Date of Award
5-15-2020
Document Type
Thesis
Degree Name
Bachelor of Arts
Department
English
First Advisor
Barbara Black
Abstract
This capstone centers around the production of monsters in the genre of the Victorian Gothic. I specifically examine Heathcliff from Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, and Mr. Hyde from Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. By exploring the structure of these Gothic works, I argue that monsters, specifically the monsters that fall under Maria Beville’s definition of the unnamed monster, are beings that embody and challenge the categories of person, animal, and thing. I argue that these characters’ Otherness is the catalyst for this inability to be categorized by investigating the ways that the Victorians viewed and understood Otherness. I look at the ways that these monsters escape clear definitions, and the uneasy boundaries between human/non-human, natural/supernatural, and normal/other that they leave in their wake.
Recommended Citation
Bonin, Madeline, "Human Monsters/Monstrous Humans: Victorian Gothic Constructions of Unnamed Monsters in Wuthering Heights and The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde" (2020). English Honors Theses. 47.
https://creativematter.skidmore.edu/eng_stu_schol/47