Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
Robert Louis Stevenson
1986

Introduction

Robert Louis Stevenson's supernatural story The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (most commonly known by the shortened title Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde) became an immediate best-seller in Great Britain and America when it was published in 1886. The novel has also earned accolades from the academic community for its artistic style and penetrating psychological themes. The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde is based on the story of Edinburgh's infamous Deacon Brodie, who was discovered to have been living a double life, coupled with a dream Stevenson had one night, what he called "a fine bogey tale," about a man who drinks a potion made from a white powder and subsequently transforms into a devilish creature. The next morning, Stevenson started to write a detective/horror story in the style of those written by Edgar Allan Poe, and three days later his draft was complete. After a critical response from his wife, Stevenson threw the draft in the fire and started a new one that he completed in another three days and revised during the next six weeks. This version became, with minor alterations, the published version of the text, with its compelling illustration of one man's futile attempts to weed out the evil inclinations of his soul. Most of Stevenson's readers would agree with Stewart F. Sanderson's judgment that the complex characterization of the tortured Dr. Henry Jekyll creates "a work of extraordinary psychological depth and powerful impact."

Author Biography

Robert Louis Stevenson was born in Edinburgh, Scotland, on November 13, 1850, to Thomas, a civil engineer, and Margaret Isabella (Balfour) Stevenson. He was six years old when he first displayed his literary talents during a competition against his cousins. After the competition, one of his uncles presented him with a prize for his history of Moses. At sixteen, his father published his first work, The Pentland Rising, an account of a 1666 rebellion by Covenanters. Both works had a religious focus, reflecting the influence of his parents. However, while attending Edinburgh University, Stevenson denounced his Presbyterian upbringing and declared himself to be agnostic. His parents were further disappointed when he discarded his plans to become an engineer and spent a good deal of his time at the university exploring the brothels and pubs of Edinburgh. During his university years, Stevenson gained a reputation for outrageous behavior and earned the name "Velvet Jacket" for his unconventional style of dress.

Stevenson read authors like William Hazlitt and Daniel Defoe at the university and subsequently adopted their styles in his early writing. While working on his law degree, he saw several of his essays published in various periodicals. His first two books, An Inland Voyage (1878) and Travels with a Donkey in the Cevennes (1879) were based on travels that he enjoyed throughout his life. Although Stevenson earned a degree in law at the university and continued his studies in a law office in Edinburgh, he never practiced the profession, preferring instead to travel and to write. Due to the ill health that plagued him all his life, his parents supported his lifestyle and his writing career, which they considered to be a more restful occupation.

The 1883 publication of his novel Treasure Island brought Stevenson worldwide public acclaim. The adventure tale also earned him enough money to devote himself to his writing. Stevenson gained more attention with the publication in 1886 of The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. He reported that the idea for the novel sprang from a dream he had about a man transforming into a monster after drinking a potion made from white powder. While dreaming this "fine bogey tale," as he called it, Stevenson started to scream and was subsequently awoken by his wife, Fanny. The next morning he began to write and three days later he had completed a first draft. After a negative response from his wife, Stevenson threw the manuscript in the fire and began a rewrite which he completed in another three-day period and revised during the next six weeks.

The subject of evil, explored so creatively in The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, had fascinated Stevenson throughout his career and had appeared in several of his works. Although he had rejected the Calvinist doctrines his parents taught him, the focus of the interplay of good and evil continued to influence his imagination. A study of this subject in relation to the unconscious and dreams appears prominently in two of his critically acclaimed short stories, "Thrawn Janet" and "Markheim."

Stevenson died on December 3, 1894, in Apia, Samoa. Although Stevenson gained acclaim as a poet, an essayist, and a travel writer as well as a novelist, he will be remembered for his most popular works: The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and Treasure Island.

