871-72) and Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the d'Urbervilles

(1891) are famous examples that are known to reflect Darwin’s theory of

evolution (Beer 199).

Within this context, the current thesis aims to provide readings of two

late Victorian fin de siècle novels that exemplify the relationship between

literature and science. To be specific, this thesis aims to provide the case of

literary works where science plays an important role in the development of

their narratives. In addition to this, the current thesis attempts to read failure

of science in the late Victorian novels. For realizing this goal, Robert Louis

Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Hyde (1886)2 and Bram Stoker’s

Dracula (1897) are selected. The two novels are read as cases where science

turns out to work improperly while playing a crucial role in the development

of narrative, finally providing the failure of science. In providing such

analyses, each chapter examines the scientific context and elements, and sees

2 Hereafter called Jekyll and Hyde for convenience

6

how Jekyll and Hyde and Dracula finally realize the failure of science per se

in their narratives. But before delving into the scientific context and the final

failure of science in the two late Victorian novels, the peculiar nature and

context of science and literature during the period in which the two works

were produced should be explained first, to provide a common ground in

understanding them.

The Victorian England was marked by its radical departure from the

previous period. Officially started by Queen Victoria’s succession to the

throne in 1837, the period witnessed a great many numbers of scientific

breakthroughs and their applications in various forms of technologies. The

Great Western Railway was opened in 1839, a year after Queen Victoria’s

ascendency to the throne. In the same year, the first commercial electrical

telegram was utilized to use for the railway system as well as the first railway

timetable. The inventions made in that year also included the photograph,

invented by Louis Daguerre in France, followed in 1840 by Fox Talbot in

Britain. These inventions profoundly changed the notion of time and space,

affecting the way people perceived the world: it was a period of change. In

1854, Thomas Cook declared a slogan, “to remain stationary in these times of

change, when all the world is on the move, would be a crime. Hurrah for the

Trip – the cheap, cheap Trip” (qtd. in Urry 14).

7

Along with the inventions briefly listed in the above paragraph,

nineteenth century Victorian England witnessed a series of scientific

discoveries that deeply affected the way people understand human beings.

This change is well demonstrated in Darwin’s On the Origin of Species (1859)

and its profound influence. The prevailing idea on the human beings and

other creatures around the time of the publication of On the Origin of Species

was mainly Christian, for nearly all leading scientists and philosophers were

Christian men. But Darwin’s idea of evolution replaced the divine with

secular science, revolutionizing the thinking of the nineteenth century. In

1860s, “Darwinism” was used to describe “someone who rejected a

supernatural origin of the world and its changes” (Mayr 85)

The nineteenth century was also a period where what are now known

as psychology and anthropology laid their grounds in early works such as

Herbert Spencer’s The Principles of Psychology (1855) and Edward Burnett

Tylor’s Primitive Culture (1872). The development of medical science also

affected the way people understand themselves. Vivisections made clear that

human flesh is not different from other animals’, while the emerging field of

neuroscience demonstrated functional aspects of human, their actions related

to certain parts of their brains. David Ferrier’s Functions of Human Brain

(1876) is a prime example of such a field of study. With these developments

8

in different fields of science, humans now became to be understood as

scientific objects that can be examined and analyzed.

While the scientific and technological advancements marked new and

changed sense of the world and the position of human beings, the nineteenth

century England continued to bear appalling social conditions that had existed

ever since the rapid growth of urban population and industrialization which

had been caused by the Industrial Revolution. It was only 1836 when the

Factory Act limited children under thirteen to work less than forty eight hours

a week in textile factories, followed by the Ten-hour Act in 1847 to limit

women and children under eighteen to work less than 10 hours a day in textile

factories. In 1854, the Broad Street cholera epidemic killed 668 people

living in a district near Golden Square in London, where only 49 housings

held approximately 860 people with bad sanitary condition (Hempel 206).

Although the actual crime rate was decreasing in the latter half of the

nineteenth century (Mc Donald 406), sensational crimes such as the murders

of Jack the Ripper in London’s East End area in 1888 also marked the

problematic nature of nineteenth century England, as a society with rapid and

profound developments and discoveries with unresolved problems continued.

The confused state of scientific discoveries, technological applications,

and the problematic social conditions all reflect the late Victorian psyche. In

9

the later part of the nineteenth century, especially around fin de siècle, theories

that highlighted the negative side of the human were imported to the England:

Cesare Lombroso’s criminology based on physiognomy and Max Nordau’s

theory of degeneration that denounced various art forms as degenerative

activities. These theories regard human beings as degenerating rather than

making evolutionary progress. In these theories, science was not used as a

tool for enlightenment; it was used rather to discover the negative side of

human beings, exposing what had been previously unknown with the help of

scientific inquiries. The perception of science in the nineteenth century,

especially towards the end of the century, then, was not entirely positive.

As seen in the usage of the terms “science” and “scientist,” science in

the nineteenth century was still in a state of flux. The fin de siècle hype in

occult exemplifies the state of science at the time, Society for Psychial

Research being a prime example. Established in 1882 to prove supernatural

phenomena such as thought transfer and the existence of human soul, the

society had a wide variety of known figures from different sector as its

members, such as W.B. Yeats, Arthur Conan Doyle and Frederic William

Henry Myers. Even Sigmund Freud attended at the American Society for

Psychial Research and Bram Stoker attended at one proceeding of the society’s

meetings.

10

In literature, the confused and ambivalent state of scientific influence

laid ground for the “Gothic return” in 1890s. Borrowing Fred Botting’s

reading of the Gothic literature of the period, it was “in the context of

Victorian science, society and culture that their fictional power was possible,

associated with anxieties about the stability of the social and domestic order

and the effects of economic and scientific rationality” that explains the literary

works considered as major Gothic texts of the time. In Botting’s reading,

Jekyll and Hyde and Dracula are the two major Gothic texts of fin de siècle,

with “strange realignments of the relationship between science” (Botting 88).

At the same time, the same period was when H.G. Wells’s “scientific

romances” first appeared. According to Arthur B. Evans in his reading of

nineteenth century science fiction, Wells’s works are results of accumulated

works of literature in which science played key roles, with growing popularity

of Science Fiction in the latter half of the century. Evans contributes this

popularity to a writer of the other side of the Channel, Jules Verne, who

popularized the new genre in the early 1860s with his didactic SF novels and

affected many writers in other European countries as well. To Patrick

Brantlinger in assessing Victorian science fiction, the genre of SF was an

illustration of “the dangers of scientific overreaching.” Brantlinger reads

Jekyll and Hyde as a work linked to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) in its

11

“nightmarish plot of the mad scientist concocting monsters” (Brantlinger

373).3

To go back to the earlier mention on the problematic and unclear

relationship between literature and science, then, it would be futile to try to

define whether the subjects of current thesis are a new generation of fin de

siècle Gothic or science fiction novels. Gothic and science seem to be at odds

to each other, as Robert Mighall suggests that Gothic "horror fiction has a

generic obligation to evoke fear or suggest mystery," while science “attempts

to contain fear and offer a rational explanation for all phenomena” (Mighall

xxiv). The ironic term, “science fiction,” seems to be inappropriate as well to

embrace the two novels the current thesis aims to examine, for the definition

of the term itself varies widely by different critical approaches. The current

thesis thus avoids the notions of Gothic or Science Fiction. Rather, this

thesis aims to look at each novel focusing on their relationship to the

contemporary scientific discourses which would finally provide an analysis of

how their incorporation of science leads to revelations of the failure of science

itself in a sense that science in each work proves to be at fault from the start,

or it contradicts itself during the course of the novel.

3 However, Brantlinger regards Dracula as one of the fin de siècle horror stories where the villains have evolutionary throwback or atavism.

12

In reading the two late Victorian fin de siècle novels by Robert Louis

Stevenson and Bram Stoker, recent interdisciplinary studies on Victorian

novels provided theoretical ground. Julia Reid’s seminal publication on the

two-way relationship between science and literature in Robert Louis

Stevenson’s works, Robert Louis Stevenson, Science and the Fin de Siècle

(2006) was particularly helpful in reading the works in conjunction with

contemporary scientific discourses, as well as a series of academic papers by

Anne Stiles on the relationship between late Victorian novels and

contemporary discourses of neuroscience. More classical works in the field

of interdisciplinary study on literature and science, including Gillian Beer’s

Darwin’s Plots (1983) was also helpful in laying ground for understanding the

mixed relationship between literature and science in Victorian period, although

the focus of research in Beer’s book was on George Eliot and Thomas Hardy.

For the failure of science in the two novels, the previous literary

studies did not share much insight. The readings of Jekyll and Hyde and

Dracula have been mostly employing psychoanalytic theories. Elaine

Showalter’s reading of Jekyll and Hyde as gay narrative or Nina Auerbach’s

reading of Dracula as a narrative of the other might be proper examples of the

psychoanalytic readings. But it was a wide variety of derivative popular

culture reproductions of the novels that led me to the inception of the topic for

13

the current thesis. Although there are countless reproductions of the two

novels that the current thesis examines, almost all of them are reduced into

mere love stories or horror film, or adventures to exterminate monsters. This

reduction of the original novels to conventional commercial plots led me in

turn to pay attention to what are not presented in the popular representation of

the two novels, which are the important role and the ultimate failure of science

in each work.

Through the notion of failure of science, I would like to examine the

contradictory nature of science in each novel that proves to be at fault, while it

displays a certain relationship with the contemporary scientific discourses.

