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The Shadow on the Bed: Dr. Jekyll, Mr. Hyde, and the Labouchere Amendment
In May 1885, five months before Robert Louis Steveson wrote The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Great Britain's Parliament passed the Labouchere Amendment to the Criminal Law Amendment Act. This amendment, which went into effect inn January 1886, the same month as Jekyll and Hyde's publication, criminalized "acts of gross indecency" between men, regardless of age or consent, and specified a punishment of no more than two years' imprisonment with or without hard labor. This criminalization of even private homosexual acts was a response to the growing visibility of the "invert;" Canon J. M. Wilson, in an address of 1880, warned that
immorality, used in a special sense, which I need not define, has been o late increasing among the upper classes inn England, and specifically in the great cities. ...This is not the place to give details or evidence. There is amply sufficient ground for alarm that the nation may be on the eve of an age of voluptuousness and reckless immorality.
Historian Jeffrey Weeks has argued that the Labouchere Amendment helped to create the very subculture it meant to suppress. The Amendment stigmatized and publicized the "homosexual" as a type: for example, sexologist Havelock Ellis wrote that Oscar Wilde's conviction, in 1895, under the Amendment, "appears to have generally contributed to give definiteness ad self-consciousness to the manifestations of homosexuality, and...aroused inverts to take up a definite stand."
The Labouchere Amendment punished sexual acts, but not speech acts. In response to the Amendment, writers such as Oscar Wilde, John Addington Symonds, H. Rider Haggard, Henry James, and Robert Louis Stevenson - some self-identified as homosexual, some not - forged a literature we might call bachelor because of its concern with the male communal fantasies of resolutely unmarried men. Stevenson was not a bachelor: he was married to Fanny Osborne, eleven years his senior and mother of three children from a previous marriage. Nor was Oscar Wilde, strictly speaking, a bachelor. Fin de siecle bachelor literature may have been written by married men, but it enacted flight from wedlock and from the narrative conventions of bourgeois realism. Tzvetan Todorov, in his study of the Fantastic, maintains that fantastic...