Note: English essay
In Anne Rice’s ‘Interview with the Vampire’ and Louis
Stevenson’s ‘Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde’, the protagonists –
despite committing ‘evil’ acts – are not presented as complete monsters.
Instead, both Stevenson and Rice use their protagonists to embody the concept
of the conflict of good versus evil through their own inner battles. In doing
so, they present evil not as the preserve of a monstrous few, but as an
affliction from which we all suffer.
Stevenson presents the conflict of good and evil as a
duality within our very nature through his characterisation of Jekyll. The
narrative’s originally told in the third person, mostly from Utterson’s view,
so we initially see Jekyll simply as a supporting character. By delaying the
truth of Jekyll until the very end, it not only maintains the mystery
surrounding Jekyll’s condition, but also allows Stevenson to draw a stark
contrast between Jekyll and his alter ego Hyde in everything, demeanour and
appearance. Jekyll’s ‘a large, well-made, smooth-faced man of fifty… [with]
every mark of capacity and kindness’, whilst Hyde’s ‘pale and dwarfish [and] he
gave an impression of deformity without any nameable malformation.’ Stevenson
describes Jekyll with sibilance, softening his description and giving the
impression of all-round goodness and gentility, whilst Hyde’s description
possesses more hard consonants, consequently hardening his description and
subconsciously making him even more dislikeable to the reader. This mirrors the
effect Hyde’s own appearance has on the other characters, a subconscious
registering of his true malignance. By initially seeing Jekyll and Hyde as two
separate entities, this further reinforces the disparity between them. In doing
so, when Stevenson does reveal Jekyll’s secret, this further illustrates
the original conflict that Jekyll battled with – of good versus evil – as well
as the duality there can be in a person, ‘that man’s not truly one but two.’
Without disparity or duality, there is no conflict.
Whilst Stevenson uses Jekyll to present the duality of human
nature and the successive inner conflicts involved, Rice splits this duality
into two separate races in ‘Interview with the Vampire’, using mankind to
represent the potential for goodness, innocence and redemption, and vampires to
represent lost innocence, ruthlessness and evil. Rice uses her protagonist
Louis as a construct to represent the age-old conflict of good versus evil by
creating her own form of duality within Louis as he struggles to reconcile his
human morality and his vampiric nature. Whilst the divide between the two
natures is less tangible as it was with Jekyll, the division between Louis’s
two conflicting natures is nevertheless clear, his birth as a vampire resulting
in the vampiric ‘detachment that made [it] possible’ for him to kill mortals
nightly, whilst still retaining that ‘passion, [that] humanity’ that causes him
so much suffering.
Rice’s novel is initially narrated in third person, but this
form soon switches to the first person narrative of Louis as he recounts his
story to the young reporter. By choosing to have Louis narrate, Rice
personalises the narrative, giving the readers a far more intimate portrait of
Louis’s story than might’ve been possible if it had been narrated in third
person; first person allows the reader to directly experience Louis’s
struggles.
There are intermittent periods where the narrative switches
briefly back to third person to remind the reader of the basis of Louis’s
narrative, that he’s still talking to someone. Rice thereby reflects the
duality of Louis’s conflict in the story itself by creating a dual
narrative, Louis’s narration occurring alongside real-time events. Therefore,
the reporter’s character is a narrative device used to draw forth Louis’s
story, whilst also breaking up the plot periodically to comment and ask Louis
the questions that the readers themselves are asking, from the mundane,
‘Rosaries have crosses on them, don’t they?’ to the more profound ‘He was just
a killer. No regard for anything.’ The readers can also learn additional
information through the reporter that Louis himself might not have conceded if
Rice had structured the text to simply be one continuous first person
narrative; this gives the text the tone of the confessional. By structuring her
novel in this manner, Rice presents Louis’s inner conflict between good and
evil as a journey of struggles and self-discovery that the reader can
experience vicariously through his first person narrative.
Unlike Louis, though, the division between Jekyll’s two
selves is more clearly defined. By splitting Jekyll’s evil so that it forms a
separate, thinking entity, Stevenson further heightens the sense of conflict as
good struggles against evil.
‘And this again, that that insurgent horror was knit
closer to him than a wife, closer than an eye; lay caged in his flesh, where he
heard it mutter and felt it struggle to be born; and at every hour of weakness,
and in the confidence of slumber, prevailed against him…’
By personifying Jekyll’s evil, Stevenson gives Jekyll a
literal enemy to pit himself against, allowing Stevenson to compare the nature
of inner conflict with the nature of literal battles. At the end of Jekyll’s
confession, even though Hyde really is simply another part to his personality,
he refuses to acknowledge this fact, which is shown in how he refers to Hyde as
‘him’, ‘it’ or ‘Hyde’, rather than ‘me’ or ‘myself.’ He refers to Hyde as the
‘insurgent horror’, as if he is a parasite or invasion, and this can be seen as
Jekyll’s attempt to disassociate himself from Hyde and a refusal to take
responsibility for his own misdeeds. Jekyll even starts referring to himself in
the third person, further emphasising Stevenson’s idea that inner conflict’s
akin to a literal battle between two opposing sides.
At the time Stevenson was writing, the inner conflict
of good versus evil was a popular concept in Victorian culture, a society that
strictly followed the dichotomy of outward respectability and repression of all
primal and emotional desires. The Victorians characterised pleasure and
emotional exuberance as ‘faults’, and the absence of these characteristics are
what Jekyll aspires to. However, as Jekyll himself observed:
‘It’s the curse of mankind that these incongruous fagots
[good and evil] were thus bound together – that in the agonised womb of
consciousness these polar twins should be continuously struggling.’