The term “failure” here is used to formulate the self-contradiction of science in

each novel, not to point that there are seemingly obvious forms of “failures”

displayed in the narratives of Jekyll and Hyde and Dracula. In terms of the

visibility of failure, the two novels rather make success not failure. The

monsters in the two novels, in the former Mr. Hyde and the latter Count

Dracula, are eliminated at the end. In Jekyll and Hyde, the monster is

destroyed by lack of potion that enabled it to emerge, and Count Dracula is

exterminated by a team of male professionals led by a foreign doctor. But the

current thesis aims to examine a failure in a different sense, which means that

science as a driving force of the narratives is at fault although the novels make

14

success in visibly eliminating their monsters.

The following two chapters will read Jekyll and Hyde and Dracula

following the order of publication. Chapter I will analyze Jekyll and Hyde

upon its relationship to the scientific discourse of the time, nominally the

theory of double brain and the theory of degeneration as well as the

relationship of the novel with the emerging science of chemistry. The

chapter will focus on the nature of science in Jekyll and Hyde and study the

logic of failure behind the ending where the monster is eliminated due to lack

of unrepeatable procedure. Chapter II will focus on the use of new

technology in exterminating the monster, of the narrative, while reading details

related to the contemporary scientific discourses in describing it. The failure

of science in this case will be examined in the novel’s emphasis on the cutting

edge technology and the help of medical professional, which nevertheless lead

the protagonists to commence very non-scientific solution for destroying the

monster at the end. By providing such readings, the current thesis aims to

provide a ground for the largely ignored aspect of Jekyll and Hyde and

Dracula, which is the science constituting driving force behind the narratives,

yet remains in a state of failure at the ending of each novel.

15

Chapter I. Jekyll and Hyde: The Strange Case of Self-Experiment of

Pharmaceutical Chemical and Its Tragic Result

The first information readers receive from Robert Louis Stevenson’s

1886 novel Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde is its title. From the

outlook, the title itself reads much like a kind of medical case. A look at the

titles in the medical journals of the time, such as The Lancet or British Medical

Journal well supports this reading, for articles in such medical journals usually

took the titles with the word “case.” For example, among the articles of the

medical magazines, published in the same year with the publication of Jekyll

and Hyde, there are many articles with titles such as “The Case of Edwin

Bartlett”4 or “A Case of Chloroform Poisoning; Recovery.”5 In this regard,

Oscar Wilde’s remark on the novel that “the transformation of Dr Jekyll reads

dangerously like an experiment out of the Lancet” (qtd. in Stiles, Double

Brain 879) was correct in a sense, although Wilde here was referring

Stevenson’s novel to critique “that delightful master of delicate and fanciful

prose” for being “tainted with this modern vice, for we know positively no

4 Alfred Leach. The Lancet 177: 3274 (May 1886) 1017-1018

5 William Martin. British Medical Journal 3:2 (July 1886) 16-17

16

other name for it” (Wilde 77). However, within the title, the word that

precedes the medical term “case” is an adjective “strange.” This adjective

indicates that the novel will not be a normal medical case where a doctor states

the progress of a certain disease, or report different stages of infection or

operation usually in a first person narrative. Rather, it would be correct to

say that the word “strange” is placed at the very start of the novel to provide

readers a sense of awe and horror, regarding that the novel was marketed as

“shilling shocker” and the work itself was originally conceived as a “crawler,”

which is “a sensational tale of supernatural incident designed to produce a

pleasurable chill in its readers” (Mighall, Introduction x).

But it is neither of a medical case nor a supernatural incident that

opens up the narrative of Jekyll and Hyde. Instead, the first character that

readers come to encounter is Utterson the lawyer, who drives the chapter as if

it were a case of criminal investigation. Utterson appears to be a law

professional with a hard character, who “never lighted by a smile; cold, scanty

and embarrassed in discourse; backward in sentiment; lean, long, dusty, dreary

at somehow lovable” (JH 5). Under this circumstance, the opening chapter

of Jekyll and Hyde neither appears as a medical case or a supernatural horror

story. Jekyll and Hyde appear only indirectly through Mr. Enfield’s account

on “a very odd story” (JH 7) that he witnessed one night on “a bystreet in a

17

busy quarter of London.” (JH 6) in which a man trampled over a young girl.

In Enfield’s account of the incident, Hyde is first mentioned as “a little man

who was stumping along eastward at a good walk” and described as someone

“[not] like a man” but “like a some damned Juggernaut” (JH 7). But there is

no chance for the readers to know that it is Hyde, who later turns out to be

another split self of Dr. Jekyll: his name, Hyde, is mentioned almost at the end

of the chapter, only after the lawyer inquires his name. Providing the name

of Hyde, Enfield supplies a series of description on Hyde’s appearance that

He is not easy to describe. There is something wrong with his

appearance; something displeasing, something downright

detestable. I never saw a man I so disliked, and yet I scarce

know why. He must be deformed somewhere; he gives a

strong feeling of deformity, although I couldn’t specify the

point. He’s an extraordinary-looking man, and yet I really can

name nothing out of the way. No, sir; I can make no hand of it;

I can’t describe him. And it’s not want of memory; for I

declare I can see him this moment. (JH 10)

In a number of studies on Jekyll and Hyde, the above descriptions of

Hyde were associated with the late Victorian debate on degeneration,

18

particularly drawing from Max Nordau’s Degeneration (1895)6 and Cesare

Lombroso’s publications on criminology introduced to England in 1891 with

Havelock Ellis’s The Criminal (Arata 34). In Man of Genius, an English

translation edited by Havelock Ellis, Lombroso comments that “the criminal,

and often the lunatic, differ by the possession of ignoble features” in contrast

to “the possession of noble and almost superhuman characters (elevation of the

forehead, notable development of the nose and of the head, great vivacity of

the eyes)” (Lombroso 15). Hyde’s possession of “ignoble features” that are

not fully explained in Enfield’s account, with his “ape-like fury” (JH 20), all

accounts for the reflection of degeneration debate in Jekyll and Hyde.

Meanwhile, Jekyll is indirectly introduced in the first chapter during

Enfield’s account, as “a name at least very well known and often printed” (JH

8) when Hyde draws a cheque to compensate the damage he caused to the

little girl. While Enfield does not mention Jekyll’s full name, Utterson

seemingly recognizes that the well-known figure mentioned by Enfield is

Jekyll. As well-kept Victorian professionals, the two mutually agree never to

refer the incident. On the surface, this mutual agreement seems to be a part

of Victorian professional code of conduct. This is partly plausible

6 Originally published in German in 1892 under the title Entartung.

19

explanation which can be applied throughout Jekyll and Hyde, for there are a

number of textual evidences indicating the characters’ stature. In the part

where he mentions the cheque (signed under the name of Jekyll), for example,

Enfield notes that he believes the case is of black mail, and he calls the house

which Hyde is dwelling a “Blackmail House.” (JH9) If the case really is of

blackmail, then the two should not refer to the incident until the case becomes

clear, for it might hurt their friend’s reputation of a well-known doctor.

The seemingly plausible decision to keep the incident secret at the end

of the first chapter, however, bears one problem: there is no way for them to

fully explain what they have witnessed. This generates a mystery over the

‘strange’ case, which is continued in the second chapter titled “Search for Mr.

Hyde.” Utterson the lawyer reviews Dr Jekyll’s Will, which he thinks as

“madness” and “disgrace.” According to the will that Utterson is keeping,

“Henry Jekyll, MD, DCL, LLD, FRS, & c.” is to bequeath all his possessions

to Edward Hyde in case of “disappearance or unexplained absence for any

period exceeding three calendar months” (JH 11). Unable to explain the will

of his long-time friend, the lawyer goes to another friend, Dr. Lanyon, only to

hear that Jekyll “began to go wrong, wrong in mind” with “such unscientific

balderdash.” Again, everything is unclear about the incident of Hyde, as well

as Jekyll’s behavior. Moreover, the “unscientific balderdash” mentioned by

20

Lanyon is not explained at all. But still, the lawyer thinks that the difference

between the two doctors is only “on some point of science” (JH 12), not quite

understanding what is going behind the scene.

From that point on, the “strange case” reads as if it were a detective

story, or a criminal case led by a lawyer investigating an unresolved case of

crime. At this time, Utterson himself briefly meets Hyde, who is “pale and

dwarfish” with “an impression of deformity without any nameable

malformation” and acts like “a man in mental perplexity.” But again, Utterson

cannot specify what has gone wrong with the man who “seems hardly human,”

only to mutter “There is something more, if I could find a name for it.” (JH 16)

Visiting Jekyll’s house, Utterson merely discovers the fact that Hyde visits

Jekyll’s house, but only through “the old dissecting room door,” or, “the

laboratory.” (JH 17) He is still unable to identify the object of his

investigation, and cannot explain the exact degenerative characteristics of

Hyde as well. Even after he finally meets Jekyll to inquire about Hyde, the

response he acquires from his interviewee is something that he cannot

comprehend: according to Jekyll, the mystery that Utterson tries to solve is

“one of those affairs that cannot be mended by talking” and Utterson should

better “let it sleep” (JH 20).

21

Utterson’s pursuit of the criminal case is put off nearly one year in the

narrative, with no particular incident happening. Then a murder by Hyde

breaks out, at this time with more detailed descriptions of degeneration in the

suspect’s appearance. Hyde is described by a witness again as a “very small

gentleman” and said to be “particularly small and particularly wicked-looking”

(JH 23), which is in a high contrast to Jekyll’s “large handsome face” (JH 19).

Moreover, Jekyll, who in the previous chapter told Utterson not to bring up the

issue of Hyde, also tells Utterson that he received a letter from Hyde, which is

“written in an odd, upright hand” (JH 27). At this point, Utterson’s rather

futile effort to develop a criminal case seems to produce an outcome, with

logical explanation of the whole case. Yet again, Mr. Guest, the lawyer’s

head clerk, points out that the writing of Hyde is actually of Jekyll’s. “What!”

