"His bachelor house": The unhomely home of the fin de siècle's bourgeois bachelor in Robert Louis Stevenson's Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde

This article seeks to specifically examine the ways in which the figure of the bourgeois bachelor and his construction of an alternative form of masculine domesticity in Victorian fin-de-siècle society are conveyed in Stevenson’s Gothic novella via the unhomely home space. By applying Freud’s theory...

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Main Author: Prosser, Ashleigh
Format: Journal Article
Published: 2014
Online Access:https://robert-louis-stevenson.org/wp-content/uploads/jss-2014-volume-11.pdf
http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.11937/92733
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author Prosser, Ashleigh
author_facet Prosser, Ashleigh
author_sort Prosser, Ashleigh
building Curtin Institutional Repository
collection Online Access
description This article seeks to specifically examine the ways in which the figure of the bourgeois bachelor and his construction of an alternative form of masculine domesticity in Victorian fin-de-siècle society are conveyed in Stevenson’s Gothic novella via the unhomely home space. By applying Freud’s theory of 'das unheimliche' (the uncanny, literally translated as ‘unhomely’) to a close reading of the text, this paper seeks to identify moments of the unhomely within the home and read them as spaces through which the bourgeois bachelor’s alternative form of masculine domesticity at the fin-de-siècle can be understood. This interpretation of Stevenson’s text is founded on reading the unhomely home as a literary chronotope, a symbolic representation of the experience of masculine domesticity within a specific moment in time, the Victorian fin de siècle, through a specific space, the bourgeois bachelor’s home.
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spelling curtin-20.500.11937-927332024-08-23T04:03:27Z "His bachelor house": The unhomely home of the fin de siècle's bourgeois bachelor in Robert Louis Stevenson's Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde Prosser, Ashleigh This article seeks to specifically examine the ways in which the figure of the bourgeois bachelor and his construction of an alternative form of masculine domesticity in Victorian fin-de-siècle society are conveyed in Stevenson’s Gothic novella via the unhomely home space. By applying Freud’s theory of 'das unheimliche' (the uncanny, literally translated as ‘unhomely’) to a close reading of the text, this paper seeks to identify moments of the unhomely within the home and read them as spaces through which the bourgeois bachelor’s alternative form of masculine domesticity at the fin-de-siècle can be understood. This interpretation of Stevenson’s text is founded on reading the unhomely home as a literary chronotope, a symbolic representation of the experience of masculine domesticity within a specific moment in time, the Victorian fin de siècle, through a specific space, the bourgeois bachelor’s home. 2014 Journal Article http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.11937/92733 https://robert-louis-stevenson.org/wp-content/uploads/jss-2014-volume-11.pdf unknown
spellingShingle Prosser, Ashleigh
"His bachelor house": The unhomely home of the fin de siècle's bourgeois bachelor in Robert Louis Stevenson's Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde
title "His bachelor house": The unhomely home of the fin de siècle's bourgeois bachelor in Robert Louis Stevenson's Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde
title_full "His bachelor house": The unhomely home of the fin de siècle's bourgeois bachelor in Robert Louis Stevenson's Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde
title_fullStr "His bachelor house": The unhomely home of the fin de siècle's bourgeois bachelor in Robert Louis Stevenson's Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde
title_full_unstemmed "His bachelor house": The unhomely home of the fin de siècle's bourgeois bachelor in Robert Louis Stevenson's Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde
title_short "His bachelor house": The unhomely home of the fin de siècle's bourgeois bachelor in Robert Louis Stevenson's Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde
title_sort "his bachelor house": the unhomely home of the fin de siècle's bourgeois bachelor in robert louis stevenson's strange case of dr jekyll and mr hyde
url https://robert-louis-stevenson.org/wp-content/uploads/jss-2014-volume-11.pdf
http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.11937/92733