Monster's Ink (ENG 2710)

This, too, was myself. Robert Louis Stevenson, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, 1886
Jungian analysis has the virtue of stating for us in a new way the problem of the nature and origin of evil. It warns us that, when we finally return to Ithaca, we will find evil there too.

Dr. Henry Jekyll concocts a chemical mixture that enables him to enjoy the sensual side of his nature without blame or embarrassment by changing into the violent, dwarf-like sociopath, Mr. Hyde. This article aims to answer two essential questions about Stevenson's Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886). First, what does Hyde represent? Second, why do women seem absent from the story?

Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu's story "Carmilla" became the basis for the better known novel "Dracula," by Bram Stoker, and an examination of the earlier story exposes the controversial themes of women's power and lesbian love affairs that Stoker attempted to control in his retelling. Stoker changes the story to make the women characters subservient to the males, and chooses to either punish women for their desire in Lucy's case, or makes them asexual helpers after they escape death, as with Mina Harker. Mina also functions as a guard between the male vampire hunters and homosexuality.

Explores the content to which psychoanalytic criticism and fin de siècle gothic writing are fascinated by a concept of anxiety that is related to the cultural meaning and construction of the maternal and the figure of the mother. Significance of Sheridan Le Fanu's novella "Carmilla" which was published in 1872; Discussion on the psychoanalytic work of Sigmund Freud and Melanie Klein.

Discusses four 19C works that examine the possibility that a male may create new life without a woman: Mary Shelley's "Frankenstein", Nathaniel Hawthorne's "The Birth-mark", Robert Louis Stevenson's "The Strange Case of Dr Jeckyll and Mr Hyde" and H.G. Wells's "The Island of Dr Moreau". With the belief in, and anxiety about, the supremacy of science, the 19C witnessed in fictional works a recurrent staging of the male subject's attempt to harness technology for the purpose of overcoming the biological limitation of his sex and procreating a new being. Science and technology function in these texts as a substitute for the female body, and the male scientist demonstrates, through the process, his defiance of nature as well as his rejection of the feminine.

Prior to 1976, in film and fiction, the vampire was portrayed into the mold in which he had been cast by Bram Stoker in the greatest of the nineteenth-century vampire novels, Dracula--an essentially solitary predator whose presence was the stimulus for an intrepid group of vampire hunters to form and bay in his pursuit, and whose time to center stage was limited to brief, menacing appearances and capped with a spectacular death scene. All this changed however, when Anne Rice published her first novel, Interview with the Vampire in 1976, and turned the vampire paradigm on its head

This essay positions the drug-using doctor at the intersection between traditional Gothic horror and a new fin-de-siècle medical realism, embedding the cultural anxieties at the fin de siècle in relation to the ethical and theological boundaries of scientific knowledge. The objective is to provide a framework for reading and interpreting the medico-gothic narrative of addiction. The essay examines the writings of three pioneering physician-scientists: one historical – Sigmund Freud – and two fictional – Dr Jekyll, in Robert Louis Stevenson‘s Strange Case of DrJekyll and Mr Hyde (1886), and Dr Seward in Bram Stoker‘s Dracula (1897).