Plot Summary

Part I

The story opens with Dr. Jekyll's friend and solicitor, Gabriel John Utterson, and Utterson's dis-tant kinsman, Mr. Enfield, taking a walk one Sunday. They find themselves passing a "certain sinister block of building" in the London district of Soho that "bore in every feature, the marks of prolonged and sordid negligence." After stopping in front of a "blistered and distained" door on this block, Mr. Enfield recalls that one evening at three he was returning home through that section of the city when he saw a man run into a little girl. He notes that "the man trampled calmly over the child's body and left her screaming on the ground." Immediately, Enfield apprehended the man and brought him back to the child and to the group that was gathering around her. Enfield admits that the suspect "was perfectly cool and made no resistance, but gave me one look, so ugly that it brought out the sweat on me." The rest of the crowd responded similarly. After ascertaining that the child was not severely harmed, Enfield directed the man to pay the family compensatory damages. The man then withdrew behind the same door at which Utterson and Enfield now find themselves and returned with a signed check. Both Utterson and Enfield comment on the mysterious air about the house. Enfield admits that he sometimes sees the man, whose name is Hyde, coming in and out of the door and that there is "something wrong with his appearance; something displeasing, something down-right detestable." He continues, "I never saw a man I so disliked, and yet I scarce know why…. He gives a strong feeling of deformity." Utterson claims to know the man who signed the check for Hyde, but asks his friend not to speak about the incident in the future.

That evening, Utterson puzzles over a copy of Dr. Jekyll's will with the instructions that at his death, all of his possessions were to pass into the hands of his "friend and benefactor Edward Hyde." It further states that if Dr. Jekyll unexplainably disappears for any period exceeding three calendar months, Hyde should "step into the said Henry Jekyll's shoes without further delay and free from any burthen or obligation." Unable to comprehend Jekyll's motives for writing the will, Utterson seeks advice from one of his oldest friends, Dr. Lanyon, who admits that Jekyll "began to go wrong, wrong in mind" over ten years ago and that he has not seen much of him since. Lanyon claims that he never heard of Edward Hyde.

After that night Utterson begins to "haunt the door in the by-street of shops waiting to catch a glimpse of Hyde." One night, Utterson spots the "pale and dwarfish" man who gave "an impression of deformity without any nameable malformation." Hyde seems to know him and approaches the lawyer "with a sort of murderous mixture of timidity and boldness," speaking "with a husky, whispering and somewhat broken voice." Utterson concludes that "not all of these together could explain the … unknown disgust, loathing and fear" he felt toward this man who seems "hardly human." He reads the stamp of "Satan's signature" upon Hyde's face.

The next day Utterson asks Poole, Dr. Jekyll's servant, about Mr. Hyde. When Poole admits that Jekyll instructed all the servants to obey Hyde, Utterson worries about his friend's safety. Two weeks later, when Utterson brings up the subject of his will, Jekyll tells him not to worry about him.

Part II

A year later, a maid sees from her window Mr. Hyde club an older man to death. After the police find a sealed envelope at the scene addressed to Utterson, they bring it to him the next morning. Later, Utterson identifies the body as Sir Danvers Carew. Utterson also recognizes the stick the murderer used as belonging to Jekyll. When Utterson and the police go to Hyde's residence, they discover the other half of the broken stick in his ransacked rooms. The next afternoon, Utterson finds Jekyll "looking deathly sick," and with a "feverish manner." Jekyll insists he is done with Hyde, who will never be heard of again, as evidenced by a letter he claims Hyde has written. Utterson has Mr. Guest, his head clerk and an expert at handwriting analysis, compare the letter from Hyde to one from Jekyll. When Guest finds "a rather singular resemblance" between the two, Utterson concludes that Jekyll forged the note to protect Hyde.

The police investigate Hyde's past and discover "tales [that] came out of the man's cruelty, at once so callous and violent; of his vile life, of his strange associates, of the hatred that seemed to have surrounded his career." Now that the "evil influence" had been withdrawn, Jekyll enjoys "a new life." He comes out of his seclusion and renews his relations with his friends, charities, and his church. "His face seemed to open and brighten, as if with an inward consciousness of service; and for more than two months, the doctor was at peace." Soon, however, he cuts himself off from his friends. In an effort to understand Jekyll's change of heart, Utterson meets with his friend, Dr. Lanyon, whom he finds seriously ill, with "some deep-seated terror of the mind." Lanyon insists he has had a shock from which he will never recover. He tells Utterson that Jekyll is ill as well and determines to "lead a life of extreme seclusion." After Lanyon dies a few weeks later, Utterson opens an envelope Lanyon gave him and finds a sealed envelope with the instructions "not to be opened till the death or disappearance of Dr. Henry Jekyll."

