Playing with Personality

So, coming to the end of Brit Lit, Professor Peavoy decided to up the reading assignments and include a couple golden oldies: Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest. I knew what to expect when reading each text, but I didn’t expect to find such striking similarities between the texts themselves. Both texts, very near the surface, express a really strong anxiety over selfing.

Obviously, Dr. Jekyll has issues with his concept of self. I did see that one coming, at least. But even Jekyll’s conception of identity was surprising. “I hazard the guess,” he says, “that man will be ultimately known for a mere polity of multifarious, incongruous and independent denizens.” Dr. Jekyll’s explanation for his experiments is that he couldn’t never reconcile himself to the duplicity of his own character. He was ashamed of his duplicity, though he claims there was nothing truly shameful in the other side of himself, that he was simply to proud to let those interests of his be shown. And so he kept those interests hidden, satisfying them only in secret, and instead acting publicly as Dr. Jekyll. This “statement of the case” emphasizes the performativity of Jekyll’s identity. By choosing to perform only one aspect of his identity, Jekyll claims, he drove further apart the various parts of himself, and his experiment and potion allows him to finalize their separation. As Jekyll he can perform his “good” self and as Hyde, his “bad” self. This variableness of identity is ultimately punished within the text, as it probably deserves to be. Dr. Jekyll does use his other identity to trample children and beat old men to death. His ability to change his self is attributed to an impurity in one of his main ingredients, metaphorically tying it to the impurity of his pursuits, and of the divided nature of himself. He dies because of his experiments and his performances.

The treatment of split personalities is definitely the point of the Dr. Jekyll/Mr. Hyde character, and by extension the novella. I found this focus to be strengthened by the reappearance of doubling in other characters in the story, specifically, Mr. Utterson and Mr. Guest. Mr. Guest, fittingly, makes only one appearance in the text, really. He shows up in the section labeled, “Incident of the Letter” (wouldn’t Lacan be drooling for a title like that?) as Mr. Utterson dwells on a letter that Dr. Jekyll supposedly received from Mr. Hyde. When introducing the character of Mr. Guest, who is Mr. Utterson’s head clerk (Mr. Utterson is Dr. Jekyll’s lawyer and the main character of the novella in many ways), the narrator explains that “There was no man from who he [Mr. Utterson] kept fewer secrets…and he was not always sure that he kept as many as he meant.” Mr. Guest enters and leaves the story without being given any really character apart from that defined by his relation to Mr. Utterson. Their conversation is characterized by complete agreement and complete lack of emotion. They discuss Sir Danvers’s murder as though it were the weather. All that Mr. Guest supplies is the reinforcement of Mr. Utterson’s own thoughts as well as the voicing of those thoughts that Mr. Utterson has seemingly repressed. The relationship between Mr. Utterson and Mr. Guest seems, in some ways, like the relationship between Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. They seem to have access to the same pool of thoughts, be of the same opinions, the only difference being that Mr. Utterson and Dr. Jekyll both deny certain thoughts/acts that the other of the pair is willing to bring up and bring out. I find the doubling of Mr. Utterson and Mr. Guest in Robert Louis Stevenson’s purely utilitarian use of the character Mr. Guest, and think that this doubling importantly supports and strengthens the anxiety over identity expressed in The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.

As I said, I was more surprised to find this unusual treatment of identity in The Importance of Being Earnest. Within the first act, both Algernon and Jack reveal their Bunburying. Bunburying, a neologism of Algernon’s, is the use of an invented person in order to get away with doing whatever you want. Algernon invented Bunbury, an invalid, so that he can get out of any unpleasant obligation in order to pay a visit to Bunbury. Jack, however, takes his Bunburying further. He invented a younger brother Ernest, so that he can leave the country and his ward, Cecily, in order to go up to the city and do whatever he likes. In the city, though, he assumes the name Ernest so that he can act in ways that, morally, are not appropriate for the guardian of a young ward. To a lesser and more realistic degree, Jack does exactly what Dr. Jekyll does. Without the aid of a color-changing chemical concoction, he changes his identity and can behave, as Ernest, in ways that Jack could not behave. For Jack, too, identity is a performance. It is, though, a performance with material results. He wants to reveal his Bunburying and his real name (Jack) to Gwendolyn once she accepts his proposal of marriage, but it turns out, she only wants to marry someone named Ernest; should could never marry someone named Jack.

Algernon, too, gets in on this secret identity business, leading Cecily to believe that he is Jack’s younger brother Ernest. He proposes to Cecily and it turns out that she also could only ever marry a man named Ernest, never a man named Algernon. Confusion and humor follows inevitably, as Algernon and Jack plays various roles and the fiancés Gwendolyn and Cecily meet and the “truth” comes out.

One thing that interests me about the portrayal of identity in both Stevenson’s novella and Wilde’s play is the way in which the excess of personality and identity of a few characters depends on the lack of personality and identity of others. Gwendolyn and Cecily, for example, may as well be the exact same person. They repeat each other’s lines verbatim. They have no real distinguishing character traits. They simply fill the role of mildly clever, somewhat feisty fiancé. Women in Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde are even more unfortunate. They are either unspeaking victims or weeping servants. In both works, the depictions of servants also highlight the identity of the main male characters. Both Poole (Dr. Jekyll’s butler) and Lane (Algernon’s butler) are somewhat prominent characters, but they really are really only flat and functional. Wilde treats this topic explicitly, though dismissively, with Algernon’s own explicitly dismissive treatment of Lane. Lane mentions something about his past marriage and Algernon tells him that he really has no interest in hearing about Lane’s life. It is only the upper-class white males of both works that are allowed to explore their own characters.

And about the “truth” that is revealed at the end of The Importance of Being Earnest. (I guess I should have warned that there’d be spoilers before now. Well there will continue to be.) It turns out Jack was actually Ernest all along. He never knew who his parents were, and it turns out his father and namesake was Ernest Moncrieff. General Moncrieff is also the father of Algernon, so Jack/Ernest also wasn’t lying when he claimed to have a brother. At his core, then, Jack is one unified and (unintentionally) “honest” man. Though Wilde plays with multiple personalities, the story ends with this performance resolved. The “traditional” view of identity is not really questioned. Everything is back where it belongs and nothing has changed, except for a name. And really, what’s in a name?

Stevenson seems to commit a bit more to the play of multiple identities and the flexibility of these identities. I don’t know, though, what I think about the ultimate outcome of the story. Does Dr. Jekyll’s death reinforce the view that a person’s identity is fixed and singular, though possibly hybrid, or does it support Dr. Jekyll’s own view that we are each inhabited by “multifarious, incongruous, and independent denizens”? Since Dr. Jekyll does get the last word on the subject, maybe we, as readers, are meant to agree with him and understand that, though we are “compound” in our nature, it’s better to hold it all together than to let it tear you apart like Dr. Jekyll.