SOURCE: Magistrale, Tony, and Sidney Poger. “Poe's Victorian Disguises: The Hound of the Baskervilles and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.” In Poe's Children: Connections between Tales of Terror and Detection, pp. 45-55. New York: Peter Lang Publishing, Inc., 1999.

[In the following essay, Magistrale and Poger argue that works such as Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's ”The Hound of the Baskervilles” and Robert Louis Stevenson's Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde reflect Edgar Allan Poe's conception of the human psyche as the ultimate mystery.]

Jekyll and Hyde is a pre-Jungian fable, a vivid illustration of the Shadow side of a decent man, that aspect of our natures whose presence we all have to acknowledge.

(Aldiss qtd. in Wolf 114)

Fifty years after Poe invented the detective story and provided the horror tale with a level of psychological intensity to which it had not been previously subjected, Arthur Conan Doyle and Robert Louis Stevenson adapted Poe's techniques in two of their most popular novels. Interestingly, Sherlock Holmes depreciated Dupin to Watson in A Study in Scarlet: “In my opinion, Dupin was a very inferior fellow. That trick of his of breaking in on his friends' [sic] thoughts with an apropos remark after a quarter of an hour's silence is really very showy and superficial. He had some analytical genius, no doubt; but he was by no means such a phenomenon as Poe appeared to imagine” (25). His criticism notwithstanding, Holmes modeled many of his investigative techniques after Poe's detective. In “A Scandal in Bohemia,” for instance, Holmes uses Watson to create the diversion of a false fire in the same way that Dupin used the firing of an unloaded musket in a crowd by a confederate to distract the Minister D——— in “The Purloined Letter.”

Robert Louis Stevenson's investigation of the double or split personality is dependent upon Poe's initial treatment of this theme. Poe's explanation of perversity helps us to understand why a thoroughly good man, a well-respected doctor and honorable friend, would feel compelled to turn himself into a monster. Moreover, Stevenson's novel takes place in an environment that is decidedly Poe-like: from the symbolic interior chambers of Jekyll's house and laboratory to the transformative energies that occur to his main protagonist after dark.

Both Doyle's The Hound of the Baskervilles and Stevenson's Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde reflect Poe's world. Each portrays a patriarchal society in which women are either victims or secondary to the privileged male power. The only women in Poe's detective tales are victims: Mme. and Mlle. L'Espanaye and Marie Roget. And with the exception of the vampire-lovers we discussed in Chapter 1, the females in Poe's horror tales are also more likely to be the objects of male violence. The only women in Stevenson's novel are the small girl viciously trampled by Hyde, Jekyll's servants, and women of the street. In Doyle's novel, women play a secondary role as well, performing as servants or dependent on their husbands or lovers; the narrative's main struggle is between Stapleton and Holmes. Poe's patriarchal world prevails in both of these Victorian tales, although the seeds of the growth in women's roles can be seen in such a tale as Doyle's “A Scandal in Bohemia.”

Another of Poe's techniques that influenced Doyle and Stevenson is the creation of place as character. Baskerville Hall is located in the midst of the moor, a forbidding structure in a forbidding landscape. Within the moor is the Grimpen Mire, an area of quicksand that treacherously swallows up horses that gallop wild across the moor. The horses are sucked up, disappearing with a dreadful cry. The Mire waits for men. On the moor, within walking distance of the Mire, is Baskerville Hall, a habitation right out of the Gothic tale, formed by the same architect who constructed the infamous House of Usher: “The whole front was draped in ivy, with a patch clipped bare here and there where a window or coat of arms broke through the dark veil. From this central block rose twin towers, ancient, crenellated, and pierced with many loopholes” (375-76). This house is more solid than that of Usher since no crack runs up its side and it appears to be less sensitive to sibling reunions, but it is just as forbidding, maybe even more so because of its surroundings. The city of London has given way to the country of Dartmoor.