Part III

One evening Poole arrives at Utterson's home and tells the lawyer that Jekyll has been shut up in his room all week. Poole is certain that there has been "foul play." When the two return to Jekyll's home and try to get him to come out of his room, Jekyll, in a changed voice, refuses. Poole tells Utterson that all week the person in the room has been begging for "some sort of medicine." Utterson breaks down the door and finds the dying Hyde "sorely contorted and still twitching." Jekyll is nowhere to be found. Utterson finds a note from Jekyll asking him to read Lanyon's letter as well as his own confession.

Lanyon's letter relates that one evening, he received a note from Jekyll exclaiming, "my life, my honour, my reason, are all at your mercy; if you fail me to-night, I am lost." Following Jekyll's instructions, Lanyon brought back to his home the contents of a drawer taken from Jekyll's study. The drawer contained a white powder, a vial of some chemical, and a book of entries recording a series of experiments. Lanyon then admitted a dwarfish man wearing clothes much too large for him, who mixed the powder and the contents of the vial. The man suggested that Lanyon watch him, for "a new province of knowledge and new avenues to fame and power shall be laid open to you, here." Lanyon agreed, commenting, "I have gone too far in the way of inexplicable services to pause before I see the end." After the man drank the potion, he transformed into Jekyll. What Jekyll then related "sickened" Lanyon's soul.

Jekyll's confession begins with his description of his "profound duplicity of life" and the shame he felt over his own "provinces of good and ill which divide and compound man's dual nature." In an effort to rid himself of his evil side, Jekyll created a potion that transformed him into Mr. Hyde. Yet he had mixed feelings about this transformation. Part of him as Hyde "felt younger, lighter, happier in body" and more free than Jekyll ever had, while at the same time he recognized this new creature as "pure evil." Jekyll continued taking the potion until one night he found himself transforming without the drug and noted that Hyde was getting stronger. He then admitted that as Hyde he killed Carew "with a transport of glee" and so had his "lust of evil gratified and stimulated." When the transformations occurred more frequently, and Jekyll realized that eventually he would not be able to transform back into himself, he became Hyde one more time, knowing that he would then commit suicide to keep himself from the gallows.

Characters

Richard Enfield

Utterson's distant kinsman and a "well-known man about town." He is similar in temperament to Utterson. The two men enjoy Sunday walks, putting "the greatest store by these excursions, count[ing] them the chief jewel of each week." They "not only set aside occasions of pleasure, but even resisted the calls of business, that they might enjoy them uninterrupted." Enfield first alerts Utterson to the existence of Hyde.

In his book on Stevenson, Irving S. Saposnik finds Enfield "a strange, yet appropriate complement to his distant kinsman." This "well-known man about town" has a habit of "coming home from some place at the end of the world, about three o'clock of a black winter morning." Thus, according to Saposnik, he represents the "'other Victorian side of Utterson's sobriety.' "

Mr. Guest

Utterson's trustworthy head clerk. "There was no man from whom he kept fewer secrets." Since Guest was also a great student and critic of handwriting, Utterson takes him examples of Jekyll's and Hyde's handwriting, which the clerk finds bears "a rather singular resemblance" to each other.

Edward Hyde

Jekyll transforms both his physical and his moral self into Edward Hyde, a diabolical man who wallows in his wickedness. Stevenson forces readers to gain information about Hyde through the other characters in the novel, which adds to his air of mystery. Enfield insists that there is "something wrong with his appearance; something displeasing, something down-right detestable." He relates the problem many have who encounter him—an inability to get a clear vision of him: "I never saw a man I so disliked, and yet I scarce know why…. He gives a strong feeling of deformity, although I couldn't specify the point…. I can't describe him." Stevenson records the "haunting sense of unex-pressed deformity with which the fugitive impressed his beholders."

