* - In the beginning of the second semester 2013 Greg Buzzwell [http://britishlibrary.typepad.co.uk/english-and-drama/2013/07/the-mystery-of-the-neglected-vampire.html ] wrote "The Victorian fin de siècle was an era noted for its decadents, aesthetes, dandies and New Women. Viewed from a sunny perspective all could be seen as positive signs of a new age of liberation and freedom dawning within society. Viewed from a gloomier aspect however all could be seen as signs of transgression, perversity and moral and physical degeneration. Perhaps the latter view had something to do with the prevalence of another popular figure during the Victorian fin de siècle [   ], namely the vampire. As a metaphor for vile transgression, disease and decay few literary tropes served quite so well as a pale undead figure with a taste for human blood[  ] Robert Louis Stevenson's enigmatic short story 'Olalla', published in the Christmas of 1885, sits in the shadow of the more illustrious 'Strange Case of Doctor Jekyll and Mr Hyde ' (1886). Stevenson was writing the former at the same time as he was going through the proofs for the latter but while Jekyll and Hyde opened a Pandora's Box of new urban, scientific and psychological horrors 'Olalla' acts as something of a loving farewell to the golden age of Gothic fiction. Taken together they serve as a staging post between old and new nightmares."

 

In his commentary to 'Olalla' he indicates 

"several typically Gothic elements. It is set in the past and takes place in an exotic Southern European Catholic country. The landscape, in the tradition of Ann Radcliffe, is beautifully described. There is even a portrait on a wall which depicts a long-dead ancestor who bears an uncanny resemblance to someone still living - an echo of both Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto and Nathaniel Hawthorne's The House of the Seven Gables (and a device later used by Arthur Conan Doyle in The Hound of the Baskervilles). The decayed Spanish house and the strangely lifeless figure of the mother mirror each other in the same fashion as the unravelling once grand Ushers mirror their literally collapsing mansion in Edgar Allan Poe's famous tale. Ancestral secrets and physical decay were staples of early Gothic fiction and Stevenson gathers together the traditional themes and adds a twist of post-Darwinian theory in the idea of physical and mental flaws being inherited, rather than ancestral sins [   ] Having completed the tale Stevenson returned to the proofs of Jekyll and Hyde, a narrative in which he held up a mirror to the very different dawning nightmares of the future - nightmares being played out not in a foreign land of long ago but in the here and now of London. Sweet dreams ....."

 

I wouldn't have selected this summation about RLS's short story "Olalla" and its relation to "Dr J & Mr.H" if I hadn't just been reading similar information in an excellent introduction to the latter [ "The Strange Case of Dr.Jekyll & Mr Hyde", written by Robert Mighall. R. Mighall details RLS's subtle allusions to homosexual issues (indicating  William Veeder, “Children of the Night: Stevenson and Patriarchy”, Hirsch and Veeder (1988), pp. 107-60; Rictor Norton, “A (longish) pre-Victorian digression on blackmail”, enviado para o Victoria Web (http://www.listserv.indiana.edu);    Robert Louis Stevenson: The Critical Heritage,  Paul Maixner ed. (1981), p. 229. ]and the importance of "houses" and "castles" ( Hugh Walpole "The Castle of Otranto"; E.A. Poe  "The House of Usher", Dickens and "Bleak House"; Hawthorne and "The House of Seven Gables"), among other fascinating points.

 

The VN-L had just responded to M.Couturier's query about the Zemblan "Wodnaggen," applied to Judge Goldsworth's house [ "Actually, it was an old, dismal, white-and-black, half-timbered house, of the type termed wodnaggen in my country, with carved gables, drafty bow windows and a so-called "semi-noble" porch, surmounted by a hideous veranda"]  The proximity bt. RLS's London geography and Dr. Jekyll's house, to Judge Goldsworth's "wodnaggen" home and King Charles's castle, in Zembla, was particularly unsettling to me. It invited me to reread "Pale Fire" from a new perspective, mainly as  partically presenting a satirical (but appreciative) view of bad blood, lineages and homosexuality - as it had been initiated by R.L.Stevenson.  After all the description by CK of the Judge's house, its decoration and "alphabetical daughters" always struck me as being as surreal as the King's castles. If New Wye was situated in the present, but with unspecified locations in a map (like RLS's London), Zemblan was "far,far away" and its emphasis on lineage and decadence more clearly marked. For Mighall " Stevenson's tale put the modern city, and specifically London, firmly on the map of Gothic horror." for, not only "location reinforces the supposed dichotomy between the 'blackguardly' Hyde, and the prosperous and respectable Jekyll..it provides an allegorical reflection of Jekyll's true relationship with Hyde...a geographical expression of the Hyde within Jekyll. ...creating an Urban Gothic stageset for late-Victorian horror."

 

R. Mighall explains that RLS's intention was to write a "Christmas Crawler" ("a sensational tale of supernatural incident designed to produce a pleasurable chill in its readers."). In "Olalla" Stevenson "provides a modern twist to the conventional Gothic theme of aristrocratic family curses and ancestral returns, adapting it to the concerns of mental pathology or what was termed 'social hygiene' [   ] Stevenson cleverly adapts, and innovates within, the conventional framework of Gothic fiction. He uses stock features of the mode to explore contemporary concerns and emphases..." [   ]"This pattern of suppressed guilt, of a double life of daylight respectability and nocturnal transgression, or the 'ghost' of old crimes overtaking their prepretators, contained...within a fairly conventional supernatural tale, would be developed in a far more subtle and disturbing way later. The "Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr Hyde" dispenses entirely with the distancing devices ...set "over there"..and "back then". It is situated in London in the present day, and situates horror within a respectable individual [   ] Stevenson's tale is presented as a 'Case', evoking the procedures of both legal and medical knowledge and testimony; but it is a strange case, its strangeness deriving from its disruption of the very expectations associated with these procedures and forms of writing."  After discussing  "the 1967 Sexual Offences Act" and the "The Blackmailers' Charter" passed in 1885 and the hints concerning a homosexual connection bt. Jekyll and Hyde (and pedophylia), Mighall notes that "Stevenson's tale is actually more complex and disturbing...for he used this picture of criminal monstrosity to reflect on that which had actually defined it: the world of respectable physicians and legislators."

 

To isolate, from my former reading of PF, the amusing moments in which VN is writing a satire about Gothic tales and taste  while applying to them his own peculiar stylist twists, that is, attuned to a different kind of "dark" comedy, is a terrible task!  

In a way it helped me to understand why I could never believe that Zembla was only a reflection about exile and ancient Russia. It also allowed me to envisage a contrast between what happened with Dr.J and Mr. H (ie: that the two are one, with their criminal and respectable sides intermingled - cf. VN's careful diagrams in LOL), in the light of certain theories about John Shade and Charles Kinbote as "one," something still in need of further probing. 

What I perceived was how distinct is RLS's depiction of the "duality of man" (and a lot more splits, as we'll find it at the end of Dr.Jekyll's 'Confessions') since it doesn't fit into the Freudian perspective of the "repressed unconscious" (Dr. Jekyll was fully aware of both his noble aspirations and of his dark animal side).

I have the impression that those who favor the "three or two-in-one" authorship of PF, connecting it to RLS's story, inadvertently rely on the popularized Freudian theory to develop some of their arguments (Shade's repressed homosexuality, for one).