Dr Jekyll And Hyde Duality Analysis
Doubles, including performance, are present throughout the plot of Harding’s Florence and Giles, with our main antiheroine Florence, a young girl with a murderous streak and an intellect far beyond her years, presenting ‘herself as unknowing in order to achieve her goals…[which makes her] unreliable but highly aware’ (Dinter, 2012, p.68). The narrative perspective is predominantly from Florence as first-person, although third-person is used at times, and her reliability as a narrator is immediately thrown into disrepute, explaining to us as the reader that ‘for a girl my age I am very well worded [but that] such concealment has become my habit’ (Harding, 2011, p.5).
Florence is secretive throughout the novel and uses acting/performance in order …show more content…
Both “types” of duality are seen in Harding’s novel: the former through Florence who is both an innocent child but displays chilling cold-bloodedness, and the latter through the representations of Florence and Miss Taylor - both are women whose education is somewhat frowned upon, they only feel comfortable when in control of a situation and both are a matriarchal figure to Giles. Typical of Gothic literature as a discourse is that it reflects troubles of the period, of which “doubling” is one, as Dryden points to ‘issues of duality - split personalities, physical transformations, mistaken identities, doppelgangers - were found to be manifested in the social, geographical and architectural schisms of the modern city’ (2003, p.19). The performance of Florence throughout the novel is another side of doubling which runs throughout the novel, and her cunningness and selfishness is something which makes the reader evoke feelings of betrayal and resentment. At the beginning, we are made to feel sorry for her, but with the story’s progression, ‘such acts, gestuers, enactments…are performative in the sense that the essence or identity that they otherwise purport to express are fabrications’ (Butler, 1990, p.185). In essence, Florence “acts” too much to make us empathise with her, which actually has the reverse effect and actually alienates the
Florence is secretive throughout the novel and uses acting/performance in order …show more content…
Both “types” of duality are seen in Harding’s novel: the former through Florence who is both an innocent child but displays chilling cold-bloodedness, and the latter through the representations of Florence and Miss Taylor - both are women whose education is somewhat frowned upon, they only feel comfortable when in control of a situation and both are a matriarchal figure to Giles. Typical of Gothic literature as a discourse is that it reflects troubles of the period, of which “doubling” is one, as Dryden points to ‘issues of duality - split personalities, physical transformations, mistaken identities, doppelgangers - were found to be manifested in the social, geographical and architectural schisms of the modern city’ (2003, p.19). The performance of Florence throughout the novel is another side of doubling which runs throughout the novel, and her cunningness and selfishness is something which makes the reader evoke feelings of betrayal and resentment. At the beginning, we are made to feel sorry for her, but with the story’s progression, ‘such acts, gestuers, enactments…are performative in the sense that the essence or identity that they otherwise purport to express are fabrications’ (Butler, 1990, p.185). In essence, Florence “acts” too much to make us empathise with her, which actually has the reverse effect and actually alienates the