Just as the Baskerville mansion and the Grimpen Mire signal the darkest inclinations at work in Doyle's novel (indeed, Stapleton plots his nefarious schemes from within the Mire where the demonic hound is also found), physical settings in Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde highlight the dual nature of the narrative's protagonist. The address where both Jekyll and Hyde reside is the same, yet the chambers within the building itself mirror the personality split that gives birth to Hyde. The part of the house where Jekyll resides features all the physical comforts and civilized amenities that might be associated with one of London's most respected physicians: “This hall, in which he was now left alone, was a pet fancy of his friend the doctor's; and Utterson himself was wont to speak of it as the pleasantest room in London” (53). On the other hand, the area that Hyde inhabits is located in the back of the house, behind Jekyll's quarters. It is secreted, much like Hyde himself, from the places in which Jekyll conducts his business, personal as well as professional. Jekyll's front door opens to one of the most elegant streets in London; the door that Hyde uses “equipped with neither bell nor knocker, was blistered and distained” (39). On Hyde's side of the building we find the darker impulses of the human psyche: men conducting strange errands at three in the morning, dubious activities that are cloaked in secrecy, and society's own unacknowledged denizens—tramps and delinquent children forever lost, geographically and spiritually.

Jekyll's hall and Hyde's laboratory, Jekyll's front door and Hyde's rear entry, Jekyll's brightly-lit parlor filled with colleagues and friends and Hyde's shadowy isolation—all are part of the same building—as Hyde is the brooding “Juggernaut” (40) contained within the placid doctor. As the narrators of Poe's horror tales house an internal dualism that make them both criminal and victim to the acts they perpetrate, the two sides of Jekyll are represented in the man of science and the creature that science created. Vladimir Nabokov was first to point out that Hyde can no more be separated from Jekyll than the subconscious part of the mind can be disconnected from the conscious. Both share an intimacy that is, like the geography of place in Stevenson's novel, housed within a single entity. And as the subconscious part of the psyche exists to haunt the conscious mind, Hyde is that part of Jekyll.

Stevenson wrote a novel about doors; doors that preserve secrets, and doors that betray them. The nature of doors is to protect the interiors that are located behind them, to allow entry as well as to forbid it (Wolf 54). The doors that appear in Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde are physical, as we have seen, but they are also metaphorical, as in the frequent dream that Utterson is said to experience early in the novel. He locates himself in Jekyll's bedroom, watching his friend sleep, when Hyde appears as a dual nightmare intruding into this dream-within-a-dream, crossing through the doors of both bedroom and psyche: “[Utterson] would see a room in a rich house, where his friend lay asleep, dreaming and smiling at his dreams; and then the door of that room would be opened, the curtains of the bed plucked apart, the sleeper recalled, and lo! there would stand by his side a figure to whom power was given, and even at that dead hour, he must rise and do its bidding” (48). This dream sequence specifically links Mr. Hyde with the unconscious mind and the fact that its power is so great that the conscious mind—“the sleeper recalled”—is a prisoner to its demands, forced to “rise and do its bidding.” But Hyde appears to haunt not only the darkest recesses of Jekyll's mind, but violates the threshold of Utterson's as well.

Throughout this novel doors are constantly being forced open to reveal the illicit and horrific contents they hide. “The Last Night” section, for example, requires Utterson and Poole to break down the door to Jekyll's laboratory. Once inside, the only trace of Henry Jekyll that remains is his final act of suicide: forced to kill the opposing sides of his psyche because Hyde had destroyed the balance. In the symbolism of Utterson's dream, Hyde is again the dominant figure, as he is throughout his interactions with Jekyll, violating private domestic thresholds—the bed curtains as well as bedroom door—to interrupt the doctor's happy dreams and sense of security. Stevenson posits in this scene (and will extend this argument through the novel's spontaneous and unprovoked recollections that transform Jekyll into Hyde with greater frequency and without warning) that once the “door” separating the unconscious from the conscious is opened, it becomes difficult, if not impossible, to close it again. The deceptive Jekyll conceals Hyde within himself and is confident that he can become Jekyll whenever he wants, a supreme example of the doctor's scientific hubris. But Hyde cannot be eliminated from Jekyll; there are at least two occasions in the narrative where Jekyll is transformed into Hyde unexpectedly. While the evil of Hyde can exist alone, the social Jekyll cannot exist without the atavistic Hyde. Indeed, Stevenson's story goes so far as to argue that the unconscious and irrational side of humankind is just as powerful (and perhaps more so once it is unleashed) than our rational and conscious impulses. Once the beast is set free, it is extremely difficult to cage him again. Thus, Jekyll discovers that he cannot keep Hyde contained in his laboratory bottles.

