《變身怪醫》中的權力、瘋狂論述和社會排除

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國立臺灣大學文學院外國語文學系碩士論文

Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures College of Liberal Arts

National Taiwan University Master Thesis

《變身怪醫》中的權力、瘋狂論述和社會排除 Power, Madness, and Social Exclusion in Strange Case of

Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde

武文葳 Wen-wei Wu

指導教授：陳重仁博士

Advisor: Chung-jen Chen, Ph.D.

中華民國 106 年 6 月 June 2017

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Acknowledgement

This thesis would not have been possible without the help, guidance, support, and encouragement of many people.

First and foremost, my particular thanks go to Dr. Chung-jen Chen, my advisor for patiently assisting my master study and research. He opened up the window to the world of Victorian novel and medicine for me. His insightful comments and suggestion in all aspects are greatly appreciated and will not be forgotten. He gave me the courage of overcoming obstacles along the way and the passion of doing my academic research. I am also grateful to the committee members, Prof. Mou-lan, Wong from NTU and Prof.

Yin-i, Chen from NCCU, who provide me constructive criticism and inspiring advice, especially in the aspect of looking closely at what constitutes the protagonist’s and other role’s madness in the novella, which would be a great scheme for further academic research.

I would like to thank all my friends and fellow classmates at NTU who have been the supportive assistance and the source of intellectual stimulation. Their

encouragements and warm support are greatly appreciated.

Lastly, my deepest gratitude is sent to my family for their love and support

throughout my life. To my beloved parents who have been so caring and supportive and always believed in me. To my brother who has been a counselor in my life.

This thesis is dedicated to all those people.

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摘要

本論文旨在探討羅伯特‧路易斯‧史帝文生《變身怪醫》中愛德華‧海德其瘋狂的顯現。本文試圖以十九世紀英國監禁瘋人歷史傳統、文化觀念以及權力的運作剖析《變身怪醫》中瘋狂所代表的意義。本文首將愛德華‧海德認定為一個瘋子。其二將訴諸傅柯對於《瘋顛與文明》中理論框架的審視，將瘋狂視為一種社會疏離現象;監禁瘋人為一種社會控制手段。瘋狂的再現塑造了當時的文化對於瘋狂的想像，並揭示小說中瘋狂的含義，反映出社會文化結構上的改變及態度。

最終，本文也試圖以傅柯《懲罰與規訓》的脈絡，探討權力在小說中的體現、在空間的配置上權力的施展及運作，並強調權力在權力網絡中的分配和部署。

關鍵詞：瘋狂、權力、社會排除、《變身怪醫》、米歇爾‧傅柯、《瘋顛與文明》、

監禁

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Abstract

The aim of this paper is to explore the historical milieu that contributed to the confinement of the mad, cultural perceptions and the implication of madness, and the deployment of power in Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. This paper will firstly posit Edward Hyde as a madman. Secondly, the focus will be brought to assume

madness as an alienation from the society and confinement as a technique of social control by resorting to Foucault’s examination of the theoretical framework of Madness and Civilization, and the ways in which the representations of madness help shape

cultural perceptions of madness back then. This chapter will also shed light on the implication of madness in the novella, mirroring the structure and change in social and cultural attitudes. Lastly, Foucault’s Discipline and Punish informs me the readings of the manifestation of power, for how power is exercised within the spatiality. The network of power will be stressed upon how the power is distributed and deployed in Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Notions of individual power will be explored in terms of the enclosed cabinet.

Key words: madness, power, social exclusion, Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization, confinement

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The aim of this paper is to explore the historical milieu that contributed to the confinement of the mad, cultural perceptions and the implication of madness, and the deployment of power in Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. This paper will firstly posit Edward Hyde as a madman, having the actions as “broke out in a great flame of anger, stamping with his foot, brandishing the cane, and carrying on like a madman”

(Stevenson 22)¹.Secondly, the focus will be brought to assume madness as an alienation from the society and confinement as a technique of social control by resorting to

Foucault’s examination of the theoretical framework of Madness and Civilization, and the ways in which the representations of madness help shape cultural perceptions of madness back then. This chapter will also shed light on the implication of madness in the novella, mirroring the structure and change in social and cultural attitudes. Lastly, Foucault’s Discipline and Punish informs me the readings of the manifestation of power, for how power is exercised within the spatiality. The network of power will be stressed upon how the power is distributed and deployed in Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr.

Hyde. Notions of individual power will be explored in terms of the enclosed cabinet.

Scottish novelist Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr.

Hyde is a novella exploring the split personality and dark side of human’s mind. The

book took Britain and America by storm when it first published in January 1886. This enduring literary work has been received much attention and many adaptations have been produced from movie versions, cartoons to musical. The ten-chapter tale of

Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde “struck many reviewers as marking a new level of achievement in its power to provide spellbinding entertainment while intimating a

1 All quotes refers to: Robert Louis Stevenson, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (New York:

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valuable moral”(Stevenson 94). The effect of the novella is far-reaching which has become part of the language, with the psychological tag phrase "Jekyll and Hyde"

coming to mean “a person who is vastly different in moral character from one situation to the next” (Saposnik 718). This book depicts hidden monsters lurking in every person, and men's civilized self is forever trying to control. The existence of Mr. Hyde serves as a demon figure as opposed to other characters, such as Gabriel John Utterson the lawyer and Sir Danvers Carew, an important Member of Parliament, with the feature of

well-educated, well-mannered, respected, and prestigious profession.

The novella is about a lawyer named Gabriel John Utterson who investigates a strange case involving his good old friend Dr. Henry Jekyll and notorious and sinister Edward Hyde who tramples across a young girl with no compassion. Upon finding out the will of Jekyll’s sole beneficiary is Hyde, Utterson is concerned about whether his friend is being blackmailed and decides to seek out Mr. Hyde. A maid witnesses Hyde beat a man to death with a heavy cane which later reveals to be the very cane that Utterson gave to Jekyll. Months passed by, Jekyll starts refusing visitors and locks himself up which disturbs his butler Poole and makes Poole visit Utterson for desperate help. Breaking into Jekyll’s laboratory, all they find are the distorted body of Hyde with Jekyll’s clothes on and enclosures within a large envelop explaining the entire mystery.

“It is a commonplace in scholarship on Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde to focus on the moral corruption of Henry Jekyll and the emergence of Edward Hyde,”

whom many viewed as the quintessential doppelgänger (Comitini 113). The critical spotlight on the double “has also become part of popular culture in that many versions of the story present Jekyll and Hyde as the representation of the struggle between good and evil that occurs within everyone” (Comitini 113). In emphasizing the emergence of

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Edward Hyde, critics have tended to ignore the implication of madness which Hyde carries. The concept of madness is based on the “presumption that human behavior occurs within well-defined boundaries” (Bean 28). The violent acts done by Edward Hyde have profusely linked violence to madness. It is rather surprising how little attention has been given to Edward Hyde’s deviant identity and maniac behavior. The unusual behavior and abnormal demeanour Edward Hyde manifested can be seen as a state of madness, for the word “madness represents social, personal, and cultural context of the term as signifying a number of different meanings” throughout the time (Baker 4).

