#to the real world genres and conventions of the 19th century is actually its number one defining unique feature in the ya bookscape

[rotzaprachim]

i guess the thing that keeps me coming back to the draft is it’s so big and sprawling that there’s multiple genre imitations/pastiches in there so it doesn’t /feel/ like the same story in a way that would have me be bored. but also it’s SO big and sprawling 

#are we doing nature writing sheer artic climes lutefisk western today OR claustraphobic teenage boarding school SHenanigans #OR are we doing scotwalerland lifestyle or straight dickens pastiche? so many little bits to chip away at #a hartz iz nisht kein meleks trone #the setting and location of gverse do give SO much room to experiment with genre tho and i think SOC being tied very strongly #to the real world genres and conventions of the 19th century is actually its number one defining unique feature in the ya bookscape #which leigh herself didn't Get because KOS didn't do that.... at all

[zayrickyear2jh]

13/12/19 BA2a Research: Session 4 The nightmare city and the urban laboratory

Plot Summary: Chapter 3

We meet Dr Jekyll at last. A large, well made smooth-faced man of fifty, although

In this chapter - Jekyll reassures Utterson he can be free of Mr Hyde whenever he wants. He says it’s a private matter and he asks Utterson to let is sleep. He calls Dr Lanyon hide bound, meaning narrow minded.

Plot summary:The Carew Murder Case Chapter 4

Nearly a year passes peacefully.

The Hyde commits murder. HIs victim is Sir Danvers Carew, a respected member of parliament.

The events witnessed and somewhat strongly described

Consider the careful setup

Before the coming of the ever-present fog, the night was cloudless and brilliant lit by a full moon. Why might the full moon be important to mention?

Stevenson writes in rapturous terms:

The maid servant sat at her window and fell into a dream of musing.

Carew appears to her as an aged and beautiful gentleman with white hair and a very pretty manner of politeness

The moon shone on his face as he spoke

Such an innocent and old world

Hyde

A great flame of anger

Broke out of all bounds

Ape like fury

Why do you think Stevenson sets up the murder scene in such a romantic way? Its the contrast between the elements of good but evil. The scene represents tduality in action.

The association of Carew with innocent and beauty makes the violence more shocking by contrast.

It has the effect of turning Carew into a martyr-like figure. His death can be seen as symbolic.

Utterson exhibits his usual self-control (ego; reality principle)

He is ever the gentleman: refusing to draw hasty conclusions.

Uttterson travels through the chocolate-coloured fog towers Soho, accompanied by the police, to Mr Hyde’s lodgings the witness has identified him. It seems to Utterson like some city in a nightmare.

Mt Hyde has done a runner but the policeman is optimistic. Several thousand pound are found in Hyde’s bank account: surely the man will call to collect  it. All they have to do is lie in wait for him.

So the chapter ends on a cliff-hanger with a clear hook to chapter 5.

Carew ‘accosts’ Hyde with ‘a very pretty manner of politeness’

What might Stevenson be hinting at here?

Elaine Showalter calls the novella a fable of findesiecle homosexual panic. She notes that working class men of the ear were sometimes seen as erotic object by their aristatic superiors.

Hyde is classless rather than working class this itself would have been disturbing and bewildering.

‘Blackmaile’s Charter’

-Known as the Blackmailer’s Charter’s this was the piece of legislation that led to arrest of Oscar Wilde in 1895.

Urannian- The word homosexual wasn’t used in English til 1892 in a translation of a German sexology manual Psychopathia Sexualis. Victorian mainly used the word Uranian for them, this actually meant having a female psyche in a male body. Ironically the 1885 act helped create the concept of a homosexual identity.

The duality of Rober Louis Stevenson

Stevenson himself was a man of contradiction

Effeminate but straight

Wealthy but dressed down )stuffy with bad teeth)

Born to strictly religious parents but lived a bohemian life as an adult.

Played at being lower class but exploited upper class connection.

Not conventionally handsome, he was said to have mesmirizing eyes and drew many male admirers including folklorist Andrew Lang and novelist Henry James. Stevenson appeared to enjoy the attention of his male admirers. And, whether he intended it or not, Uranian men of the era did find sympathetic undertones in his work. To use mourned parlance, could this be a type of queer baiting?

There is no biographical evidence that Stevenson himself experienced any same sex attraction, but Claire Harman suggest.

Social Taboos in Gothic horror

Jekyll and Hyde: The Gothic revival.

Stiles notes the Gothic conventions of Stevenson’s novella: the nocturnal settling, the theme.