Utterson expresses his inability to relate an exact description of him when he comments that Hyde "was pale and dwarfish … [and] gave an impression of deformity without any nameable malformation." The lawyer notes that when he met Hyde, the latter had "a sort of murderous mixture of timidity and boldness, and he spoke with a husky, whispering and somewhat broken voice…. Not all of these together could explain the … unknown disgust, loathing and fear with which Mr. Utterson regarded him." In his final estimation, Hyde seemed "hardly human" and marked with "Satan's signature."

Jekyll has a mixed response to his alter ego. When he drinks the potion and transforms into Hyde he at first admits, "I felt younger, lighter, happier in body; within I was conscious of a heady recklessness, a current of disordered sensual images running like a millrace in my fancy … an unknown but not an innocent freedom of the soul. I knew myself at the first breath of this new life, to be more wicked, tenfold more wicked, sold a slave to my original evil; and the thought, in that moment, braced and delighted me like wine." After this first transformation, Jekyll notices that he is smaller as Hyde, as if "the evil side of [his] nature, to which [he] had now transferred the stamping efficacy, was less robust and less developed than the good…. It had been much less exercised and much less exhausted…." Jekyll embraces the sense of freedom he experiences as Hyde, claiming, "when I looked upon that ugly idol in the glass, I was conscious of no repugnance, rather of a leap of welcome." He understands that Hyde contains an integral part of his soul: "This too was myself. It seemed natural and human. In my eyes it bore a lovelier image of the spirit, it seemed more express and single, than the imperfect and divided countenance I had been hitherto accustomed to call mine."

Yet as Hyde unleashes all of Jekyll's repressed desires, Jekyll cannot help but label him "pure evil" and note that the evil "had left on that body an imprint of deformity and decay." He explains that "in the hands of Edward Hyde [his pleasures] began to turn toward the monstrous," and he became shocked by his "vicarious depravity." Hyde becomes more corrupt as Jekyll tries to contain him. On the evening of Carew's murder, Hyde comes out stronger than he ever had before and, as a result, he beats the helpless man "with a transport of glee." After the murder, "that child of hell had nothing human; nothing lived in him but fear and hatred." His fear of the gallows finally prompts him to commit suicide.

Media Adaptations

• There have been several film, television, and audio versions of The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. The six silent films that were made from the novel were produced from 1908 to 1920. The most notable of this group was the version produced by Famous Players-Lasky Corporation, starring John Barrymore and Nita Naldi in 1920. In 1932 Paramount Publix Corp. produced a version starring Fredric March and Miriam Hopkins. Spencer Tracy and Ingrid Bergman starred in the most famous film version, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer's production in 1941. An educational version was released by Sterling Educational Films in 1959.
• The four television productions include an adaptation by director Charles Jarrott in 1968, starring Jack Palance as Jekyll/Hyde; one by David Winters as a musical in 1973, starring Kirk Douglas; another by Alastar Reed in 1981, starring David Hemmings; and a version by Michael Lindsay-Hogg, starring Anthony Andrews. Hollywood also produced an animated version.
• Several versions have appeared on cassette in abridged as well as complete form. Naxos Audio Books produced an audio compact disc of the novel.

Dr. Henry Jekyll

As he does with the character of Edward Hyde, Stevenson surrounds Dr. Jekyll with an air of mystery, suggesting that even his closest friends did not have a clear picture of the man. Readers learn from Jekyll's confession at the end of the book that he was troubled by what he discovered in himself—"those provinces of good and ill which divide and compound man's dual nature." He explains that throughout his life he was "inclined by nature to industry, fond of the respect of the wise and good among my fellowmen, and thus, as might have been supposed, with every guarantee of an honourable and distinguished future." Utterson considers him to be "a large, well-made, smooth-faced man of fifty" who enjoys his relations with his friends and spends his time devoted to his charities and his religion. However Jekyll admits to recognizing in himself a "certain impatient gaiety of disposition" and a failure to conquer his "aversions to the dry-ness of a life of study." Since he found it difficult to reconcile his baser urges with his "imperious desire to carry [his] head high and wear a more than commonly grave countenance before the public," he suppressed his "undignified" pleasures "with an almost morbid sense of shame." Thus he committed himself "to a profound duplicity of life."

