The response is, regardless, always extremely interesting. McEwan's defense shifted from being that he was unaware of "Lucien's," the "rent boy" he hired, profession, and that he only hired him in order to help him carry luggage, to being that he wanted to utilize a rent boy during a talk about the monstrosity of homosexuality, and the potential of "recovering" from a homosexual lifestyle. I, probably like most people, don't believe that for a second (again, reflecting the Ted Haggard and Larry Craig situations). I look forward to the awkward public statement that surely will follow.
I'd like to take this time, then, to do something slightly egotistic, but I do think it relates (and it also performs one of the functions that this blog is supposed to serve, essays about sexual identity and literary analyses). I'd like to post an essay that I wrote in November 2008 for a Gothic Literature and the History of Sexuality Class. The topics, sexual repression, the homosexual return of the repressed, and the "monstrosity" of homosexuality, all relate to this issue, and I think it's a good way to demonstrate the interconnection between literary analysis and real-world issues. I haven't edited the essay since I wrote it, so it's a little clunky and grammatically tedious (my style and ability to write essays have improved since then), so I apologize.
The Monstrosity of Homosexual Desire as Reflected by Institutional Constraints
In both Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein dualism is utilized to present the implications of a latent identity. This repressed identity is characterized by bodily monstrosity, establishing the notion that “by focusing upon the body as the locus of fear, Shelley’s [as well as Stevenson’s] novel suggests that it is people (or at least bodies) who terrify people” (Halberstam 28). In these novels “the architecture of fear...is replaced by physiognomy” (Halberstam 28-29), a fear authorized by political and familial institutions. These institutions, repressing the individual, produce a dichotomization of identity that emphasizes a stifled sexuality “that is in some respects located in a desire to excise female influence from male life” (Heilmann 375), and therefore embodies a system of male homosexual desire. Dr. Jekyll, in his relationship with his alter-ego, conceals his sexuality from the homophobia inherent in Mr. Utterson’s character, concluding in a sexual fury that is intensified by physical ugliness. Victor Frankenstein, in disconnecting himself from traditional familial structure, threatens to destroy the basis of the family, creating a “monster” that combines the political and social pressures on him with his own homosexual desires.
Throughout Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde instances of embarrassment and secrecy allude to an ‘unspeakable’ association between the two eponymous characters. When first confronted by Mr. Utterson at Dr. Jekyll’s home “Mr Hyde shrank back with a hissing intake of the breath. But his fear was only momentary” (18). Two important points of view are established here: Hyde’s fear of discovery and Utterson’s characterization of monstrosity, illustrated by Hyde’s hissing. This differentiates the tensions involved in the narrative: the repression of identity, in this case homosexuality, and the homophobic attitude that causes it. This homophobia, as the dominant social structure, explicitly defines homosexuality as an abomination, both in this novel and Frankenstein, producing Mr. Hyde and Frankenstein’s monster. Hyde, as observed by this societal homophobia, conforms to homosexual monstrosity, Utterson depicting him as giving “an impression of deformity without any nameable malformation” (19). Although “pale and dwarfish” (19), the source of deformity is not connected to a physical malformation. He “seems hardly human” and “troglodytic” (19) as defined by some fundamental internal attribute that Utterson terms “Satan’s signature” (19), and that can be understood as homosexuality itself.
The secrecy of Jekyll and Hyde’s relationship, portrayed when Poole states “’O, dear no, sir. He never dines here…Indeed we see very little of him on this side of the house; he mostly comes and goes by the laboratory’” (20), leads Utterson to his suspicion, a suspicion based in part on the “criminal anthropology of the 1890s…[which] made essential connections between outward appearance and inward essence” (Halberstam 41). Hyde’s physical characteristics, although not the definitive locus of his deformity, do indicate to Utterson a criminality that is associated with homosexual intent. Utterson’s fear for Jekyll is manifested in the notion “that while the ‘paranoid Gothic’ is sustained on one level by a fear of sexuality between men, it also evinces a belief in the fixity of social relations and positions” (Halberstam 44). When Doctor Lanyon, in the homophobic role also inhabited by Utterson, illustrates Hyde as “dressed in a fashion that would have made an ordinary person laughable: his clothes, that is to say, although they were of rich and sober fabric, were enormously too large for him in every measurement” (56), the reader is aware that these clothes are Jekyll’s, hinting at an intimacy signified by the exchanging of clothing, and therefore suggesting the fear of sexuality between men. However, Lanyon then muses “as to his [Hyde’s] origin, his life, his fortune and statue in the world” (57), utilizing social structure as a means to measure Hyde’s worthiness of a romantic relationship with Jekyll.
