Thread by @GCSE_Macbeth

JEKYLL AND HYDE TIME!

4 key quotes about UTTERSON. Enough for a good exam answer.

First up...

1/

"Drank gin when he was alone, to mortify a taste for vintages."

I think this is the best-value quote in that opening description of Utterson.

First of all let's focus on TASTE FOR VINTAGES. Utterson definitely has a TASTE for sensual pleasure: in this case fine wine.

2/

The choice of GIN is interesting too -- I wonder if gin had the same sense in the 19thC as in the 18th...a cheap, somewhat disreputable drink associated with social problems.

3/

There's some nice symbolism going on here -- a taste for life's hedonistic pleasures, but hiding that pleasure means indulging in something altogether more seedy and ilicit.

But now the big one...

4/

MORTIFY.

To MORTIFY his taste doesn't just mean to deaden it, although the gin certainly does that. The word MORTIFY refers in Christianity to purifying the flesh through self-denial or self-punishment.

5/

So MORTIFY carries the sense of the Church-sanctioned guilt and self-denial that Utterson must undergo.

Of course, we're being primed in this quote for his eventual turn away from the uptight, respectable life.

6/

Wine appears quite frequently in the novel...it's no coincidence that wine is what Utterson avoids, and much later in Jekyll's account he describes the transformation into Hyde as delight[ing] him "like wine".

7/

NUMBER 2:

"Hitherto it had touched him on the intellectual side alone; but now his imagination also was engaged, or rather enslaved".

ENGAGED OR RATHER ENSLAVED is *the* Utterson quote.

8/

RLS is showing how, and how quickly, Utterson abandons his "dry, dusty" rationality and apparent professional disinterest in the affairs of others. The mystery of Jekyll and Hyde, with its centre of evil and potential homosexuality, buries itself deep into Utterson.

9/

The word ENSLAVED shows the anxiety over the imagined homosexual figure, both in its power over Utterson and over Jekyll in the dream-vision that follows.

Another important point about Utterson is how he's a surrogate for the reader themselves.

10/

Utterson is the original "reader" of Jekyll's story -- literally, in the sense that he's reading it in letters and documents, and symbolically in that the reader of "The Strange Case Of Dr Jekyll And Mr Hyde" discovers the story through Utterson's discovery of it.

11/

Utterson's fascination with the case, then, duplicates the reader's fascination with it. His voyeurism is our voyeurism. RLS is almost satirising his own readership, forcing them to confront the gap between their respectability and their morbid curiosity.

12/

NUMBER 3:

"Hitherto unknown disgust, fear and loathing" (Search For Mr Hyde).

The reason Utterson can't explain his loathing of Hyde, the reason he feels such disgust without any observable cause, is this:

13/

What Utterson feels isn't really -- or isn't *just* -- loathing of Hyde. It's loathing of himself.

Utterson, a quintessentially repressed Victorian man, responds instinctively to Hyde. He is obsessed. He "haunts" Hyde's house just as Hyde "haunted" his dreams.

14/

Utterson responds to Hyde's chaotic, immoral nature. It's something inside Hyde that affects him -- RLS repeats over and over that there's nothing specific about Hyde's external appearance that bothers Utterson. Instead...

15/

...what Utterson is disgusted by is his OWN reaction to Hyde. He experiences self-loathing at the recognition of repressed, chaotic, shameful parts of his own nature.

If man is "not truly one but truly two", then it has to be true of Utterson also.

16/

And NUMBER 4...

Key quote number 4 is NO QUOTE AT ALL.

What happens to Utterson at the end of the text?

17/

Utterson has been our eyes and ears through the whole story, but RLS cuts him off in the THIRD TO LAST CHAPTER, simply saying he "trudged back to his office" to read Lanyon's and Jekyll's narratives.

18/

It's so obvious, so easy to imagine an epilogue in which Utterson attends Jekyll's funeral, or sets his affairs in order, or destroys his laboratory, or SOMETHING, that we have to wonder why RLS didn't write one.

19/

It re-emphasises the idea of Utterson as a reader surrogate. Once the mystery is solved, we have no further use for him, and he has nothing else to tell us.
Perhaps it reflects Utterson' devotion / sublimation, to Jekyll's story. He has almost ceased to exist outside of it.

20/

The lack of closure is/would become a horror trope, and it tells us something about Utterson's character here. He has been changed by Hyde, and we will never know if or how he was able to resolve or process that change.

21/

And if the duality of Jekyll reveals the duality in Utterson, and in turn the duality in everyone reading, then perhaps RLS doesn't want to allow us any closure or resolution. The duality exposed by the story must stay unresolved in the reader.

Goodnight.

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