The birth of Gothic horror

Horace Walpole’s dream Castel of Qtranto

Place and time

Power/Sexual power

Note how Walple’s The castle of otranto was also inspired by dream.

Key features of the Gothic

Wild landscapes vs improsonment. The re-emergece of the past within the rest.

Fascination with obscene patriarchal figures figures

Explores the limits of what is is to be human: internal desires or forces outside your control.

full of perverse weird and dangerous kinds of sexuality.

The vulnerability of women in the 19th century

The Gothic genre had scope to explore the lives of the 19th century woman.

The genre often depicts the triumph of young women over seemingly impossible forces.

If you’ve your story female protagonist you may like to explore the tropes of Gothic horror in your critical analysis.

The Uncanny

Gothic horror is all od uncanny moments.

Figures that are not quite human such as dolls, waxworks, automat

Strange, mysterious, unsettling, unnerving, unearthy

Meaning Un heimlich means un-homely

Therefore we don’t feet at home with the uncanny or the home is somehow transformed or changed.

No one can ever quite describe Mr Hyde. A prolonged state of uncertainty.

J and H was fascinated with clockwork autumata. Could be a potential

Tip: If you’re writing a horror film, try making it personal: use your own fears and phobias to make the terror.

And harness the power of the uncanny by focusing on dread and apprehension rather than outright horror.

main it unhomely: unsettle the viewer with sinister hints a radio that turns on by itself a child’s toy that is not where you left it, a writhing maggot in a piece of fruit.

Make it un-secret: show us something that shouldn’t be shown.

Give the view time to feel the fear: You have to allow the sense of underlying unease to intensify over time.

Birth of the city/the urban Gothic

Jekyll and Hyde is seen as the first Urban Gothic novel.

In the mid 1800s huge numbers of people left the country for an excited new life in the city. But many had to live in slums with no sanitation. Disease was rife. Young children worked in factories or cleaning chimneys.

London was the largest city in the world, totalling 4 million inhabitants in the 1880s’. Stevenson chose it as the setting for his ‘urban gothic’ tale but some critics argue it’s real settling is Edinburgh, where Stevenson grew up.

The evil within..

In the tale 19thC Gothic novel the threat is no longer some external force. Instead the evil is sinuously curled around the very heart of the respectable middle-class norm’ This made it more frightening because it made the evil inescapable.

Middle-Class Victorian had a great fear that sexual depravity and other kinds of moral decay would pass from the nocturnal world to the safe space of the home.

Like a district id time city in a night mare ( The Carew Murder Case)

They grew less interested in the wild landscapes of traditional Gothic, and focused instead on the new landscape of the city: an equally appropriate source of desolation and menace.

By identifying and exploring that obsession through art and literature, they sought to control and contain it.

This fear is made visual in Jekyll and Hyde through symbolic use darkness and fog.

The urban labaratory and the strange science of the mind.

The primary figure at the heart of most Victorian fin de siecle texts is the scientist and during the fin de siecle what the scientist tends more and more to dabble.

Questioning boundaries: science, pseudo-science, and the occult.

The greatest pace of advance and change in the fields of science and medicine led Victorians to necessarily suspend disbelief: unlikely things might easily turn out to be true.

As a result the gap between science and the occult was much narrower in Victorian Britain than today.

The dual brain

we’ve already seen that hypnosis suggested the possibility of a hidden self. This concept was reinforced by the victorian theory.

Left brain is seat of logic and reason

Right brain is emotions

Women and savages were strong in the right brain. Hyde is describe as ape-like

Sergeant F: the uncanny quality of the double

In 1875 the Cornhill magazine published the case study of a brain damaged French soldier Soldier F.

Sergeant F was male, and his condition was caused by a wound the battlefield. But the dual or multiple personality was almost overwhelmingly a female condition and still is today its known as Dissociative Identity.

Stles theories that small, puny, right brained Hyde has something of the victorian feminine about him: emotionally unstable.

Victorians also believed that your personality could be read in the shape of your skull.

The Victorian era saw a huge divide between rich and poor, and in essence these types of belief enabled upper class Victorians to feel okay about their unequal wealth.

Phrenology

Developed by Franz Joseph Gall in 1796, this pseudo-science made the claim that your personality and character could be recognised by the shape of your skull.

The Profession Sickist

In letter he described himself as a professional sickest. As a result, much of his work was written in bed.

Strange case of Jekyll and Hyde

The Lancet = medical journal

Jekyll is both physician and patient, call into question the legitimacy and objectivity of scaentific case studies.

As a professional sickest its likely the Steenson experienced it.

Film to watch - The burke and Hare murders