Adapted and substantially shortened from my 2020 M.A. research on Robert Louis Stevenson, gender, queerness, embodiment, and the material language of the hand.
Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde is a novel of doubles: Jekyll and Hyde, respectability and desire, public identity and private action. But one of its most persistent doubles is smaller and easier to overlook. The hand is at once part of the body and an instrument used by it.
The Hand as Instrument
That ambiguity gives the hand unusual power. It can touch, write, strike, sign, confess, conceal, and leave evidence. It belongs to a person while also functioning as the means through which that person acts on the world.
In a novel preoccupied with the instability of identity, the hand therefore becomes more than anatomical detail. It sits at the intersection of body, agency, instrument, and sign.
Touch Without Declaration
Hands also provide Stevenson with a language for intimacy that does not require the text to name identity in modern terms. Gestures, contact, recognition, and bodily proximity can register relationships that the novel’s social world cannot—or will not—state directly.
This matters when reading the novel’s male relationships historically. Rather than retroactively assigning contemporary sexual identities to Stevenson or his characters, we can attend to the text’s own vocabulary of strangeness, intimacy, embodiment, and desire. The hand is particularly useful because touch can communicate before—or instead of—declaration.
The Written Hand
The hand is also handwriting. In Jekyll and Hyde, written documents are never simply containers for information. Letters, signatures, wills, confessions, and comparisons of handwriting make writing material evidence of the body that produced it.
A written hand can identify its author while simultaneously disguising him. That tension mirrors the novel’s larger problem: how can a self be both recognizable and divided?
The hand that writes is therefore another kind of double. It is physical action converted into a sign that survives the moment of action.
Reading the Strange Other
The novel ultimately puts another hand into this system: the reader’s.
We hold a text made from traces of other hands. We examine documents alongside Utterson and the other characters. We are asked to interpret bodies from signs, identities from handwriting, and hidden relations from fragments.
The hand condenses several of the novel’s central problems because it can be self and instrument, body and evidence, actor and sign at once. Stevenson’s strange hand points toward the other—but it also points back at the person reading it.
Research Context
This portfolio piece adapts one strand of my 2020 Columbia University M.A. research, Hyde and Hand: Strangeness in Stevenson’s case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and now sits alongside a reproducible digital-humanities project designed to test, extend, and generate new questions from its original close-reading argument.