It is rather convincing to suggest that the misdeeds Edward Hyde had done were always in the state of instability, unreason, and madness. Moreover, what should be considered is that the term madness is used by the other characters in the novella to describe Hyde’s disposition, countenance, and attributes. Therefore, it triggers off another reading of Edward Hyde’s a series of misdeeds in the field of madness.

How the madmen and other social useless are being constructed as marginals and excluded from the normal society? How to interpret the seclusion scene demonstrated in the novella? What is the implication of such madness displayed in the novella? This paper aims to explore the historical conditions that contributed to the confinement of the mad, cultural perceptions of madness, and the deployment of power in the novella. It is necessary to take account of the historical, social, and cultural context of madness for delineating madness in the novella. Madness is understood as sociologically based. The focus of discussing madness in this paper would mostly be on the aspect of the

protagonist’s detention and treatment, about how the mad Hyde is dealt with. For analyzing the cultural perception of madness in the novella, the accounts of the

nineteenth century thinking toward madness would be greatly used, for how madness is perceived is strongly “influenced by society and culture, and therefore reflects their

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meanings” (Houston 2).

Madness then is placed within the environmental and cultural nexus. This paper would assume madness as an estrangement between people and society through the Foucauldian lens that located madness in the realm of social control with Foucault’s groundbreaking book, Madness and Civilization, which examines the history of madness from the period of Renaissance to the modern experiences. Madness, according to Foucault, is a child of social construction more than a psychiatric fact.

How society’s stance on madness is reflected upon the historical conditions and cultural norms. In light of Michel Foucault’s Madness and Civilization, I intend to analyze Edward Hyde’s maniac state, which is considered as social nuisances, embarrassment, a threat, and a disease of civilization that has to be cast out, away from a well-established community. Social exclusion featured in Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde plays a dominant role as emphasizing how the figure, Edward Hyde is marginalized, treated, and ended up in the confinement. By excluding and confining the abnormal, a

civilization could be established, so that the fantasy of being wholeness can be achieved in any given community. Foucault deeply investigates the history of madness with archeological approaches and how the concept of madness alters with the lapse of time since “madness has donned and doffed radically different masks down the ages” (Porter, Madmen 27).

This section then will begin with a review of literature, which addresses a spectrum of perspectives regarding the issues discussed in Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr.

Hyde. The first review area includes the cultural contexts from which the novella

emerged. The second area includes the discussion of Henry Jekyll’s subversive nature as a kind of hypocritical repression rooted in a given society. The third area includes

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sexual perceptions, sexual identity, and masturbation in the novella.

Douglas S. Mack’s “Dr Jekyll, Mr. Hyde, and Count Dracula” explores the cultural contexts from which the text emerges. Dr. Jekyll “conducts his experiments in a

laboratory which had in former days been used as a dissecting theater” (153). The practice of medicine rapidly changes the faces of advances in science, “as well as new approaches by physicians” (French 95). As the rise of modern medicine and anatomy swept the western world, new approaches of medicine has been practiced. In the Scottish cultural contexts, dissecting theater is associated with Edinburgh in the 1820s where the performance of human anatomy is a high-profile profession by renowned medical doctors. To perform such function, the dissecting theaters need a steady supply of human bodies which can only be obtained through the new graves (robbed at night), murdering tramps, and prostitutes. The dissecting theater is a complex area which involves violence, death, and prostitution (160).

According to “Evil as Hypocritical Repression,” Daryl Koehn discusses “the way in which societal hypocrisy prevents us from becoming self-aware” (87). Each of us has a vision of who we would like to become and who we are, “a vision shaped by outside forces” (91). The self has an inner drive to realize its unique talents; nevertheless, the self “is always more than this socially promoted ideal” (91). Repression then,

strengthens the power of mankind’s hidden self. The more hidden self we repress, “the more hateful and twisted it becomes” (107). The feelings we suppressed do not

disappear. On the contrary, the momentum of such feelings may be silenced for a period of time, and will explode at some point, that is when we rebel against the natural body, our animal like instinct and spirit awakes. Perhaps such hypocritical demeanour can be linked to Victorian morality in the Victorianum, a period full of many contradictions and connotations which includes a particularly strict set of moral standards

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(hypocritically applied) imposed on Victorians and a “widespread cultivation of an outward appearance of dignity and restraint together with the prevalence of social phenomena” (Merrimen 124).

There are a variety of debates concerning sexual perceptions, sexual identity, and masturbation of reading Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, yet Stevenson once mentioned Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde has nothing to do with sexuality in the his private letter to John Paul Bocock. However, people remained high degree of interests in discussing the text from sexual perspectives. Stevenson wrote: “He (Henry Jekyll) says so himself; but people are so filled fully of folly and inverted lust, that they think of nothing but sexuality” (Stevenson 86).

The nineteenth-century Britain “saw the continuation of policing sex and sexuality”

(Moore 147). Based on Grace Moore’s “Something to Hyde: The “Strange Preference”

of Henry Jekyll,” this article examines the transition of the notion of policing sex and sexuality. Sexuality has been forced to retreat from the public to the private domestic sphere due to Britain’s transition to an industrial capitalist economy. With the rise of the commodification of labour force, the pleasure of sexual acts was “negated to its utility and the value of its end products” (Moore 147). A non-productive intercourse is viewed as a self-indulgent and degenerative process which may corrupt an individual or a society for it would lead to further crime. The practice of homosexuality had been either marginalized or persecuted by the society “which had come more and more to regard same-sex partnerships as depraved or sick” (Moore 147). By the nineteenth century young children had been disciplined and divested “of their sexuality and any curiosity they showed in their own bodies was regarded as abnormal and perverted” (Moore 148).

Henry Jekyll, suffered from physical deteriorating and a victim of self-policing, would be expected as having systematic masturbation (Moore 151). It would therefore suggest

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that Henry Jekyll is the danger of onanism in the Victorian society. What is concealed is perhaps Michel Foucault’s direct indication of the relationship between abnormality (the human monster, the individual to be corrected, and the masturbating child) and masturbation which Moore could have emphasized (Foucault, Abnormal 55).

Yen-Wen Hsia’s “Constraint and Confinement: Sexual Prison in Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde” sheds light on the issue of sexual privacy and transgression in

the novella. Victorians highly valued self-control in every aspects of life. With the Victorian concerns over sexual privacy and transgression, the paper denotes the issue of masturbation happened in the private space of Jekyll’s laboratory during his

sequestration. Hyde’s appearance somehow invokes the modern imagination of the consequences of masturbation. In addition, Hsia also points out Mr. Utterson's austere demeanor prevented him from masturbation in the late Victorian era. By unearthing the historical archives of sexual scandals, Hsia implies how contemporary flâneurs and physicians played a role of transacting child prostitutes. Based on such viewpoint, Hsia further discusses the homosexuality and the contemporary male homosexual prostitution.