Stevenson's and Doyle's novels, published at the end of the nineteenth century, can be considered mirror images of each other because they deal with similar themes and techniques. But this is not surprising, considering their mutual source in the writings of Poe. Each novel often relies upon the characteristics of its sibling. Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde is a horror story which tries to use the rational techniques of the detective story; Baskervilles is a detective story haunted by the ghost story. Daniel Sheridan, in “Later Victorian Ghost Stories: The Literature of Belief,” characterizes the different emphasis of both tales: there are “tales of the supernatural, like The Hound of the Baskervilles, in which the ghost is explained away in natural terms; and tales of the pure supernatural, in which the ghost turns out to be indeed supernatural” (35). While the narrative design of Jekyll suggests a rational tale of science run amok, the fact that Jekyll is transformed physically into a monstrous being pushes the implications of internal dissonance found in Poe's “William Wilson” to its supernatural extreme. Stevenson and Doyle try to come to grips with man's place in a shifting universe, and the unstable quality of that universe is what causes the novels themselves to shift beneath our feet. Their respective narratives face some of the same problems also encountered by Poe: how to deal with the fear at the center of life when life itself appears out of control; how to re-establish that control or adapt to the new circumstances that emerge to fill the vacuum. Both novels take place in the battle ground between hostile Apollonian and Dionysian forces (Nietzsche 556), and while each acknowledges the power of the other, in the end, Jekyll is clearly a tale of supernatural horror while Baskervilles subverts the supernatural in re-establishing the rational dominance of the detective.

The Hound of the Baskervilles begins with a declaration by Sherlock Holmes that if “‘we are dealing with forces outside the ordinary laws of Nature, there is an end of our investigation. But we are bound to exhaust all other hypotheses before falling back on this one’” (358). Holmes does not deny the existence of the supernatural, just our abilities to deal with it. We must confront and exhaust all other possibilities within the rational realm. In fact, Holmes is willing to—nay, asserts that he must—abandon the case if it contains a supernatural thread. This observation is ironic in that the supernatural thread was suggested by Dr. Mortimer, a man of science whose specialty is both banal and scientific: the measurement of skulls. Mortimer's writings include “Is Disease a Reversion?” “Some Freaks of Atavism,” and “Do We Progress?” (345). Holmes's world is one of probability and rationality, as when he finds the source of the anonymous note warning Sir Henry away from London and when he tries to determine the identity of the man in the cab by sending a telegram to Barrymore at Baskerville Hall to eliminate him as one of the suspects. He is reluctant to admit supernatural causes, even though in the Baskerville case there seems to be a weight of supernatural evidence.

In a similar way, none of Jekyll's male cronies is willing to believe in the possibility that Hyde and Jekyll are one and the same. All of Stevenson's male characters are rational men; thus, in their eyes, Jekyll's misappropriation of scientific principles becomes all the more shocking and contemptible. Like Hawthorne's Aylmer in the story “The Birthmark,” Jekyll's moment of scientific triumph is also his greatest moment of failure. When confronted with things that seem to be beyond the ken of science or experience, either Utterson or the police use well-known detective procedures to try to explain the inexplicable. In searching for clues after the murder of Sir Danvers Carew, an inspector finds the charred end of a cheque book. “‘You may depend upon it, sir’ [the inspector] told Mr. Utterson ‘I have him in my hand. He must have lost his head, or he would never have … burned the cheque book. Why, money's life to the man. We have nothing to do but wait for him at the bank, and get out the handbills’” (64). This conclusion is worthy of a hard-boiled American detective, but, alas, it does not work. In a similar way, Utterson tries to explain to Poole, Jekyll's butler, why Jekyll wears a mask. “‘These are all very strange circumstances, … but I think I begin to see daylight. Your master, Poole, is plainly seized with one of those maladies that both torture and deform the sufferer; hence, for aught I know, the alteration of his voice; hence, the mask and the avoidance of his friends; hence, his eagerness to find the drug, by means of which the poor soul retains some hope of ultimate recovery’” (84-85).