Utterson thinks, “Henry Jekyll forge for a murderer!” (JH 30). The case

against Hyde now turns into a practical suspicion on the possibility of Jekyll as

Hyde. At the same time, the issue of double comes to play in reading Jekyll

and Hyde, which is later told by Jekyll himself that “man is not truly one, but

two.” (JH 55) Stevenson later commented about the theme of double, that he

“had long been trying to write a story on this subject, to find a body, a vehicle,

for that strong sense of man’s double being which must at times come in upon

and overwhelm the mind of every thinking creature” (Stevenson, Dreams 263).

22

The doubleness that Utterson discovers places the whole project of criminal

case in a state of crisis, making it unavailable for Utterson to constitute the

case from his basic assumption that the criminal is Hyde, who is a separate

individual from his friend, Dr. Jekyll. Rather, the issue of double, presented

in a form of the split personality of Jekyll and Hyde takes the central role in

reading Jekyll and Hyde.

The issue of double in Jekyll and Hyde was evident to many of its

readers. However, the responses from readers showed a wide gap in

understanding the issue. One anonymous contemporary reader wrote in a

review titled “Secret Sin” in the Rock, a magazine of the Unified Church of

England and Ireland that:

It is an allegory based on the two-fold nature of man, a truth

taught us by the Apostle PAUL in Romans vii., ‘I find then a

law that, when I would do good, evil is present with me.’

We have for some time wanted to review this little book, but

we have refrained from so doing till the season of Lent had

come, as the whole question of temptation is so much more

appropriately considered at this period of the Christian year,

when the thoughts of so many are directed to the temptations

of our Lord. (qtd. in Maixner 224)h

23

While the anonymous reviewer on the Rock viewed the novel inherently

Christian, there were readers who read scientific implications from Jekyll and

Hyde. John Addington Symonds, an English poet and literary critic wrote in

a letter to Stevenson:

The fact is that, viewed as an allegory, it touches one too

closely. Most of us at some epoch of our lives have been upon

the verge of developing a Mr Hyde. Physical and biological

Science on a hundred lines is reducing individual freedom to

zero, and weakening the sense of responsibility. I doubt

whether the artist should lend his genius to this grim argument.

It is like the Cave of Despair in the ‘Faery Queen.’7 (qtd.

Maixner 210)

For many scholars, including scholars of the history of science,

exactly what the “double being” that Stevenson mentioned means has also

been a subject of investigation. Anne Harrington, a historian of science, for

example, refers to Jekyll and Hyde in explaining the changed perspective on

cerebral asymmetry that

7 Faery Queen is Edmund Spenser’s epic poem, in one part a man named Despair tries to convince one of its protagonists, the Red Cross Knight to kill himself.

24

After 1865, however, to claim that independent action of

man’s two hemispheres could turn him into some sort of Dr.

Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, one would have to argue further that

Jekyll would tend to focus his personality in the civilized,

rational hemisphere, while Hyde would give vent to his

criminal instincts from somewhere in the recess of the

uneducated, evolutionarily backward right hemisphere.

(Harrington 136)

Literary scholar Anne Stiles reads the contrasted characteristics of Jekyll and

Hyde to be representations of opposite features connected to the two

hemispheres of human brain, while not forgetting to mention that the two sides

of human brain were well associated to race and gender bias at the time (Stiles,

Double Brain 884). Hyde’s physiognomy, as well as criminal character, is

then treated in relation to the right hemisphere, which was related to “the

supposedly inferior or feminine seat of emotions, instincts, and the

unconscious” to be finally connected to criminals and the insane (Stiles,

Double Brain 885).

But even without his familiarity with science and various possible

scientific sources for the theme of double in Jekyll and Hyde, it was not

entirely new to Stevenson. His play Decaon Brodie, or the Double Life

25

(1880; revised in 1888) and short stories “Markheim” (1885) and “Olalla”

(1885) all had the apparent theme of double. Decaon Brodie, or the Double

Life, written with William Ernest Henley, was based on a true story of a well-

respected Scottish business man and town councilor William Brodie, who was

at the same time a burglar and thief at night. “Markheim” visits a dark side

of human nature in a form of an unidentified visitor, a double of the

protagonist’s conscious, to a man who just accidentally commit a murder. In

“Olalla,” a male protagonist meets a woman named Olalla, a beautiful yet

dangerous woman with her hereditary vampiric lust for blood. The woman

plays double in a way her two fold identity is unknown to the protagonist until

the end of the story. Biographical evidences suggest that he started working

on the story of Deacon Brodie as early as 1865. In 1883, he wrote The

Travelling Companion, a short horror story rejected by his publisher and

destroyed afterwards by Stevenson himself (Misyoshi 474). On his destroyed

work, Stevenson notes in his “Chapter on Dreams” that he “had even written

one, The Travelling Companion … that Jekyll had supplanted it” (Stevenson,

Dreams 250).

While it is true that the theme of double in Jekyll and Hyde has

connection to his early works, the novel has certainly been read as having a

relationship between the contemporary scientific discourses. Earlier studies,

26

such as Ed Block’s 1982 article, tried to establish a connection between the

contemporary evolutionary psychology and Jekyll and Hyde, claiming that the

work is “Stevenson’s most sustained depiction of psychological aberration

depicted in evolutionist terms” (Block 458), influenced by the authors

friendship with a evolutionist psychologist James Sully. According to Block,

the two met at the Savile Club8 and exchanged their ideas about double

personality. Even in more gendered readings, the influence of scientific

discourses was noted. Stephen Heath pointed out in “Psychopathia Sexualis:

Stevenson's Strange Case” that "it is significant in this context that doctors and

medical science are so important in the story, that it is indeed a case" (Heath

102; emphasis original). In his reading of the novel as a story of male

homosexual desire, Richard Freiherr von Kraft-Ebing’s Psychopathia Sexualis

(1886) was a main source of reference.9 Elaine Showalter, too, drew

attention on the medical discourses of the time, especially of male hysteria in

reading Jekyll and Hyde as a tale of repressed homosexuality. As mentioned

8 A Victorian London club of like-minded spirits, which had its members such as Thomas Hardy, H.G. Wells and W.B. Yeats. “The Saville Club – A brief history.” The Saville Club. Web. 16 June 2011. <http://www.savilleclub.co.uk/home/history-of-the-club>

9 Richard Freiherr von Kraft-Ebing was the first scientist to study sexology. In 1879, he published Text-Book of Insanity, in which he promoted diagnosis and analysis of mental illness, rather than imprisonment of patients. Psychopathia Sexualis, first published in 1886, was continued to its 12th edition upon Kraft-Ebing’s death.

27

earlier, Stephen Arata demonstrated a link between Jekyll and Hyde and the

late Victorian debate on degeneration.

Stevenson’s own biographical background also provides an insight

that his works possibly have a link to the contemporary scientific discourse.

He came from a family of Scottish lighthouse engineers, and was educated in

Edinburgh University with engineering degree. He even delivered a paper on

a new form of light house technology at the Royal Scottish Society in 1871,

only a few days before he quit his academic career. During his final years, he

was a member of the Society for Psychial Research, a society that had

members from various professions to scientifically prove phenomena that

transcend scientific understandings of the time. He was also familiar with

contemporary scientific figures such as James Sully and Frederick William

Henry Myers, whom he built acquaintance through letters and private clubs of

gentlemen (Reid 4). His continued interest in science appears in a number

works such as New Arabian Nights (1878) where a young protagonist joins a

‘Suicide Club’ after reading Darwin, or an essay “Pulvis et Umbra” (1888)

where he comments both on the negative Darwinian view of human as

“disease of the agglutinated dust” (Stevenson, Pulvis 307) and the positive

Christian notion of human will as a characteristic that differentiates human

beings from animals.

28

Stevenson himself, however, denied any influence of science in Jekyll

and Hyde. While it was suspected by many scholars that the notion of case is

particularly from various medical cases of multiple personality, such as the

case of Louis V in Rochefort Asylum in France, a then popular case of

multiple personality, or the cases of Félida X and Sergeant F, Stevenson

commented that he had never heard of a medical case of double personality,

and he only received a published case of Louis V after the novel was published.

The person who is said to send the case of Louis V to Stevenson is Frederick

William Henry Myers, a poet and scholar who later became the president of

the Society for Psychical Research. Myers indeed sent a series of letters with a

list of suggestions that he wished Stevenson to reflect in the future editions of

the novel.10 Why, then, did Stevenson deny any scientific influence on his

novel? Whether it was to keep the “single key” of his novel “remain

enigmatic, like human existence, like human conscience itself” (Dury 248) or

not, Jekyll and Hyde helplessly turns to the notion of the contemporary science,

10 In his first letter to Stevenson dated 21 February 1886, Myers writes: “The present letter is called forth by the extreme admiration with which I have read and reread your ‘Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde’. I should be afraid to say how high this story seems to me to stand among imaginative productions; and I cannot but hope that it may take a place in our literature as permanent as ‘Robinson Crusoe’.” He then suggests that “certain points which I think that you might expand or alter with advantage; and which are well worth the slight trouble involved” (Maixner 213)

29

in this case a medical case study, after what has been seemingly a criminal

case investigated by Utterson as a lawyer.

As soon as Utterson’s unresolved mystery turns into a practical

suspicion on the relationship between Jekyll and Hyde, the novel moves on to

a very short chapter titled “Remarkable Incident of Doctor Lanyon.” In this

chapter, Utterson still hears from Dr. Lanyon that he “wish[es] to see or hear

no more of Doctor Jekyll” (JH 32), which is incomprehensible in terms of

logical construction of the criminal case. The lawyer inquires Dr. Jekyll in

turn, and the answer he acquires is that Jekyll thinks himself as on “a

punishment and a danger [he] cannot name.” (JH 33) At this time, the same

phrase muttered by Utterson comes from Poole, Jekyll’s master servant:

“There is something wrong” (JH 37). Again, unable to provide any logical

explanation for the case, Utterson merely comments to Poole that “this is a

very strange tale, Poole; this is rather a wild tale, my man” (JH 40). From the

information he gathered from Hyde’s character and appearance, Utterson at

this point can only suggest to Poole of possibility that Jekyll maybe “seized

with one of those maladies that both torture and deform the sufferer” (JH 41).

