Monstering the Invisible -

A study of the socio-cultural production of Gothic monstrosity

By Steve Kettle

May 2016

I
 CONTENTS

Abstract…………………………………………..……………………………..p IV

Acknowledgements…………………………………..…………………………p V

Introduction……………………………………………………………………..p VI

Chapter One: ‘in this city…everyone was part of everything’……..…………..p X

Chapter Two : ‘The primitive duality of man’…………..……………………..p XXI

Chapter Three: ‘It was his beauty that ruined him’…………..………………...p XXX

Conclusion……………………………………………………………………...p XXXIX

Bibliography…………………………………………………………………….p XXXL

II
 ABSTRACT

MONSTERING THE INVISIBLE –

A study of the socio-cultural production of Gothic monstrosity

MAY 2016

Davison surmises that the Gothic is used as a site to interrogate socio-cultural divides,
serving as a barometer of anxieties for that temporal culture. This study engages with three
gothic texts and identifies the marginalised social Other, abjected from centralised
normativity due to socially circumscribed definitions of difference. This difference, the
social monstrous, is always viewed apophatically, the language of monstrosity. However,
the monster is cultural product, and though abjected remains a part of culture. The presence
of this visible monstrosity is both a reinforcement of social boundaries, and also suggests
that if there are visible monsters within a society, it is probable that there are invisible
monsters, repressed and hidden from sight to uphold the hegemonic binary. In the texts of
Hugo, Stevenson and Wilde examined in this study, this is a binary of good and bad
defined by wealth and social position: the ‘good’ being wealthy and therefore the monster-
makers, the ‘bad’ being the poor, the hegemonically ugly side of society.

The language of monstrosity is appropriated as the mode of social critique, and applied to
theoretical arguments of Cohen, Kristeva, Bakhtin and le Bon regarding theories of
monster, abject, carnivalesque and crowd respectively. By this application and analysis, the
invisible and repressed will be monstered visible. Whilst in any culture there are a myriad
of, from a hegemonic perspective, visible and invisible monsters, such as sexuality, gender,
race; this study will focus upon the monster of repressed desire.

The study will utilise the medium and metaphor of fog in illustrating the perceived threat
of the Other encroaching upon normative space and swallowing boundaries, in its presence
as a concealing medium and a site of transgressive behaviour and transformation, and as a
metaphor for the Other.

III
 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Many thanks to the teaching staff at Swansea University for inspiration and encouragement

to undertake this project, and to Dr Liz Herbert McAvoy and Prof Caroline Franklin for

theory guidance at an early stage.

Special thanks to Dr Steve Vine for unwavering intellectual and moral support and

guidance throughout this journey; and for introducing me to monster theory three years

ago.

Final thanks to my partner Amanda Lane for lending a critical and sympathetic ear.

IV
In Monsters in English Literature Goetsch notes the societal emphasis placed upon

exteriority - the outward projection of the self, and a construction influenced by pervading

hegemonic cultural normativity, when he states that ‘our attempts to understand strangers

begin with a look at their bodies’.1 The body could be described as the cover by which the

book is judged, a passive medium onto which external culture inscribes,2 and therefore the

site of social monstering.

The word ‘monster’ is key to this discussion and is defined by the Oxford English

Dictionary as:

1.a: a mythical creature which is part animal and part human

4.a: a creature of great size
5: a person of repulsively unnatural character, or exhibiting such cruelty or
wickedness as to appear inhuman. 3
This definition has two dove-tailing facets - one regarding exterior appearance, and the

other of exteriorised behavioural characteristics. Such definitions could be described as

apophatic, the monster labelled as something visually horrible, undesirable and to be

avoided. This is an idea supported by the etymology of the word monster as ‘malformed,

creature afflicted with a birth defect’, taken directly from the Latin monstrum meaning

‘divine omen, portent’, and from the root of monére meaning to warn or show.4 It is

therefore no coincidence that the monstrous figure tends to appear at cultural crisis points.

1
Goetsch, P. (2002). Monsters in English Literature: From the Romantic Age to the First World War / Paul
Goetsch. (Neue Studien zur Anglistik und Amerikanistik ; Bd. 83). Frankfurt am Main ; New York: Peter
Lang. p8
2
Butler, J. (2006). Gender Trouble: Feminism and the subversion of identity / Judith Butler; with an
introduction by the author. (Routledge Classics). New York: Routledge.p129
3
http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/121738?rskey=4S6nxa&result=1#eid
4
http://etymonline.com/index.php?allowed_in_frame=0&search=monster

V
 In his seminal text Monster Theory, Cohen surmises that ‘the monstrous body is

pure culture…a construct and projection’,5 and defines the monster as ‘an embodiment of a

certain cultural moment – of a time, feeling and place’.6 This consideration of subjective

culture posits it as the monster-maker. As a cultural product, Williams surmises that ‘the

monster’s proper function is to negate the very order of which the monster is a part, and to

critique the principles…that sustain order itself’.7 As such, the monster can be viewed as

both a mirror to what society abject’s, and as a figure representing difference within a

cultural body. Such consideration imbues the monster with a fluidity, accounting for its

continuing haunting cultural presence and malleable form operating at the very edges of

society. As a product of culture, the monster remains a part of it, its form shifting with

societal changes. This consideration is reinforced upon engagement with Butler’s

observations that subversion comes from ‘within the [paternal] law, through the

possibilities that emerge when the law turns against itself’.8 Whilst she writes regarding

gender and performativity, she views the eponymous gender troubles as societal monsters

abjected from within the norm, yet remaining a threat. Moreover, she discusses the idea of

a patriarchally constructed boundary between norm and monster defined and ‘maintained

for the purposes of…regulation and control’.9

Having defined the monster as a part of society that is marginalised, we can also

view the monster as a Kristevan abject figure - deformed and unwanted, disturbing the

hegemonic norm from its liminal space. But what is the ‘norm’, and how does it control

culture and therefore the visibility of the monster? For the purposes of this study I will

5
Cohen, J (1996). Monster Theory reading culture / J J Cohen, editor. Minneapolis, Minn. ; London:
University of Minnesota Press.P4
6
Ibid
7
Williams, D (1996). Deformed Discourse: The function of the monster in medieval thought and literature /
David Williams. Exeter: University of Exeter Press. P14
8
Butler, J (2006) Gender Trouble: Feminism and the subversion of identity / Judith Butle; with an
introduction by the author. (Routledge Classics). New York: Routledge.P93
9
Butler, J (2006).P133

VI
consider the norm as a singular body constituted of its social parts in the same way that Le

Bon imagines the crowd – ‘the sentiments and ideas of all persons in the gathering take one

and the same direction…in possession of a sort of collective mind’.10 In other words, what

may be monstrous to one individual may not be monstrous to the next. But if the two

individuals are considered as part of the crowd of normativity, then the over-riding

sentiment of the mass creates a normative and inclusive set of ideals, what Butler refers to

as Lacan’s Paternal Law - ‘a universal organising principle of culture’.11

However, if the monster is an abjected part of society and societal culture is fluid in

thought like the form of its monsters, then it is possible that in order to fit into the norm,

individuals have to repress their desires. As Kristeva notes, ‘all abjection is in fact

recognition of the want on which…desire is founded’.12 Such consideration leads to the

key exploratory point of this study concerning the visibility and invisibility of monsters -

that if monsters are a product of society and fluid, shown, visible and abjected; then there

must also be invisible un-abjected monsters within society, hiding in the crowd.

