‘There is something else not quite right about night life, something shadowy in every sense. However efficiently artificial light annihilates the difference between night and day, it never wholly eliminates the primitive suspicion that night people are up to no good.’ ( Alvarez, Night)
‘Are not the sane and the insane equal at night as the sane lie a dreaming? Are not all of us outside this hospital who dream, more or lesss in the condition of those inside it, every night of our lives?…Do we not nightly jumble events and personages and times and places, as these( people on Bethlehem Insane Asylum) do daily? ..I wonder that the great master who knew everything , when he called Sleep the death of each day’s life, did not call Dreams the insanity of each day’s sanity’ ( Dickens)
‘ …Fog everywhere.fog up the river…fog in the eyes and throats of ancient greenwich pensioners….’ ( Dickens)
Alvarez in his evocatively titled book of ‘Night‘ suggests that gas-light made the relationship between darkness and light profoundly disturbing. Indeed he argues that Dickens’ nightly strolls around the city were as much ‘in the same spirit of explorartion as Dr Livingstone travelled Africa, the ‘dark continent,,,’ Hardly surprisingly that both Dickens and Stevenson should exploit the ambivalence of the unlit city in their novels. This predilection for the ‘unlighted’ spaces of the city finds particular expression in Oliver Twist and Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde where the absence of light serves as a metaphor for moral darkness and sexual disquiet.
The wandering, labyrinthine spaces of London engender a powerful sense of anxiety and ‘dis-ease’ through their literal lack of visible signposts and direction. Perceptual bewilderment on the part of both protagonist and character, operates as the uncanny key to the ‘invisible’ or repressed aspects of human nature. Faced by night’s encroaching spectres, protagonists and readers experience disorientation and alienation.
Being ‘faced’ by that which one fears or craves( and therefore fears) isolates individuals from even themselves:
‘ And still the figure had no face by which he might no it; even in his dreams, it had no face…’ ( Stevenson)
‘At his head it stood( the phantom) silent, erect, and still – a living grave-stone, with its epitaph in blood..’ ( Dickens)
Primal anxiety is devastatingly represented here. Looking yields no rational ‘truth’ but instead makes the protagonist ‘look within’ : looking has become both a means of torment and thwarted understanding. So much of Western Cuture’s vocabulary relies upon sight as a means of supposedly rational comprehension. Here the failure of sight to rationalise and contain horror propels the protagonists into nightmare. Instinctive knowledge, which has been denied and repressed raises to the surface of the narrative and consciousness. ‘Unspeakable’ acts and vices begin to make themselves known.
And if homosexual desire is the ‘love that dare not speak its name’ in Victorian Society then the facelessness of Hyde reminds Utterson here that Hyde’s proclivities are dangerously near his own. For the facelessness of Hyde operates as a palimpset by which the repressed desires of the ‘respectable’ protgaonists can project and imprint their own sexual wants.
Likewise the shadow of nancy’s ghastly shape -shifter figure haunts Sikes so that he has to return to the site of the original crime and replay her slaughter with his own. In this haunting he is rendered ‘human’ and conscience ridden which surpises him as much as the reader: ‘..the very ghost of Sikes’ Condemnation by his former colleagues seems more endurable to Sikes than the everlasting torment of purgatory. The nightmare dialogue with Nancy makes any sort of human connnection preferable. He tries to move into ‘light’ but ironically finds the darkness of retribution and conscience inevitable.
‘The eyes again!’ he cried in an unearthly shriek.
In this world of Night even the gift of light and ‘sight’ has metamorphised into perpetual torment. The pre-verbal ‘muscularity’ of the eye horror continues to agitate and horrify long after the nigtmare is supposedly over.