Hyde, according to Hsia, is a male homosexual prostitute, having the inclination toward cross-class sexual liaisons. Moreover, the names of the district, characters, and

metamorphosis in the text have the suggestive meaning of the “erection of a phallus and contemporary homosexuality” (Hsia 47). Hyde’s tendency toward homosexuality

“triggers Utterson’s homosexual reaction toward Jekyll” (Hsia 47).

A common version of Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde presents a world of Edward Hyde’s destructive tendency rooted in hypocritical repression and the sexual issues concerning the nineteenth century Britain. However, I would like to shift the emphasis from the familiar areas of discussion of hypocritical repression, sexual

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perceptions, and masturbation to a discussion of madness. Felman suggests that in every literary text “continues to communicate with madness- with what has been excluded, decreed abnormal, unacceptable, or senseless” (Felman 5). I want to suggest Edward Hyde’s inappropriate demeanour demonstrates an aura of madness. It is in the state of madness that Edward Hyde does misdeeds ended in seclusion, being supervised and observed and finally plays a role of self-surveillance. According to Baker, “Victorian asylums rapidly lapsed into custodialism where control and discipline was paramount,”

and the inmates were treated as objects to be managed rather than subjects to be treated (Baker 63).

For analyzing the historical conditions that contributed to the confinement of the mad, cultural perceptions of madness, the progressive identification of madness, and the deployment of power in Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Michel Foucault’s Madness and Civilization plays a dominant role in illuminating such issue with

historical facts in the nineteenth century, considering the cultural, social, and historical contexts back then. This study tries to apply Foucault’s context of Madness and Civilization to the novella to argue how the power is deployed and exercised, the ways

in which power is distributed within the spatial form, and suggests Edward Hyde’s state of madness which leads to confinement, a practice of the realization to segregate those who “fail to meet certain social standards and whose failure to conform makes them subject to a fundamentally moral condemnation” (Poetzl 44). Regarding the cultural perceptions of madness in the novella, this thesis will follow the contexts of madness of what Foucault raises in Madness and Civlization accompanied with the historical facts, assuming Edward Hyde’s madness as an alienation from the society resulted in the final sequestration.

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preoccupation” which remains “diverse and enigmatic entity or experience” and a “term that actively defies” (Baker 2). Madness is something that must be expelled and placed out of reach from the community. Madmen are given their “own spaces of confinement, separated from society” (Hunton 3). Roland Barthes once commented on Foucauldian madness a variable and heterogeneous meaning. Foucauldian madness “no longer has a constant identity” (Poetzl 112). The experience of madness in the western world

presents a polymorphic universe. Madness, then, can be seen as a multifarious, variable perception, and a social constructed fact, for the “modern times inherited varied model of madness” (Porter, Madness 123). What Foucault does in the book Madness and Civilization is to unearth the knowledge of madness by identifying several forms of

perception and a wide range of “political, economic, social, philosophical, artistic, literary, and medical data” to investigate the sequences of events from the Renaissance, followed by the Classical Age, and the modern experience (Porter, Madness 116). The two themes of “spatial exclusion and cultural integration” constitute Madness and Civilization (Dreyfus 3).

The starting point of western experience of madness is “to be found in the area vacated by leprosy toward the end of the Middle Ages” (Racevskis 42). It was the very area that continued to “support various rites of purification and exclusion while filling up with a strange new population of ‘vagabonds, criminals, and deranged minds,’

individuals who became the new subjects of ‘social exclusion but spiritual integration”

(Foucault, Madness 42). Through a clear division, the madmen along with their counterparts are thrown into a set location. Edward Hyde’s dwelling, Soho, is such a case where the dingy, gloomy neighboring area is “a low French eating house, a shop for the retail of penny numbers and twopenny salads, many ragged children huddled in the doorways, and many women of many different nationalities passing out…”

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(Stevenson 23). The description of such slum-like places seem like the one designated for the “abnormal.” Living in the small sector of low places, these motley groups of people are forgotten and abandoned by the society.

During the time of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries Europe “madness was an extremely broad sociocultural category, with many manifestations and meanings”

(Porter, Madmen 9). The establishment of Hôpital-Général “marks the beginning of a radically new relation between madness and reason” (Foucault, Madness 11). The network had been spread all over Europe over a period of time. Not only madmen but vagabonds, homeless people, and others were being confined in a spatial region.

Confinement “was to discipline anarchy more than to heal the mentally sick” (Porter, Madmen 19). The operation of confinement functions as an “exercise of a new kind of

power within the institution” and a technique of “police” (Castel 46). The purpose of the institutionalization of madness was simply to “exclude unreason from the orderly and reasonable processes of society” (Racevskis 47). Incarcerating the “nonproductive social elements from society at large” is to practice social control and provide relief for the poor rather than offering medical treatment (Poetzl 113). Madness is thus seen as social undesirables and moral deviancy. Madman “continued to be perceived as monsters throughout the Classical period,” but overtime “madness became identified with disease and crime as well” (Foucault, Madness 127).

The new association of madness with disease allows certain scientific explanations for what the nineteenth century would call madness as mental illness. In order to deal with such issue, a new system of asylums was created around the concepts of

surveillance. The inmates “were not merely observed and judged by others but were required to examine and judge themselves” (poetzl 132). Another important role the

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physician played is that he possessed the “power through his function as father and judge” not because he owns the scientific knowledge (poetzl 132). In Foucault’s analysis, the description of confinement and exclusion is always the core of the book.

Foucauldian power emphasizes power is practiced rather than held. Foucault’s genealogy of power traces the historical transformation from the sovereign power in seventeenth century to the panopticism in the nineteenth century. The meaning of power changes with some frequency, “but a long-term continuity of form of what can only be called power is (and was) the counterpoint to these dramatic shifts in cultural

classifications (Dreyfus 4). Power becomes “less obvious, more ubiquitous, and therefore more effective” (Nealon 31).

The confinement was “to bring the patient to an awareness of his status as a

subject…observed and punished by his warders, was led by a carefully structured series of procedures to do the same thing to himself” (Dreyfus 8). Since Edward Hyde is being confined in the laboratory, he is totally being secluded from the outside world. The deployment of power is being exercised throughout the excluded spatial region.

However, Hyde’s spontaneous transformation of becoming indicates another kind of power is being practiced, that is self-surveillance. In the novella, power is increasingly intensified and saturated, specifically becoming more effective.