Utterson’s forensic investigation on the case turns out to be futile, with every

attempt failed to provide logical explanation to the mystery over the case.

30

It is only the last two chapters, then, that provide explanation on

Utterson’s unresolved investigation, turning the forensic case into a medical

one. Respectively titled “Doctor Lanyon’s Narrative” and “Henry Jekyll’s

Full Statement of the Case,” the two chapters present first person narratives by

each doctor. These two narratives construct the novel as a medical case,

making the novel as a whole follow the structure and convention of Victorian

medical case studies. The Victorian case studies usually start with an

“ostensibly objective third-person narrative, written by one or more scientists,”

later followed by anecdotes, data, and illustrations of the case (Stiles, Double

Brain 889). Jekyll and Hyde follows this structure, with Utterson’s

investigation in third-person providing various ‘symptoms’ observed by

numerous witnesses. The narratives by two doctors are presented after the

third-person account, though not fully rationalizing the case.

The two last chapters are titled respectively as “Doctor Lanyon’s

Narrative” and “Henry Jekyll’s Full Statement of the Case.” But the inability

to fully explain the case is still continued in the narratives of doctors. On the

discovery that Dr. Jekyll is indeed Mr. Hyde, Dr. Lanyon rather refuses to

provide details. After witnessing the transformation of Hyde to Jekyll in

front of his eyes, Dr. Lanyon’s primary response is screaming “’O God!’ again

and again,” rather than rationally analyzing the case as a doctor. “Horror” is

31

a word for Dr. Lanyon to summarize what is behind the unresolved mystery.

Without any clear explanation, he concludes his written account of his

involuntary discovery, briefing to Utterson:

What he told me in the next hour, I cannot bring my mind to

set on paper. I saw what I saw, I heard what I heard, and my

soul sickened at it; and yet now when that sight has faded

form my eyes, I ask myself if I believe it, and I cannot answer.

(italics mine. JH 54)

While he denounces Jekyll’s interest as “such unscientific balderdash” (JH 12)

in the earlier part of the novel, his own unscientific and illogical response

draws shadow on his status as a renowned doctor whose residence is in

“Cavendish Square, that citadel of medicine” with his “crowding patients.”

If Utterson fails to establish any logical explanation on the case, it is also true

in Dr. Lanyon’s response, making the unresolved mystery still more enigmatic.

Dr. Lanyon’s full name, Hastie Lanyon, with its first appearance in the whole

novel, may indeed indicate the true nature of his character, who is described as

“a hearty, healthy, dapper, red-faced gentleman, with a shock of hair

prematurely white, and a boisterous and decided manner” (JH 12) when he

was first introduced during Utterson’s investigation.

32

The final chapter of the novel, “Henry Jekyll’s Full Statement of the

Case” is incomplete in another respect. While Dr. Lanyon’s narrative is not

helpful in resolving the mystery in a way of his unprofessional and

unscientific response to his revelation, the statement in the final chapter is

incomplete in a way of its unreliability. Jekyll begins the statement with

explanation on how he realized that “man is not truly one, but truly two” (JH

55) and how his fascination with the double nature within himself has emerged.

As the statement progresses, however, Jekyll’s narrative fluctuates between the

two identities of Jekyll and Hyde. With marked use of numerous ‘I’s, it

becomes unclear whether the personal pronoun ‘I’ indicates Jekyll or Hyde.

In sentences such as “He, I say – I cannot say, I” (JH 67) where third person

and first person is mixed, it is even impossible to distinguish which part of the

two identities is working as a narrator. Towards the end of the chapter, which

is supposed to provide a clear explanation for the whole case to be clarified,

then, everything becomes yet again unclear with the unreliable narrator(s).

Moreover, the dominating narrator at the end turns out to be Hyde, not Jekyll.

After Jekyll questions “Will Hyde die upon the scaffold? Or will he find the

courage to release himself at the last moment?” Hyde seemingly interrupts

and says, “God knows; I am careless; this is my true hour of death, and what is

to follow concerns another than myself.” Though it is unclear whether it is

33

Jekyll or Hyde who answered to the initial question, it becomes clear in the

very last sentence of the novel. “Here then, as I lay down the pen and

proceed to seal m my confession, I bring the life of that unhappy Henry Jekyll

to an end” (italics mine. JH 70).

To understand Jekyll and Hyde as a medical case, it should also be

mentioned that the last chapter provides Jekyll’s own account of his self-

experiment, which closely resembles various accounts of self-experiments

recorded in Victorian medical journals. For example, in one short article in

January 1885 issue of The British Medical Journal, a doctor at the

Westminster Hospital describes his self-experiment of cocaine dose, which he

commences after his colleague suggests the safety of the substance.

On the 9th, at 7 P.M., after a hard day's work, I took three

drachms, and almost immediately fell into a deep sleep, which

lasted four hours. … There 'was a general feeling of wellbeing,

with considerable mental excitement, and I was able to read

steadily for many hours. …. There was renewed mental and

physical activity, and I felt that any exertion could have been

undertaken without difficulty. (Caudwell 17)

34

Compared to the above passage from the medical journal, the description on

the experiment of “the drug” in the final chapter very much resembles the

actual record in its way of experiment and its narrative technique. Jekyll

finds “certain agents” to have “the power to shake and to pluck back that

fleshly vestment” (JH 56) and commences a self-experiment on himself:

I hesitated long before I put this theory to the test of practice.

I knew well that I risked death; … I had long since prepared

my tincture; … I compounded the elements, watched them

boil and smoke together in the glass, … [I] drank off the

potion.

On the effect of his self-experiment, Jekyll continues that

The most racking pangs succeeded … I came to myself as if

out of a great sickness. There was something strange in my

sensations, something indescribably new and, from its very

novelty, incredibly sweet. I felt younger, lighter, happier in

body. … I was suddenly aware that I had lost in stature. (JH57)

In this sense, the earlier mentioned comment of Oscar Wilde on Jekyll and

Hyde that “the transformation of Dr. Jekyll reads dangerously like an

35

experiment out of the Lancet,”11 is also correct in regard to the narrative style

as well as the structural configuration of the novel. Within this frame, it

would even be possible to take Hyde as a certain kind of disease that the whole

narrative of Jekyll and Hyde tries to locate, explain and to exterminate. In this

regard, Utterson’s violent move to break into the laboratory of Jekyll at the

end of his part can be read as the final medical maneuver to save the patient, in

this case Jekyll suffering from Hyde. The patient of this case, Jekyll, found

dead at the end, and the following two narratives work as data that support the

preliminary observation made by Utterson the lawyer.

But to examine why the “strange” case of Jekyll and Hyde turns out to

be that of a failure, how science works towards its failure in the novel should

be examined. As a number of scholars have demonstrated, it is certain that

the contemporary scientific discourses, such as the theory of degeneration and

double brain, laid ground for the development of the character(s) of Jekyll and

Hyde. However, the science practiced by the characters, especially by Jekyll

as a doctor, has not been evaluated much in the previous literature on Jekyll

and Hyde. Patrick Brantlinger, for example, dismissed the relationship

11 The Lancet is a medical journal first found by Thomas Wakley in 1823. The journal is still in print, and publicly provides the archive of its publication from 1820s through its online service.

36

between Stevenson’s novel and science in his assessment on Victorian science

fiction, commenting that Stevenson’s “horror story has little to do with

science,” for the transforming “powder” which Jekyll produces in his “at-

home laboratory” is a mere allegorical device of good and evil (Brantlinger

374).

The powder produced in Jekyll’s “at-home laboratory” is of a

pharmaceutical chemistry. Jekyll composes a certain kind of chemical, which

Hyde later presents to Lanyon as “transcendental medicine” (JH 53), which

Poole finds as “strange things” during the final breakdown of the laboratory

(JH 46). In Lanyon’s narrative, the drug is described as “a phial of some

tincture, a paper of some salt, and the record of a series of experiments that

[has] led (like too many of Jekyll’s investigations) to no end of practical

usefulness” (JH 50). Description of the drug’s production clearly suggests

that it is made through a complex chemical process:

The mixture, which was at first of a reddish hue, began, in

proportion as the crystals melted, to brighten in colour, to

effervesce audibly, and to throw off small fumes of vapour.

Suddenly and at the same moment, the ebullition ceased and

the compound changed to a dark purple, which faded again

more slowly to a watery green. (JH 53)

37

Hyde boasts to Lanyon that his “transcendental medicine” is a “new

providence of knowledge and new avenues to fame and power” (JH 53).

The drug that Jekyll produced, however, turns out to be a product not

of his scientific experiment, but of a pure accident. Jekyll confesses in the

last chapter that the provision of the drug has “never been renewed since the

date of the first experiment.” He reports that he tried to reproduce the potion

for numerous times, but they all turned out to failed attempts. To this

inability to reproduce the result of an experiment, he concludes that the

production of the drug was based on “that unknown impurity” (JH 70) caused

by the impurity of the first supply of certain chemical. Since Jekyll abused

the drug without knowing that his experiment was scientifically erroneous, the

novel’s ending where Jekyll lost control of his experiment had been

anticipated from the start.