The gothic form is a site used to examine society, and therefore its monsters;

representing, as Davison notes, ‘a barometer of socio-cultural anxieties in its exploration of

the dark side of industry, cultures and nations – to interrogate socially dictated and

institutionally entrenched attitudes and laws.’13 By engaging with three gothic texts:

Robert Louis Stevenson (1886) The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde

Oscar Wilde (1891) The Picture of Dorian Gray

Victor Hugo (1831) Notre Dame de Paris

10
Le Bon, G (1947). The Crowd: A study of the popular mind / by Gustave Le Bon. London: Benn.P27
11
Butler, J (2006).p97
12
Kristeva, J (1982). Powers of Horror: An essay on abjection / Julia Kristeva; translated by Leon S.
Roudiez. (European perspectives). New York: Columbia University Press.P5
13
Davison, C M. (2012). The Victorian Gothic and Gender in The Victorian gothic: An Edinburgh
companion / edited by Andrew Smith and William Hughes. (2014). Edinburgh: Edinburgh University
Press.P124

VII
this study will examine the textual cultures through the visible monsters presented therein,

arguing that it is only the values of the respective cultures that control this visibility, the

exterior appearance of monstrosity. It will also expose the subjected invisible monstrosity

of desire, repressed and hidden behind a veneer of social acceptability, making it visible by

monstering it. Returning to its etymology, the monster is a figure of ‘showing’ both what is

already visible, and of exposing what is hidden, repressed and abjected. Of interest to this

study is the function of the fog within texts, which OED defines as:

1 – flabby substance (in the body), waste flesh

2a – a thick mist or water vapour suspended in the atmosphere; an obscured

condition of the atmosphere14

Like the monster itself, the fog is fluid in form and at once translucent and opaque; a

visible medium that is able to conceal completely and also to reveal slight shadows of what

is within. Whilst it can be an oppressive presence able to permeate all areas of society, it is

imbued by its nature with a varying degree of transience, threatening to suddenly reveal

what is hidden within; to expose and monster. This study will utilise the fog as a literal

atmospheric condition serving as a concealing medium, a metaphoric device as a site of

transgression and confusion encroaching threateningly upon normative space, and as a

visual metaphor for the behaviour of the crowd theorised by Le Bon as a social group. As

such, this study will view the fog both as a site of monstering, and as the manifestation of a

monster.

14
http://www.oed.com/search?searchType=dictionary&q=fog&_searchBtn=Search

VIII
 Chapter One

‘in this city…everyone was part of everything’15

In her discussion regarding Victorian gender and national identity, Horner refers to Hugo’s

Notre-Dame de Paris as the first mysteries novel, using gothic devices to heighten

important dialogue about social inequalities.16 Such inequalities affected the very time in

which Hugo was writing (the French Revolution of 1830) and, thus, it comes of no surprise

that this social unease (a fin-de-siècle crisis-point) both interrupted the writing of the text,

and pervaded it in the socio-cultural binary and Bakhtinian subversions presented within it.

Prior to this social upheaval, France was ruled under the feudal estate system. This rigid

social structure denied upward social mobility to the late medieval period in which Hugo’s

text is set, which saw the rise of the mercantile classes and their power demands that they

felt their financial status warranted; and the demands of the land-owning peasants who

wanted land-owner rights that the system denied them.17 The aristocracy sat atop this social

system, empowering them to become the cultural monster-makers abjecting all other

estates. Consequently, the new middle classes and peasants became an abject group

threatening to normative power; a monster prowling the antiquated borders.

In 1789 these Others had revolted in social dissatisfaction, swarming normative

space and swallowing cultural boundaries (a 'foggy' image of a crowd later employed in

15
Hugo, V.(2004). Notre-Dame de Paris. Translated and edited by John Sturrock. London: Penguin.p100
16
Horner, A(2014) Victorian Gender and National Identity in Smith, A., & Hughes, W. (2014). The
Victorian Gothic: An Edinburgh companion / edited by Andrew Smith and William Hughes. Edinburgh:
Edinburgh University Press.p111
17
http://www.victorianweb.org/history/hist7.html

IX
this study). This uprising of the Other is indicative of the prejudices and fear that were

prevalent in Hugo’s contemporary France, and also in the Victorian society of Wilde and

Stevenson. However, by setting his text in the hegemonically primitive society of the

medieval- ‘an epoch of dark and sinister backwardness’,18 and then aligning it with the

present, Hugo used the medieval as a site by which to critique contemporary culture with

its still-feudal model. In doing so, Hugo reveals that ‘the ideas of modernity as being

radically different’19 are mistaken: rather, it bears more than a passing resemblance to the

monstrous medieval.

Indeed, Hugo uses the architecture of Paris, a constant medieval presence, in order to

illustrate the lack of progression - ‘Were we, men of 1830, to be granted the power of

mingling, in spirit, with these Parisians of the fifteenth century…everything around us

would be so old as to seem, to us, quite new.’20 Like Stevenson and Wilde, Hugo’s text

also pays ‘attention to society’s monster-making role…suggest[ing] that monsters are in

part, products of sexually repressive, hypocritical societies’.21 It is the social threat of the

desirous and primitive Other that aligns Notre-Dame with the other texts to be discussed.

Hugo’s text depicts a cultural binary: the norm being the aristocracy, the wealthy

and the clergy; and the Other being the poor; thieves and cripples with normatively

monstrous libidinal behaviour and bodies, abjected on the basis of difference. At the

margins, they form a visible sub-culture that permeates all areas of the city like a fog. First

witnessed in the text at the public performance of Gringoire’s play, the Other appears as a

cripple who ‘had the idea of perching himself in some prominent position so as to attract

both eyes and alms…of the multitude with his rags and a hideous sore that covered his

18
Bildhauer, B., & Mills, R.(2003). The monstrous Middle Ages / edited by Bettina Bildhauer and Robert
Mills. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.p3
19
Ibid
20
Hugo, V.(2004).p33
21
Davison, C. M.(2012). The Victorian Gothic and Gender in Smith, A., & Hughes, W. (2014).p137

X
right arm’;22 siting the aesthetically and hegemonically ugly side of society in the midst of

normativity.

Imagining the normative boundaries akin to a fog or a cloak demarcating social

difference and struggle in the text is a grotesque image. It is a metaphorical blanket of

feudalism strewn over a crowd creating a single social entity, a barrier of suppression and

subjection; and the image of a dark, pulsing mass hegemonically aligned with the Other. In

Hugo this counter-culture subverts and mocks the norm as Bakhtin theorised with his

carnivalesque, offering ‘a completely different, non-official extra-ecclesiastical and extra-

political aspect of the world…a second world’.23 Bakhtin’s grotesque body is, like Le

Bon’s crowd, not an individual body but ‘cosmic and universal’;24 and unlike the social

body of divides, restrictions and repressions

the distinctive characteristic of this body is its open unfinished nature, its
interaction with the world…most fully and concretely revealed in the act of eating; the
body transgresses here its own limit: it swallows, devours, rends the world apart, is
enriched and grows at the worlds expense25

For this study, the image of a swallowing mass depicts the poor as a metaphorical

fog, a presence threatening to engulf the hegemonic world and grow in its stead, dissolving

and changing boundaries and leaving the norm lost and abjected. So when Gringoire finds

himself lost in the bowels of this subculture, his hegemonically entrenched perspective

envisions its denizens as ‘dim and shapeless figures of some kind…crawling…all making

for the light which flickered at the end of the street, like those ponderous insects’.26 Only

when he peeks out from under his cloak of normativity does he sees its true nature –

Hugo, V.(2004).p50
22

23
Bakhtin, M., Morris, P., Voloshinov, V., & Medvedev, P.(1994). The Bakhtin Reader: Selected writings of
Bakhtin, Medvedev, and Voloshinov / edited by Pam Morris; with a glossary compiled by Graham Roberts.
London ; New York: E. Arnold.p197
24
Bakhtin, M., Morris, P., Voloshinov, V., & Medvedev, P.(1994).p234
25
Bakhtin, M., Morris, P., Voloshinov, V., & Medvedev, P.(1994).p228
26
Hugo, V.(2004).p97

XI
 in this city, the boundaries between races and species seemed to have been
abolished…men, women, animals, age, sex, health, sickness, all seemed communal;
everything fitted together, was merged, mingled and superimposed; everyone was
part of everything27

Whilst his normative self still sees the visible monstrosity of his surroundings, describing

the houses as looking like ‘enormous heads of monstrous’28 beings, he also sees this as a

sort of social utopia, a carnivalesque world of ‘loud laughter and obscene singing’29 which

Kristeva theorises as ‘a way of placing or displacing abjection’.30 Given the text’s

contemporary cultural crisis, such a sub-culture could be read as the shadow of the French

revolutionaries pervading Hugo’s text like a fog.