With Michel Foucault’s abundant information and data regarding the history of madness, this paper tries to use Foucauldian contexts of Madness and Civilization and Discipline and Punish to achieve the purpose in analyzing the historical conditions that

contributed to the confinement of the mad, cultural perceptions and the implication of madness, and the deployment of power in the novella. Since madness is a progressive identification in the history of madness, this study aims to regard madman as social

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undesirables, nuisance, moral deviancy, abnormality, and a target of police just as Edward Hyde manifested. The confinement displayed in the latter part of the novella serves as functions of social control, policing, and self-surveillance.

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Chapter 1

Historical Condition of Madness in the Victorian Era

This chapter would put the spotlight on the historical conditions of madness and related legislation in the nineteenth-century Britain. In the Victoria’s age, the moral climate contributed the subsequent result of the struggle between social classes and orders. The high social and moral value of the nineteenth-century Britain almost governed Victorian’s lives. The society was directed at the value of moral behavior which strictly regulated individual’s certain modes of conduct, or “Victorian prudery,”

that could perhaps explain Edward Hyde’s madness and outward manner (Saposnik 719). Victorians preferred to suppress and deny the existence of barbaric and primitive element of humanity, rather than embrace it. However, the centrality of this thesis would mainly focus on the discussion of the confinement and power networks in the novella.

By drawing upon the historical facts of madness, Michel Foucault built up the picture of how madness has historically been structured, constructed, and reconstructed, demonstrates how the process is “related to powerful agencies and structures” (Baker 62). Foucault’s Madness and Civilization thoroughly investigates social, historical contexts, and cultural milieu of madness. Foucauldian concept of madness emphasizes how over time madness comes to be recognized in the place of isolation and segregation.

Following the conceptual framework of Foucault who casts a critical light on the history of madness from the Renaissance to the nineteenth century of western experience, this chapter will delineate the historical milieu of madness in Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Madness and Civilization plays a pivotal role in shaping public perceptions of madness and the conception of confinement as means of containing and treating

madness.

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The Great Exhibition at the Crystal Palace opened by Queen Victoria on May 1, 1851 marked the golden ages of Victorianism, a grand period of all time which

prevailed for the next twenty years. The great success of the Great Exhibition had been the millstone of exhibiting culture and industry in the early Victorian era. The glass-and iron architecture drew more than 14,000 exhibitors marveled at the every aspects of art from around the world. It was just after two months when the largest and modern Colney Hatch Lunatic Asylum was established among Europe, which housed 2500 patients and marked the Victorian psychiatric reform. Colney Hatch Lunatic Asylum

“symbolized madness to the Victorians, as Bedlam had to the Augustans” (Showalter 23). Madness appears as a stark which can not be easily ignored and erased in the nineteenth century (Bean3).

The concept of locking up the mad has long been exercised throughout Europe, but

“the theory and practice of confining the insane in foundations designed exclusively for them came late” (Porter, Madness 89). Before the system of asylums and The Great Confinement, there had been regulation and control over the mad. In the Middle Ages of Europe, the mad were “hidden away in a cellar or caged in a pigpen,” or were even

“sent away, to wander the pathways” (Porter, Madness 90). Approximately by the end of the medieval period, formal segregation came to emerge, in the name of Christian charity. “Lunatics were sometimes locked in towers or dungeons under public auspices”

(Porter, Madness 90).

At the beginning of the eighteenth-century European countries, state and its protocols played a significant role in regulating the mad as Michel Foucault argued the wide-spread system of the great confinement throughout Europe in his seminal work Madness and Civilization. Those who were being considered as unreason repelled by

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law and social order “became the targets for sequestration in a vast street-sweeping operation” (Porter, Madness 92). “Paupers, petty criminals, layabouts, streetwalkers, vagabonds” along with beggars were categorized as the group of unreason, “but symbolically their leaders were the insane and the idiotic” (Porter, Madness 92). By 1660s, almost 6,000 such undesirables were confined in the General Hospital of France, which rapidly cloned in other provinces of France. The purpose of establishing such systems was not for the therapeutic design, but a policing measure with custodial acts.

The Great Confinement represents the banishment of madness and physical sequestration as well.

I. Foucauldian Great Confinement and its Influence

Michel Foucault’s great and profound foundation act of the Great Confinement launched in France, and generally spread across Europe in the mid-seventeenth century.

The changing perception of madness was the cause of the Great Confinement, the rise of institutionalization, originated in the eighteenth century as Foucault claims. “The Great Confinement,” as Foucault terms, it began roughly in the eighteenth century and continued to the nineteenth century. Foucault characterized “the eighteenth century as the period of ‘great confinement,’ when the society chose the lunatic as the residue filling up the place of social exclusion once filled by the leper (Arieno 25).

In Madness and Civilization, it traces “the concatenation of fundamental”

structures of western experience of madness instead of reproducing “a chronology of discoveries or a history of ideas” (Racevskis 42). The liminal position and spatial exclusion of leprosy isolated from the society and the description of exclusion opens up the first chapter of Madness and Civilization. Seeking to reveal the techniques of management of dealing with the insane as an indicator of broader social processes,

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Foucault has been influential on the realm of anthropology, sociology, and psychiatry alike. The western experience of madness begins with the area vacated by leprosy while filling up with new subjects of invalids, criminals, beggars, the poor and deranged minds which bear new signs and social norms supporting the concept of social exclusion and separation by the lapse time.

In the period of Renaissance, the strange disappearance of leprosy has left derelict and low places. Leprosy withdrew, but what remained longer was the meaning of

exclusion and the images attached to. The barren reaches and wastelands were the world of non-human where leprosy once dominated. Leprosy, which was believed as a

diseased element harming the society, would then be replaced by “poor vagabonds, criminals, and ‘deranged minds’” carrying the symbol of exclusion and abjection and sharing the same spirit of sequestrating the hazardous member of the society. The continuity of the system of sequestration remains, but what was superseded was the subject. The form of exclusion brings new meaning not only as “social exclusion but spiritual reintegration” (Foucault, Madness 5).

In the legendary landscape of the Renaissance, there existed a privileged place of the Ship of Fools, which carried “insane cargo from town to town” searching for their reason (Foucault, Madness 7). Water adds values to the images of the Ship of Fools, with the meaning of carrying the madmen off of the land and a symbol of purification.

The embarkation and the voyages of the madmen are “a rigorous division and an absolute Passage” (Foucault, Madness 8). Through the ritual division, the liminal position of the madmen had been gradually developed and clarified. The image of the Ship of the Fools symbolizing “a great disquiet”, suddenly emerged from the “horizon of European culture at the end of the Middle Ages” (Foucault, Madness 11). During the

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Renaissance, madness circulated throughout the society and became part of the historical background and language of everyday life.

