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Cours de C. HUGUET
COMMENTAIRE DU CHAPITRE 4
"The Carew Murder Case"
pp. 21-22 (Norton): "Nearly a year later… before to Henry Jekyll"
(Introduction)
Strange Case of Doctor Jekyll and Mr Hyde is one of those stories that almost dissociate themselves from their author and, although Charles Dickens certainly remains the great mythologist of the nineteenth century, Stevenson shares with him the privilege of having created a character (or is it two characters?) refusing to be confined within the pages of a book and having actually entered into the English language.[1] As present-day readers of the novel, we thus have considerable advantages over Stevenson's contemporaries when it comes to assessing long-term implications of novelistic practices. But we also necessarily miss much of the fun and excitement of a first-time reading experience the "Story of the Door" and "Search for Mr Hyde" overture chapters inevitably fail to raise the same interrogations. Nor does "the Carew Murder Case" create the same enthralling suspense, understandably; as a result, to do justice to Stevenson's craftsmanship in this striking episode one needs to keep in mind the primary level of reading and analyse first the storyteller's zestful exploitation of textual strategies that are the hallmark of most Victorian thrillers. Because Stevenson himself defined his new novel not only as "a fine bogey tale" but also as an allegory, critical focus may then shift to the novelist's working up of motifs and ideas, both personal and topical, allowing the desired balance of entertainment and edification to be reached. Nevertheless, like many a quintessential Victorian, Stevenson could still remain profoundly ambiguous; his engineering of the execution of one "good" gentleman by another "wicked" one is a case in point and may ultimately be examined as a finely ironical illustration of the hidden depths the unsavoury/unsaid diktat rarely fails to produce in nineteenth-century fiction.
(I. A Victorian mystery-thriller)
Jekyll and Hyde may be seen as a superb mosaic of Victorian literary conventions and devices; Stevenson was a man of his day, whose tastes and techniques as artist were to a large extent characteristic of the notion of fiction that was in the air since the mid-fifties. His natural inventiveness made sensationalism particularly attractive to him. Mary Elizabeth Braddon, whom he discovered at the age of fifteen, would always be a "very good read," he acknowledged in a letter to her written in the last years of his life. Although the sensation novel had dominated the 1860s, it was still immensely popular two decades later, and Stevenson, along with writers like Thomas Hardy, availed himself unsparingly of some of its specific ingredients, notably the nerve-tingling brew of mystery and violent crime of a characteristically gruesome nature, perpetrated in lurid "blood-and-thunder" scenes. In order to turn a helpless old man into "a body," a "it," Stevenson chooses to have him savagely assaulted and clubbed to death rather than neatly shot dead on the spot, for instance, thus revealing his inherited allegiance to sensation-seeking literature. And with a view to making Hyde's display of cruelty more blood-curdling if possible, he appeals to the reader's imagination through the senses of sight and hearing combined: "the bones were audibly shattered and the body jumped upon the roadway."(l. 35)
This typically Victorian addiction to strong emotions needs to be placed against the background of contemporary popular drama too. Melodrama was a flourishing genre throughout the nineteenth century, and Stevenson's fascination with popular theatricals of all kinds has been well documented. The very title of his novel, "Strange Case of…" looks towards melodramatic extravagance of emotion and clearly manifests, more largely, Stevenson's awareness of the rhetorical concept of "Admiratio," that is the excitement created by whatever is exceptional. The reading contract established by the self-advertising title-page adjective remains valid throughout the murder episode. Hyperbolic adjectives and adverbs are rife ("singular" l. 2; "notable" l. 3; "incredibly" l. 41; "is it possible?" l. 60). In the deadly encounter, extremes are pitted the one against the other the villain has to be an arch-villain, a master criminal, and the victimised gentleman a paragon of virtue. The text generously distributes markers of intensity: "very" ("very small gentleman; very pretty manner; very much surprised; very tough and heavy wood" ll. 15, 18, 32, 42-3); "great" ("a great flame of anger" l. 29). The moon itself is conveniently full; as for the walking-stick, it is made of "rare" wood. Comparisons between before and after are ostentatiously drawn to enhance the exceptional nature of the occurrences ("rendered all the more notable; never had she felt more at peace" ll. 2, 11-12). Stylistic emphasis mirrors the characters' predicament, Hyde's crime supposedly constituting an uncontrolled exaggeration of Jekyll's "wild" disposition.
The remarkable theatricality of the "scene at the window," as Stevenson names it in his "A Chapter on Dreams," should also be assessed in the light of the novelist's taste for melodrama. The episode is neatly divided into three "acts" (preparation for the tragedy/ unwinding/ aftermath), with a loud curtain-fall in-between the last two acts: "At the horror of these sights and sounds, the maid fainted." (ll. 37-8) The preference given to the visual (the murder scene itself is mere dumb-show, the thud of blows being the only noise to be heard) enhances the rhythmic sophistication / staginess of the narrator's commentary, due in particular to the contrasted final iamb and trochee as well as to the histrionic alliteration in [s] and rhyming effect in [ei]. Such lines inevitably remind the reader of melodramatic stage-diction. The text skilfully exploits stage-levels too, the maid's garret window standing for the upstage part of the show-room, thus heralding in an interesting change from the eye-level perspective of Hyde so far adopted. Stevenson's attentive eye to scenography allows the décor to be made the most of, with a significant dialectics of indoor/outdoor action , from the maid's room to the open streets, back to Utterson's chambers, through the streets again and into a police station cell.