Both novels are concerned with disguises, secrets, hidden personalities, and the problems of what we carry inside ourselves. Mrs. Stapleton is disguised as Stapleton's sister. Stapleton himself pretends to be Laura Lyons' suitor in order to use her to get rid of Sir Charles. Stapleton himself is really a Baskerville, hoping to inherit the fortune when his true identity is revealed. As a friend and neighbor of Sir Henry, Stapleton conceals the evil hidden inside himself and symbolized by the Grimpen Mire.

In Stevenson's text, Jekyll and his cronies hide their emotionalism, their passions, and their sexual energies under their professionalism and bourgeois shields of respectability. At the core of Jekyll's group there is an egotism—a prideful superiority—that Hyde, the most selfish and imperious of them all, embodies. It is thus ironic that all of these men refuse to acknowledge consciously their potential identification with Hyde. Indeed, on several occasions Jekyll's cronies appear willing to engage morally, if not legally, compromising actions to insulate Hyde's violent behavior and thereby preserve Dr. Jekyll's independence. For example, it is a very curious breakfast party, including Enfield, the trampled girl's father, and the doctor, who in the novel's opening scene await the bank to open so that Hyde can essentially buy his way out of trouble. There is a subtle collusion at work among all these men who profess to hate Hyde and are repulsed by his awful trampling of the girl. Yet in this scene and in others throughout the text, Hyde is protected by Jekyll's friends and colleagues, the latter in turn believing that they are somehow also protecting Dr. Jekyll. The monster's actions throughout the novel underscore the fact that affluent single men have always possessed the freedom to engage in behavior of their own choosing, and then retreat behind a safe veneer of proper conduct. The real horror of this novel is not found only in Jekyll's misuse of science, but in the sobering possibility that a powder compound may not necessarily be required to summon the Hyde that lurks within each of us.

A Victorian context aids in understanding the issues present within both these narratives. Victorian readers were concerned with Darwinism. Those who denied the idea of the descent of man, who felt that humans had issued fully formed from the hand of God, were threatened by the new theories. They felt beleaguered by the attacks of scientists, those who had “proof” of the non-existence of God. They denied that man and monkey were related, but many of their most vehement denials suggest an uncomfortable feeling that there were too many parallels between the two species to be ignored. Those who followed Darwin felt that humans had soared high above their beginnings, taking a long journey from their animal beginnings to their present exalted status. The Romantic sensibility world welcomed Darwin's thesis of an inextricable bond between the natural and human worlds. Victorians, on the other hand, had a profound distaste for the bizarre and the fantastic; for them, the link between human and ape was cause for cultural stress rather than celebration. Jekyll and Hyde came to represent for the Victorian imagination the essential threshold figure between the human and animal realms. This fear of atavism was also a favorite topic for Doyle's Dr. Mortimer, of evincing within humans characteristics which indicate a throwback to their animal natures. People of England prided “themselves on a Britain that seemed to be progressing to ever-new heights [but] secretly feared something below the surface” (Keating 21). They feared their own inner beings might revert to savagery in some form of atavism, “the recurrence of primitive characteristics from the remote past” (21). They feared “the violence within” (22), that propensity toward savagery that civilization was intended to have brought them beyond. They looked with horror at the idea of sliding back down the chute, as in the children's game of Chutes and Ladders, of somehow reverting inexorably to their animal natures. Dr. Watson incites this Victorian paranoia in his atavistic description of caves of prehistoric dwellers on the moor in one of his letters to Holmes: “When you are once out upon [the moor] you have left all traces of modern England behind you, but on the other hand you are conscious everywhere of the homes and the work of the prehistoric people. … As you look at their grey stone huts against the scarred hill-sides you leave your own age behind you, and if you were to see a skin-clad, hairy man crawl out from the low door, fitting a flint-tipped arrow on to the string of his bow, you would feel that his presence there was more natural than your own” (385). Essentially, Stevenson's and Doyle's novels prey upon Victorian anxieties about their place in the evolution of the species. These texts suggest that humankind's nature may have more in common with the apes than with the angels.