This duplicity continually troubled Jekyll. He explains, "I was no more myself when I laid aside restraint and plunged in shame, than when I laboured, in the eye of day, at the furtherance of knowledge or the relief of sorrow and suffering."

Initially, Jekyll seems to have altruistic motives behind his experiments. His altruism coupled with his hubris overtakes his prudence as evidenced by his admission that "the temptation of a discovery so singular and profound at last overcame the suggestions of alarm." Looking back on the consequences of his actions, Jekyll claims, "Had I approached my discovery in a more noble spirit, had I risked the experiment while under the empire of generous or pious aspirations, all must have been otherwise, [but] at that time my virtue slumbered; my evil, kept awake by ambition, as alert and swift to seize the occasion."

When Hyde starts to appear without the aid of the potion, Jekyll's fears engulf him. He suspects that if this were "much prolonged, the balance of [his] nature might be permanently overthrown, the power of voluntary change be forfeited, and the character of Hyde become irrevocably" his. He recognizes that he is slowly losing hold of his "original and better self," and becoming slowly incorporated with his "second and worse." Jekyll develops a real horror of becoming Hyde when he recognizes, "to cast it in with Hyde, was to die to a thousand interests and aspirations, and to become … forever despised and friendless." As a result, he stops taking the potion and returns for a time to his old self, regaining "an inward consciousness of service." However, he does not have the strength to keep his darker side in check. After two months, he "began to be tortured with throes and longings, as of Hyde struggling after freedom" and so "in a moment of weakness and at last, in an hour of moral weakness, I once again compounded and swallowed the transforming draught."

Dr. Hastie Lanyon

Early in the novel, when Jekyll's behavior confounds him, Utterson seeks advice from his "genial" friend Dr. Lanyon—a "healthy, dapper, red-faced gentleman" with "a boisterous and decided manner." Lanyon and Utterson are Jekyll's two oldest friends. Later in the novel, however, Lanyon's appearance and disposition change as noted by Utterson, who finds his friend seriously ill with "some deep-seated terror of the mind." The shock of facing Hyde's true identity disables him and eventually leads to his death.

Jekyll as Hyde considers Lanyon "bound to the most narrow and material views … [denying] the virtue of transcendental medicine." Hyde also criticizes him for not taking Jekyll's work seriously. Yet when Hyde suggests that Lanyon should watch what happens when Hyde drinks the potion so "a new province of knowledge and new avenues to fame and power shall be laid open to you, here," Lanyon agrees. His curiosity emerges in his response: "I have gone too far in the way of inexplicable services to pause before I see the end." "The moral turpitude" Hyde unveils to him, though, "sickens" his soul.

Saposnik determines Lanyon's refusal to be involved in his friend's scientific inquiries to stem from his cowardice rather than his lack of conviction. Saposnik argues that Lanyon abandons Jekyll "because he was afraid of the temptation to which he finally succumbed," the offer Hyde made to show him "a new province of knowledge and new avenues to fame and power." Commenting on Lanyon's relationship with Jekyll, Saposnik calls him "a friend in name only" whose "envy of Jekyll works in direct contrast to that which prompts Utterson to loyalty. Like Jekyll, Lanyon's outward manner belies his inner compulsions; but, unlike his colleague, he cannot struggle with their emergence."

Poole

Poole is Jekyll's servant, who provides information to Utterson about his master. Poole exhibits loyalty and concern about Jekyll's welfare.

