ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that from the analysis presented, more can be learned about the constitution of a nineteenth-century exclusionary matrix and how the literary/aesthetic domain reflects and adds to social unconsciousness, its figures, preoccupations, and articulations. Monstrosity signifies distortion, horror, and aversion, constituents of what Punter calls the “dialectic of persecution” in Gothic literature. The plurality of the story’s three narratives—Utterson’s, Lanyon’s, and Dr Jekyll's—mirrors an inherent not-knowing what exactly is occurring. The two-in-one or one-in-two subject at the centre—Jekyll/Mr Hyde, Hyde/Jekyll, Hyde within Jekyll, decomposing and recomposing—undermines the idea of a stable self, the very “fortress of identity”. In the strange alliance and protectionism between Jekyll and Hyde, more is at stake than just the transformation of one into the other. The repugnance surrounding Hyde marks him off from respectable bourgeois bachelors, so that “homo-sexuality may be distanced from the notionally heterosexual fraternity”.