The reactions to this fear of atavism not only pervaded the lecture circuit and the major journals of the time, but also the popular literature. Both The Hound of the Baskervilles and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde have, as their major impetus, a reaction to these social fears. Doyle's Dr. Mortimer, obsessed with this concept of atavism, asks, “Do We Progress?” Looking at the evidence, it might seem that if the answer is an affirmative, it is put forth without much confidence.

Each novel presents characteristics of evolutionary throwback in the small stature of regressive beings: Selden, the convict, in Doyle; and Hyde in Stevenson. Both these men are of smaller stature than normal, as if man, on his pathway to progress, had grown taller (a prejudice which still exists in our own society which gives tall men a pre-eminent place and brushes aside those of a “lower” stature). Selden is described in terms of an animal: a “terrible animal face,” “small, cunning eyes … like a crafty and savage animal” (399). When he is discovered, Selden curses and hurls a rock (a primitive weapon) at Dr. Watson and Sir Henry Baskerville. Watson catches sight of “his short, squat, strongly-built figure” which rapidly disappears as he easily outruns his more civilized human pursuers (400). Selden's animal qualities culminate in his animal speed and the savagery of his actions, as well as the savagery of his crimes.

Hyde, Jekyll's inner regressive being, is described by Enfield as being “deformed somewhere,” (43) although Enfield cannot specify what the deformity is. The only consistent details are his small stature and grotesque appearance. “Little” is the very first word that Enfield uses in describing Hyde (40), and he goes on to say that he first observed Hyde “slumping along eastward” (40) which suggests the latter's warped and deformed status. Utterson recalls him as “pale and dwarfish … he had a displeasing smile, he had borne himself … with a sort of murderous mixture of timidity and boldness … but not all of these together could explain the hitherto unknown disgust, loathing and fear” (52) which Hyde inspired. Hyde's hand was of a “dusky pallor and thickly shaded with a swart growth of hair” (112). While other specific details are missing, Hyde fills the London citizenry with a sense of loathing in his bestial appearance. He snarls, he growls, he acts the animal to Jekyll's facade of noble humanity.

Both Selden and Hyde are projections of the evil which resides, hidden, within society. For Doyle, these regressions are illustrated in three figures: the convict, the hound, and the criminal Stapleton. Selden's actions are not only illegal (he is known as the “Notting Hill murderer”) but horrible. His crimes were marked with “peculiar ferocity” and “wanton brutality” (375). He is cut off from almost all human intercourse. His only connection is with his sister, Mrs. Barrymore, who supplies him with food, clothing, and a chance to flee the country. Her kindness comes from her memories of childhood, when she acted the older sister. It is this memory which moves her, not a commitment to protecting the perpetrator of such evil crimes.

The dog itself is further evidence of a throwback, a reversion to the spectral hound that tore out the throat of Sir Hugo. The hound has its origins in the ghost stories of the Victorian era. If Doyle were creating one of those tales, the beast would have been a real ghost, wreaking its vengeance on the descendents of the Baskerville lineage. Many ghost tales would have found the hound triumphant in destroying all the remnants of the family. But this is a detective tale, not a ghost story, and nothing is allowed to exist which cannot be scientifically explained. Thus, it is left for science to discredit the supernatural and return the narrative to the natural—a movement that is in opposition to the supernatural transformation that occurs to Dr. Jekyll. But even though science and the rational triumph in Doyle (the hound is shot), Sir Henry Baskerville is almost killed in the obscuring fog and the howls of the hound continue to resonate even after the creature is dead. Indeed, the image of this dog aggressively bearing down upon its human prey dominates the reader's memory of this book.