Utterson himself recognizes “the ghost of some old sin, the cancer of some concealed disgrace” (20), perhaps demonstrating his apprehension of Jekyll’s homosexuality. What Utterson does not realize is that it is not Jekyll’s decision for it to be a concealed disgrace, but a necessity based on the institutional pressures expressed by Utterson, the very pressures that forced it to mutate into a cancer, a notion that alludes to both monstrosity and the vengeful demeanor of the return of the repressed. With this recognition Utterson states: “it turns me cold to think of this creature stealing like a thief to Harry’s bedside” (21). This again delineates Hyde in terms of criminality and homosexuality, since he is like a thief when he is at Jekyll’s bed, suggesting that their relationship is threatening to Jekyll. Utterson believes that Jekyll is innocent, only haunted by some old sin, but that Hyde is actively malicious, controlled by dark secrets. This is absurd, since both Jekyll and Hyde are ultimately revealed as fragments of one individual.
In this manner “the Gothic monster is an excellent example of the secret of sexuality that is both hidden and revealed within the same text” (Halberstam 42). The monster embodies the effects of repression as well as the return of the repressed by stratifying identity into its constituent parts. Because of this, Utterson dissociates Jekyll into his innocence (the repressed Jekyll) and his unspeakable sexuality (Hyde, the embodiment of the return of the repressed). The monster itself is the expression of sexuality, or, as Judith Halberstam defines it, “an example of the way that sexuality is constructed as identity in a way that ignores all other identifying traits” (42). Hyde is Jekyll’s sexuality, a sexuality that formed against societal limitations, and therefore an ignorantly violent sexuality that tramples children. Such sacrifices of children (the product of heterosexual unions) by the “monster” will also be subsequently discussed in the context of Frankenstein as a function of homosexuality’s revenge against the limitations of political and familial institutions. This violence is inherent in the return of the repressed, a return obvious in the notion that Jekyll’s monster “lay caged in his flesh, where he heard it mutter and felt it struggle to be born” (75). Jekyll gives birth to this child, a child caged by the dominant institutions that cause Jekyll’s struggle with his own sexuality, a sexuality that is “knit to him closer than a wife (74-75), suggesting that this monster of homosexual desire is an inherent feature of Jekyll that displaces the necessity of females and female reproduction, substituting a “’dark desire to reproduce without the other’” (Halberstam 29).
The notion of repressed identity, with an emphasis on sexuality, or as Judith Halberstam describes, that “it is identity itself which is buried alive, or rather which is figured as live burial” (35), is prominent in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. However, unlike in Stevenson’s novel where homosexuality was subject to social pressures, in Frankenstein the limiting factor is usually familial. The ultimate cause of Victor’s repression is, indeed, a sense of obligation that is apparent when he states: “my mother was dead, but we had still duties which we ought to perform” (25). These duties are his promise to marry his cousin and therefore solidify the bonds of his family. However, he becomes distracted by scientific inquiry, asking “whence…did the principle of life proceed?” (30), a question concerned with both universal origins and sexual origins. This interest in origins, perhaps formed by the “desire to excise female influence from male life” (Heilmann 375), is an early indication of Victor’s homosexuality and his rejection of the traditional structure of the family. The simple answer to his question of where life comes from is, from a Christian point of view, God, or from a more scientific point of view, the female body. Victor is subsequently presented as a counterfeit God, but his discourse is more heavily invested in replacing the functions of the female body and traditional family, not divine power.
Victor’s creation of the monster is illustrated in terms that compare it to female reproduction, especially in that there is “so much time spent in painful labour” (31). This process of birth, although painful to Victor, also evokes emotions of “delight and rapture” (31) which may be due to the elation at his own ability to mimic female reproduction and therefore make females obsolete. Despite Victor’s delight, he is reminded that he is violating the traditional arrangement of domestic and familial institutions when his mind turns to his father, stating: “I knew well therefore what would be my father’s feelings” (33). This fear of paternal rejection will, however, in the passion of this moment, succumb to his desire of creation and perverse companionship, although he recognizes that “a human being in perfection ought always to preserve a calm and peaceful mind, and never to allow passion or a transitory desire to disturb his tranquility” (33), a notion originating in social expectations that condemn his transgressive passion. He is, although pressured by paternal limitations, able to overcome the tension and commit his act of creation that will mark him with “Satan’s signature”.
