The Idea of Lost Identity in Fantasy Fiction: Stevenson, Stoker, and Lovecraft

Text by professor Timo Airaksinen part no:3.

In fantasy literature, monsters are so terrifying that to meet one leads to insanity and suicide. However, "I am becoming a monster" must feel worse. Thomas Nagel asks, "What is it like to be a bat?"; I ask what it is like to become and be a monster – is it possible to know? To answer, we need semiotic tools. I design a Nagel Test to determine one's ability to formulate de se thoughts and beliefs during and after the monstrous transmogrification. To do this, I will discuss what I call a Perry Case and Perry Tale. Most emphatically, my goal is not to offer new interpretations of the masterpieces of Stevenson, Stoker, and Lovecraft. I use their stories as sources of examples. I sketch a theory of monsters in the fantasy world. My modest main aim is to understand the logic and semiotics of losing one's personal identity and its psychological consequences. I imagine the semantics of a possible world maximally similar to the readers' actual world, except it allows monsters and, because of them, monstrous threats to one's identity. This is the language game played by the classical horror writers I will introduce.

Keywords: Thomas Nagel, de se beliefs, possible worlds, monsters; personal identity; physical identity; horror; suicide, madness, literary strategies, Oscar Wilde, George Orwell

"Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn." (H.P. Lovecraft).

3. Stevenson: Killing Mr. Hyde

Dr. Jekyll is anxious about but tempted by evil deeds. In his medico-chemical laboratory, he cooks a potion that transforms the mild-mannered scientist into a violent criminal, Mr. Hyde. Their physical differences reveal their different characters. Unlike the tall, respectable-looking doctor, Mr. Hyde is a small man with disgustingly ugly looks. He is a socially, morally, and physically disabled person. His appearance is a sign and symbol of his deformed character. The doctor created a blunt instrument of crime who has almost nothing in common with him. Jekyll uses Hyde as a tool. But then Jekyll would be responsible. Perhaps Hyde is a reduced version of Jekyll. One may suggest that Mr. Hyde is, psychologically and morally, a reduced version of Dr. Jekyll – as indicated by his smaller size and crippled appearance. However, the relationship between the two men is a moot question. When we strip Jekyll of his good characteristics, Hyde should emerge. But Hyde's violent immorality may not be an original part of Jekyll, whose immoral wishes appear rather tame. He speaks only of pleasures. It seems the two men are two distinct personalities in their separate bodies. As Jekyll writes in his "Full Statement": "[M]an is not truly one, but truly two. I say two because the state of my knowledge does not pass beyond that point." But he also writes about the "two sides of me." The two-person theory looks more like his considered opinion.

Here we meet a metonymic pair of characters, Jekyll and Hyde. Their identities clash, and the monster will prevail. Yet, the Nagel Test remains positive. The doctor can understand Mr. Hyde's psychology. Therefore, this is not a true monster case. The doctor wants to enjoy forbidden pleasures without moral qualms. As the good doctor may see it, he is not responsible for Mr. Hyde's crimes because he is a distinct personality with a distinctive physical appearance and bodily identity (Lacey, 2010). Alas, the doctor has evil temptations, and the fiendish Mr. Hyde does what the doctor always wanted – and much more (Bissey et al., 2010; Olson, 2003). – Mr. Hyde is absent, and Dr. Jekyll denies responsibility:

Time ran on; thousands of pounds were offered in reward, for the death of Sir Danvers was resented as a public injury, but Mr. Hyde had disappeared out of the ken of the police as though he had never existed. Much of his past was unearthed, indeed, and all disreputable: tales came out of the man's cruelty, at once so callous and violent; of his vile life, of his strange associates, of the hatred that seemed to have surrounded his career [. . .]. The death of Sir Danvers was, to [Dr. Jekyll's] way of thinking, more than paid for by the disappearance of Mr. Hyde. Now that that evil influence had been withdrawn, a new life began for Dr. Jekyll. He came out of his seclusion, renewed relations with his friends, and became once more their familiar guest and entertainer. (Stevenson, 1886)

The doctor's false peace of mind does not last because his new potion becomes unstable and slips out of control. Dr. Jekyll is now horrified when he realizes that Mr. Hyde will prevail. Stevenson created an articulate allegory of the two competing sides of human agency – we cannot deny its psychological validity. However, my approach is not psychological; hence, we pay attention only to the morals at the end of the story when the good doctor disappears without a trace. The searchers later receive the doctor's letter concerning his approaching suicide. They break into the laboratory, where they find Mr. Hyde close to death:

Right in the middle there lay the body of a man sorely contorted and still twitching. They drew near on tiptoe, turned it on its back and beheld the face of Edward Hyde. He was dressed in clothes far too large for him, clothes of the doctor's bigness; the cords of his face still moved with a semblance of life, but life was quite gone; and by the crushed phial in the hand and the strong smell of kernels that hung upon the air, Utterson knew that he was looking on the body of a self-destroyer. – "We have come too late," he said sternly, "whether to save or punish. Hyde is gone to his account; it only remains for us to find the body of your master." (Stevenson, 1886)

They have, at this point, failed to find the doctor. He played with fire, which in the end, consumed him. He created a monstrous shadow personality that he could adopt freely. But now he fails to recover and return at will, which means the monster will come to dominate. The doctor will become a sinister-looking moral monster. Dr. Jekyll wanted to play with something he now could not control: his personal and bodily identity. He will, in the future, be subordinated to Mr. Hyde. His only solution is suicide/murder, as the horrified doctor realizes. He must kill Mr. Hyde, which means suicide. This happens just in time when he is again, now involuntarily, changing his identity. He murders Mr. Hyde, who drags the doctor with him to an early grave – his final crime.

We are now in the deep waters of fantasy fiction. Stevenson presents a clear-cut instance of the basic fantastic trope of a person who becomes a monster and loses his former identity for good. Dr. Jekyll will permanently change into Mr. Hyde, an intolerable horror when he must finally confess to himself that he is a monster. However, the reader of the story must face a disappointing possibility. Mr. Hyde is wanted for murder, and the whole city of London is chasing him. Therefore, if the doctor turns permanently into Mr. Hyde, he has no hope of survival. He will hang, and suicide is the only escape. Such an ending leans on the fear of punishment, not the horror of lost identity. A reader of fantasy literature may prefer the more imaginative horror ending.

The doctor was ready to play along with Mr. Hyde, but then he assumed he was not Mr. Hyde. Now, he will become Mr. Hyde: he faces a fiend that is himself. In Stevenson's story, Dr. Jekyll, as I said, even after he turns into Mr. Hyde, still passes the Nagel Test: he knows what it is like to be a moral monster. But we find the applications of the de se thought and Perry Tales more difficult to evaluate. After Mr. Hyde killed Sir Danvers, he may have said to himself, as I imagine, "I enjoyed it so much." But now it is unclear who this "I" is. "I" refers to the speaker, but is this Jekyll or Hyde? Physically, Hyde is the murderer, but Jekyll also enjoys the act of violence – that is why he created Mr. Hyde. Suppose the authorities hanged the culprit; whom did they hang? They prefer to hang Mr. Hyde's body, but then Dr. Jekyll also meets his doom on the gallows. In this tale, the referent of "I" is essentially contestable. Incidentally, the trouble with the de se thoughts indicates that it is not self-evident that the doctor would realize beforehand what it is like to be combined with Mr. Hyde, a double personality. Now he has the experience, but could he explain it to his audiences? Stevenson does not give us a hint.