The concept of Foucauldian The Great Confinement is made explicitly by arguing

“it is common knowledge that the seventeenth century created enormous houses of confinement” (Foucault, Madness 35). The function of confining the mad was an effort attempted to exclude the social useless from the organized and reasonable society. To consign the awkward and the troublesome to a liminal position of a spatial receptacle was the purpose of total system of The Great Confinement. The practice of confinement became the realization to segregate those “who fail to meet certain social standards and whose failure to conform makes them subject to a fundamentally moral condemnation”

(Racevskis 44). The Great Confinement was to implement exact segregation of

abnormals from the community and to remove the social deviants from society’s view at large. During the period of The Great Confinement, madness was reduced to silence and the mad were locked up on a great scale. According to Foucault, confinement is an aspect of social control. The madmen, “along with the poor, sexual deviants, and criminals were marginalized” as a way of defining the boundaries of acceptable and tolerable behavior (Houston 10).

According to Foucault, the origins of confinement in England came early as 1575 as the decree of the legislation “the punishment of vagabonds and the relief of the poor prescribed the construction of houses of correction, to number at least one per county”

(Foucault, Madness 40). The purpose of establishing the houses were to “install trades, workshops, and factories (milling, spinning, weaving) to aid in their upkeep,” assuring the inmates of work (Foucault, Madness 40). After several decades, the network had extended throughout Europe. “Those who condemned by common law…the insane”

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were being contained in the centers of confinement-“hospitals, prisons, jails” in

“England, Holland, Germany, France, Italy, Spain” all across the European continents as John Howard investigated (Foucault, Madness 41). Confinement, as a kind of “category of classical order,” now becomes a norm all over Europe and a social sensibility in European culture (Foucault, Madness 41). The true design for creating The Great Confinement was rather discipline anarchy than heal the mentally sick.

By the 1600s, it had housed “some 6,000 inmates, including lunatics and imbeciles”

(Porter, Madmen 18). The decree of the foundation of the General Hospital of Paris in 1656 marked a significant era when a brand new administrative organization was just established. Its establishment drew a new bound between madness and reason. As the starting of the General Hospital of Paris, one thing had been made clear: “the General Hospital had nothing to do with any medical concept” (Foucault, Madness 37). The purpose and the function of the General Hospital of Paris is a sort of semijudical structure more than a medical establishment. The General Hospital of Paris, an administrative entity outside the courts with already constituted powers, enforces the right of decision, judgement, and execution. The General Hospital of Paris established by the King holds a strong power between the police and the courts, “at the limits of the law: a third order of repression” (Foucault, Madness 37). The structure of the General Hospital of Paris, with its forms of “monarchical and bourgeois order of France”

extended its network over France (Foucault, Madness 37).

As the confinement system sprang up all over Europe, negative device of exclusion for coping with insane were replaced by means of confinement for the first time. The new demarcation of the undesirables replaced the exclusion of leprosy, the confinement substituted for the lazar house. The confinement was institutionalized as a new structure

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of domination. The revival of the old rites of exclusion was demonstrated as the rise of the new waves of confinement system, which was considered as an institutional creation began to sweep through and influence the western world for centuries. The waves of institutionalizing the mad become trends among Europe. The confinement functioned as a kind of social control, which suggested that the unwanted and eccentric elements of the nineteenth-century English society were casted to the newly erected asylums. The institutionalization of the asylum was the “accepted remedy to the problem” (Arieno 4).

The modern experience starts at end of the eighteenth century when a wide spectrum of receptacles for the insane proliferated: “private asylums run on a

profit-making basis, retreats run by monks and nuns within Catholic Europe, charitable and subscription foundations, city and state-owned institutions, wards and wings

attached to the General Hospital of Paris, and so forth” (Shepherd, III: 2 ). According to a “report of a Parliamentary Select Committee,” “the incidence of insanity was 2.26 cases in every 10,000 of the general population in 1807” (Arieno 1). The number skyrocketed by 1844, “the number of the insane had risen to 12.66 cases per 10,000”

(Arieno 1).

All the secluded spatial institutions rapidly developed and integrated from the year of 1845 onwards. It was the time when multiplying asylum was founded under the supervision of medical doctors for the purpose of curing the mad whose family could not afford the necessary medical aid. The number of madmen increased to “29.63 per 10,000 by the year of 1890” (Arieno 1). The officially recognized population of madmen had increased continuingly, and such dramatic increase became the impetus urged and forced the English government to respond to. The system of the asylum embodies a governmental scheme of social control, seemed to be the societal response

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to the rising number of the insane. The operation of confinement functions as an aspect of social control with the aim of protecting the whole society. In the eighteenth century, people had a dread of a mysterious disease spreading in the air, prevailing “a sort of undifferentiated image of rottenness that had to do with the corruption of the morals as well as with the decomposition of the flesh (Foucault, Madness 193). Madness was no longer the order of nature, but a new order. A new division was drawn that madness was linked more firmly than ever to the conception and practice of confinement.

Madness, detached from the relation with leper, raised a question that had ever been solved. It embarrassed the legislator of ending confinement with the decree of law.

A series of three stages of legislation were issued, and a new system of asylum was newly established. The rise of the asylum reflected the new act for unreason along with other deranged and abnormal individual. Its purpose has nothing to do with curing but discipline them. Asylum was seen as a custodial institution more than therapeutic hospital.

II. The Invention of Mental Illness

The invention of mental illness came in the late eighteenth and the early nineteenth century, “as doctors monopolized definition of the condition of those confined to

asylums” (Houston 11). The asylum is not only a spiritual exclusion but also a new rule of normality imposed on by psychiatry. Influenced by the Enlightenment, physicians believed that “the aetiology of insanity was organic” (Porter, Madness 123). The enlightened physician “introduced the psychological definition of madness as mental illness” (Poetzl 112). As the “‘new science’ refigured the body in mechanical terms which highlighted the solids rather than the fluids,” the old humoral readings had lost the credits in the medical community (Porter, Madness 124). Insanity was viewed as the

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lesions of the body. “The madman was thus a disordered sensory-motor machine in a state of breakdown” which made medicine endow with authority (Porter, Madness 125).

After the French Revolution, madness came to be realized not just a disease but as a disorder of the psyche. With “specific moral connotations,” madness was categorized as a kind of mental illness (Poetzl 112).

One factor contributing to the growing concern of insanity was George III, who suffered from recurrent mental illness which was thought to be insanity (recent research has shown that George III suffered from porphyria) (Skultans 10). The refigured

madness was, “at bottom, a bodily disorder” systemized by Herman Boerhaave, a

“highly influential Leiden professor” (Porter, Madness 125). Insanity was a genuine malady rooted in “the real, mechanical Affections of Matter and Motion” in A New System of the Spleen (1729) by Newtonian Nicholas Robinson (Porter, Madness 126).

