Chapter 3: Darwin as Super-Naturalist in Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897) and Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1896)
This third chapter will discuss two novels – Dracula and The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde – simultaneously because the mad scientist figures from both of their narratives draw from a very specific scientific discourse – evolutionary theory. The influence of Darwin’s theory of natural selection as described in works such as The Origin of Species and The Descent of Man can be found in innumerable corners of Victorian literature, but towards the close of the period, a particular “spin off” of Darwin’s theories called atavism persisted in popular fiction. Atavism speculates that if Darwin’s theory of man evolving over the ages from more primitivism organisms is true, then there is no reason he might not de-evolve or degenerate as well. Like Wells’ Time Traveller, the scientists appearing in these two novels adopt the accepted scientific discourse of the day and take them to logical extremes, thus casting “unreal” phenomena as real and pushing the boundaries of reality beyond the belief of surrounding characters and readers.
Robert Louis Stevenson’s tale of a scientist, Dr. Jekyll, who secretly has an experimentally induced split personality, responds directly, in many ways, to atavistic theories. The narrator not only describes the inner demon, Mr. Hyde, with whom Dr. Jekyll battles as monstrous and violent, but also employs descriptors that cast Hyde as a more primitive and less evolved version of Jekyll. Characters in the novel, including Jekyll himself, call Hyde a “dwarf” with a “savage laugh” and “ape-like fury” (Stevenson). Utterson, for example, says that, “Mr. Hyde was pale and dwarfish, he gave an impression of deformity without any nameable malformation, he had a displeasing smile” (Stevenson). In his written confession revealed posthumously, Jekyll refers to Mr. Hyde as “the brute that slept within me” (Stevenson). One would not think it possible for one man to transform into another so radically different – both mentally and physically – but Stevenson’s use of scientific discourse makes Dr. Jekyll’s experiment more than a supernatural horror story, but rather a test of evolutionary theory’s limits.
Bram Stoker’s Dracula, meanwhile, features two mad scientists, in the form of a major character, Professor Van Helsing, and a more minor character, Dr. Seward. Dr. Seward, in his study of patient Renfield, who always requests small animals such as spiders, flies, and cats to eat, like Dr. Jekyll, indirectly refers to atavism, as he refers to Renfield as “an undeveloped homicidal maniac.” And Van Helsing reproduces a Darwinian discourse when he tries to persuade the other men of the existence of vampires – of not only the possibility of them, but the scientific inevitably of them. He offers a litany of examples to support the ideas that “we all know, because science has vouched for the fact” (Stoker) – of bats that attack cattle and horses to suck their blood and “one great spider [that] lived for centuries in the tower of the old Spanish church, and grew and grew, till, on descending, he could drink the oil of all the church lamps” (Stoker). His argument in these examples of spiders and bats is that if a behavior can occur in animals, it can also occur in humans. With this argument, he, like Darwin, uses observations of animals to correlate to humans and corroborate his theories.
What’s interesting to note for this chapter is that the extent to which theorists like Darwin and the atavism theorists he inspired were themselves considered “mad” has considerably impact on how we might view these texts as questioning the nature of reality. How much can Van Helsing be an extension of Darwin that tests reality if Darwin himself already was doing so? Is Darwin himself already participating in the Victorian realist experiment in the ways described here?