The procession of the fool’s pope is a parody of officialdom – ‘in front marched…

the Duke of Egypt…then came…every thief in France’;31 and the textual pope is

Quasimodo, the seeming embodiment of anti-normativity, of difference and monstrosity,

visually adhering to monstrous definition and etymology:

the ideal of grotesqueness…tetrahedral nose…horseshoe mouth…tiny left eye,

obstructed by a bushy red eyebrow, while the right eye had vanished entirely
beneath an enormous wen…irregular teeth, notched here and there like castle
battlements…horny lip on which a tooth encroached like an elephants tusk...the

27
Hugo, V.(2004).p100
28
Ibid
29
Hugo, V.(2004).p103
30
Kristeva, J.(1982). Powers of horror: An essay on abjection / Julia Kristeva; translated by Leon S.
Roudiez. (European perspectives). New York: Columbia University Press.p8
31
Hugo, V.(2004).p87

XII
 grimace was his real face. Or rather his whole person was a grimace. A huge head
sprouting red hair; between two shoulders an enormous hump, the repercussions of
which were evident at the front; a system of thighs and legs so strangely warped
that they met only at the knees…broad feet and monstrous hands…like a giant
broken in pieces and badly reassembled...a sort of Cyclops32

Visually, his body is one of extremes, as if all of societal sin had been inscribed onto its

surface. And if considered the visual representation of the subculture, he is a jumble of

Otherness. Of note is that Quasimodo is referred to as Cyclops; mythical one-eyed beings

who were monsters of great strength. Williams refers to the cyclops as ‘precivilised in a

sense that they are ignorant of the…practices of civilised men’33 linking Quasimodo with

the primitive Other. Williams argues that they can be deceived as they have only

monocular vision, therefore are unable to see both sides – ‘the single eye…connoting the

via negativa of dissimilitude in which is revealed the incompleteness of what is seen and

understood’.34 Applied to Quasimodo, it is evident that he is controlled by Frollo; their

relationship being a parallel to the societal high/low subjugation.

Returning to the imagery of the normative cloak, Quasimodo with his deformity

can be envisioned as the Bakhtinian social body of the Other. From a bourgeois

perspective, he is a signifier of monstrous openness and depravity, and evidence of a

breeding monstrosity of the Other– the wen on his eye described as ‘an egg containing

another devil, just the same, and that contains another little egg with another devil inside,

and so on’.35 His description of being ‘too far from the state of society and too close to that

of nature’36 further defines him as primitive and monstrous, both as an individual and as a

representation of a social body.

32
Hugo, V.(2004).p70/71
33
Williams, D.(1996). Deformed Discourse: The function of the monster in mediaeval thought and
literature / David Williams. Exeter: University of Exeter Press.p152
34
Williams, D.(1996).p134
35
Hugo, V.(2004).p157
36
Hugo, V.(2004).p241

XIII
 Quasimodo lives a dual life, and whilst being visually aligned with hegemonically

low culture, in Bakhtinian inversion he resides above them literally in the high towers of

the cathedral, the visual representation of the cultural invisible monstrosity, a Hyde to

Frollo’s Jekyll. Taken in as a foundling by the Arch Deacon of Notre-Dame Claude Frollo

on the first Sunday after Easter (Quasimodo37), the two are imagined together: the

cathedral’s ‘great central rose-window flames like the eye of a cyclops ablaze with the

reflection from the forge’,38 providing a clear parallel of Quasimodo observing the world

from the battlements with his one good eye, and thus from one perspective - that of Frollo.

When allied with Frollo, Quasimodo’s cyclops image is one of panoptic judgement.

Foucault’s exploration of Bentham’s Panoptican as a symbol of power and control – ‘to

induce…a state of conscious and permanent visibility that ensures the automatic

functioning of power’39 has resonance with this consideration. The high spires of Notre-

Dame are architecturally akin to Bentham’s Panoptican, with Frollo controlling those

within and watching those below, an invisible yet oppressive moral eye seeing ‘everything

without ever being seen’.40

Quasimodo and Frollo have a close bond and reciprocal relationship, with

Quasimodo doing his masters bidding, and Frollo caring for and taking the time to teach

Quasimodo sign language. However, this discourse increases Quasimodo’s marginalisation

and dependence upon Frollo. This language appears deformed and illegible, viewed by

those who witness it as ‘a strange dialogue of signs and gestures’41between ‘Quasimodo…

the demon and Frollo…the sorcerer’.42 There are also Hyde-like allusions when they are

37
Hugo, V.(2004).p155
38
Hugo, V.(2004).p245
39
Foucault, M.(1991). Discipline and Punish: The birth of the prison / Michel Foucault; translated from the
French by Alan Sheridan. London: Penguin.p201
40
Foucault, M.(1991).p202
41
Hugo, V.(2004).p89
42
Hugo, V.(2004).p175

XIV
further described: ‘one of them’s soul’s like the other one’s body!’43 This is an interesting

comparison, figuring Quasimodo as Hyde or Dorian’s picture, the visible representation of

the monstrosity of Frollo’s invisible and repressed desire.

Representing the clergy estate, Frollo is a powerful cultural force. He is described

as having an ‘insatiable activity of his intellect’44with ‘only one aim in his life: to know’.45

A man hungry for knowledge, it is revealed that the church no longer held mysteries that

satisfied his desires. In his high social position, Frollo is allowed to explore his desires

unchecked; and when his desire focuses on the gypsy, Esmerelda, it becomes more visible.

Frollo describes this obsession by metaphorically locating her as a fly to his spider:

‘she flies, she is happy…but then she comes up against the fatal rosacea, the spider

emerges, the hideous spider’.46 It is of interest that he envisages his desire as a spider,

predatory and hideous to his social-self; an outward expression of desire that he represses.

He also refers to his desire as a rosacea – a reddening of the skin, a blood-rush flush of hot

desire with allusions to penile erection. He exonerates himself of blame for his desire by

reimagining himself as the fly, moving in desirous thirst ‘towards knowledge, towards the

light’.47 In search of his knowledge (a more socially acceptable desire than a sexual one) he

is the prey, trapped and helpless by the visible monstrosity of Esmerelda’s sensuality

envisioned as her ‘ingenious web…spun between you and the light’.48 Yet, this too is

sexual fantasy of entrapment and helplessness in the face of lust.

