Seeing and Surveilling Disability: Ethics and Modes of Looking in R.L. Stevenson's Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde

Abstract

Abstract:According to Anne McGuire, "disability marks the body in ambiguous ways—it appears and disappears, is noticed and is hidden." Applying a critical disability lens to literary analysis requires asking questions about how and why we—as readers but also the presumably normate "we" whom narrators often metonymically implicate—notice and hide disability in literature. This paper argues that Robert Louis Stevenson's Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886) encourages a reconsideration of looking practices, specifically how we look at (and view) disability. Unlike conventional (often ableist) texts that encourage (especially nondisabled) readers to look at disabled characters, Strange Case forces readers to see through the eyes of disabled characters. Stevenson's novella demonstrates how changing the way nondisabled readers see the disabled subject is foundational to mutual understanding. I categorize modes of looking demonstrated in the text using Rosemarie Garland-Thomson's distinction between the gaze, "an oppressive act of disciplinary looking that subordinates," and the stare, "an intense visual exchange that makes meaning" (9). By doing so, I provide a productive new reading of disabled-nondisabled relations in Stevenson's Strange Case. This paper promotes a more ethical approach to reading texts with disabled characters, acknowledging the power of both the writer and reader in controlling the construction of the disabled subject. I conclude that what is important for the development of ethical reading approaches is an attention to interpreting what we do "see"—that is, which mode(s) of looking we adopt.