Gabriel John Utterson

Utterson is Jekyll's "dry" lawyer and friend. Stevenson characterizes him as having "a rugged countenance that was never lighted by a smile." He is "cold, scanty and embarrassed in discourse," "backward in sentiment" "dusty, dreary and yet somehow lovable." In his discourse with others, "something eminently human beaconed from his eye; something indeed which never found its way into his talk … but more often and loudly in the acts of his life." "He was austere with himself, but he had an approved tolerance for others," as evidenced through his patience with Jekyll in all of his dealings with him. Utterson admits, "I incline to Cain's heresy…. I let my brother go to the devil in his own way."

Foreshadowing his future relationship with Jekyll, Stevenson writes, "in this character, it was frequently his fortune to be the last reputable acquaintance and the last good influence in the lives of downgoing men." Though staid and serious, he found his friends and acquaintances "liked to sit a while in his unobtrusive company, practicing for solitude, sobering their minds in the man's rich silence after the expense and strain of gaiety."

Sanderson notes Stevenson's effective use of juxtaposition as he counters the novel's "sharply focused images of violence," with Utterson's character, which Sanderson describes as "equally economical and graphic." Sanderson considers Utter-son "unsmiling, unsentimental, austere, but tolerant of the peccadilloes of others, and inclined always to help rather than to reprove; a man of complete probity and conscience in matters of trust."

Saposnik argues that Stevenson presents Utterson as the novel's "moral norm." Saposnik decides that the novel opens with a focus on Utterson

not only because he is Jekyll's confidant (the only one remaining) but because by person and profession he represents the best and worst of Victoria's social beings. Pledged to a code harsh in its application, he has not allowed its pressures to mar his sense of human need…. As a lawyer, he represents that legality which identifies social behavior as established law, unwritten but binding; as a judge, however, he is a combination of justice and mercy (as his names Gabriel John suggest), tempering rigidity with kindness, self-denial with compassion.

Themes

Supernaturalism

The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde is a fine example of supernatural fiction. Supernatural works focus on metaphysical concerns, based on the need to understand the unknown and unnameable. In primitive societies, reality that could not be comprehended was explained through folk-tale and fable—the foundation for all supernatural works. In supernatural literature at least one of the main characters goes against the laws of nature. The themes of these works revolve around good and evil, love and hate. One overriding impulse is to regain the natural order of the universe, to escape from the world of unknown terrors and return to normal day-to-day life. Readers respond to these works with amazement, terror, or relief as the characters struggle to return to that natural order.

One type of supernatural fiction focuses on the Promethean personality. This term was taken from Greek mythology. Prometheus, the son of Iapetus and Clymene, was one of the great benefactors of mankind. According to legend, he molded mankind out of clay and water. He later stole fire from the gods and gave it to man, who was then able to learn the sciences. Zeus considered these acts to be a form of blasphemy, and so he had Prometheus chained to a mountain peak in the Caucasus. During the day an eagle would tear at his liver, which would grow back during the night, only to be eaten again the next day.

The literature that contains elements of the Promethean personality includes Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, Bram Stoker's Dracula, and Robert Louis Stevenson's The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Dr. Frankenstein and Dr. Jekyll are especially Promethean. They are both scientists who defy the natural laws of God and the universe in an effort to create life. In each story there is little scientific detail; the focus instead is on the consequences of "playing God." This type of literature also relies on gothic conventions, especially setting details like desolate landscapes and dark alleys.

Jekyll explains his Promethean urges when he describes the seemingly altruistic motives behind his experiments. He determines that if the evil impulses could be separated from the good,

if each … could be housed in separate identities, life would be relieved of all that was unbearable; the unjust might go his way, delivered from the aspirations and remorse of his more upright twin; and the just could walk steadfastly and securely on his upward path, doing the good things in which he found his pleasure, and no longer exposed to disgrace and penitence by the hands of this extraneous evil. It was the curse of mankind that these incongruous faggots were thus bound together—that the agonized womb of consciousness, these polar twins should be continuously struggling.

Like Frankenstein, however, Jekyll's ambition overtakes his caution. In his confession Jekyll admits,

the temptation of a discovery so singular and profound at last overcame the suggestions of alarm…. Had I approached my discovery in a more noble spirit, had I risked the experiment while under the empire of generous or pious aspirations, all must have been otherwise, [but] at that time my virtue slumbered; my evil, kept awake by ambition, was alert and swift to seize the occasion.