As a separate entity, unlike Dorian’s picture or Hyde, Quasimodo has his own

desires. His relationship with the church bells has been described as objectum sexuality,

with Quasimodo experiencing a range of sexual and emotional attachments to the bells,
43
Hugo, V.(2004).p177
44
Hugo, V.(2004).p172
45
Hugo, V.(2004).p160
46
Hugo, V.(2004).p284
47
Hugo, V.(2004).p284
48
Ibid

XV
dispensing with human intimacy49 – ‘he loved them, he caressed them…fifteen bells in his

harem’.50 Receiving comfort from their vibrating responses to his touch, such a reading is

plausible as a deformed discourse, hegemonically deemed unnatural and monstrous. But it

is also relevant that the church is viewed as an extension of his body -‘the gnarled

cathedral was his carapace’.51 Rather than the bell-relationship being something obscene, it

could be viewed as a natural extension of his own body. The relationship with Esmerelda is

arguably just him seeking human contact, which she gives to him without prejudice or the

expectation of reciprocation. In this way their relationship could be viewed symbiotically,

‘that protection for a creature so unfortunate should have come from another creature so

deformed…had its poignancy. The extremes of natural and social deprivation had met and

were aiding one another’.52 Such a reading would also reinforce the textual representation

of contemporary revolution, the peasant and middle classes working together to save one

another from oppression.

A revolution can be seen in the actions of Quasimodo in turning away from Frollo and the

institution that ‘had been for him in turn egg, nest, house, homeland and universe’.53 Whilst

his deafness had seemed ‘to place a barrier between subject and language’,54 the fact that

he still had sight in one eye allows him to have a view of the world free from Frollo’s

subjugation.

Without his Hyde to inscribe his desire onto, Frollo’s now unrepressed desires

became visibly and satirically inscribed upon his own body. No longer able to just observe

from his panoptical seat in the cathedral, he is driven into the liminal city spaces to pursue

49
Marsh, A.(2010). Love among the objectum sexuals. Electronic Journal of Human Sexuality, 13.
http://www.ejhs.org/volume13/ObjSexuals.htm
50
Hugo, V.(2004).p167
51
Hugo, V.(2004).p164
52
Hugo, V.(2004).p351
53
Hugo, V.(2004).p163
54
Davis, L. J.(1995). Deafness and insight: The deafened moment as a critical modality. College English,
p884

XVI
his voyeuristic impulses, tricking Phoebus to allow him to watch his rendezvous with

Esmerelda from a dark adjoining cupboard where, ‘breathing hard’,55 he passes out in a fog

of desire -‘a cloud came over his eyes, his arteries throbbed violently, everything spun

noisily around him’.56 In this desirous fog, a site of transgression and monstrosity, Frollo

stabs Phoebus in a fit of passion, his monstrosity inscribed upon his body and exposed as a

‘livid, green, convulsed face, with the eyes of a damned soul’.57 During an attempted rape

scene, Frollo pins Esmerelda down ‘writhing on top of her and answering her blows with

caresses’58 bestially ‘gnashing his teeth’,59 emphasising his visible monstrous behaviour. In

a return to the spider/fly dichotomy, Frollo blames Esmerelda for his behaviour, telling her

that ‘you had possessed me for so long that I should possess you in my turn. When one

does evil one must do the whole evil. To be only half a monster is insanity’.60 The image of

being half a monster creates intertextuality between Hugo, Wilde and Stevenson; of men

driven mad by hegemonically repressed sexual desire.

The image of Esmerelda, of femininity and sensuality being cloistered within the

panoptical Notre-Dame is arguably one of continued repression both of Esmerelda and of

Frollo’s desire. On a metaphorical level, with Quasimodo as the manifestation of Frollo’s

desire, it would appear that he has managed to obtain the object of his desire and repress it

within the societal boundaries of the church. However, Quasimodo is no longer under his

control, and no longer able to be half a monster, Frollo’s desire takes his whole being and

is monstered visible.

As the site not only of oppression but also of repression, Notre-Dame becomes the target

for the subjected others seeking to establish change and redefine cultural boundaries. The

55
Hugo, V.(2004).p301
56
Hugo, V.(2004).p301
57
Hugo, V.(2004).p304
58
Hugo, V.(2004).p381
59
Ibid
60
Hugo, V.(2004).p329

XVII
sub-culture assault on Notre-Dame is laden with imagery of the Republican revolutionaries

storming the Bastille which, like the church, is a symbol of tyranny and oppression. The

attack is described with foggy allusions as ‘a mist full of men advancing towards him…

shadows moving about in the shadows’,61 encroaching upon normative space. Just before

Quasimodo pushes Frollo off the cathedral parapets into the abject crowd below (a literal

abjection from cultural centrality), Frollo is depicted out of control, mad with desire – ‘at

this moment of extreme horror, a fiendish laugh, a laugh only possible for someone no

longer a man, broke out on the priest’s livid face’.62 His monstrosity is ultimately released

from his dead body, broken and deformed by its fall and lying at the foot of Notre-Dame.

Finally free from repression and visible within the abject crowd, Frollo’s body is a

subverted parallel to the beggar in the normative crowd at the start of the text.

With echoes to contemporary events, Hugo’s use of the monster to critique social

order and its principles created a hegemonic fear, the vibrations of which are still resonant

in the later texts of Stevenson and Wilde. By using a carnival setting, Hugo sought from

the outset to undermine the hierarchal social structure, using this primitive culture to

demonstrate not only how culturally close to the seemingly primitive the contemporary

was, but also to make visible the monstrosity within the norm.

61
Hugo, V.(2004).p405
62
Hugo, V.(2004).p487

XVIII
XIX
 Chapter Two

‘The primitive duality of Man’63

In Mysteries of London, Reynolds draws attention to the proximity of elegant and

impoverished areas. The fearful mysteries of the city have little to do with the
supernatural but much to do with abject living conditions of the poor and the
conspiracies of the rich that sustain them64

This image of fin de siècle London depicts a society in crisis – the poor being the abjected

dirty child of industrialisation, an atavistic social element whose close topographical

proximity to the bourgeoisie both illustrated huge class divides, and emphasised social

difference; the visible monstrosity of the poor as a social other. As a result of their

abjection, the poor remain, by definition, a part of society and the means by which

normativity is demarcated. They live amongst the bourgeoisie in the industrial fog which

Ridenhour describes as being so thick that it turned day into twilight and created an

oppressive atmosphere and cover for criminal activities.65 This dark image of the

monstrous poor rubbing shoulders with the hegemonic norm is aligned with, and

incorporated within, the city itself, ‘dominantly figured as a swamp, labyrinth, and

described as black, rotten and diseased…populated by Others who threaten to undermine

and over-run society’.66 This description has resonance from a normative perspective of the
63
Stevenson, R L(1886) The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. Ed. Robert Mighall (2002) London:
Penguin Classics.p56
64
Horner, A(2014) Victorian Gender and National Identity in Smith, A., & Hughes, W. (2014). The
Victorian Gothic: An Edinburgh companion / edited by Andrew Smith and William Hughes. Edinburgh:
Edinburgh University Press.p113
65
Ridenhour, J.(2013). In darkest London: The gothic cityscape in Victorian literature / Jamieson
Ridenhour. Lanham: The Scarecrow Press.p21
66
Spooner, C., & McEvoy, E.(2007). The Routledge companion to Gothic / edited by Catherine Spooner and
Emma McEvoy. London; New York: Routledge.p34

XX
Hugo subculture, its portrayal serving to underline the negative exteriorised focus of

monster viewing. Reynold’s also seems to suggest that the real monsters are the

perpetuators of the class divide, namely the wealthy bourgeoisie; and with hindsight

perhaps this perspective has merit. However, the dominant culture prevalent at that

moment is the deciding one - the monster-makers. This illustration of the duality of fin-de-

siècle London has parallels with the eponymous characters of Stevenson’s 1886 novella

The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, a whole divided by exteriorised hegemonic

perceptions of good and bad, normal and abnormal; and concerning this study, the

repression and expression of desire.

Stevenson’s novella immediately sets about defining its textual culture and social

boundaries with the description of Utterson. However, this description is not physical, but

rather a description of his character, of his tolerance and ‘good influence in the lives of

down-going men’.67 The purpose of this is to establish his authority as narrator, and a

member of the bourgeoisie, fit to make social observations and thus determine social

boundaries and monstrosity. He is the social barometer against which the other characters

are judged, the notion of exterior acceptability demonstrating the aesthetic values of

Victorian society, where appearing good is being good; and Dr Henry Jekyll is aligned

with him as a friend, a man of great social standing and a respected pillar of the

community.