William Cullen, an Edinburgh University professor, produced a more psychological schema of insanity to hold that insanity “was a nervous disorder” triggered by “some inequality in the excitement of the brain,” and the “cause of derangement lay in acute cerebral activity” (Porter, Madness 128). Insanity then was emerged as a psychological condition. “Madness has been retrospectively defined as mental illness,” but it has increasingly been associated with “the negative concept of deviancy; sociological notions of statistical abnormality and anthropological theories of atypical social types”

(Poetzl 112).

III. Rise of the Asylums and Related Legislation

The nineteenth-century Britain witnessed and experienced kaleidoscopic and profound societal changes. The Victorian society saw “an unprecedented increase in population, industrial capacity and urban growth which resulted in massive social

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change and dislocation” (Arieno 1). Demands for the management and control of segregation of the social useless were rapidly proliferating. The “increasing intolerance of disruptive behavior within the domestic sphere” was one of the “driving force that lay behind the rise of the asylum” (Suzuki 138). Facing such critical issues, the national government determined to manage and respond to the varying fact of the society

through a series of governmental investigation, regulation and intervention. Legalism was the response of the dilemma of what the Victorians tried to resolve.

Institutionalization was founded in response to the threats and anxieties posed by madness in the emergent modern society. The institutional system of the asylum

concentrated the new discipline concerning the very place of abnormality in the society.

The regime and status of the asylum functioned as a “total social system of control, punishment, and regeneration” (Shepherd III: 6). From the middle of the nineteenth century onward, the asylum was part of the trend of the institutional-based response to the social deviancy, “ranging from the penitentiary prison, workhouse, and juvenile reformatory to compulsory schooling” (Shepherd III: 273). The phenomenon in the nineteenth-century Britain was the dramatic and sharp increase in the proportion of the insane and subsequently institutionalized.

The nineteenth-century England witnessed the grand expansion of the system of county and borough asylum designed for pauper lunatics. It all began with the adoption of County Asylums Act of 1808 authorizing the establishment of the institutions for the poor, mentally ill and criminally insane and was extended by the Lunatic Asylums Act of 1845, which made the public network of the county asylums an imperative.

It was apparent that the primary value for the community in the early history of asylum was a dumping place that contained the unwanted, useless, and troublesome.

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(Arieno 119). Andrew Scull suggested that asylums “were large dumps for the awkward and inconvenient of all descriptions” (Arieno 119). The Victorian asylum had become a widespread dumping ground for offenders, excluding the insane along with “those metaphorical siblings of the insane” from normal society (Shepherd III: 5). The

alarming growth of the insane impelled “local and national government towards urgent action” (Shepherd II: 133). The rise of the county asylums was a response to the general trend of isolating the dangerousness, deviant, and social incompetent in total institutions.

In 1827, nine county asylums were established in Britain. The surprising phenomenon of that time was the lasting rise in the proportion of the officially recognized insane population and “central government’s response to this originally local responsibility”

(Arieno 1).

Madness was visibly a threat to the society, a problem of law and order, and a challenge posed to the society in the nineteenth century, yet madness still remained as

“social problems” without legal solution until the legislation of the first “social laws”

(Castel 14). The Madhouse Act in 1828 provided the newly establishment of a

commission to license and supervise asylums. However, the region of practicing such activities was limited “to the metropolitan area of London” supervised by The

Metropolitan Commissioners and leaves other provinces for the magistrates to fulfill their duties (Arieno 29).

The 1834 Act while founding the administrative machinery proper to handling the lunacy problem “with government sponsored asylums, also created an alternative solution—the workhouse” (Arieno 31). The cost of staying in a county asylum “varied from 100 shillings to 350 shillings a head” while the workhouse cost “on an average 40 shillings per person” (Arieno 32). The Law on the Insane of June 30, 1838 was the very

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first great legislative measure that recognized “a right of assistance and treatment for a category of the sick or those in need” (Castel 14). The legislation was the first one to establish a whole systematic mechanism of assistance, with the invention of an alternative sequestrated space, that is, the asylum.

Madness was recognized as a contemporary perception of growing problems of chaos. By the mid-century England, to respond to the phenomenon, public county asylums were made compulsory by the central government. The Lunatics Act of 1845 required “all countries and principal boroughs of England and Wales to make provision for the care of lunatics” (Showalter 17). It aims to make sufficient specialized

provisions mandatory for this controversial sector of the anomaly and disadvantaged.

Under the Act of 1845, permanent national “Lunacy Commissioners” or “Commission in Lunacy”, a governmental body, was established with the aim of carrying out the act,

monitor the condition in the asylums and the treatment of the patients. Often,

commissions could to be found in public spaces such as “taverns or coffeehouses and were very well attended by the public” (Suzuki 13). The establishment of the county asylum sought “not merely to contain, repress, and quarantine the undesirables, but also professed to aim at their rehabilitation, their resocialization into an acceptable,

responsible, disciplined mode of existence” (Shepherd II: 132). The institutionalization of the asylum held specific historical precedents and worked as a means of receptacles for the unwanted of the society.

The pervasiveness of the legislation is seen in “every city, town, liberty, parish, place or district” and extended to all England and Wales (Arieno 37). The Lunatics Act of 1845, later amended in 1853, remained its effectiveness of controlling and

supervising lunatics and asylums until almost the end of the nineteenth-century England.

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Previously, local agencies withdrew lunatics from workhouses unwillingly because of cost considerations which then were required to do so by law in 1845 (Arieno 38). The growing demand for the asylums had far outstripped the supply. In 1864, 44,695 lunatics were known to the authorities, only “under half were in county and borough asylums (Shepherd II: 137). Though county official carefully planned the design to meet estimated demands, public asylums had become overcrowded which greatly exceeded the capacity of the asylums. The government hoped that the newly built institutions could tame and domesticate madness and then place madness into the sphere of

rationality. The asylum became “the preferred medicine for the sickness of civilization”

(Porter, Madmen 161). The newly erected system of asylums were institutionalized and dominated the landscape the nineteenth-century England and (Castel 3).

In 1890 sixty-six county asylums rapidly emerged and functioned (Pedlar 9). By 1900, the aggregated numbers of the “confined insane steadily increased, rising to almost 100,000 in Britain” alone (Shepherd III: 2). It seemed that the disadvantaged could turn back into productive and normal citizens under the system of asylums. The role of the asylum was to “resocialize the patient into behavioral patterns acceptable” to the society, and yet “making his or her presence tolerable to family and neighbours”

(Shepherd II: 135). The asylum can, as Andrew Scull believed in, be an appropriate place “for working-class families to send their relatives whose anti-social behavior was very difficult to cope with in the confined space of the working-class home” (Shepherd II: 135). The continuing growth of demand for asylums and the growing population of recorded insanity rate in the nineteenth-century England urged to an extent that families willing to consign the troublesome family members to asylums. However, people who have higher up the social scale sometimes preferred to banish their mad relatives

domestically and consign them to outhouses such as cellars, or locked rooms where they

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were hidden away from neighborhood and authorities alike, “often in squalid and humiliating conditions” (Shepherd II: 136).