The moment of creation is intimately set in Victor’s laboratory, where “the rain pattered dismally against the panes, and my candle was nearly burnt out” (34). Since the laboratory is where Victor has spent most of his days, this nighttime encounter can also be identified as an erotically charged bed scene between Victor and his monster, inaugurating the expression of Victor’s homosexual desire. He renders an antithetical image of his creation by stating that “his yellow skin scarcely covered the work of muscles and arteries beneath; his hair was of a lustrous black, and flowing; his teeth of a pearly whiteness; but these luxuriances only formed a more horrid contrast with his watery eyes, that seemed almost of the same colour as the dun white sockets in which they were set, his shriveled complexion, and straight black lips” (34). The monster is a pastiche of physical deformity mapped onto beauty. He has lustrous hair and pearly white teeth that contrast to his watery eyes and black lips. These conflicting characteristics reflect Victor’s internal struggle between his homosexual desire and the institutional pressures that are preventing it, expressing it in a monstrous form with skin that “scarcely covered the work of muscles and arteries beneath,” a transparency that mirrors Victor’s recognition of his sexuality. This transparency arises from the fact that the creation itself is an expression of homosexuality, and he is now directly facing his sexuality in that “the endeavor of Frankenstein to first create life on his own…suggests, if only be default, a homoerotic tension which underlies the incestuous bond” (Halberstam 42).
Victor remarks that the monster was ugly “while unfinished,” but that “when those muscles and joints were rendered capable of motion, it became a thing such as even Dante could not have conceived” (35). The ugliness of being unfinished suggests his personal struggle due to his unexpressed sexuality, but that, when that sexuality is capable of motion¸ or has been expressed, a full recognition of his perversion occurs.
This intimate moment between creator and creation is interrupted by Clerval, the representative of heteronormative friendships whose “presence brought back to my thoughts my father, Elizabeth, and all those scenes of home so dear to my recollection” (36). Clerval reminds Victor of his social and familial obligations, forcing him to reject the transgressive desire that he has just accepted. Like Dr. Jekyll, Victor fears discovery, searching his room “as children are accustomed to do when they expect a spectre to stand in waiting for them on the other side” (37) before he admits Clerval in. This specter is the homosexuality that Victor will now conceal just as ardently as he created it. However, Victor has already emancipated the monster and it is permitted to run its course of destruction, exterminating all of Victor’s associations with the heteronormative family. This commences with the murder of William, after which Victor sees the monster’s “gigantic stature, and the deformity of its aspect, more hideous than belongs to humanity, [which] instantly informed me that it was the wretch, the filthy daemon to whom I had given life” (48). His characterization of the monster as a wretch and a filthy demon suggests the extent of his rejection of the monster, or a denial in the face of this deformity. Victor recognizes that “nothing in human shape could have destroyed that fair child. He [the monster] was the murderer!” (48). The monster, a creature without a human shape, is a symbol for a homosexuality that is consuming the child, the product of heterosexual unions, just as Hyde trampled on the girl. Victor emphasizes that he is the monster, indicating both himself and his creation as part of a stratified identity, one that is repressing itself and the other that is exacting vengeance on the institutional pressures that restrain it.
The next victim is Justine when she is executed for the murder of William. She is not intentionally murdered by the homosexuality that the monster represents, but is a sacrifice to political institutions based on the structure of class relations. These political institutions, based on a male hierarchy embodied in Victor’s father as well as the judge, do not acknowledge homosexuality in their social system and therefore condemn a scapegoat, a servant of lower class. Victor, however, ascertains that he is “the true murderer” (57) of both William and Justine, again associating himself with his creation. Victor comprehends that he should explain his story and save Justine, but, because he is closeted, he rationalizes that those political institutions will not believe him, which he may be right about. He begins to live in perpetual fear “lest the monster whom I had created should perpetrate some new wickedness” (60), emphasizing his inability to control the return of the repressed and his increasingly bitter attitude towards his sexuality. His “abhorrence of this fiend cannot be conceived” (60), indicating that he, like the institutions that originally repressed him, now scorns his sexuality and desires to conform to social conventions, a desire to remain repressed.
The narrative of the monster while at the De Lacey’s cottage also underscores this struggle to conform to social conventions. The monster, homosexual desire itself, is confronted with a family that, despite being traditionally heteronormative, is itself oppressed due to class relations. This leads the monster to anticipate the potential for him to be integrated into this family structure, despite the fact that the elderly, children, and women have all previously rejected him (70). After spying on the family, the monster “discovered the names that were given to some of the most familiar objects of discourse: I learned and applied the words fire, milk, bread, and wood” (75), symbolizing his indoctrination into domestic life. He then learns that “the youth and his companion had each of them several names, but the old man had only one, which was father. The girl was called sister, or Agatha; and the youth Felix, brother, or son” (75). He, along with ascertaining language, is constructing his conception of the relationships involved in the traditional heterosexual family, a familial structure that he understands he is adverse to. Safie, although an “other” like the monster, is heterosexual and easily incorporated into this structure.