Jekyll is described by Enfield as a person who is ‘the very pink of the proprieties…one of

your fellows who do what they call good’,68 and by Utterson as a man who surrounds

himself with similar men - ‘intelligent, reputable…and all judges of good wine’.69 That a

social requirement of ‘good-ness’ is being able to judge wine illustrates both hegemonic

67
Stevenson, R L(1886).p5
68
Stevenson, R L(1886).p9
69
Stevenson, R L(1886).p19

XXI
superficiality and the pervading class divide. Whilst such descriptions are at times explicit,

there is a general undertone of their goodness which is implicit and seemingly without

reproach. There is little talk of physical exteriority, with Dr Jekyll only being described as

‘a large, well-made, smooth-faced man of fifty, with something of a slyish cast perhaps,

but every mark of capacity and kindness – you could see by his looks’.70 This last comment

underlines that in the textual society, the measure of a man was largely based upon his

exterior projection, his visibility. The private lives of men remained private and invisible,

though Utterson introduces a small doubt regarding Jekyll’s person. In referring to his

‘slyish cast’, Utterson suggests that there is something slightly deviant about his friend.

The word ‘cast’ has allusions with genealogy and could be read as a suspicion that Jekyll

has a questionable heritage, perhaps not a fully paid-up member of the elite due to a poorer

background, or perhaps a foreign heritage. At this temporal location, the bourgeoisie felt

threatened from the cultural margins due to the rapidly shrinking British Empire and an

influx of non-indigenous people. In addition, the word ‘cast’ also has connotations of

secrecy and shadow, which both serve to underline Utterson’s suspicions and to cloak

Jekyll in the monstrous fog as a site of Otherness. Or perhaps fearing the sight of his own

repressed desires, his own slyish cast, Utterson does not look further into this abyss. As

Nietzsche notes, ‘He who fights with monsters should look to it that he himself does not

become a monster. And when you gaze long into an abyss the abyss also gazes into you.’71

In his statement, Jekyll talks of the ‘trembling immateriality, the mist-like

transience, of this seemingly so solid body in which we walk attired’.72 This statement is,

like the monster, ‘meaning laden’;73 giving imagery of a performance of behaviour, a misty

cloak of normativity worn to cover and repress the shadow of the true desirous self.
70
Stevenson, R L(1886).p19
71
Nietzsche, F(1886) Beyond Good and Evil – Aphorism 146.
72
Stevenson, R L(1886).P56
73
Bildhauer, B., & Mills, R.(2003). The monstrous Middle Ages / edited by Bettina Bildhauer and Robert
Mills. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.p2

XXII
Davison’s summation that Victorian ‘manliness was bound up with the concept of self-

control74 dovetails with such imagery, men being expected to repress their desires in order

to socially conform. Killeen surmises that Stevenson’s text connects the Foucauldian

repression hypothesis with Victorians who were ‘monsters of perversity who lived public

lives of staid conformity but who came out of the closet nightly to perpetuate the most

horrific versions of abuse.’75 This comment suggests the presence in the centre of

normative culture of a monster, present yet socially invisible, its fluid form adapting from

the marginal Cohen and Kristeva manifestations like the fog which pervades the cityscape.

The bourgeoisie are these monsters of perversity, represented in the form of Jekyll. These

Victorian pleasure-seekers though maintained hegemonic repression and recognised the

danger that a visible monstrosity would pose. The start of Stevenson’s novella sees Enfield

threatening Hyde with social defamation, stating that as he was too much of a gentleman to

kill him, the next best thing was to threaten his social reputation – ‘We told the man that

we could and would make such a scandal out of this, as should make his name stink from

one end of London to the other.’76 In other words, they would make his monstrosity visible.

That this was a threat worsened only by death illustrates the importance of appearances in

Victorian culture, but also the quiet acknowledgement of centralised invisible monstrosity.

In order to maintain hegemonic control, and individually to retain inclusion in that

elite le Bonian crowd, it was essential to keep monstrous desires closeted and invisible. But

the urban space, with its dark spaces and close proximity between the classes brought

desires to the closet door, scratching to get out. The pervading transient presence of the fog

in the text ‘roll[ing] over the city’77 therefore serves as a medium by which repressed

74
Davison, C. M.(2012). The Victorian Gothic and Gender in Smith, A., & Hughes, W.(2014).p125
75
Killeen, J(2009) in Smith, A., & Hughes, W.(2014).p2

76
Stevenson, R L(1886).p8
77
Stevenson, R L(1886).p21

XXIII
desires could be expressed out of the closet but still out of sight. Fluid in form like the

monster, the fog simultaneously represents the visible and invisible, concealing and

swallowing, making it threatening to the bourgeoisie as it incurs upon their social space

because of both what may hide within, and what it may incorporate and consume. Linked

with the abject, it represents a blurring of literal and metaphorical social boundaries and

threatens to envelope the norm and engulf their status and definitions by which they mark

Otherness. The fog also becomes the site of social transgressions ‘making the monster all

the more appealing as a temporary egress from restraint’;78 an attractive site of desire,

evoking and allowing escapist fantasies ‘of aggression, domination and inversion in a safe

liminal space’79 without the risk of losing social reputation. It blurs the boundaries between

norm and other, concealing and bringing the abject space close to and indeed into the

bourgeoisie homes, as noted by Utterson when walking through Jekyll’s lab. There,

Utterson describes the space with abject characteristics, ‘dingy…windowless…

distasteful…strange…foggy’;80 and notes how ‘even in the houses the fog began to lie

thickly’,81 that monstrous desires are being realised now within the elite homes.

Stevenson’s text depicts bourgeois Dr Jekyll seeking release from this internal

desirous battle in the guise of Mr Hyde, a gentleman-monster form which excited him ‘like

wine’82 and allowed him to roam the streets in search of unspecified and ‘undignified

pleasures’.83

78
Cohen, J.(1996). Monster Theory reading culture / Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, editor. Minneapolis, Minn.;
London: University of Minnesota Press.p17
79
Cohen, J(1996).p16
80
Stevenson, R L(1886).p26
81
Ibid
82
Stevenson, R L(1886).p57
83
Stevenson, R L(1886).p65

XXIV
 Mr Hyde was pale and dwarfish, he gave an impression of deformity without any
nameable malformation, he had a displeasing smile…and he spoke with a husky,
whispering and somewhat broken voice.84

This description of Hyde by Utterson focusses upon his exterior appearance, but it is not

particularly monstrous upon consideration of the term’s etymology. It is interesting that in

a culture so governed by aesthetics, that this monster does not look terribly monstrous. He

dresses like and indeed uses language befitting a gentleman, even chastising Utterson for

using ‘not fitting language’85 when accused by the lawyer of lying. Yet he is depicted as

Other, an ‘atavistic throwback’86 different from the norm in some way, his voice aligned

with Quasimodo as ‘broken’. It may be his status as an allegory for the populace which

creates his vague exteriority - from the normative perspective he is the faceless masses of

the poor embodied in a foggy crowd, or as a Bakhtinian social body in Hyde. His

indeterminacy could represent the embodiment of unspecified desire, representing the

bourgeois fear of regression, succumbing to bestial desires like the poor, ‘living in

overcrowded houses where incest is not uncommon’.87 Or that upon looking at his exterior,

the bourgeoisie recognise something of themselves in his gentlemanly form, known and

identifiable and within normative boundaries; whilst at the same time finding themselves

repulsed by some part of his character, something that they want to abject. This creates an

internal crisis – the disruption to the social body upon recognition that there is something

inside the norm that was invisible, but that upon the sight of Hyde threatens to leave its

foggy enclosure and manifest into the very heart of society. ‘Hyde’s threat is pathologised

as an absence within a bourgeois culture that perceives deformity but cannot account for

it’.88

84
Stevenson, R L(1886).p16
85
Stevenson, R L(1886).p20
86
Ridenhour, J(2013).p34
87
Horner, A(2014).p113
88
Smith, A.(2004). Victorian Demons: Medicine, masculinity and the gothic at the fin-de-siecle / Andrew
Smith. Manchester: Manchester University Press.p39

XXV
 Considering this, Dr Jekyll’s statement at the end of the novella could be described

as a warning against expressing monstrous desires, thereby reinforcing hegemonic control.