The late nineteenth century “has been tagged as the ‘age of incarceration,’” in which the asylums had a dominant role to play (Shepherd III: 273). It was an “era of the large-scale institutionalization of the insane” which marked the milestone of every county in the nineteenth-century England (Arieno 38). Under the system of the “large public asylums built after mid-century,” the social control of repression and custody

“inherent in the reformers' theory of 'moral treatment' soon gained dominance over therapeutic aims” (Shepherd III: 273). The process of rehabilitating the deviants and treating the insane were replaced by the policy of sequestration, to isolate deviance from the community then placed in a secluded area became crucial in the system of the institutionalization. People who live on the margins of social tolerance were easily to be sequestrated or sent in an asylum. The socially incompetent were pushed to the

segregative space, the asylum.

IV. Domestic Confinement of Lunatics

“In the context of institutionalization and confinement,” the domestic side of treating the insane shares the same belief as the public side does in sequestrating and locking up madness for the purpose of shielding the society (Suzuki 4). The control of lunatics was a very pervasive phenomenon in the nineteenth-century England. Whether at home or asylum, offering a space for secluding lunatics and controlling their

undesirable actions were always a difficult task. Being sent to an asylum, the madmen were “transplanted from one form of control to another form, from a discreet and invisible one to an obvious and solid one” (Suzuki 138). In the nineteenth-century England, many historians brought the focus on the system of asylums which

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enormously changed the mechanism of the control and care of the insanity.

It was conceived that “a very large percentage of people commonly regarded” as abnormal were not confined in the system of asylums (Shepherd III: 1). On the contrary, many lunatics were held in non-specialist institutions, “such as workhouses or gaols, and very substantial numbers remained more or less within the community, under family or parochial care” (Shepherd III: 1). Confining the undesirables and controlling strategies exercised by the family within the domestic sphere have largely escaped the attention of the society due to the historian’s focus on asylums.

As the specific institutions established throughout the European continent, the institutions “took the insane away from home, assuming the responsibility of their treatment and custody” (Suzuki 2). Medically qualified men, who specialized in the condition and treatment of the insane, gradually replaced the chief role of the patient’s family as the major decision maker towards the treatment of the patients since “family members historically have been important actors in psychiatric decision making”

(Suzuki 2). Family was also placed “at center stage of the contemporary ideology of social cohesion” (Suzuki 112).

On the landscape of the nineteenth-century England, several interrelated features were obviously shown: asylums mushroomed and medical superintendents were well attended (Suzuki 2). The rise of the institutionalization of asylum and the advent of the psychiatric profession were characterized in the nineteenth-century England. In addition to the public sphere of the system of asylums, there were a number of madmen being confined domestically by their families. To cope with the madmen, the family “had to police the behavior of the lunatics and use a variety of tactics to achieve some

semblance of normality” (Suzuki 151).

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Family as a close knit community shared mutual affection, establishes a framework and strategy of grasping, understanding, and managing lunacy at home. Historically, family has “performed a vital function by judging a sick person’s state, transforming him or her into a ‘patient’” (Suzuki 1). The exercise of confining madness domestically was intertwining with the fundamental domestic ideology of the nineteenth-century England which “hailed the family as the most important anchor of a society in turmoil and in danger of disintegration (Suzuki 119). Families in the nineteenth-century England prevented the madmen from doing misdeeds and made them obey orders.

The reasons for the nineteenth-century families to control lunatics at home were the danger they challenged and posed to the family and the awkward behavior shown in public, which presented multiple hazards to the family. The embarrassment and

uneasiness caused by misconduct of the lunatic outside the domestic sphere and in public places were what bothered the family. The lunatic’s physical presence at public sphere represented a constant threat to the society, and therefore the family attempted to enclose madness within the private sphere. Concealing the distasteful misconduct of lunatics “and the ugly sight of coercion” were the core spirit of sequestrating madness in the domain of private sphere. Chaos and disturbance would ensue when families did not try to contain the lunatic’s misdemeanor in domestic places.

The attempts made by the families to enclose the disarray caused by their lunatic members within the private domain were to “prevent the disturbances from being noticed by the public” (Suzuki 136). The exposure of undesirable behavior of a lunatic

in public view disturbed the family most acutely. The major difficulty for lunatic’s family was to maintain the semblance and the façade of normality of a lunatic in the public sector. Domestically, intense policing, surveillance, and controlling were being

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exercised on madness, whereas externally the semblance of normalcy of lunatic was performed.

Madness within the domestic sphere centered on the issue of “finding an individual who could design and establish a suitable regime and exercise control over the patient”

(Suzuki 111). It was perceived that the ideal person for coping with madness domestically was the family of the lunatic or a close relative. The “inmate” being controlled, grasped, and manipulated by the “superintendent” constituted a

person-to-person relationship based on the idea of coping with the pattern of disruptive behavior.

The concept of The Great Confinement proposed by Michel Foucault has been influencing the western world for years. Confining the human encumbrance for the purpose of protecting the community from the threat they posed. The spirit of The Great Confinement continued affecting the European countries in the form of the system of asylum established in the nineteenth century. It can be seen that the increasing

institutionalization of the asylum in the nineteenth-century Britain was the response to the growing social problems. For the next chapter, the focus will be stressed upon the cultural perception and the implication of madness of the nineteenth-century Britain in Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde since the “representations of madness are inevitably influenced by cultural” perception of “medical, juridical, philosophical, or a composite that has entered into popular currency” (Pedlar 1).

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Chapter 2

Cultural Perception and Implication of Madness in Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde

The focus of this chapter is on the cultural perception of madness in the novella, examining the cultural attitude and how people perceive madness in the

nineteenth-century England. Among Europe, “England is a particularly rich area for investigation because of the long-standing, cohesive, and fascinating notion of the cultural specificity of English madness” (Showalter 6). England “produces and contains more insane than any other” European countries (Porter, Madmen 90). Ever since the eighteenth century, “the links between an ‘English malady’ and such aspects of the national experience as commerce, culture, climate, and cuisine have been the subject of both scientific treatises and literary texts” (Showalter 7). The English have long

considered their nation as “the global headquarters of insanity” with paradoxical attitude of complacency and sorrow (Showalter 7). Throughout the early modern period,

insanity “was a fact of life for English people” and the “specifications of madness were

‘socially constructed’” (Porter, Madmen 43). In Reliques of Ancient English Poetry collected and published by a bishop named Thomas Percy, he states that there were more mad-songs produced by the English than any other countries.

During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries “madness was an extremely broad sociocultural category,” carrying many manifestations and meanings (Porter, Madmen 9). Madness was (and still is) a fact “heavily loaded with cultural meanings” (Suzuki 94). The representations of madness are highly influenced by cultural attitudes.

