On the representation of infantile sense-making processes and the art of characterization: Archaic thought and its history in the works of Stevenson, Hardy and Wilde (Scotland, Robert Louis Stevenson, Thomas Hardy, Oscar Wilde, Ireland)

This study explores three texts---Robert Louis Stevenson's The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Thomas Hardy's The Return of the Native and Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray---in which the allegorical quality of the characterizations have been routinely seen as how these works resist (or lack an interest in) representing humans in all of their psychological complexity. While the majority of criticism has tended to explain the lack of internal representation in the characters of these works as a symptom of culture (Stevenson's Calvinist distaste for individual psychology) or as a political choice (Wilde's resistance to prevalent concepts of the psyche) or as a characteristic of the author's literary project as a whole (for Hardy plot was more important than character), this study suggests that the way in which the characters not "fully" people, far from being an escape from psychological concerns, is precisely where a crucial level of psychological complexity is to be found---embedded within the representations of imaginary people are a complex set of references to primitive ideation about self and other, the residue of the yet-to-be differentiated world of early developmental life. Drawing upon the psychoanalytic concepts of Margaret Mahler, D. W. Winnicott and Andre Green, this study considers how the representational strategies of (incompletely) representing humans allows the texts to include references to both the primitive sense-making formulations related to infantile life and to the way in which archaic life is preserved in later psychological formations (as a residue of a relationship that was, during infancy, gradually being understood as being between two people). Thus, no one character embodies the implied infantile subject or primary caretaker; rather, vestiges of that early relationship are dispersed among all signs of the human and human-like. The rhetorical choices in characterization are not the only place where the texts relay the artifact of infantile thought-processes as inflected by a particular relational environment. Concerns central to the time when notions of self and other were becoming more permanently established are re-enacted in the plot as well as conveyed by a variety of other narrative choices.