The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde was written by Tusitala.
He was digging at the problem despite the fact that the church was so close to his house.Hitherto it had touched him on the intellectual side alone; but now his imagination also was engaged, or rather enslaved, as he lay and tossed in the gross darkness of the night and the curtained room.He would be aware of a field of lamps at night, a man walking quickly, and a child running from the doctor. Juggernaut trod the child down and passed on regardless of her screams.He 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 being plucked apart.He would stand by his side and do his bidding, even at the last moment.The figure in these two phases haunted the lawyer all night, and if at any time he dozed over, it was but to see it glide more stealthily through sleeping houses, or move the more swiftly, even to dizziness, through wider labyrinths of lamplighted city.Even in his dreams, the figure had no face, or one that baffled him, and thus it was that there sprang up and grew apace in the lawyer's mind.He thought that once he set eyes on him, the mystery would lighten and perhaps roll away, as was the habit of mysterious things.He may be able to see a reason for his friend's strange preference or bondage.It would be a face worth seeing, the face of a man without bowels of mercy, who had but to show himself to raise up, a spirit of enduring hatred.
The scene is entered via a church clock tolling.The excursion into dream language can begin once time is announced.It is as if Utterson needs an awareness of chronological, conventional time and its orienting effect in order for permission to be granted for this nightmare exploration of Hyde and his power, in the erotically charged, gross darkness of the night.The public Utterson gives up to the private man when the intellectual is taken over by the imagination.The church clock tolling is ironic since it is so conveniently near to Utterson's dwelling.It is possible that the fact that Utterson lives by the Church gives him a strange moral and psychological complexity.He needs to feel safe in order to flirt with danger, even if it is only in his imagination.His proximity to the church creates a deep felt conflict and then he subverts the spiritual self?
I wonder in whose eyes this proximity is so important and why this might be.The nearness of the Church may be reassuring because of Utterson's preference for down-going men.He can let the public know that he lives by the church.It could be used for his private longings too.The care for fallen men carries with it a sense ofvoyeur.
When the intellectual is subsumed by the imagination, it forms a conflictual realm alternating between fascination and repulsion.The narrative is indicative of the subject matter at its heart.
The impossibility of seeing Hyde's face is indicative of the conflict between repulsion and fascination.The night realm seems to release Uttterson from self censorship and he dreams of that which he dare not admit in a more conscious reality.The desire to see or visit Hyde's face is described as "singularly strong" and is associated with a form of bondage.The narrative of the dream can be used to express repressed sexual desire.The appearance of the 'unspeakable' Hyde preoccupies all the central male figures in the narrative.The illegibility of Hyde is indicative of the secretive, taboo nature of homosexual desire, a desire which seems to preoccupy Utterson in the visually ambiguous nightmare above.The line "then the door of that room would be opened, the curtains of the bed plucked apart" makes sexual violation central to the effect.There are suggestive metaphors for violent sexual intercourse between repressed middle class men and their dark other.Their violation is initiated by a Hyde figure who represents their lawless, aggressive opposite; a rough working man who would be a subject of fascination for all his friends.The energy and roaming tendencies of Hyde contrast with the leisurely walks of his pursuers.The respectable male protagonists seem to be as much night's sexual watchmen as Hyde himself.In the novel, the hunter and the hunted are not the same.