Stevenson "loved to speak in a circle of stage-fire," to use Ruskin's celebrated comment on Dickens. He readily acknowledged his debt to pictorial art too: to reach a climax, the text should offer a powerful tableau for contemplation, and the reader certainly gets good value in fright thanks to the striking body language (ll. 27, 31-2). In his essay "A Gossip of Romance," Stevenson voices his liking for plastic poses most clearly: "the characters fall from time to time into some attitude to each other or to nature, which stamps the story home like an illustration." The reader's sense of vicarious experience is further enhanced by the optical pleasure to be derived from the bird's-eye view adopted. Kept at a safe distance from the scene, the servant-girl and the reader are invited to stare at the execution of Carew with the same sense of temporary visual power that the Victorians used to gain through the medium of the home stereoscope or the panorama (a large painted representation producing a compelling illusion of three-dimensionality, including lighting effects and false perspectives, to be contemplated in a darkened room). Stevenson pays considerable attention to his fear-producing colour-scheme in this night scene: Carew's hoary hair (l. 14) and gold watch offer a sharp contrast to literal and metaphorical blood-red Hyde ("a great flame of anger," ll. 29-30; "the gory splintered cane" l. 45). The text unashamedly capitalises on chiaroscuro effects, with a mythically-charged light source ("the moon shone on his face," l. 21) for an appeal to the horror-struck reader's imagination.
Such attentive stage-setting of the nightmare also obviously looks back to the Gothic genre, which comes as no surprise in an age characterised by a "Gothic Revival," in architecture especially. Stevenson's gothicisation of his story is not original; the maze of dark lanes, the defenceless maid in an all-male world, the menacing grotesque fiend are recognisable Gothic bric-a-brac. Hyde owes much to Dickens's evil dwarf Quilp, in The Old Curiosity Shop. The text similarly transmutes reality by asserting the interdependence of the domestic and the abnormal, allowing perfectly identifiable feelings (professional ambition) to coexist along with "insensate" ones. (l. 44) Proximity is a key element in a scene which is not just a matter of taking crime as its subject, but of showing it acted out in, and threatening, seemingly ordinary surroundings, hence the amount of realistic notations: the maid's timetable l. 5, the detail of the box under the window in the cramped room l. 9, Mr Utterson's habit of breakfasting in bed l. 50.
In this context of transmutation of reality, the careful build-up of suspense is mere routine. The text teasingly allows tension to mount the victim's leisurely approach, the fatal encounter and its consequences, "the day after" are necessary steps in the creation of this enigma of the sphinx. All certainties have to be blurred and it is important that the servant-girl should be close enough to take in all the dreadful details of the scene (it ensures a sense of the alien among us), and far enough not to overhear the conversation, leaving the reader no option but to cling to pure conjecture: "from his pointing, it sometimes appeared as if he were only inquiring his way; but…" ll. 20-21. The narrative makes a show of cautiousness, to the point of fussiness: indefinite verbs and phrases crop up ("seem; appear; something; as of…" ll. 18-23). Stevenson emerges here as the proud, self-confident master of "few and/but startling details," effortlessly guiding his spell-bound reader from the gradual revelation of Hyde's personality and identity in the early chapters to the next necessary stage in the concatenation of events: the disclosure and confirmation of the disturbing relationship between Jekyll and his "protégé." Utterson functions as a central cog in the machinery of suspense, since his name is found on the envelope, he identifies the body and, above all, tantalisingly recognises the cane. After histrionically programming itself as thrilling matter ("The Carew Murder Case"), the episode spins out the palette of human reactions, from idle musing to passing curiosity, surprise and unbearable horror, to come to a dramatic close and a solemn cliff-hanger l. 68. Stevenson develops a powerful rhetoric of suspense throughout, making the most of linguistic delay mechanisms such as hypotaxis (large amount of subordinate clauses: ll. 5ff or 41ff, for instance).