A scientific experiment requires an element or elements that remain

unchanged (dependent variables), elements that change (independent

variables), control (a separate sample for comparison that is not exposed to the

experiment). In the case of Jekyll’s self-experiment, the design of

experiment was at fault from the start by employing a material with unknown,

uncontrollable attribute. Due to the fundamental error, Jekyll constantly fails

to conduct replication of the original experiment. The goal of replication is

38

to detect error of experiment and acquire more precise estimate of effect

(Anthony 9), and Jekyll’s experiment is destined to fail in replicating itself due

to the error that the experimenter did not recognize at first.

In fact, Jekyll’s malfunctional drug and the tragic result it caused

exemplify the impure, unregulated medicines which proliferated in the time of

Jekyll and Hyde’s publication. The accidental impurity of chemical in many

ways reminds the concern over the drug impurity in the 1880s. The drug

impurity and safety was a very popular issue during the period. By 1880,

advertisements for patent medicines occupied 25% of all advertisements (Loeb

105), but the patent medicines were practically unregulated. Many of them

were in fact “ineffective, addictive, or even lethal” (Loeb 113), and the

advertisers appropriated the fear. In a way, Stevenson’s novel is an extreme

case of such fear, which does not only stay as a fear of chemical impurity, but

extends to a broader suspicion on science.

The medical case of Jekyll and Hyde then becomes a case of scientific

abuse, of an unforeseen result of badly designed chemical experiment, and of a

potential of failure inherent in the science, or what seems to be a scientific

method itself. “Strange” case as it is, the failure inherent in Jekyll’s usage of

science exposes the often unnoticed nature of science, while incorporating the

contemporary scientific discourses into the development of its narrative.

39

Under this circumstance, Jekyll and Hyde is indeed an exemplary case where

the very contemporary scientific discourses of the late-Victorian period are to

be seen in a form of novel, along with the concerns over its possible errors and

dangers.

Many questions, however, still remains in reading Jekyll and Hyde as

a cautionary tale on the possible failure of science: why does science fail in

Jekyll and Hyde? As explained in this chapter, the scientific experiment

conducted by Jekyll is destined to fail from the start, and the impurity of the

material Jekyll uses reminds of the contemporary concern or fear over drug

impurity. But why does that have to happen to Jekyll? Is there any

possibility of success of science rather than a failure?

Answering the last question provides a simple answer to the many

questions. If Jekyll’s experiment makes success, it is still Hyde that wins at

the end of the whole narrative, since the drug which Jekyll tries to reproduce is

the very compound that initiated Hyde within Jekyll. The flaw of Jekyll’s

initial experiment then becomes to have twofold meanings: it is flawed in a

scientific sense and in a moralistic sense since the flawed experiment is the

very birth of Hyde, an immoral being which takes up Jekyll. This twofold

flaw leads the whole narrative to the final presentation of failure by the death

of the protagonist, Jekyll.

40

With no actual solution to the main problem of the narrative, the

novel’s scientific elements such as the notion of degeneration, pharmaceutical

chemistry, or the way Jekyll and Hyde constructs its narrative all becomes

futile. Since the birth of Hyde from a flawed scientific experiment is

scientifically wrong as well as morally wrong, there is no other way than to

present failure at the end as a solution, though it can be said that it is a very

perverse solution that involves the death of protagonist/antagonist at the same

time in the same physical body. Although science proliferates throughout the

novel and plays an important role, then, it is helpless in resolving the actual

problem of the narrative.

41

Chapter II. Dracula: Helpless Science against the Unknown

Since its first publication in 1897, Bram Stoker’s Dracula has

produced innumerable derivative works in a wide variety of forms, from films

and novels to Japanese manga. Count Dracula has become a representative

figure in popular culture. Along with Jekyll and Hyde, Stoker’s novel

remains as “the most-filmed texts of all time” (Elliott 465). Within this

context, the image of Dracula as a horrific figure of blood sucking monster has

been reiterated in the popular consciousness. Unfortunately, however, the

popular image of the vampire does not have much to do with Stoker’s original

novel, for too many of the derivative works merely appropriated the character

as a figure of horror.

While the popular reproductions Dracula have been mostly dealing

with the stereotypical image of the vampire, often reducing the novel to a

horror fiction or a love story, the work has been much analyzed by academics

in a wide range of critical approaches. With strong presence of Dracula as a

partriarchal figure exterminated only by a team of professional male characters,

psychoanalysis has been a prominent approach in reading the novel.

Christopher Craft, for example, coined the term “Crew of Light” in his reading

42

of the novel. The term was invented to describe the “group of crusaders

includes Van Helsing himself, Dr. John Seward, Arthur Holmwood, Quincey

Morris, and later Jonathan Harker” (Craft 130)12 while reading the novel

focusing on the issue of gender. In a similar vein, Nina Auerbach comments

in a chapter on Dracula in her Our Vampires, Ourselves (1997) that humanity,

symbolized by the Crew of Light, overcomes the count Dracula when “Van

Helsing becomes a more overbearing patriarch than the vampire” (Auerbach

78).

Stoker himself being a problematic figure with his ambivalent identity

of Anglo-Irish or Anglo-Celtic descendant, Dracula has also been read through

socio-political approaches. Departing from Stoker’s unclear national identity,

the novel can be read as an allegorical tale of national politics (Ingelbien 1090).

Terry Eagleton’s analysis of Dracula is one example of such reading.

Eagleton reads Dracula as an “absentee landlord” or a “devout Anglophile,”

who tries to move to London while his capital and land diminish towards an

end (Eagleton 215). In this reading, Count Dracula’s meticulous effort to be

assimilated into the British society symbolizes the political situation of non-

British Anglophiles. Marxist reading of Dracula, such as Franco Moreti’s

12 The term took the word lux from one of the female characters’ name, Lucy.

43

assessment of the vampire as a “metaphor for capital” is another branch of

critical approaches to Stoker’s novel. Moretti draws Marx’s notion of capital

as “dead labour which, vampire-like, lives bonly by sucking living labour, and

lives the more, the more labour it sucks” (qtd. in Moretti 73) to read count

Dracula as a personified capital yet at the same time a symbol of feudal

economic order, which has to be destroyed to establish free trade for bourgeois.

The above readings, however, largely ignore the strong presence of

science throughout Dracula. The novel is crowded with science in terms of

tools and method used in pursuing the count, the way of building its narrative,

and the leading figure of vampire hunt being a scientific professional, while

contemporary scientific discourses also come into play during the progress of

the novel. As in Jekyll and Hyde, these presentations of science seemingly

work fine until the end. Moreover, in the case of Dracula, there seems to be

a no problem whether science plays an important role or not, for the monster

of the novel is completely defeated by the protagonists and the novel seems to

mark a happy ending. But a closer look at the novel reveals the problematic

nature of the science employed in various forms in Dracula.

From the beginning of the novel, what might be surely called new

technology – an application of scientific knowledge in everyday life – marks

the strong presence. When explaining the property in London that the Count

44

wishes to purchase, Harker uses photographs that he took with his Kodak

(Stoker 23). Although the basic level photography technology was invented

in the earlier period around the time of Queen Victoria’s succession to the

throne, it was only 1885 when the first transparent photographic film was

introduced, along with the first British branch office of Eastman Company.

The appearance of new technologies continues, as Mina writes in her letter to

Lucy that she has been practicing typewriting, as well as shorthand (Stoker 53).

Though not as cutting-edge as Kodak, type writer was also a fairly new

technology at the time, creating new jobs for women to work in offices or

work as freelance “typewriters.” The list of new technologies introduced

does not stop at the typewriter. Right after introducing Mina’s use of

typewriter, the novel goes on to mention Dr. Seward’s use of phonograph in

recording his diary. As same with the other technologies introduced in

Dracula, phonograph was also very new to the novel’s contemporary readers.

Still, other technologies appear in the later part of the novel, namely blood

transfusion and telegram. The former is used in curing the victims of

Dracula, and the latter in overcoming the spatial limit in fighting the monster.

What is the implication of these cutting-edge technologies appearing

in Dracula, a novel where a mysterious monster is pursued to be destroyed at

the end? What does it have to with the notion of science? An insightful

45

view on the role of technology in Dracula by Friedrich Kittler, a German

literary critic and media theorist, provides clues to such questions. Focusing

on the “media machines and the technologies of writing” in the nineteenth

century novels, Kittler reads Dracula as “no vampire novel, but a written

account of our bureaucratization,” implying that the monster in the novel is

destroyed not by an act of staking its heart but by a systematic processing of

information (qtd. in Partington 53). In this reading of the novel, it is modern

technology that operates as a protagonist, not the atavistic vampire. Dracula

is no more a Gothic horror, but the very modern representation of systematic

thinking that enables the human characters to analyze and understand the

unknowable. This rather radical view, placing science and its applied form as

technology in a position of driving the whole narrative, provides one point of

departure for the current chapter: Isn’t there any failure in the usage of

technology as application of science?

Reading Bram Stoker’s original novel reveals much more than a mere

horror fiction. The novel is indeed composed of various types of records,

including journal entries, newspaper article, letters, and transcriptions of

phonograph diary. As in the case of Jekyll and Hyde, Stoker’s Dracula

indicates its property not as a pure work of literature from the start. While it

is the title itself that displays this characteristic in Jekyll and Hyde, Sotker’s

46

novel does this by presenting a short passage before the first chapter, notably

in a form of acknowledgement. The acknowledgement declares the novel to

be a collection of texts in various sorts, with “all needless matters …

eliminated, so that a history almost at variance with the possibilities of latter-

day belief may stand forth as simple fact.” The collected materials are also

claimed to be “exactly contemporary, given from the standpoints and within

the range of knowledge of those who made them.” (Stoker i) Following the

claim made in the acknowledgement, the novel constitutes a kind of report on

a particular matter that can be inferred from its title, Dracula.