Stapleton is himself a throwback: his face sprang out of Sir Hugo's portrait. Holmes reveals to Watson that the eighteenth-century portrait of Sir Hugo could have been done of Stapleton. Stapleton is a descendent of the evil branch of the Baskerville family (a standard Gothic trope), carrying its bad blood in an undiluted stream from the wrong side of the family. His evil nature is illustrated in his beating of his wife, in his betrayal of Laura Lyons, in the way he uses fear of the past to kill Sir Charles, and in his association with the Grimpen Mire. As Selden is associated with the lonely and hilly moor, his evil nature illustrated in its gloomy isolation, so is Stapleton associated with the quicksands of the Mire, its swallowing up of wild horses, and its deceptive bearing concealing the evil under its placid skin of sand. Stapleton is at home in this inhospitable place, the only one capable of negotiating around this landscape of evil, maintaining his reign of fear by keeping the hound free of discovery in the center of the Mire.

One of the more sobering elements in each of these novels concerns the fact that both Stevenson and Doyle probed the darker sides of human nature. Stapleton and Seldon are Doyle's degenerate men, fallen beings who have lost touch with the affirmative virtues of society and morality that the detective represents and seeks to uphold. In Jekyll and Hyde, Dr. Jekyll manages to refrain from using the powder that summons Hyde for more than a two-month period. As a consequence, he informs us proudly that he “enjoyed the compensations of an approving conscience” (115). But this novel has often been interpreted as a study in substance abuse addiction because none of the satisfaction that Jekyll attains in practicing abstinence—from a return to the social world of friends and charitable work to the security of his professional reputation—is sufficient to deter him from the blood rush that he gains in becoming Hyde: “I began to be tortured with throes and longings, as of Hyde struggling after freedom; and at last, in an hour of moral weakness, I once again compounded and swallowed the transforming draught” (115). Jekyll comprehends fully that becoming Hyde is a dangerous and morally dubious act, a risk to everything he values most in his life. But Stevenson has provided us with yet another illustration of Poe's Imp of the Perverse: Jekyll is drawn to self-destructive behavior in spite of the consequences; in fact, the risk involved only seems to heighten his need for the experience.

Jekyll is the only one who is in possession of the truth about Mr. Hyde. In place of Holmes's employment of science as an instrument for man's progress and advancement, Jekyll reverts to using science as a means of uncovering man's deathless cycle of sin. Stevenson's tale offers a disintegrating vision of life through chemistry, while Doyle would remind us that life is only bearable when it is under the control of reason. Like Holmes, Jekyll trusts implicitly in his science and his powers of self-discipline, believing that he can regulate his journey into the heart of darkness. But Mr. Hyde proves otherwise: that Darwin's theories of our close intimacy with the bestial world more than justify Victorian discomfort, and we deny the power of this connection at great risk. If Holmes is a constant reminder of the Enlightenment's view of reason as a guiding force to regulating human behavior, Jekyll into Hyde suggests the opposite: that reason is an inadequate barrier to the perversity inherent in human nature.

These novels resemble each other in other important ways. Both are told through the eyes of a solid Englishman, unpoetic, rational, and sensible. Both these narrators are derived from Poe's narrator in the Dupin tales. Watson, who tells the Holmes tale through memory, letters, and diaries, is all common sense. His detection, when Holmes is not on the scene, is expert and sharp. Watson acts quickly and decisively, spying on Mrs. Barrymore, pursuing Selden over the moor, interviewing Laura Lyons. When Holmes is there, Watson willingly assumes a more diminutive status, taking orders from Holmes, depending on him for conclusions, action, and decisions. In other words, Watson is a conventionally secondary narrator except when, in the absence of Holmes, he becomes the only one on the field. Watson's values are those of his audience: he is kindly, protective of women, in touch with his emotions, living up to a code of honor. He is prosy, except for certain moments, such as in his description of the prehistoric dwellers on the moor.

