Identity
Signatures: From Handwritten to GeneticThroughout history, contributing factors to a person's identity have changed dramatically. In an attempt to demonstrate this change, both Robert Louis Stevenson's The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and Anne Joseph and Alison Winter's "Making the Match: Human Traces, Forensic Experts and the Public Imagination" can be used. Throughout the eighteen eighties: the setting of Jekyll and Hyde, the primary method of identifying people was non-scientifically; people were identified by their personality, social status, and physical characteristics. As the world has progressed to the "technological age" we now live in, a person's identification extends further: their fingerprints, their online "screen name-" because as Joseph and Winter explain "minuscule residues of peripheral human productions are supposed to contain the essence of an individual's identity" (193).
------------------------------------------------------------------------**Bibliography**Joseph, Anne and Alison Winter. Making out a person's identity has progressed considerably in the past one-hundred years and therefore so has the common idea of what is characterized as identity. Now fingerprints are substituted for or placed in addition to a handwritten signature on a driver's license; DNA fingerprints can establish paternity, increase self awareness, potentially destroy chances at receiving insurance (DNA can provide a portal into someone's medical future), exonerate Christopher Columbus from introducing the White Plague to the new world and convict a person of murder (Joseph and Winter, 206). Hyde and "Making the Connection" supports the thesis that during the eighteen eighties although there were new breakthroughs in ways of identifying a person, the main identification method remained primarily visual; in the nineteen nineties, identification of an individual no longer relies at all on physical characteristics of a person as much as they do on more scientific methods: genetic makeup, DNA sequences and fingerprints. The nineteenth century also marks the birth of the idea that there is "something unique and essential about single individual[s]. An example of this progression is this: during the eighteenth century, the handwritten signature was the only existing kind and now signatures can be found in a fingerprint or a genetic (DNA) structure. In the modern world, the setting of Joseph and Winter's piece, physical appearance can no longer be depended on as the sole identification method: plastic surgery and tummy tucks are the order of the day, and people can change their appearances virtually overnight. Before then, and still then by most of society, "identification" was solely referring to physical characteristics - explaining why Jekyll could realize he had changed to Hyde by the change in his hand and the formation of his face: these were identification methods of the time.
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