Jekyll and Hyde: The Story of the Door

Abstract

‘The Sire de Malétroit’s Door’, one of Stevenson’s earliest short stories, was published in 1878 and gives the first substantial indication of his interest in the symbolic potential of doors (stairs come later). In the story, the symbolism develops surprising ramifications: surprising, at any rate, given that Freud was at that time still an unpublished young man of twenty-two. The door has, of course, as much to do with domestic architecture as the china in The Country Wife has to do with household ornaments, Sir Willoughby Patterne’s leg with walking or Mme Bovary’s carriage-ride with sight-seeing in Rouen. So laden with sexual significance is it, in fact, that it’s a wonder it stays on its hinges.

it will strike me myself as strange that the case histories I write should read like short stories.

Sigmund Freud

The double stands at the start of that cultivation of uncertainty by which the literature of the modern world has come to be distinguished.

Karl Miller

Today two things seem modern: the analysis of life and the flight from life… One practises anatomy on the inner life of one’s mind, or one dreams.

Hugo von Hofmannsthal