The sedulous ape: atavism, professionalism, and Stevenson's 'Jekyll and Hyde.' - Robert Louis Stevenson

Criticism, Spring, 1995 by Stephen D. Arata

It can be argued that, in rejecting Besant, Stevenson simply embraces a different model of professionalism, one that would become increasingly familiar in the modernist period. Certainly, in his hauteur regarding the reading public, as well as in his commitment to the values of craft, of style, of culture and taste, Stevenson participates in that reshaping of authorial self-presentation that Jonathan Freedman has identified most notably in James, Pater, and Wilde. As Freedman suggests, rejecting the middle-class marketplace could be a highly marketable strategy, just as distancing oneself from both the Besantian professional and the "general reader" could be a way of asserting one's own more authentic professionalism.(37)

Yet while James, Pater, and Wilde - all consummate modernist professionals by Freedman's standards - have been assimilated into the modernist canon, Stevenson has not. There are doubtless many reasons for this exclusion, but one has to do with Stevenson's conspicuously split allegiances, his dual commitment to aestheticism and "style" on the one hand and to what George Saintsbury called "the pure romance of adventure" on the other.(38) A feuilletonist who wrote pirate stories, Stevenson combined a Paterian attention to the intricacies of style and form with blood-and-thunder celebrations of male adventure. While aestheticism in turn became a key component of much Modernist writing, adventure did not. Stevenson's champions in the twentieth century have almost always been those who, like Proust and Nabokov, recognize in him a fellow dandy. Critical considerations of his adventure stories have, by contrast, tended to thrust him firmly back into the nineteenth century. Late-Victorian adventure stories were themselves rejections of both realism and professionalism. Unlike aestheticism, however, adventure rejected them in the name of a reimagined male bourgeois identity. It was thus a form of critique - occluded, self-interested, contradictory - arising from within the patriarchy itself. Stevenson's simultaneous embrace of aestheticism and adventure thus possesses a certain coherence, yet it was also the source of significant incoherences. Like Oscar Wilde, Stevenson cultivated a "style" both aesthetic and personal that carried within it an implicit critique of conventional middle-class mores. Yet like Andrew Lang, Rider Haggard, Arthur Conan Doyle, and other votaries of the "male romance," Stevenson used the conventions of "adventure" (and again, those conventions could be said to structure both his work and, especially after the move to Vailima, his life) in an attempt to reshape his male middle-class readership and ultimately to affirm his ties to them.

That Stevenson felt this split in his allegiances with special acuteness while writing Jekyll and Hyde is suggested by his account of the story's genesis offered in "A Chapter on Dreams" (1892). In this essay Stevenson writes that Jekyll and Hyde, like many of his tales, originated in a dream which he simply transcribed and elaborated. Indeed "I am sometimes tempted to suppose . . . [that] the whole of my published fiction . . . [is] the single-handed product of some Brownie, some Familiar, some unseen collaborator, whom I keep locked in a back garret" of the mind "while I get all the praise."(39) Stevenson's conscious self - "what I call I, my conscience ego, the denizen of the pineal gland" - is left merely to bring some order to the Brownies' ideas and then to "dress the whole in the best words and sentences that I can find and make" (16:187). For post-Freudian readers this account of creativity's sources in the unconscious will sound familiar. Like Freud, Stevenson is deeply indebted to Romantic paradigms of the aritist: "A Chapter on Dreams" in effect reimagines Shelley's Cave of Prometheus in proto-psychoanalytic language. Like Freud, too, Stevenson distinguishes between dream and waking world in terms of a series of productive contrasts: energy and order, licentiousness and morality ("my Brownies have not a rudiment of what we call a conscience" [16:188]), spontaneity and craft, and so on. It seems especially appropriate that Edward Hyde should spring from a dream, since like the Brownies he is so easily identified with the raging energies of the id.