The index of the novel reveals that there are total 27 chapters in the

novel, most of them composed mainly of Jonathan Harker’s journal and Dr.

Seward’s diary, supplemented by other records such as Mina Murray’s journal,

scraps from a newspaper, letters, etc. The composition makes up a whole

“case,” by showing the accumulation of information in different types.

However, in the opening four chapters, it is not clear who or what is under the

scope of the whole case at first. The first four chapters provide an account of

Jonathan Harker, a solicitor who visits Transylvania for his client who wishes

to purchase a property in London. During his stay at his client’s castle, he

find that there is “something so strange about this place and all in it that I

cannot but feel uneasy” (Stoker 25), realizing that he is “a prisoner of a sort”

47

(Stoker 27) as well as the only living creature in the whole castle. He later

finds that his client, Count Dracula, is indeed a non-human being preparing to

infiltrate into the British soil.

At the point of the whole narrative where Jonathan Harker discovers

his client’s true intention of infiltration and his own inability to stop the plot

being commenced by the Count, Jonathan’s narrative abruptly stops. Instead,

a series of letters between Mina Murray and Lucy Westerna, Lucy’s journal

and Dr. Seward’s diary are presented, accompanied by a newspaper article.

In these following chapters, Lucy’s journal and Dr. Seward’s diary come in a

form of medical case study.13 Written in a first-person, the former presents

her friend Mina’s symptoms of sleep-walking, the latter a doctor’s case study

on his patient, in this case Renfield the lunatic whom he suspects of being a

“zoophagous (life-eating) maniac” (Stoker 70). With changes in both

patients’ symptoms, a newspaper article, supposedly scrapped in Mina’s

journal, is followed. The article reports an arrival of a Russian schooner with

its sailors all dead, except for “an immense dog” (Stoker 78) that runs away to

the shore, or as readers might recognize, the Count.

With the arrival of the Count, Dr. Seward’s case study “grows even

13 In a letter to Mina, Lucy mentions that Dr. Seward say that she “afford[s] him a curious psychological study” (Stoker 55), and she agrees with the doctor’s opinion.

48

more interesting” (Stoker 106) while Lucy’s sleep walking gets much worse.

In response to Lucy’s worsening symptoms, her fiancé, Arthur Holmwood,

requests Dr. Seward to call for help. To this request, the doctor invites

“Abraham Van Helsing, M.C., D.h., D.Litt., etc.,etc.” Van Helsing is

depicted as “a philosopher and a metaphysician, and one of the most advanced

scientists of his day” who possesses

an iron nerve, a temper of the ice brook, an indomitable

resolution, self-command and toleration exalted from virtues

to blessings, and the kindest and truest heart that beats – these

form his equipment for the boble work that he is doing for

mankind – work both in theory and practice, for his views are

as wide as his all-embracing sympathy. (Stoker 112)

With the above description preceding his appearance in the text, it is expected

that Van Helsing would provide solutions to the problems with his advanced

scientific methods. But what is followed is his mere observation that “there

has been much blood lost” and he cannot specify its functional cause. Yet he

emphasizes that “there is always cause for everything” (Stoker 114), which

lays ground for understanding the whole novel as a process of accumulating

knowledge against the unknown.

49

The power of knowledge and the importance of its accumulation by

employing scientific method and utilizing technology are emphasized

throughout the novel. In describing his patient Renfield, Dr. Seward

comments, “If I could have as strong a cause as my poor mad friend there, a

good unselfish cause to make me work, that would be indeed happiness”

(Stoker 71). Van Helsing asserts that “knowledge is stronger than memory,

and we should not trust the weaker” (Stoker 119). The term “knowledge” is

indeed mentioned by different characters of the novel as a resource against the

monster they wish to exterminate. Mina actively requires Dr. Seward’s

record of Lucy’s illness, thinking that “Lucy might have something to add to

the sum of our knowledge of that terrible Being” (italics mine. Stoker 221).

She even strongly claims to Dr. Seward that a record must be created from

Lucy’s death, since “in the struggle which we have before us to rid the earth of

this terrible monster we must have all the knowledge and all the help which we

can get” (italics mine. Stoker 222) Later in the novel, the word is employed

again in describing Van Helsing when he is reading records prepared by

Jonathan and Mina Harker, that “he seems to think that by accurate knowledge

of all details he will light upon some clue” (Stoker 269).

But the knowledge is not only a weapon for the humans against the

monster. Dracula has also been accumulating knowledge, conducting his

50

own experiment over his victims. Renfield’s zoophagous experiment in the

earlier part of the novel well exemplifies this, Renfield himself conducting his

own experiment on eating a wide variety of creatures from bug to a small bird

before his master arrives. It is noteworthy to point out that Renfield has his

own note to record his findings (Seed 74), and Dr. Seward indeed expresses

his envy of Renfield’s ability “to begin a new record each day” (Stoker 71).

Dracula himself turns out to be a kind of a scientist. Before becoming an

undead, he was “soldier, statesman, and alchemist – which latter was the

highest development of the science-knowledge of his time” (italics mine.

Stoker 302). With his scientific background, Dracula is in fact

“experimenting, and doing it well” by “creeping into knowledge

experimentally” (Stoker 302).14 He tries to penetrate into his enemies by the

same technic, which is science in his own regard.

More than conducting his own experiment, Dracula actively attempts

to breach his opponents’ accumulation of knowledge. He tries to destroy all

the manuscripts produced by Mina, whose ability of using typewriter enables

the male characters to possess knowledge on the monster. This attempt,

14 Dracula’s boxes with Transylvanian soil are noted in the invoice for the British customs as

"Fifty cases of common earth, to be used for experimental purposes” (Stoker 226).

51

however, remains futile by leaving one copy of manuscript and Dr. Seward’s

phonograph intact. From that, it becomes possible again for the humans to

reproduce the knowledge even after its partial loss. Similar to this attempt to

destroy the source of knowledge, Dracula affects the infected Lucy to destroy

any knowledge on her case. While asleep, she is manipulated by Dracula to

do the following, though the attempt is quickly nullified:

She took the paper from her breast and tore it in two. Van

Helsing stepped over and took the pieces from her. All the

same, however, she went on with the action of tearing, as

though the material were still in her hands; finally she lifted

her hands and opened them as though scattering the fragments.

(Stoker 152)

The modern technologies enable the band of human characters to

counter Dracula’s transcendental abilities. Cutting-edge technologies used by

the characters - typewriter, phonograph and telegram – make it possible for

humans to transcend time and space, as Dracula does by transformation and

telepathic control over his victims. While Dracula tries to consume his

victims by his abilities, it is the technologies that finally succeed to consume

Dracula. Starting from Mina’s typewriting, which enables to revive Harker’s

shorthand records and Dr. Sward’s phonograph, it revives the texts to become

52

undead. The previously un-decoded texts become to function as undead,

undying record that enables humans to accumulate knowledge about Dracula.

In the case of phonograph, it enables Dr. Seward’s voice to be heard even

without the physical presence of himself. Similarly, telegram transgresses

time and space, enabling communication between humans in a way Dracula

does with his victims through telepathy. Thus the very means that are used

against the vampire are themselves working in a vampiric way. In this regard,

there is a fundamental resemblance in the state-of-art Victorian technology and

Dracula’s abilities.

The fundamental resemblance between the technology and the

vampiric properties raises questions on the notion of science in the novel.

While it is true that typewriting enables the protagonists to clarify the threat of

Dracula and properly assess it, why do Van Helsing and the Crew of Light

need the documented record from the first place? Even though the

accumulation of knowledge through various types of technology lays ground

for fighting the vampire, it is also true that Van Helsing, a scientist, is

introduced from the start as a figure “who knows as much about obscure

diseases as anyone in the world” (Stoker 111) who bears the titles of “M.D.,

D.Ph., D.Litt., etc., etc.,” (Stoker 112). If not for their particular inability to

deal with the previously unknown threat of vampire, the typewritten records

53

should not matter much to them. On this inability, Van Helsing provides an

excuse to Dr. Seward during discussion on supernatural phenomena such as

corporal transference and materialization,

Ah, it is the fault of our science that it wants to explain all;

and if it explain not, then it says there is nothing to explain.

But yet we see around us every day the growth of new beliefs,

which think themselves new; and which are yet but the old,

which pretend to be young – like the fine ladies at the opera.

(Stoker 191)

Van Helsing, as a leading figure of the Crew of Light, indeed moves

very carefully throughout the novel, deferring judgment on the threat of

Dracula. His treatment of Lucy, the first victim of the vampire, clearly shows

this reluctance. When first invited by Dr. Seward to examine Lucy’s illness,

he continuously delays to provide a clear explanation. Van Helsing tells Dr.

Seward that they should keep Lucy’s symptoms as secret first, for he has

thought that will unfold later to Dr. Seward. On the reason for this deferred

delivery of clear knowledge, Van Helsing draws an analogy of planting corns

that he has sown the seeds, and “Nature has her work to do in making it sprout”

(Stoker 119). But again, his careful and cautious move is not fully explained

by the titles he bears, and the description preceding his first appearance in the

54

novel, describing him as “a philosopher and a metaphysician, and one of the

most advanced scientists of his day” (Stoker 112).