Identity

Dr. Jekyll disturbs the natural order of the universe because throughout his life he struggles to accept the dual nature of his identity. He determines that all of us are plagued with this duality: "With every day, and for both sides of my intelligence, the moral and the intellectual, I thus drew steadily nearer to that truth, by whose partial discovery I have been doomed … that man is not truly one, but truly two…. I hazard the guess that man will be ultimately known for a mere polity of multifarious, incongruous and independent denizens." He explains that throughout his life he was "inclined by nature to industry, fond of the respect of the wise and good among my fellowmen, and thus, as might have been supposed, with every guarantee of an honourable and distinguished future." However Jekyll also admits to recognizing in himself a "certain impatient gaiety of disposition" and a failure to conquer his "aversions to the dryness of a life of study." Jekyll is troubled by "those provinces of good and ill which divide and compound man's dual nature" and so determines to rid himself of his baser desires.

Change and Transformation

This need to remove the troublesome part of his identity prompts Jekyll to defy the natural laws of the universe by transforming into the diabolical Mr. Hyde. Irving S. Saposnik, in his essay on The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, comments, "As the mirror of Jekyll's inner compulsions, he represents that shadow side of man which civilization has striven to submerge: he is a creature of primitive sensibilities loosed upon a world bent on denying him. A reminder of the barbarism which underlies civilization, he is a necessary component of human psychology which most would prefer to leave unrealized."

Freedom

Jekyll must admit to experiencing a certain sense of freedom when he transforms into this "shadow side" of himself. When he becomes Hyde he notes, "I felt younger, lighter, happier in body; within I was conscious of a heady recklessness, a current of disordered sensual images running like a millrace in my fancy … an unknown but not an innocent freedom of the soul." The freedom he experiences results from the release of his inner desires, which, being a respectable Victorian gentleman, he previously had to suppress.

Good and Evil

Stevenson's main focus in the novel is on this struggle between good and evil in Jekyll's soul. G. B. Stern in his book on Stevenson argues that the novel is "a symbolic portrayal of the dual nature of man, with the moral inverted: not to impress us by the victory of good over evil, but to warn us of the strength and ultimate triumph of evil over good once sin is suffered to enter human habitation."

Topics for Further Study

• Research Freud's theories on sublimation and apply them to the character of Dr. Jekyll.
• Philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche was Stevenson's contemporary. Investigate Nietzsche's theories of good and evil and apply them to The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.
• Write your own detective story or tale of the supernatural.
• Compare and contrast the structure of The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde to that of one of Edgar Allan Poe's short stories.

Style

Point of View

Stevenson continually alters the point of view in The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, which creates suspense and reinforces the novel's concentration on duplicity. The novel opens with a focus on John Gabriel Utterson, Dr. Jekyll's friend and attorney, and his gradual uncovering of the horror that lies at the heart of the story. Then the nar-rative immediately shifts to Utterson's friend and relative, Richard Enfield, who first informs Utter-son of the existence of Edward Hyde. Enfield expresses the problem faced by those who encounter Hyde and try to describe him when he comments, "I never saw a man I so disliked, and yet I scarce know why…. He gives a strong feeling of deformity, although I couldn't specify the point…. I can't describe him." Others who see him are struck by a "haunting sense of unexpressed deformity." The characters' inability to gain a clear vision of Hyde reflects his nature. Hyde represents Jekyll's dark side, an integral part of his soul that he had repressed for years. In his assessment of Hyde, Jekyll insists, "This too was myself." Yet readers do not gain a full understanding of Hyde or Jekyll until the end of the book when Jekyll makes his confession.

Narrative

In his overview of The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde Stewart F. Sanderson comments on the construction of the narrative: "The pace of the narration, the deft way in which details supporting both the action and its unravelling are interwoven throughout the narrative, and the economy with which the story's terrifying atmosphere is created, combine to form a work of extraordinary psychological depth and powerful impact."