Madness is perceived as a “quintessentially social illness rather than a mere biological fact,” it should be understood in culture and social contexts. It was assumed that the

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way madness was perceived was a parallel and a reflection of cultural and social factors.

The conception of madness “was Protean, in that the idea itself” is cosmic and

“encompassed no end of meanings” (Porter, Madmen 28). Defining madness is a social process influenced by history and characterized by the contexts of culture for “the meanings of madness were matters for continuous renegotiation” (Porter, Madmen 28).

The insane is “treated as a social label, akin to” the category of disorder and subversive (Porter, Madmen 26). “Attitudes towards madness were never an island, they

complemented wider images of” irrationality and dangerousness; they sometimes

“interacted with changing evaluations of…threateningly marginal individuals” (Porter, Madmen 41). Madness is seen when someone transgresses the social norms which is

operated according to historical and cultural assumptions about what is accepted

behavior and is excluded in a separate spatial region (Bean 27). The image of the insane was the “nomad wandering in a social no-man’s-land, threatening all the rules that governed the organization of society” and “assimilated to those of wild animals” (Castel 36). Madness “meant otherness” and is conceived “as being alienated” while “the term

‘alienist’ was coined around the middle of the nineteenth century as an alternative to the older term ‘mad-doctor’”(Pedlar 11).

It was assumed that lunatics “as a degenerate person of feeble will and morbid predisposition” (Showalter 18), and through a spatial arrangement that madness would be safely managed and controlled. It was believed that by confining the mad, the society could be protected from “dangerous infiltration by those of tainted stock” (Showalter 18). Madness is not only a loss of reason but as “deviance from socially accepted behavior” which could be regarded as “abnormal or disruptive by community standard”

(Showalter 29). The concept was to “remove deviants from society’s view” and to

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“consign the awkward and unwanted, the useless and potentially troublesome” (Arieno 6).

Foucault’s Madness and Civilization is to unearth the history of the significance and reconstruction of madness, with the issue of how madness has come to be

understood and experience and is read by the adherence of deviancy and social control (Still 4). Foucault’s history of madness aims to “urge to sharpen a fresh perspective”

conjoining the way of conceptualizing madness, and how madness is treated and realized (Still 21). Madness was seen as an odd and unacceptable behavior and

offensive to the society. Like criminals or other social useless, madness is a particularly urgent threat to the serenity of life; “a problem and a preoccupation affecting” people (Still 9). The deviant behavior has always been repelled by people, and it is Hyde, the non-conformist who violates “society’s supposedly normal standards” labeled as a madman (Baker 2). Edward Hyde, a figure of the asocial individual who poses threat, frightens people as his notorious name spreads across the town. The asocial and deranged Hyde’s orientation to reality is “considered excessively divergent from socially accepted norms” (Still 22). His deviation from the normality is against the social norms which should be segregated by internment. The notion of deviancy is part of the problem imposed on the society, and a spatial confinement is a response to this social malaise. In the novella, a resemblance can be found when Edward Hyde is castigated and consigned to the margins of the house, a disconnection between social interaction with people and society.

I. Hyde’s Physical Appearance and Deportment

Physically and morally deformed is manifested on Edward Hyde. Madness is noticed by the proliferation of symptoms, “in gait, in physiognomy, in weird demeanour

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and habits” (Porter, Madmen 45). The mad “gives themselves away by their appearance,”

by the way they walk, talk, and look, as behaving mad, talking mad, and looking mad (Bean 3). The behavior Hyde shown is so odd, having a sense of bewilderment that is more than unusual. People are aghast at the Hyde’s deportment that madness seems to be the only credible explanation. Edward Hyde is described “only in vague terms;

deformed in some indefinable way, vaguely diabolic, primitive, or animal-like, possibly effeminate, provoking in those near him loathing and fear” (Dury xxis). It is largely through Utterson’s gaze, though not exclusively, that constructs readers’ vision of Edward Hyde. Hyde’s deformity and beast-like countenance is sharply rebuffed by people who view him as a devastating force. “He [Hyde] had never been photographed;

and the few who could describe him differed widely, as common observers will. Only on one point, were they agreed; and that was the haunting sense of unexpressed deformity with which the fugitive impressed his beholders” (Stevenson 24). The indefinite remarks of Hyde is partly observed and described by other characters as having a repulsively ugly figure characterized by deformity, small, and hairiness which symbolizes the maniac, hideousness, and dangerousness Edward Hyde casts to the society.

It is assumed that madness “is as madness looks” and has been depicted as “strange and disheveled-as ‘wild men’” (Porter, Madness 64). The external appearance is

realized as the importance of “indication of state of mind” (Pedlar 95). The idea of madness is “being imprinted on the body, manifest in physiognomy or posture, was widely accepted” (Pedlar 4). People in nineteenth-century England believed in the science of physiognomy which held that a maniac could be emphasized by his/her physical appearance as having the feature of deformity, animality, and degeneracy. The physiognomy is conceived of “face and body as the outward expression of internal

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processes” (Pedlar 4). Edward Hyde’s witless deportment is exhibited on his physical appearance including hairiness, shrunken body, abnormality, and ugliness. Edward Hyde’s small stature and his air of primitive suggest a destructive threat posed to humanity, and his physical appearance can not be grasped entirely, but can only be realized by indirect conversation between characters. From the first chapter, Hyde’s appearance is slightly mentioned when Mr. Utterson and Mr. Enfield ramble around London and remark a gloomy door which stirs Mr. Utterson’s interest to a mysterious figure, that is, Edward Hyde. “It wasn’t like a man; it was like some damned Juggernaut”

(Stevenson 9).

The loathing and repulsive countenance of Hyde keeps people distance: “so ugly that it brought out the sweat on me [Mr. Enfield]like running” (Stevenson 9). Not just Mr. Enfield feels nauseous seeing Edward Hyde, but the girl’s family and a surgeon feel the same way. “I had taken a loathing to my gentleman [Hyde] at first sight. So had the child’s family, which was only natural…every time he looked at my prisoner [Hyde], I saw that Sawbones turn sick and white with desire to kill him…I never saw a circle of such hateful faces [crowd]” (Stevenson 9). Having an opportunity glimpsing at Hyde, Mr. Utterson is sick of the deportment he exhibits. “He was small and very plainly dressed, and the look of him, even at that distance, went somehow strongly against the watcher’s inclination” (Stevenson 16). Facing Hyde is hellish for people to imagine.

Hyde’s ghastly and unnamable deformity is like an abyss people can not escape from, and is deeply rooted in people’s mind which can not be easily forgotten. The barbarous and inhumane Edward Hyde is pictured as:

He is not easy to describe. There is something wrong with his appearance;

something displeasing, something downright detestable. I never saw a man

《變身怪醫》中的權力、瘋狂論述和社會排除

Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures College of Liberal Arts

National Taiwan University Master Thesis

Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde

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