Discourse Analysis of Lombroso's Criminal Man in Stevenson's Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde

Seminar paper from the year 2014 in the subject English - Literature, Works, Friedrich-Alexander University Erlangen-Nuremberg, language: English, abstract: During the nineteenth century, there was a tremendous development of new sciences. Susanne Scholz argues that on the one side these new disciplines transformed human beings into objects of investigation and they tried to determine the boundaries of the human as well as to establish boundaries between culture and pathology. On the other side this new path of socio-political and sociobiological thinking developed into a fatal continuum, which engendered the growth of cultural anxieties and fascinations accompanied by coping strategies including Social Darwinism (Scholz 3). Charles Darwin s investigations on the origin of species, which were published in 1859, had a great influence on the Victorian society and they created fear of the status of the human subject (Scholz 4). According to his theories, evolution and civilisation are processes of continuous development and a fight against adverse conditions. If this would be the case, the whole process could also shift backwards and change evolution into degeneration (Scholz 4). Charles Darwin presented a line of development, which inevitably leads from the ape to the atavistic stages of human development, finishing in the peak of the civilised human beings, the English gentleman (Scholz 4). Because of the fear, that among English gentleman, processes of degeneration could transform the civilised humans back to their atavistic roots, there was a great need of new sciences and methods, which could visualise the unknown. §The gothic romance Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886) by Robert Louis Stevenson is a great example to show how the fear of degeneration could be portrayed in literature and how these signs could be examined by means of the new developed sciences. Therefore, this seminar paper will focus on a discourse analysis as critical approach in terms of Michel Foucault, to show how the discourses of criminal anthropology and evolutional biology are captured in the novel, in which contexts they are embedded and which functions they could serve. The epistemological interest of this seminar paper is further to see how the specific perception of the Criminal Man introduced by Cesare Lombroso resembles the figure of Edward Hyde and in which way there were attempts to classify the unknown in this novel. In the novel we can find a great number of signs, which describe the visual appearance of its figures. [...]