The monster’s only refuge is the blind man, the individual able to transcend the social implications of sexuality and accept the physical and internal deformity of the creature. But “at that instant the cottage door was opened, and Felix, Safie, and Agatha entered…Agatha fainted; and Safie, unable to attend to her friend, rushed from the cottage. Felix darted forward, and with supernatural force tore me from his father” (91). The traditional family will always extract this monstrosity, casting it away with violence, therefore provoking the rage involved in the return of the repressed. This return is suggested when the monster “lighted the dry branch of a tree, and danced with fury around the devoted cottage, my eyes still fixed on the western horizon, the edge of which the moon nearly touched…The wind fanned the fire, and the cottage was quickly enveloped by the flames, which clung to it, and licked it with their forked and destroying tongues” (94), demolishing the home, the essential unit of the traditional family, a family that is, in Victor’s society, predominantly heteronormative. After the spatial unit of the family is eradicated, the monster can specifically destroy each member of this institution, the child and servant as previously, and now the wife and father.
Alphonse Frankenstein explicitly defines Victor and Elizabeth’s marriage “as the tie of our domestic comfort, and the stay of my declining years” (104). It is the unification of the family into a domestic unit that invigorates the father, the representative of a sociopolitical structure confined to heteronormativity. This union is, however, haunted from its inception by the monster’s promise: “’I shall be with you on your wedding night’” (116). The suggestion is that the monster, if understood as homosexuality itself, will dilute the significance of heterosexual marriage because Victor is, although permitting his sexuality to be repressed, still definitively controlled by homosexual desire. The promise is fulfilled, and Victor relates “the destruction of the best hope, and the purest creature of earth. She was there, lifeless and inatimate, thrown across the bed, her head hanging down, and her pale and distorted features half covered by her hair” (135). Elizabeth’s death is on her bridal bed as she discovers the dissolution of familial and domestic bonds because of sexual “perversity” rather than the children that her heteronormative marriage was supposed to produce. Victor sees “a grin…on the face of the monster; he seemed to jeer, as with his fiendish finger he pointed towards the corpse of my wife” (136); the monster is emphasizing Victor’s sexuality, pointing to the figure of the dead wife, a figure symbolizing a coldness towards heterosexual relationships that will always negatively affect the female. The monster is defining Victor as a homosexual, and therefore Alphonse Frankenstein must also die, signifying the disintegration of political institutions and the paternal in the face of homosexual desire.
Monstrosity is utilized in Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein to suggest a dualism of sexual identity that is constructed by the repression inherent in social, political, and familial institutions. The monster itself can be understood as the violent return of the repressed or the mechanism of revenge against traditional institutions. In Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde a social homophobia predominantly constrains Jekyll, stimulating his fear of discovery. At the same time Mr Hyde, embodying the homosexual desire extracted from Jekyll, is permitted to evoke his sexual fury, trampling over a girl, suggesting a transgression against the traditional family. This is taken farther in Frankenstein where the monster, the homosexual desire of Victor, pledges to obliterate all members of the traditional family structure. Victor becomes increasingly hateful towards the monster, and therefore his sexuality, choosing to accept societal conventions and repress his own identity. However, by this time the monster has already been unleashed, directly or indirectly murdering: William, the product of heterosexual unions, Justine, the servant of traditional domestic structure, Clerval, the heteronormative friend, Elizabeth, the heteronormative wife, and Alphonse, the paternal figure representing political and social institutions. Victor’s identity struggle against institutional pressures is illustrated in the monster’s narrative, depicting his stay at the De Lacey’s cottage. This traditional family is, in the end, unable to accept the monster’s sexuality, and casts him away as a social deformity. This is the ultimate catalyst of the monster’s destruction of the family, beginning with the burning of the home itself, the spatial unit of traditional family structure.
Works Cited
Halberstam, Judith. Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters. Duke University Press, 1995.
Heilmann, Ann and Mark Llewellyn. “What Kitty Knew: George Moore's John Norton, Multiple
Personality, and the Psychopathology of Late-Victorian Sex Crime.” Nineteenth-Century
Literature. 59.3 (2004): 372-403. JSTOR. University of California, Riverside, Thomas
Rivera Lib. 26 November 2008
Shelley, Mary. Frankenstein. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., 1996.
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