In it, he repeatedly states how he sought to do good by his experiments, to separate the

good (norm) and bad (monstrous poor) that he believed existed in the souls of all men to

avoid temptation and reinforce the social binary. It is clear from his statement that he did

not find a wholly fulfilling pleasure in his hegemonically restricted life, claiming that he

had to hide his desires ‘with an almost morbid sense of shame’.89 This internal struggle

with temptation is compared to alcohol addiction by Jekyll, admitting his weakness to

desire which corrupted his better half. He describes the drug as shaking ‘the doors of the

prisonhouse of my disposition’,90 depicting his desire as imprisoned within his socially-

defined exterior, and the drug as capable of releasing these pent up energies; of releasing

Hyde. Hughes views Jekyll’s potion similarly, quoting that in Sanity and Insanity (1890)

Mercier wrote regarding the ‘thin film of decorum’91 observed in the behaviour of drunks.

Mercier surmised that once too much of the transformative substance is consumed, the film

becomes defunct and allows for defective conduct which, transposed onto Jekyll could be

seen in the monstrous desires manifested in Hyde.

What is arguably more monstrous is that it is evident that Jekyll enjoys his dual life - ‘I

was no more myself when I laid aside restraint and plunged in shame, than when I

laboured…at the furtherance of knowledge or the release of sorrow and suffering’.92 He

can continue to be socially acceptable as Jekyll, but with a little potion and he can live out

his dark fantasies, ‘vicarious depravity…drinking pleasure with bestial avidity’93 as Hyde.

He notes that although in Hyde’s form he has ‘lost in stature’ both physically and socially,

89
Stevenson, R L(1886).p55
90
Stevenson, R L(1886).p59
91
Hughes, W(2014) in Smith, A., & Hughes, W.(2014).p193
92
Stevenson, R L(1886).p55
93
Stevenson, R L(1886).p60

XXVI
he felt happier in his body, an ‘innocent freedom…braced and delighted me like wine’.94

Despite housing Hyde elsewhere to try and his monstrous ‘half’ invisible, the two are

inexorably drawn together as they are part of the same whole; and like the city fog, Hyde’s

presence impinges upon Jekyll, seen at his house and coming out of his bedroom, refusing

to be marginalised.

Jekyll likes hiding in Hyde too much, and begins to lose himself, to succumb to his

desires - ‘I began to be tortured with throes and longings’,95 and his cravings – ‘my devil

had long been caged, he came out roaring’.96 That his description of his desires as bestial

serves to try and maintain the binary between good norm and other; reinforced when he

returns from his Hyde form kneeling, praying and crying as ‘a mist dispersed’.97 As an

addict to his desire, the controller becomes the controlled, and his ‘escapist delight

becomes horror’ when the monster crosses these socially circumscribed boundaries.98 The

excitement that a foray into the fog used to hold is replaced by a fear of exposure, of his

monstrosity being made visible. Read with Jekyll as a metaphor for normativity, such an

incursion threatens to shake the very foundations of society; the invisible monstrosity of

desire threatening to swallow and dissolve all social order and boundaries, re-writing the

norm and perhaps abjecting the bourgeoisie. Such a lack of clarity and order terrified the

bourgeoisie, and sees Dr Jekyll ensuring that the boundaries remain intact by forever

abjecting Mr Hyde. Not only does he kill himself, and therefore Mr Hyde, but he is

purposely allusive as to the ingredients of his potions and the means by which it was

created, as Hurley notes, so ‘fantastic is the science that it is only the impurity of certain

salts that make the difference’.99 The fact that this vaguely described difference or Other
94
Stevenson, R L(1886).p57
95
Stevenson, R L(1886).p63
96
Stevenson, R L(1886).p64
97
Ibid
98
Cohen, J(1996).p16
99
Hurley, K.(2004). Gothic body: Sexuality, materialism, and degeneration at the fin-de-siecle. (Cambridge
studies in nineteenth-century literature and culture; 8). Cambridge: Cambridge Univ Press.p17

XXVII
threatened the fragile social stability, threatened to expose its hidden monstrosity, is

perhaps both the reason for its final abjection into the fog and for its continued haunting

presence within it.

XXVIII
 Chapter Three

‘It was his beauty that had ruined him’100

The image is a primary building block for our sense of self, with Lacan theorising that self-

identity is founded upon external relationships, the act of looking and a response to others.

Its exterior focus is a key consideration for this discussion concerning monstrosity. In The

Picture of Dorian Gray, Wilde’s textual world explores the narcissism of upper class

decadents and their aesthetic values. Published just four years after Stevenson’s novella, it

depicts the same dark and foggy fin-de-siècle London frequented by Mr Hyde, and this

urban binary of wealthy bourgeois and abjected poor serves again as a metaphor for not

only the duality of prevalent culture and its class divides, but also of the visible exterior

self and the interior invisible soul. Wilde engages with these concepts as the site for

monstrosity; and often ‘explores social boundaries and exposes hypocrisy and vice’,101

monstering them visible.

Wilde’s eponymous protagonist is introduced as a wealthy young man of great

physical beauty, possessed of a ‘virtuous consciousness’102 and apparently keen to help

those less fortunate in his charity work for the aunt of Lord Henry Wotton. Like

Stevenson’s text, The Picture… is ‘dominated by representations of [an] ageing

bourgeois’103 population. In decline, this social group is struggling to repress its abjected

parts, backed into a corner by its own abjections having ‘continuously defined and re-

100
Wilde, O., & Gillespie, M P.(2007). The picture of Dorian Gray: Authoritative texts, backgrounds,
reviews and reactions, criticism / Oscar Wilde ; edited by Michael Patrick Gillespie. (Second ed., A Norton
critical edition). New York: Norton.p181
101
Warwick, A., & Willis, M.(2008). The Victorian literature handbook / edited by Alexandra Warwick and
Martin Willis. (Literature and culture handbooks). London ; New York:Continuum.p59
102
Murdoch, I in Robbins, R., & Wolfreys, J.(2000). Victorian Gothic: Literary and cultural manifestations
in the nineteenth century / edited by Ruth Robbins and Julian Wolfreys. Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire
[England] ; New York:Palgrave.p177
103
Smith, A.(2004). Victorian Demons: Medicine, masculinity and the gothic at the fin-de-siecle / Andrew
Smith. Manchester: Manchester University Press.p37

XXIX
defined itself through the exclusion of what it marked out as low’104 - the poor. Lord Henry

refers to the poor as - ‘the masses [who] feel that drunkenness, stupidity, and immorality

should be their own special property’,105 revealing that these desirous vices are also the

predilection of the bourgeoisie. However, as cultural boundary circumscribers, the

bourgeoisie see their behaviour as different.

