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...Stevenson's Case Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886) resemble contemporary medical case studies in its form and structure, but its core idea may also have originated from medical literature. In her 1905 introduction to Stevenson's collected works, Fanny Osbourne Stevenson traces her spouse's interest in dual personality to a specific scientific article: "[M]y husband was deeply impressed by a paper he read in a French scientific journal on sub-consciousness [sic]." (2) This unnamed article, she adds, "gave the germ of the idea" that Stevenson afterward developed into Deacon Brodie, or. The Double Life (1880), a play he co-wrote with William Ernest Henley about the infamous eighteenth-century Scottish town councilor who led a secret nocturnal life of crime. Stevenson, we learn, then used this scientific inquiry again in his "Markheim" (1885), and, finally, "in a hectic fever following a hemorrhage of the lungs," it "culminated in the dream of Jekyll and Hyde."
The possible existence of this unidentified "paper on ... sub-consciousness" jars with Stevenson's own testimony, since the author himself flatly denied using any medical theories or particular case studies as models. In an 1893 interview, a journalist from New Zealand asked Stevenson, "Had you heard of any actual case of double personality before you wrote your book?" Stevenson responded, "Never ... After the book was published I heard of the case of 'Louis V.,' the man in the hospital at Rochefort. Mr. [Frederic W. H.] Myers sent it to me." (3) One is initially tempted to take Stevenson's account of the composition of Jekyll and Hyde more seriously than that of his spouse, not only because he was writing about these events at less remove (eight years after the composition of Jekyll and Hyde rather than twenty years) but also because Fanny's testimony elsewhere in her introduction is not entirely reliable. (4) Moreover, certain aspects of Stevenson's account can be corroborated; he did correspond with Myers shortly after the publication of Jekyll and Hyde, and Myers undoubtedly sent him a copy of his 1886 article "Multiplex Personality," which contains the case study of Louis V. mentioned by Stevenson.
However, in light of striking correspondences between Stevenson's work and case studies in French and British popular and medical journals during the 1870s and 1880s, it seems highly unlikely that Stevenson's reply to the reporter was entirely honest. It may be, as Richard Dury speculates, that Stevenson "refuses to collaborate with the reporter because he does not wish to provide a single key to a story that is intended to remain enigmatic." (5) Stevenson critics including Dury, Jean-Pierre Naugrette, and Jacqueline Carroy have proposed various candidates for the "paper on sub-consciousness," the most popular being a series of articles by Bordeaux physician Eugene Azam in Revue Scientifique in the 1870s. (6) In these articles, Azam introduces his famous patient Felida X., whom Ian Hacking identifies as "[t]he first French double personality to be studied in depth." (7)
While I agree that Azam's Felida is one likely source, I believe that Stevenson had other case studies in mind as well, some of which were available to him in British rather than French periodicals, a possibility previous critics have overlooked. Stevenson was probably influenced by French physician Ernest Mesnet's case study of a soldier (Sergeant F.) who developed two distinct personalities after his left cerebral hemisphere was damaged by a gunshot wound. (8) The case studies of both Felida and Sergeant F. were translated and summarized by journalist and astronomer Richard Proctor in a series of articles appearing in the Cornhill Magazine during the late 1870s. Since Stevenson also contributed to the Cornhill during this time period, it is unlikely that these articles escaped his attention.
I further suggest that Stevenson's work does much more than simply reflect the case studies upon which it is loosely based. In fact, Stevenson's masterpiece creatively intervenes in late-Victorian debates about dual personality and its alleged cause, bilateral brain hemisphere imbalance. For instance, Stanley Finger explains that Jekyll and Hyde "could well have affected how some clinicians subsequently viewed their cases," suggesting that the case studies of dual and multiple personality reported by Myers in 1886 and Scottish psychiatrist Lewis Bruce in 1895 (and possibly many others) bear the mark of Stevenson's influence. (9)
By virtue of his training and personal relationships with scientists, Stevenson was well-qualified to intervene in scientific controversies. The author came from a family of Scottish lighthouse engineers and studied engineering before turning to literature as a profession, meanwhile befriending scientific luminaries such as engineer Fleeming Jenkin and educational psychologist James Sully. He also corresponded sporadically with other important researchers, including Myers and the renowned French alienist Pierre Janet. (10)
Stevenson amply demonstrates his familiarity with the rhetorical conventions of scientific prose in Jekyll and Hyde. The novella cleverly parodies the form of the case study in order to reveal the weaknesses of late-Victorian narrative and theoretical models. This parody of the case study, however, takes place in the unlikely medium of the Gothic romance, the genre that critics most often associate with Jekyll and Hyde. Robert Mighall, for instance, sees Jekyll and Hyde as a model of "a new breed of Gothic fiction" that challenges realist notions of time, place, and context but still exhibits a marked "somatic and physiological character," while Patrick Brantlinger places Stevenson in the category of late-Victorian "Gothic romancers, whose stories always veer toward dreams and the subliminal reaches of the mind." (11) By mimicking the case study within a Gothic romance, Stevenson lays bare the limitations of scientific prose, particularly its inadequacy in light of complex moral and social realities impossible to relate in purely empirical terms. One might conceptualize Jekyll's "perennial war among [his] members," then, as the doctor's struggle to maintain scientific objectivity in the face of a terrifying subjective reality that threatens to overwhelm him. (12)
Stevenson was no mere satirist of scientific conventions, however; he clearly endorses particular scientific theories even as he implicitly mocks the rhetoric in which they are couched. The most likely origin of Stevenson's conception of multiple personality disorder as it appears in Jekyll and Hyde is the theory of the double brain, first developed by Continental physiologists such as Austrian anatomist Franz Joseph Gall (1758-1828) and later imported to England by such physicians as Sir Henry Holland (1788-1873) and Arthur Labroke Wigan (d, 1847) during the first half of the nineteenth century. "[M]an is not truly one, but truly two," Jekyll relates, apparently supporting theories suggesting that each brain hemisphere might house a separate personality, indeed, a separate soul (p. 48). Jekyll's lament that "these polar twins should be continuously struggling" likewise evokes contemporary scientific views that the left and right hemispheres not only differed in their abilities, but also occasionally exhibited contrasting desires and moral inclinations (p. 49).
II. JEKYLL AND HYDE, LITERARY CRITICISM, AND LATE-VICTORIAN SCIENCE
With a few prominent exceptions, critics of Jekyll and Hyde have overlooked dual-brain theories as potential sources for the novella's central theme. Anne Harrington, in Medicine, Mind and the Double Brain: A Study in Nineteenth-Century Thought (1987), briefly mentions the relevance of brain duality to Jekyll and Hyde: "[O]ne would have to argue ... that Jekyll would tend to focus his personality in the civilized, rational left hemisphere, while Hyde would give vent to his criminal instincts from somewhere in the recesses of the uneducated, evolutionarily backward right hemisphere." (13) Since Harrington's excellent study is historical rather than literary, however, she necessarily leaves the narrative implications of Henry Jekyll's duality unexplored.
Elaine Showalter, too,...
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