In contrast, one of Stevenson's central narrators, Utterson, is a man with even less of the softer passions. Watson is married and has some social and home life. Utterson's social life consists solely of Sunday walks with his friend Enfield; his close friends seem to be only those men whom he knew in school, and he has maintained contact with only a few of them. His social relations seem to be repressed, and his only emotion is that of shock at actions that violate the sensibilities of the British male. His social life appears to revolve around the three friends of whom we are aware: Enfield, Lanyon, and Jekyll. Perhaps the intimacy of this social circle deepens the loss when something tragic happens to one of its members. Utterson experiences the loss of Lanyon and Jekyll, and it is perhaps as a result of their deaths that we find Utterson mute at the end of the novel. Lanyon may die for the same reason that Utterson goes mute: they both sense this dark bond with Hyde. As we traced earlier in this chapter, Hyde's presence haunts Utterson's dreamscape; similarly, Hyde's existence shakes Lanyon's complacent theories on science and society to such a degree that he does not recover.

The other similarity that ties these two texts is their layered narratives. Baskerville is told directly through Watson, beginning the tale when he enters 221B Baker Street. But the novel soon changes to excerpts from Watson's diaries (supposedly told in reflection over recent events) and from letters (even more of a present-time narrative device). Through these various mirrors of time, Watson is able to involve us more and more in the tale until the end, when he and Holmes reflect on the newly concluded case. The story begins in familiar surroundings, the apartment shared by Watson and Holmes, moves into the exciting present, then returns to the reflections of the conclusion. This sense of stylistic closure is characteristic of the detective novel.

Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde's narrative is told through the point of view of Utterson, even in the first chapter when Enfield relates the story of his first meeting with Hyde. Utterson sees puzzling clues, all of which he tries to confront with his own logical, detective-like mind. At the end, though, when the narrative leaves the matter-of-fact world of Utterson, it moves into two letters, one from Lanyon, the other from Jekyll, which detail the most fantastic parts of the narrative. By moving the last two chapters into the words of two other speakers, Stevenson leaves the rational world of the detective novel behind and advances into the world of the suprarational; our last anchor to reality is that of the man—Utterson—who reads these letters and apparently gives them credence. The reader's horrified response is all the greater for being refracted through the understanding of Utterson, as our involvement in Baskervilles is enhanced by having the story told through the sensibilities of Watson. It is not accidental that there are so many doctors involved in both these stories; their number helps with narrative verisimilitude. Moreover, Stevenson's long history of grave illness would suggest that especially in his case the occupation of physician was held with most profound respect and trust.

Each of these narratives questions basic conceptions of progress. In The Hound of the Baskervilles Sir Henry goes on a long voyage for the recovery of his shattered nerves (440) to regain strength enough to face the world again. His earlier scientific faith in the Swan and Edison generator (376), which would be used to illuminate the darkness of Baskerville Hall, is ultimately undermined by the eternal fog of the moor. Similarly, Utterson's and Lanyon's worlds of self-control and rationality crumble in the face of testimony that describes persuasively the result of Gothic science used to open doors that contain forbidden knowledge. Holmes provides Baskervilles with an ultimate return to the security of a rational universe where the scientific method explains away the mysteries of the apparently inexplicable. No such complacency, however, is available in Stevenson's novel. The Jekyll/Hyde suicide is the final image the reader takes away from the experience of entering into this nightmare. One can only imagine that Utterson's future Sunday walks will steer clear of Jekyll's neighborhood. The novel's implications are sobering reminders that every human mind contains realms its owner explores with the assistance of neither guide nor map, and that sometimes the choice to explore these worlds is a tragic and one-way journey that can never be exculpated.

Works Cited

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———. “Annabel Lee.” 1849. Davidson 46-47.

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———. “The Cask of Amontillado.” 1846. Davidson 231-37.

———. “The Fall of the House of Usher.” 1839. Davidson 95-112.

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———. “Ligeia.” 1838. Davidson 80-94.

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———. “The Murders in the Rue Morgue.” 1841. Davidson 139-71.

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———. “The Pit and the Pendulum.” 1843. Davidson 180-94.

———. “The Poetic Principle.” 1850. Davidson 464-85.

———. “The Purloined Letter.” 1844-45. Davidson 208-25.

———. “The Raven.” 1845. Davidson 36-39.

———. “The Tell-Tale Heart.” 1843. Davidson 194-99.

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