In Wilde’s text, invisible monster of repressed desire is Hyde-ing beneath a façade

of beauty. ‘Every society…sends out messages about the kind of body it is good to

have’,106 and for Wilde’s textual society, idealised beauty has classical definitions, alluding

to mythic Greek imagery with Dorian described both as a Narcissus and a ‘brainless,

beautiful creature’,107 his ‘beauty inform[ing] every aspect of his persona’.108 Lord Henry

argues that being beautiful is life’s greatest gift, and postulates that if one is beautiful then

they should focus upon that alone, that ‘real beauty ends where intellectual expression

begins’.109 Beauty is the social identifier, the currency of this decadent culture, and its

value extends into material objects; Wilde depicting scenes lavishly constructed in textual

and literal opulence. Dorian himself assembles an ‘orgy of material possessions’110 with

which to surround himself. This collecting and valuing of beauty suggests that something

is missing at the heart of this self-centred society; an attempt to fill a void or cover up its

inner ugliness by focussing instead on exterior beauty. Goetsch comments that ‘the body

plays an important…role in a society’s efforts to define itself and marginalise or

104
Craton, L.(2009). The Victorian Freak Show: The significance of disability and physical differences in
19th-century fiction / Lillian Craton. Amherst, NY:Cambria Press.p24
105
Wilde, O., & Gillespie, M P.(2007).p12
106
Yamamoto, D(2000) The Boundaries of the Human… in Goetsch, P. (2002). Monsters in English
Literature: From the Romantic Age to the First World War / Paul Goetsch. (Neue Studien zur Anglistik und
Amerikanistik; Bd. 83). Frankfurt am Main ; New York: Peter Lang.p9
107
Wilde, O., & Gillespie, M P.(2007).p7
108
Robbins, R., & Wolfreys, J.(2000).p172
109
Wilde, O., & Gillespie, M P.(2007).p7
110
Robbins, R., & Wolfreys, J (2000).p177

XXX
exclude’,111 and this intense focus upon exteriority creates a binary between exterior beauty

and ugly other.

The focus and counterpoint for discussion of this text surrounds the aesthetic

societal values represented. Returning to the etymology of ‘monster’, in this text the

abjected is the aesthetically unpleasant, deformed in comparison to the ideal; and this is

aligned with the poor, and their dark liminal spaces. The fog again serves as a concealing

medium. It is a product of industrial culture, of a system which supports the upper class

aesthetism as the unpleasantness is hidden from normative sight by the fog. Goetsch notes

that ‘some mid-Victorian observers had compared…excursions into…slums to expeditions

into the jungle…com[ing] face to face with barbarism and savagery’.112 This is an

interesting point from which to consider Dorian’s desire-led forays, taking ‘pleasure in

diving into the cesspool and relinquishing the norms of…society’.113

Lord Henry could be described as the Jekyll to Dorian’s Hyde, the transformative

potion for his social experiment being the ‘yellow book’ which he gives to the

impressionable younger man. In this regard, Goetsch’s description of Henry as a vampire

is resonant; a socially invisible monster feeding upon his protégé and observing with

fascination the influence he has - ‘he poisons Dorian with his theories and the yellow

book’,114 vicariously living out fantasies that he dare not indulge himself for fear of being

monstered. Prior to his infection, Dorian’s infatuation with the actress Sibyl Vane leads

him to denounce his friend’s ideals as monstrous ‘all your wrong, fascinating, poisonous,

delightful theories’115. Dorian values Sibyl for her beauty and her lack of identity –

“To-night she is Imogen,” he answered, “and to-morrow night she will be Juliet.”

111
Goetsch, P.(2002).p9
112
Goetsch, P.(2002).p291
113
Goetsch, P.(2002).p153
114
Goetsch, P.(2002).p304
115
Wilde, O., & Gillespie, M P.(2007).p67

XXXI
 “When is she Sibyl Vane?”

“Never…she is all the great heroines of the world in one. She is more than an
individual”116

infatuated with her, telling Henry that he ‘could hardly see this girl for the mist of tears that

came across [him]’.117 Yet this description of her obscured by his own tears illustrates that

he could not see the real person: she is cloaked both in her beauty and in her performances.

Dellamora describes her family as a ‘reservoir of intense and unresolved ambitions’118 and

argues that her brother is incestuously infatuated with her which provides resonance with

Reynolds aforementioned depiction of the poor as ‘living in overcrowded houses where

incest is not uncommon’.119 He also notes that ‘the déclassé milieu of the actress Sibyl

Vane…provides a mirror, at once both distorting and revealing, of dominant values’.120

This concept of Sibyl’s abject world as a mirror renders him Other, his aesthetic and

materialistic values appearing excessive, monstering visible the beauty-defined society. In

the midst of the abject, the poor and un-hegemonically-beautiful he is able to identify only

with Sibyl and only by means of her exteriority. He does not know her as an individual,

making his infatuation superficial and narcissistic, his description that ‘she is better than

good – she is beautiful’.121

Dorian returns triumphantly to the theatre with Basil and Lord Henry where the

‘real’ Sibyl is revealed in her performance having slipped out from beneath her

performative cloak of character. As the object of Dorian’s affections, she no longer felt the

116
Wilde, O., & Gillespie, M P.(2007).p49
117
Wilde, O., & Gillespie, M P.(2007).p46
118
Dellamora, R.(1990). Masculine desire: The sexual politics of Victorian aestheticism / by Richard
Dellamora. Chapel Hill, Nc ; London: University of North Carolina Press.p207
119
Horner, A(2014) Victorian Gender and National Identity in Smith, A., & Hughes, W.(2014). The
Victorian Gothic: An Edinburgh companion / edited by Andrew Smith and William Hughes. Edinburgh:
Edinburgh University Press.p113
120
Dellamora, R.(1990).p207
121
Wilde, O., & Gillespie, M P.(2007).p63

XXXII
need to live through her characters, the very aspect of her performance to which Dorian

was attracted. For Dorian, this ‘made her passion unreal’.122 The exposure of her

performance, in turn, exposes Dorian’s own narcissism to him and disables it. What was

for Sibyl a revolutionary moment – ‘you came…and you freed my soul from prison. You

taught me what reality really is’;123 was for Dorian the death of his beauty-defined ideal of

love, evidenced in his repetition: ‘you have killed my love’.124 With nothing beautiful

remaining, Dorian now sees these abject surroundings of ‘evil-looking houses…monstrous

apes [and] grotesque children’125 and decides that if love cannot cure his soul, then perhaps

Lord Henry was right. He begins his journey of sensual hedonism ‘to cure the soul by

means of the senses’.126

Led by the fascination of desire posed by the yellow book but aware of the dangers

of visibility; a desirous Hyde, Dorian uses the literal fog of the city to explore his

darkening nature in the slums longing to gratify his wild desire. He assumes ‘that this grey,

monstrous London of ours, with its…sordid sinners, and its splendid sins…must have

something in store’127 for him.

He had uttered a mad wish that he himself might remain young, and the portrait
grown old; that his own beauty might be untarnished, and the face on the canvas
bear the burden of his passions and his sins128

Dorian’s ‘mad wish’ to remain bodily beautiful reaffirms the value of this currency in

decadent society. If, as Butler suggests, the body is a passive medium onto which external

culture inscribes,129 then the inscribing of Dorians’ sins upon the picture suggests that his

122
Wilde, O., & Gillespie, M P.(2007).p71
123
Wilde, O., & Gillespie, M P.(2007).p73
124
Wilde, O., & Gillespie, M P.(2007).pp74/5
125
Wilde, O., & Gillespie, M P.(2007).pp74/5
126
Wilde, O., & Gillespie, M P.(2007).p154
127
Wilde, O., & Gillespie, M P.(2007).p44
128
Wilde, O., & Gillespie, M P.(2007).p77
129
Butler, J.(2006). Gender Trouble: Feminism and the subversion of identity / Judith Butler; with an
introduction by the author. (Routledge Classics). New York: Routledge.p129

XXXIII
wish has resulted in his exteriorised self (his physical body) being separated from his soul;

the latter of which is trapped inside a new bodily frame - the ‘boundary maintained for

social regulation and control’.130 In Discipline and Punish Foucault postulates that ‘the soul

is the prison of the body’131 and this consideration is resonant concerning Dorian’s wish.

