Under Construction Journal Issue 6.1 UNDER CONSTRUCTION JOURNAL 6.1 | Page 34

society, of the human subject itself” (Byron 2015, 187). However, although it is one of the most famous
Gothic novels of the period, Jekyll and Hyde is more than just a Gothic novel.
In its most basic sense, Stevenson presents this novel to the reader as a ‘case’. This suggests the
need for a detective – can we then not read the novel as a detective narrative as Danahay suggests in the
introduction to the Broadview edition of the novel (Stevenson, 2015, 17). There are examples of the police
force within the novel in the Carew Murder Case and Utterson himself takes on the role of detective in
his search for Mr Hyde: “If he be Mr. Hyde’, he had thought, ‘I shall be Mr. Seek” (Stevenson, 2015, 41).
Therefore, throughout this essay, I will draw on genre theory - to suggest that the Detective and Gothic
genres combine to create a novella which encourages the reader to consider the elements of detection at
work.
Nicola Lacey also highlights the genre duality of Jekyll and Hyde. Lacey (2010, 115) suggests that
Stevenson’s Jekyll and Hyde, at its end, is - concerned not only with the modern theme of interior
subjectivity and psychological responsibility, and medically or socially determinist accounts of criminality
such as those which dominate the later work of Dickens,-, but also with an older theme of ‘hellish’ evil, of
‘the slime of the pit’ appearing on the earth (Lacey, 2010, 115).
From Lacey’s summary, we can view the ‘older theme’ as the traditional Gothic, and the
‘criminality’ as an interbreeding with the Detective genre. More accurately, we can see the two are
inescapably connected but seemingly manifest in different characters within this novel; Utterson as the
detective and Hyde as the Gothic evil monster. This distinction suggests the dichotomy between ‘good’
and ‘evil’ is clear-cut.
However, we can see that the two distinctions may not be so simple. Charles J. Rzepka states that,
“there is the unspoken assumption that we read detective fiction for the sake of identifying with a
character in the story, usually the detective, but sometimes the criminal and sometimes both” (Rzepka,
2005, 22). In detective fiction, then, the distinction between good and evil, or more specifically, 'bad' is a
little more corrupted. The reader may in fact identify with the criminal, suggesting that the reader will not
always associate with what is considered ‘good’. I would like you to consider the 'hard-boiled' detective,
or Sherlock Holmes’ drug problem. Both of these blur the line between good and bad in a way that makes
it hard for a reader to align themselves with the character most morally upstanding. In Gothic fiction, this
may be simpler as the reader can generally identify the moral hero of the tale. In Jekyll and Hyde, however,
this is more complex than the dichotomous presentation of the protagonist suggests. The ghastly Hyde is
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