While Van Helsing delays to provide the exact assessment of

Dracula’s threat, the contemporary scientific discourses play their roles in the

novel as a background for explaining the characteristics of the Count. The

notion of “child-brain” (Stoker 341) or the description of Dracula’s appearance

as “a tall, thin chap, with a 'ook nose and a pointed beard” (Stoker 137) or “a

tall thin man with a beaky nose and black moustache and pointed beard”

(Stoker 172) indicates the influence of degeneration discourses of the time

(Halbestrom 337). In addition, in two circumstances, Stoker directly cites the

names of contemporary scientists and their studies through Dr. Seward and

Mina. In one instance in the earlier part of the novel, Dr. Seward

contemplates on the case of his lunatic patient Renfield that he might “advance

[his] own branch of science to a pitch compared with which Burdon-

Sanderson’s physiology or Ferrier’s brain knowledge would be as nothing”

(Stoker 71). Nordau and Lombroso are mentioned by Mina when she defines

the Count as “a criminal and of criminal type” and that “Nordau and

Lombroso would so classify him” (Stoker 342).

Regardless of the notion of the contemporary scientific discourses to

account for the nature of the vampire, the solution devised by Van Helsing

55

during the course of the novel seems not to have much relation to the scientific

discourses or the technology as an applied form of science. Garlic, the first

solution he devises against Dracula, for example, is introduced when Lucy is

infected. The initial reaction to this solution is “half-laughter and half-

disgust” and Lucy herself says to Van Helsing not to put up a joke. Van

Helsing’s exaggerated reaction to Lucy marks a rather comical nature of it:

unable to provide any logical support for the use of garlic, he claims “with all

his sternness” that “there is grim purpose in all I do” (Stoker 130).

The description on Van Helsing’s special tools in exorcising vampires

introduces yet another unscientific element. The following is a description

of Van Helsing’s tools that he prepares before the Crew of Light

exterminates Lucy the undead.

First he took from his bag a mass of what looked like thin,

wafer-like biscuit, which was carefully rolled up in a white

napkin; next he took out a double-handful of some whitish

stuff, like dough or putty. He crumbled the wafer up fine

and worked it into the mass between his hands. This he then

took, and rolling it into thins strips, began to lay them into

the crevices between the door and its setting in the tomb.

(italics mine. Stoker 209)

56

All the other members from the Crew of Light wonder at the meaning of his

action as well as the purpose of each tool. Quincey Morris, one of the Crew

of Light, even asks if “this [is] a game” (Stoker 210). To this inquiry, Van

Helsing confesses that the white substance is a part of the Host, which he

brought from Amsterdam, breaking the Catholic rule.

With the introduction of the Christ’s body in exterminating the

monster, the ‘science’ in Dracula gives its place to the holy power. The

“power of combination – a power denied to the vampire kind,” “resources of

science,” and the freedom “to act and think” (Stoker 238), which seemingly

play important roles during the course of the novel, certainly lose their power.

Van Helsing’s explanation on the implication of exterminating Lucy the

undead reads very religious instead of scientific. In his speech when “all was

ready,” he asserts that the undead will cease to be undead if it “die[s] in truth”

(Stoker 215). With such notions of unscientific terms, the construction of the

whole novel as a scientific case study with various supporting materials starts

to lose its ground. If the whole novel is a scientific case against the unknown,

the very unscientific solution introduced by a character who is supposed to be

the most scientific figure self-contradicts the purpose and basis of the whole

narrative.

Van Helsing’s mixed use of medical and religious terms towards the

57

end of the novel, as well as the violent extermination of the vampire well

exemplify the self-contradictory nature of science in Dracula. Entering into

Dracula’s residency in London, Van Helsing tells the Crew of Light that they

must “sterilize” the place, to “sanctify it to God” (Stoker 298). Here, the use

of medical term simultaneously with religious expression poses a question

over the nature of science in the novel. Preparing for their chase of Dracula

back to Transylvania, Van Helsing puts a Sacred Wafer in a box of earth that

belongs to the vampire as a way of sterilization. But more significant is the

final extermination of Dracula. It is done very brutally near the Count’s

castle in Transylvania, with no help of knowledge accumulation or scientific

devices. In the final moment of the vampire, Jonathan Harker, with his

“great Kukri knife” cuts the throat of Dracula, at the same time Quincey

Morris’s “bowie knife” penetrates the heart of the vampire. The doctors, Van

Helsing and Seward, play no roles in this final extermination. Dracula then

vanishes “like a miracle,” as his “whole body crumbled into dust and passed

from [their] sight.” (Stoker 377)

Similar to the acknowledgement at the start of the novel, a short “note”

that claims to be written seven years after the incident of Dracula is placed at

the very end of the novel. In the note, all the documents that constructed the

whole narrative in a case against the unknown, the “mass of material” they

58

produced, is depicted to have “hardly one authentic document.” They are

“nothing but a mass of type-writing, except the later note-books of Mina and

Seward and myself, and Van Helsing’s memorandum” (Stoker 378). This

comment contradicts the confident acknowledgement at the start of the novel

that the novel has no needless material, liquidating the basis of the novel as a

scientific case employing a wide variety of cutting-edge technological tools.

At the end of Dracula, what has seemed to be a narrative full of

science is reduced into a witness of incomprehensible phenomenon of

supernatural event. In terms of the use of quasi-medical tools and scientific

methods in accumulating knowledge to chase its anti-hero, the leading figure

of Van Helsing as a scientific professional, and the way of narrative

construction as a scientific case against the unknown, the final result of

Dracula is of a failure in a sense that all the devices and methods to contain

the unknown are led to failure at the end. Science, if used to indicate not

only scientific experiments or theories but also systematic construction of

knowledge, does not make success in providing any solution to the problem of

Dracula in the novel.

.

59

Conclusion: Inherent Failure of Science as a Mode of Fin de Siècle

Anxiety

While Jekyll and Hyde and Dracula have a popular culture image of

horror fictions, the driving force of their narratives in the original novels is

science. The science utilized in the two novels is a science in a broad sense,

which encompasses the contemporary scientific discourses, the ways the two

novels employ in their narrative constructions, and specific representations of

technology as application of science. However, the science in the two novels

certainly marks a kind of failure in a sense that it does not work properly

towards the end, regardless of the importance it takes in the development of

the narratives or specific scientific references. In Jekyll and Hyde, the failure

of science is presented in the inherent failure of Jekyll’s scientific experiment

with his wrong design of experiment, which finally leads the protagonist to

death, leaving the whole case “strange.” In Dracula, the failure is formulated

through the helplessness of science in containing the monster, presented in the

contradictory behaviors of scientific figure of Van Helsing and his followers,

as well as the very contemporary technology used against the unknown to

construct a system of knowledge.

60

The ironic nature and use of science in the two novels resonate with

the position of scientific thoughts in the late Victorian period. The theories

that are mostly considered as scientific references for the novels were indeed

not as “scientific” as what the contemporary readers of the twenty-first century

might consider as “science.” Facing a progress too fast to grip, the literary,

the scientific, and the occult were all mixed together in the final years of the

nineteenth century. The proliferation of occult, the rise of new scientific

studies such as Freudian psychology, all mark the controversial nature of

science around the time of late Victorian and fin de siècle period (Spencer 203).

The two novels all the more reflect this controversial nature in their own

failures of science, which is more clearly seen in the so called science fiction

novels such as H.G. Wells’s Island of Doctor Moreau, where the failure of

science is more visible from the outlook with their archetypical mad scientists.

Such novels provide cautionary tales of possible dangers and errors of blind

pursuit of science.

Though Jekyll and Hyde and Dracula have also been read to possess

the archetype of “many versions of scientists as terrorists of the twentieth

century” (Sayres 176), nominally mad scientists, the two novels are too often

merely read as classics of horror fiction, with no relation to science. It is in

this regard that the current thesis tried to provide a possible ground for the two

61

works to be read in their relationship to the issue of science, especially of the

failure of science, a reflection of the confused state of science, and the unclear

mix of literature and science. It is, however, not an attempt to include the

two to a certain genre convention such as science fiction. Rather, the current

thesis aimed to provide an alternative reading of the two major literary works

of late-Victorian era, focusing on the role of science in the novels and its

failure, which has not been a prominent topic for literary studies on the two

novels.

In the current thesis, Jekyll and Hyde and Dracula were examined as

cases of the failure of science. However, the failures in the two novels are in

different modes. While the former presents a problem created by an error in

a poorly designed scientific experiment, the latter provides the whole novel as

a futile attempt to contain a supernatural being through various tools, methods

and characters related to science. Although it is also evident that the

antagonists of the two novels are exterminated in one way or another at the

end of each novel, science clearly marks a failure by the very extermination of

the monsters revealing unrealized flaw from the start or the helplessness of

scientific measures in containing the unknown.

One thing that should be noted is that there are nineteenth century

novels that are much more different in employing science in their narratives.

62

Jules Verne’s archetypical roman scientifique (scientific novel) are indeed

“educational and fast-paced adventure tale heavily flavored with scientific

didacticism” with “sense of wonder” (Evans 17). While Mary Shelley’s

Frankenstein: or, The Modern Prometheus (1818) can be read as an earlier

example of failure of science in a genre of novel, it is also true that many

novels now considered early science fictions also dealt with utopian future,

such as Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward: 2000-1887 (1888).

But questions still linger: Why does science in Jekyll and Hyde and

Dracula specifically marks failure rather than success? What if science in

the two novels success rather than fail? It is destined to fail? If so, what is

behind the failure of science in the two novels? A simple answer might be

that the science in the two novels analyzed in the current thesis is destined to

fail. The failure is well represented in issues mentioned and utilized in the

two novels, such as the fear of degeneration, concerns over drug impurity,

problematic nature of knowledge production through scientific means. If

Vernesian roman scientifique and its descendants reflect the optimistic view on

the rapid progress of science and its application in human life, the two novels

analyzed in the current thesis suggest rather dark and negative aspects of the

same issue, presenting the fear of unknown that is not realized or not able to

be contained. By not working properly as intended or revealing its

63

helplessness in providing solutions, the science in the two novels marks a

failure of itself, generating what can be noted as a proper fin de siècle anxiety

on the unclear realm of science at the time the two novels were written.