Societal repression is a metaphor for the soul, a social and a moral conscience. The

imagery of repression in Foucault is to imagine the body trapped and restricted in its

actions by its soul. With Dorian’s soul now located in the picture and any sins being

inscribed upon this new body, he is free from the moral societal subjugation which

enforces the repression of bodily desires, and can plunge into a hedonistic existence. In this

regard, the picture becomes a Hyde onto which his sins are inscribed, the site and sight of

abject monstering.

As a visible representation of monstrosity, the picture becomes deformed by

Dorian’s desirous acts which aligns it with society’s poor. It becomes a Bakhtinian

grotesque body: open, swelling and transgressing its own limits, devouring Dorian’s sin

whole. In this way, it can be read as a bourgeois representation of the abject, a social body

threatening to grow and swell, bursting its circumscribed limits and encroaching into

normative space. Its presence, representation and Otherness sustains and reinforces the

norm ‘by means of [its] legible deformity’.132 This pleases Dorian on one level - he will

stay forever young and beautiful; but upsets him on another – his vanity and enjoyment in

looking at himself is disabled by the aesthetically monstrous representation in the picture.

Just as Basil has put too much of himself, his desires into the painting – ‘I have shown in it

130
Butler, J.(2006).p133
131
Foucault, M.(1991). Discipline and Punish : The birth of the prison / Michel Foucault; translated from the
French by Alan Sheridan. London: Penguin.p30
132
Pender in Cohen, J.(1996). Monster Theory reading culture / Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, editor. Minneapolis,
Minn.; London: University of Minnesota Press.p147

XXXIV
the secret of my own soul’,133 so too has Dorian, calling it ‘the diary of my life’,134 his

invisible monstrosity made visible. As such, he is forced to abject it out of not only his

own sight, but also out of the sight of anyone else for fear of being revealed. That this

abjected form is of Dorian himself creates a narcissistic crisis not only for Dorian, but also

for the society he represents; by looking at the picture, society has to admit that a part of

itself was not beautiful.

Consumed by his pursuit of pleasure, Dorian begins to lose ‘the freedom of [his]

will…moving to [his] terrible end as automatons move’.135 As he delves in pursuit of new

pleasures, his logic is to numb his guilt over Sibyl and Basil through sensual pleasure. This

numbing can be imagined as the opium he smokes,136 a fog of forgetting. Yet this fog only

envelopes his brain and hides himself within. He is still socially visible, and rumours

among his social peers regarding his behaviour begin to surface; as Basil states ‘they say

that you corrupt every one with whom you become intimate, and that it is quite sufficient

for you to enter a house, for shame of some kind to follow after’.137 In this way, Dorian, or

rather his desirous monstrosity, is aligned as a fog. Moreover, Dorian himself is threatened

with social abjection, his fears that ‘the fog will get into the house’138 illustrating the

bourgeoisie ‘instinct of terror about passions and sensations’.139

By his presence in the abject subculture, he becomes at once part of it; whilst

retaining his own social status by means of the city fog, a transient medium allowing

incursion into the abject under a cloud of anonymity – ‘The side-windows of the hansom

were clogged with a grey-flannel mist’.140 In this world, Dorian adopts the name Sibyl gave

133
Wilde, O., & Gillespie, M P.(2007).p9
134
Wilde, O., & Gillespie, M P.(2007).p129
135
Wilde, O., & Gillespie, M P.(2007).p158
136
Wilde, O., & Gillespie, M P.(2007).p153
137
Wilde, O., & Gillespie, M P.(2007).p128
138
Wilde, O., & Gillespie, M P.(2007).p125
139
Wilde, O., & Gillespie, M P.(2007).p108
140
Wilde, O., & Gillespie, M P.(2007).p154

XXXV
him – Prince Charming, which enhances his anonymity and allows his desires to grow

exponentially and monstrously - ‘the more he knew, the more he desired to know. He had

mad hungers that grew more ravenous the more he fed them’;141 this desirous addiction

having parallels with his ‘hideous hunger for opium’.142 Dorian cannot resist returning to

the site where he can express his desires and, in the docks, he confronts the nature of his

own picture in the ‘grotesque things that lay in such fantastic postures on the ragged

mattresses. The twisted limbs, the gaping mouths, the staring lustreless eyes fascinated

him’.143 The grotesque ugliness of both his surroundings and the abjected bodies within this

space enhance his own beautiful otherness; his narcissism fed by his exterior difference.

Yet this ‘ugliness that had once been so hateful to him because it made things real, became

dear to him now for that very reason. Ugliness was the one reality’.144 From this abject

space, Dorian can see that beauty is un-real, a vacuous space devoid of sensory delight and

analogous to bourgeois society itself; and that real life does not have to be beautiful to be

valuable. From this liminal space, he can recognise that the repressed and invisible

monstrosity of sensuous desire (what the bourgeoisie abject as ugly) is actually present

within normative society. It is literally and metaphorically represented by the picture, the

image of culture deformed by its repressed desires and already present at the aesthetic heart

of decadent society; a fog settled in the boudoir. If, as Lord Henry states, for Dorian ‘life

has been your art’,145 then perhaps the portrait represents a diseased art, a cancer at the

heart of society represented like an x-ray image of a dark and foggy mass with irregular

and spreading borders. As Max Nordeau noted in Degeneration (1892) ‘degeneration was

revealed through diseased art, as such art indicated the presence of corruption and was

141
Wilde, O., & Gillespie, M P.(2007).p106
142
Wilde, O., & Gillespie, M P.(2007).p154
143
Wilde, O., & Gillespie, M P.(2007).p156
144
Wilde, O., & Gillespie, M P.(2007).p154
145
Wilde, O., & Gillespie, M P.(2007).p179

XXXVI
itself potentially corrupting’.146 In this regard, Dorian's corrupted image is a mirror to

decadent society itself, inverting the aesthetic with deformation and monstering the

invisible.

146
Nordeau, M(1892) in Smith, A. (2004).p15

XXXVII
 Conclusion

strangely, the foreigner lives within us: he is the hidden face of our identity, the

space that wrecks our abode…the foreigner comes in when the consciousness of…

difference arises, and…disappears when we all acknowledge ourselves as

foreigners, unamenable to bonds and communities.147

Kristeva’s image is resonant, the acknowledgment of repressed difference within textual

societies monstered visible in this study. It also has allusions with the carnivalesque sub-

culture depicted by Hugo. Goetsch juxtaposes the power position of the norm by stating

that it is in fact the monster that, by its definition and representation, propagates cultural

boundaries, and that ‘the representation of [the] monster depends upon its function’148. In

this regard, by making the invisible-monster visible, the boundaries are re-formed. The

language of monstrosity is the instrument by which social difference is circumscribed; a

mode of social critique and a tool controlled by the hegemonic group to inscribe otherness

upon its abjected parts. By appropriating this language, the monstrosity of repressed desire

is made visible and normative boundaries subverted. This monstrosity is inscribed onto the

social body forcing recognition of its presence, of its normativity, thereby liberating the

repressed desires. Iris Murdoch discusses that ‘good is an empty space into which…choice

may move’,149 and by liberating desire, definitions of normativity, of good and bad, can be

re-written and un-monstered.

147
Kristeva, J., & Roudiez, L. S.(1991). Strangers to ourselves. Columbia University Press.p1
148
Goetsch, P.(2002).p8
149
Murdoch, I.(2013). The sovereignty of good. Routledge.p97

XXXVIII
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