THE CITY AND THE HIGHWAY: THE SPATIALIZATION OF THE DOUBLE IN R. L. STEVENSON’S THE STRANGE CASE OF DR. JEKYLL AND MR. HYDE AND DAVID LYNCH’S LOST HIGHWAY
THE CITY AND THE HIGHWAY: THE SPATIALIZATION OF THE DOUBLE IN R. L. STEVENSON’S THE STRANGE CASE OF DR. JEKYLL AND MR. HYDE AND DAVID LYNCH’S LOST HIGHWAY

Summary/Abstract: To exemplify the close connection between space and human identity, the paper explores two end-of-the-century works of art: Stevenson’s novella The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886), and David Lynch’s film The Lost Highway (1997), each of which presents a different kind of space as the basis for exploration and understanding of the instability of human identity. The concept of double identity situated in and provoked by the appearance of a fin de siècle metropolis, mutated at the end of the twentieth century into a more fluid conceptualization of self as ultimately ambiguous and unknowable, which is represented by the transient space of a highway. As Augè proposes, the erasure of frontiers caused by globalization also erases the boundaries between the individual and his or her environment through the multiplication of the spaces of circulation, consumption and communication, that is highways of different kinds, or, more specifically, non-places. While Stevenson proposed the idea that there are two sides to every person and expressed the dangers arising from the possibility of using scientific methods in order to unleash the “lower” side, for Lynch identity is no longer identifiable or graspable at all, but open to various contested perspectives, none of which can ever prevail.

• Details
• Contents