64

Works Cited

Anthony, Jiju. Design of experiments for engineers and scientists. Oxford:

Butterworth-Heinemann, 2003.

Arata, Stephen. Fictions of Loss in the Fin de Siecle. Cambridge: Cambridge

UP, 1996

Arnold, Matthew. “Literature and Science,” Popular Science 21:46 (October

1882) 737-751.

Auerbach, Nina. Our Vampires, Ourselves. Chicago, London: University of

Chicago Press, 1995.

Beer, Gillian. Darwin’s Plot. 1983. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2009.

-. “Problems of Description in the Language of Discovery,” One Culture:

Essays in Science and Literature. Madison: University of Wisconsin

Press, 1987. 35-58.

Block, Ed. “James Sully, Evolutionist Psychology, and Late Victorian Gothic

Fiction” Victorian Studies 25: 4 (Summer 1982) 443-467.

65

Botting, Fred. Gothic. 1996. London: Routledge, 1999.

Brantlinger, Patrick. “Victorian Science Fiction,” A Companion to the

Victorian Novel Eds. Patrick Brantlinger and William B. Thesing.

Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2002.

Caudwell, Eber. “The Physiological Action of Cuca and Cucaine,” The British

Medical Journal (Jan 3 1835) 17

Davies, Mark. (2010-) The Corpus of Historical American English (COHA):

400+ million words, 1810-2009. 15 June 2011 <

http://corpus.byu.edu/coha>

Dury, Richard. Robert Louis Stevenson: Writer of Boundaries. Eds: Richard

Ambrosini and Richard Dury. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press,

2006.

Elliott, Kamilla. “Film and Television,” A Companion to the Victorian Novel.

Eds: Patrick Brantlinger and William B. Thesing. Oxford: Blackwell

Publishing, 2002.

Evans, Arthur B. “Ninteenth-century SF,” The Routledge Companion to

66

Science Fiction. London: Routledge, 2009. 13-22.

Google Ngram Viewer. 17 June 2011

<http://ngrams.googlelabs.com/graph?content=science%2C+scientist

&year_start=1800&year_end=1900&corpus=0&smoothing=3>

Halberstam, Judith. “Technologies of Monstrosity: Bram Stoker's "Dracula",”

Victorian Studies 36: 3 (Spring 1993) 333-352.

Harrington, Anne. “Left-Brain versus Right-Brain Selves and the Problem of

the Corpus Callosum,” Medicine, Mind, and the Double Brain: A

Study in Nineteenth-Century Thought. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1987.

136-165.

Heath, Stephen. “Psychopathia sexualis: Stevenson's Strange Case,” Critical

Quarterly 28 (1986) 93–108.

Hempel, Sandra. The strange case of the Broad Street pump: John Snow and

the mystery of cholera. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007

Huxley, Thomas H. “Science and Culture,” Popular Science 18:10 (December

1880) 159-170.

67

Jódar, Andrés Romero. “Bram Stoker’s Dracula. A Study on the Human Mind

and Paranoid Behaviour,” ATLANTIS. Journal of the Spanish

Association of Anglo-American Studies. 31.2 (December 2009): 23–39

Kukich, John. “Intellectual debate in the Victorian novel: religion, science, and

The Professional,” The Cambridge Companion to The Victorian Novel.

Ed. Deirdre David. 2001. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2005. 212-233.

Lang, Andrew. “The Supernatural in Fiction,” Adventure Among Books. 1905.

Freeport, NY: Books for Libraries Press, 1970. 271-280.

Leach, Afred. “The Case of Edwin Bartlett,” The Lancet 177: 3274 (May 1886)

1017-1018.

Levine, Geroge. “Science and Victorian Literature: A Personal Retrospective,”

Journal of Victorian Culture 12:1 (Spring 2007) 86-96

Loeb, Lori Anne. Consuming Angels: Advertising and Victorian Women.

New York: Oxford UP, 1994.

Lombroso, Cesare. The Man of Genius. Ed: Havelock Ellis. London: The

Walter Scott Publising CO. LTD, 1917

68

Maixner, Paul. Robert Louis Stevenson: The Critical Heritage. New York:

Routledge, 1996.

Martin, William. “A Case of Chloroform Poisoning; Recovery,”

British Medical Journal 3:2 (July 1886) 16-17

Mayr, Ernst. What Makes Biology Unique?: Considerations on the autonomy

of a scientific discipline. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2004.

McDonald, Lynn. “Theory and Evidence of Rising Crime in the Nineteenth

Century,” The British Journal of Sociology 33: 3 (Sep., 1982) 404-420

Mighall, Robert. A Geography of Victorian Gothic Fiction. New York: Oxford

UP, 1999.

Miyoshi, Masao. “Dr. Jekyll and the Emergence of Mr. Hyde,”

College English 27:6 (March 1966) 470-474, 479-480

Moretti, Franco. “The Dialectic of Fear,” New Left Review 136

(November-December 1982) 67-85

Partington, Gill. “Friedrich Kittler's "Aufschreibsystem",” Science Fiction

69

Studies 33:1 (March 2006) 53-67

Putnam, Frank. W. Diagnosis and Treatment of Multiple Personality Disorder.

New York: Guilford Press, 1989.

"science, n.". OED Online. June 2011. Oxford University Press. 20 June 2011

<http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/172672?redirectedFrom=science>.

Seed, David. “The Narrative Method of Dracula,” Nineteenth-Century Fiction

40: 1 (Jun 1985) 61-75.

Spencer, Kathleen L. “Purity and Danger: Dracula, the Urban Gothic, and the

Late Victorian Degeneracy Crisis,” ELH 59:1 (Spring 1992) 187-225

Stoker, Bram. Dracula. 1986. Ed: Maud Ellmann. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1998.

Stevenson, Fanny Osborne. "Prefatory Note" to Robert Louis Stevenson's The

Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde; Fables, Other Stories and

Fragments. London: Heinemann, 1924. xv-xvi.

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

Other Tales of Terror. London: Penguin Books, 2002.

70

-. “Chapter on Dreams,” Across the Plains. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons.

1990. 229-252.

-. “Pulvis et Umbra,” Across the Plains. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons.

1990. 289-301.

Stiles, Meredith. “Robert Louis Stevenson’s Jekyll and Hyde and the Double

Brain,” Studies in English Literature 46:4, 879-900.

-. Neurological Fictions: Brain Science and Literary History, 1865-1905.

Dissertation. University of California. Los Angeles. Proquest/UMI,

2006 (Publication No. 3234346)

“The Saville Club – A brief history,” Savile Club.

<http://www.savilleclub.co.uk/home/history-of-the-club> Web. 28 Apr.

2011.

Urry, John. Mobilities. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2007.

Wilde, Oscar. The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde: Criticism :

Historical criticism, Intentions, The soul of man. Ed: Josephine M.

Guy, Russell Jackson, Ian Small. Oxford: Oxford UP.

71

Yu, Eric Kwan-Wai. “Productive Fear: Labor, Sexuality,and Mimicry in Bram

Stoker’s Dracula,” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 48: 2

(Summer 2006) 145-170.

72

국문 요약

빅토리아조 후기 소설에서의 과학의 실패:

『지킬 박사와 하이드 씨의 이상한 사례』와 『드라큘라』

『지킬 박사와 하이드 씨의 이상한 사례』(1886)와 『드라큘라』(1897)

은 여전히 문화적 영향력을 끼치고 있는 작품들이다. 이 두 작품에 대한 인식과

재생산물들은 대부분 공포스러운 이야기에 관한 것이며 이따금 애정의 요소가 감

미되기도 한다. 표면적으로 보았을 때, 빅토리아조 후기에 쓰여진 이 두 소설은

주인공에 의해 파괴되는 괴물에 관한 이야기처럼 보인다. 대부분의 선행 연구는

이 두 작품을 읽어냄에 있어 등장 인물과 문학적 장치에서 억압된 욕망이나 사회

적 문제들을 읽어내는 데 주목했으며, 이것이 이 두 작품을 독해하는 주요한 시각

이었다.

과학적 지식이 급증하고 있던 빅토리아조 후기에 쓰여진 『지킬 박사와

하이드 씨의 이상한 사례』와 『드라큘라』는 당대의 과학에 관련된 요소를 명확

히 보여준다. 이는 이야기 안에서 과학적 주제와 장치들을 사용하는 것 뿐만 아니

라 이야기를 구축하는 방식에 있어서도 확실히 드러난다. 더 나아가, 두 작품은

단순히 당대의 과학 담론을 반영하고 언급하는 것을 넘어서서 ‘과학의 실패’를 제

시한다. 두 소설은 다양한 방법을 통해 이야기 속에서 과학을 활용하며, 결말에

이르러서는 과학의 실패를 드러낸다. 각 작품에 있어 주된 갈등은 과학적 방법론

의 실패, 혹은 알 수 없는 존재를 포획함에 있어 어떠한 해결책도 제시하지 못하

는 과학의 무능력함으로 드러난다.

본 논문은 『지킬 박사와 하이드 씨의 이상한 사례』와 『드라큘라』에

서 과학에 대한 언급과 실패를 분석하며, 세기말 혹은 빅토리아조 후기 일반과 두

73

소설에서 드러나는 과학과 그 실패와의 관계를 제시하고자 한다. 과학과 그 실패

에 관한 분석을 제시함으로써 본 논문은 일반적으로 과학과 관련된 주제와 관련

되어 해석되지 않는 두 작품에 대한 다른 견해를 위한 기반을 마련하고자 한다.

핵심어: 과학, 과학의 역사, 기술, 내러티브, 19세기, 빅토리아조 소설, 세기말, 과

학 소설

74

Documents

The Failure of Science in Late Victorian Novels