Stevenson thus presents Jekyll as a literal
embodiment of the concept of good versus evil, Jekyll representing ‘good’ and
Hyde ‘evil.’ By using the natural imagery of the ‘agonised womb’ to represent
the human consciousness, Stevenson draws parallels between the mind and the
uterus, for the mind is what gives birth to our thoughts and impulses, as well
as the pain of conflicting thoughts and desires, as agonising indeed, as
childbirth. By making these comparisons, Stevenson emphasises the natural
aspect of such thoughts and desires, as well as how ‘sinfulness’ or ‘evil’ is a
natural ‘curse’ ingrained in all of man.
From a Marxist perspective, Stevenson’s text can also be
seen as a critique of Victorian society’s repressive nature, with the conflict
of ‘good and evil’ serving as a parallel for the conflict between
‘pleasure/sinfulness and severity.’ Jekyll’s downfall serves as a cautionary
tale that not even the upper-class are immune to such ‘irregularities’, and that to repress what is
natural is itself unnatural, resulting in your eventual consumption by
your own hungers.
This is also a lesson Louis comes to learn throughout the
course of Anne Rice’s text. At the time she was writing, Rice was suffering
from a severe disillusionment with the world and religion, having recently lost
her daughter to leukaemia. In her own words:
‘I felt that the vampire was the perfect metaphor for the
outcast in all of us, the alienated one in all of us, the one who feels lost in
a world seemingly without God.’¹
Her own experiences resulted in the creation of Louis, who
also loses a beloved family member. Driven to despair and guilt, Louis is
already on his way to becoming the ‘alienated one’ who ‘lived like a man who
wanted to die but had no courage to do it himself,’ and it’s enough that when
Lestat offers him human death, he plunges headlong into the abyss of evil.
Consequently, Rice is able to push forward the conflict of good versus evil
that Louis faces by combining it with the theme of innocence.
Although he felt such despair and guilt, Louis never had the
courage to take his own life, an inclination he continues to show even as a
vampire. Some people could interpret the way Louis clings to life and then
human morality as Louis’s attempt to retain his own innocence, and as a refusal
to accept that he’s irredeemably evil.
From a Marxist perspective, Rice’s presentation of evil can
also be interpreted as a metaphor for wealth and status, with the vampires
representing a whole new kind of ‘elite.’ Louis initially views Lestat with a
sense of amazement, describing how he possessed an ‘extraordinary aura’ and as
Lestat spoke to him, he ‘experienced only increasing wonder.’ Louis’s use of
sensory, wondrous descriptions shows just how Lestat dazzled him, but once
Louis becomes a member of this ‘elite’ himself, his status loses all its
glamour and wonderment as he realises the true emptiness of his existence and
that what he truly valued were the simple pleasures of his humanity. Therefore,
from a Marxist perspective, the conflict of good and evil can be seen as a
critique on the wealthy – the vampiric existence or the high life is ultimately
empty because for all their powers and wealth, none of them are able to achieve
true happiness. Indeed, it’s not powers or money that have true value, but
humanity’s simple pleasures. As Louis tells Armand:
‘Dear God,
even if there is no meaning in this world, surely there can still be goodness!
It's good to eat, to drink, to laugh, to be together!’
Louis’s speech is
continuously peppered with exclamations and question marks, which serves to
illustrate the ‘mortal passion’ that drives him on in his quest to find
goodness within his vampiric existence. His brief listing of what is good ‘to
eat, to drink, to laugh, to be together’, are notably all mortal pasttimes that
the vampires can’t have, and highlight how he is still desperately trying to
hold on to his humanity. Vampires cannot eat, and what they drink – blood – is
depicted as both a solitary necessity and – almost like sex – a sinful
pleasure. Some would argue that his birth as a vampire can be
interpreted as a rite of passage, with Louis’s transition from human to vampire
actually being a metaphor for growing up, and his inner conflict of whether to
do good or evil as a parallel for the loss of innocence as one matures and
becomes an adult. When Louis ceases to believe in goodness and finally
‘accepted [his condition]’, this can be viewed as him finally letting go of his
youthful innocence and accepting the ‘degree of coldness [he] would have to
attain to end [his] pain’ – that is, the maturity to deal with the world’s
harsh realities.
The struggle of good versus evil is the oldest one of all
human history and serves to illustrate the imperfection of humanity as well as
life’s harsh realities. Although the protagonists continue to struggle with
this inner conflict throughout the texts, the conflict ends when they accept
the evil that they’ve become. Both protagonists fall prey to evil, and from the
moment they commit their first sin, they damn themselves; all attempts at
redemption are merely ‘the chasing of phantom goodness.’ Through their texts,
Rice and Stevenson convey the idea that once you commit evil, that evil’s an
eternal stain on your soul. Evil cannot be redeemed and there’s no salvation.
In the end, you simply must take responsibility for your wrongs and pay the
price for what you are. As put so eloquently by Louis, ‘… You cannot know love
and goodness when you do what you know to be evil…’
Bibliography:
Interview
with the Vampire, by Anne Rice
Strange
Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, by Louis Stevenson
Bertens,
H. (2001) Literary Theory: The Basics, (The Politics of Class: Marxism),
(pp81-83), Abingdon: Routledge
¹ http://www.annerice.com/Bookshelf-EarlierWorks.html
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