History 364-0-01: Gender and Sexuality in Victorian Britain; Northwestern University, Fall 2014

Male Sexuality: The Double Life and the Beast Within, Day 1

• Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-94)
  • The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde published Jan. 1886
  • Born in Scotland as Robert Lewis
  • He knew from an early age that he wanted to become a writer
  • Suffered his entire life from ill health
  • He was privileged and had a beloved nanny whom he loved more than his mother; this nanny knew a lot of Scottish folk tales and Robert loved those stories
  • He qualifies as a lawyer, known in Scotland as an advocate, but he never practices law
  • He met Fanny Osbourne, who was American, a divorced woman, and ten years older than Robert – three strikes against her – but Robert falls in love with her
  • Robert ends up chasing her across America and follows her to California when she goes home, to get married
  • There have always been rumors about Robert’s sexuality, and the marriage didn’t do much because Fanny was masculine and dominating
  • Fanny was very protective of Robert, which is something that writers need – protection from the outside
  • Robert publishes a hit, Treasure Island, but he’s still not making much money
  • Robert was living at his father’s expense
  • His editor suggests that he write a short story for the Christmas market, which is for publication just before Christmas to be distributed to a wide audience – it usually involves elements of the supernatural and is in his financial interest
  • The Maiden Tribute is published in August 1885, which is about the time Robert plans out writing this story
  • It is documented that Robert was reading the Maiden Tribute as the articles were published, which shows that it was on his mind
  • Robert just barely misses the Christmas market – it is published in Jan. 1886
  • The editor was concerned because the story was more explicit than the editor wanted for the public market and general audience
  • The book gets published in Britain for 1 shilling in paperback (this is the latest Victorian technology to sell a book fast to a large audience)
    • The price of 1 shilling puts the book within budget for a large audience and everyone read it
    • This strategy was called the Shilling Shocker
    • Within six months, it had sold 40,000 copies
    • It went across the Atlantic and it sold for $1
    • Everyone is speculating what this story means, what Hyde was actually up to, how London is portrayed, and what Robert was implying with the story

• The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
  • “A Jekyll and Hyde personality”
  • The story is set up to make it appear like you are reading about two different people
  • Robert states the story is about the struggle between good and evil, light and darkness, morality and immorality
  • The readership is overwhelmingly Protestant (not Catholic – they are in a minority)
  • Literary critics state this story is in the genre of gothic – terror, darkness, horror, supernatural
  • When Victorians wrote gothic tales, they usually set it in a different, remote geographic place (other than London), usually a Catholic country
    • This suggests that in far away lands that are Catholic, these things can happen (“there can be a Dracula”), but not in Protestant Britain
    • Robert’s tale is different in that it is set in London – right here, right now
  • Victorians understood the concept of a lower self and a higher self
    • The lower self is a lesser self, the self that doesn’t do well when pressured
    • The higher self does well when tested – when presented with a moral dilemma – and Victorians hoped that the higher self would win
    • The lower self becomes increasingly associated with men and male sexuality, and becomes shorthanded as “the Beast”
    • Even when the lower self is repressed, all men inherently possess this violent, aggressive, and dangerous lower self in relation to their sexuality
  • Robert downplayed the idea that he was talking about male sexuality because he did not want to get involved, but the debates still raged
  • “I became the slave of disgraceful, secret pleasures” got toned down to “concealed pleasures”
  • Heterosexuality vs. homosexuality
    • Readers who pick up on this theme are educated males
    • It would be interpreted as a younger working class man blackmailing an older middle class man, and the issue is homosexuality
  • Dual/split personality
    • This is the modern way of interpreting the text, and how we would read it today
    • Medical psychology is interested in the mind – Robert’s wife verified that during the time he was writing the story, he was in communication with medical psychologists
  • This story was presented in theaters, and the transformation from Jekyll to Hyde was so realistic that it made women scream in terror
    • The plays had to be shut down because they were too closely related to the Jack the Ripper murders in London