As is often the case in mystery-thrillers in the Charles Dickens – Wilkie Collins vein, the detective police are allowed on the spot only to add to the general confusion at first. They are in particular conventionally endowed with a subsidiary status and a subordinate role, the main villain-finder remaining Utterson the lawyer, a clear reminiscence of the Dickensian legalistic sleuth. The aesthetic pleasure in detection is created in a straightforward way; to shift from plot to plotting, Stevenson drags in all the main ingredients of the detective story genre a morally reliable eye-witness, a necessary amount of props as evidence (the corpus delicti to prove that the servant-girl has not been dreaming the scene, like Stevenson), the walking-stick. Stevenson does not depart either from another habitual novelistic practice which consists in introducing decoys, lures, in order to waylay the reader-as-sleuth. "A maid living alone in a house not far from the river" (l. 4) does not inaugurate some Jack-the-Ripper horror-mystery after all. As for the reassuring lapse of time (l. 1) and the absence of stifling smog, they create inverted pathetic fallacy. If the artist wishes the reader to play the game of h(y)de-and-seek along with him and Mr Seek, the narrative must evince acceptance of the appropriate mood, including the right jargon (that is, a generic sociolect like "case, victim, murderer, the man"). The detective story genre is a constrained form of discourse, having its own codified laws, and the reader might be tempted to grumble over Stevenson's creaky machinery in places: why should Sir Danvers Carew post a letter to his lawyer in the dead of night? What on earth was he doing in this back street? Stevenson makes a strained use of Utterson as go-between why should Jekyll need him to start with, being a DCL (Doctor of Civil Law) and LLD (Doctor of Laws) himself? And the link between Hyde and the maid's non-entity of a master reads like a far-fetched coincidence.
However, the reader easily overlooks such lame planning thanks to the convincing narrative strategy throughout. The opening of chapter 4 offers a striking example of the multi-narrational method a montage, a palimpsest of subjective voices (Wilkie Collins's trademark) imparting depth, ensuring dramatic intensity as well as making for an effect of naturalness and authenticity, paradoxically enough. While borrowing loud journalese ("singular ferocity" l. 2) from absent reporters, the narrator also delegates power to the girl (ll. 10ff conflate indirect and free indirect speech). Narrative authority also mutely passes on to a member of the police force ("he had] been told the circumstances," ll. 51-2) and even allows bold mise en abyme (l. 63: "he briefly narrated what the maid had seen" and said). These iterative and complementary narratives obviously pave the way for Jekyll's corroboration of events in his "full statement of the case," their other main function being to protract the lawsuit analogy, one of the trade secrets of detective fiction. Events have to be neatly reconstructed from different angles, with clockwork precision, if the mystery story is to grab its client at all. The inner chronology of the book enables unlimited freedom with the linearity of events, as the elliptic chrononym l. 1 ("18–"), the analeptic pluperfect l. 5 ("had gone upstairs to bed") or the proleptic present tense l. 8 ("it seems") well show.
For all these reasons, there is no denying the enduring strength of the novel as "a magnificent bit of sensationalism," to use Stevenson's wife's own words, although the concept was a sore point with both the husband and his wife. Torn between his impulsive desire to produce a forceful shocker or "crawler," and his reluctance to put only one more low, vulgar "penny dreadful" upon the Christmas mass-market, Stevenson apologetically rewrote his little book in order to allegorise it. The murder of Carew, which he had probably dreamed as a perfect bit of "catch-penny" fiction provides an adequate illustration of the enlarged scope of the tale.
(II. From bogey tale to allegory)
If the Stevensons had the moral lesson in mind when they talked of allegorising the horror story, literary critics see allegory as a mode of expression, a form of analogy, not a mode of thought. An allegory is a sustained metaphor, "a metaphorical narrative, running parallel with a conceptual one but deferring to it" (Northrop Frye). Stevenson indeed starts with the immaterial fact of the duality of man's nature and translates it into concrete, coherent imagery.
More generally speaking, the Stevensons were disregarding literary distinctions (between the allegory and the parable, in particular) and merely thinking in terms of the Victorian docere delectando doctrine (to teach while pleasing). Stevenson burnt his first draft, rewrote and polished his story in an attempt to promote it to the rank of cautionary tale. In this light what does the concrete murder of Carew signify? Hyde is clearly to be accepted as an allegory of impending death, but judging from textual semiotic density, several analogies come to mind as well, the foremost one being the apocalyptic theme.
1) "that damned old business of the war in the members" = the biblical wrestle with oneself.
Both the narrator's and Utterson's solemn stance pleads in favour of such a reading. "The deed had been done" (a heavy-handed polyptoton: use of words having the same root) anticipates Utterson's "solemn, grave" reaction (ll. 52, 54 = a choric commentary on the action).
= to be understood as a personal, compulsive stance: Stevenson inherited a generous share of the Protestant imaginative tradition. His Bible culture = the Old Testament outlook + Scottish devil literature and double stories. Stevenson = heavily marked by the Calvinistic outlook on man = negativistic: corruptibility, predestination to damnation. Hyde must out with a vengeance, after two months of a life of great "severity."
The reality of evil = breaking the cane / breaking the sixth commandment
("Thou shalt not kill," Exodus 20:13) = usurping God's role as master of man's destiny. Hyde = a backslider, an apostate, a Cain-like outcast set apart from the common herd from then on: "gone"(l. 40). He is the type of the monster (like Macbeth he has murdered sleep: the servant-girl 's rest = spoilt, l. 39).
the war in heaven/the struggle in the streets of a God-forsaken world (no
fog ll. 6-7: fog, smoke, clouds signal God's presence). Claustrophobic recreation of Hades. London (Edinburgh?) as a type of Babylon, the Great Whore.