Under Construction Journal Issue 6.1 UNDER CONSTRUCTION JOURNAL 6.1 | Page 33

Still as Strange: The Detection of Self in The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde
Daisy Cowley • MA English, Keele University
Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr Hyde is a novel that
transcends boundaries, both scientific and generic. It plays on the fears of modern
science, much like Frankenstein does, to illicit terror within the reader. However, while
this text is evidently Gothic, it does much more than just tell a horrific story. The text
conjures somewhat of a mystery which, through Edmund Burke’s notion of the obscure,
we can read as intensifying the horror. The very title itself asks the reader to embark
on the ‘case’ which may suggest that we can read this novel as a detective novel. While
one might see the most obvious mystery to be ‘who is Hyde’, the text invites us to
question not who Hyde is, but where Hyde comes from. This, in turn, reminds us that
evil is able to exist within ourselves. This idea of self-detection aligns with the notion of
the metaphysical detective which is a relatively modern concept but is vital in
discussing Jekyll as a detective of the self. I will argue that in the case of this novel, the
Gothic and the detective as genres work together to create a narrative that is very self-
reflective and asks the reader to undertake an interrogation of the self and question
the monstrosity of Hyde.
Keywords: Detective fiction, psychoanalysis, metaphysical detective, 19 th Century fiction
Introduction
Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886) is arguably
one of the most famous novels of the Gothic fin de siècle era. During the later Victorian period, upper-
class, British society suffered from a span of degeneration that fuelled Gothic literature. Degeneration
appeared as class boundaries and conceptions of moral hierarchy broke down, as science overtook the
logic of religion, as crime and disease ran rampant in the city and as the effects of the industrial revolution
and the agricultural depression spread across the country (Byron, 2015, 186). Works such as Jekyll and
Hyde “draw their power from the fears and anxieties attendant upon degeneration, and the horror they
explore is the horror prompted by the repeated spectacle of dissolution – the dissolution of nation, of
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