Irving S. Saposnik, in his book on Stevenson, also praises the novel's narrative construction:

The three separable narrative voices—Enfield, Lanyon, Jekyll—are placed in successive order so that they add increasing rhetorical and psychological dimension to the events they describe. In contrast to other multiple narratives whose several perspectives often raise questions of subjective truth and moral ambiguity, these individual narratives in The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde provide a linear regularity of information—an incremental catalogue of attitudes toward Hyde's repulsiveness and Jekyll's decline.

Style

Several critics have praised the novel's style. Stephen Gwynn, in his book on Stevenson, insists that the novel is "a fable that lies nearer to poetry than to ordinary prose fiction." In his lecture on The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Vladimir Nabokov comments, "Stevenson had to rely on style very much in order to perform the trick, in order to master the two main difficulties confronting him: (1) to make the magic potion a plausible drug based on a chemist's ingredients and (2) to make Jekyll's evil side before and after the "hydization" a believable evil." Nabokov suggests that Stevenson accomplishes these goals through his use of setting and symbolism in the novel.

Setting

Stevenson provides setting details that gain symbolic significance in the novel. His description of London helps set a mood of suspense and suggests a foreboding sense of evil. In the morning fog, London becomes

dark like the light of some strange conflagration; and here, for a moment, the fog would be quite broken up, and a haggard shaft of daylight would glance in between the swirling wreaths. The dismal quarter of Soho seen under these changing glimpses, with its muddy ways, and slatternly passengers, and its lamps, which had never been extinguished or had been kindled afresh to combat this mournful reinvasion of darkness, seemed … like a district of some city in a nightmare.

Stevenson's description of the section of Soho where Hyde resides is especially ominous. As Utterson and Enfield walk through the city at the beginning of the novel, they find themselves in "a busy quarter" of London and pass a "certain sinister block of building" that "bore in every feature, the marks of prolonged and sordid negligence." The door to Hyde's quarters, in front of which the two men pause, is "blistered and distained. Tramps slouched into the recess…. The schoolboy had tried his knife on the mouldings; and for close on a generation, no one had appeared to drive away these random visitors or to repair their ravages."

Symbol

Stevenson uses other symbolic devices in the story, including the names "Jekyll" and "Hyde," which are of Scandinavian origin. Hyde comes from the Danish word hide which means "a haven" and Jekyll comes from the Danish name Jokulle, which means "an icicle." Nabokov argues, "Not knowing these simple derivations one would be apt to find all kinds of symbolic meanings, especially in Hyde, the most obvious being that Hyde is a kind of hiding place for Dr. Jekyll, in whom the jocular doctor and the killer are combined." Utterson's name closely fits his austere nature and relates to one of the novel's themes—the repression of personality.

Nabokov finds another important symbol in the story. The reader eventually learns that Jekyll's dissecting room, which he altered for his experiments, has become Hyde's quarters and the place where the transformations take place. Nabokov notes, "The relations of [Jekyll and Hyde] are typ-ified by Jekyll's house, which is half Jekyll and half Hyde."

Saposnik concludes,

the topography of The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde may be seen as a study in symbolic location, a carefully worked out series of contrasts between exterior modes and interior realities. Like much of Victorian life and letters, most of the story's action is physically internalized behind four walls. Utterson's ruminations, Lanyon's seduction, and Jekyll-Hyde's death all occur within the protective confines of what Stevenson in an essay termed "The Ideal House."

This Victorian home sheltered its inhabitants from public scrutiny.

Saposnik notes that as the action becomes more internal, so does the psychological direction of the novel:

Although the reader's first views of the house are external, the action soon directs him to the hall, then to the study, and finally to the ominous experiments behind the closed door of the former dissection laboratory. As Poole and Utterson break down the last barrier to Jekyll's secret, they literally and metaphorically destroy his one remaining refuge; by invading his physical sanctuary, they force him into a psychological admission whose only possibility is death.

Historical Context

Benthamism

Benthamism, also known as utilitarianism, became an important ideology in Victorian society. The term came to be associated with a philosophy of Jeremy Bentham, expressed in his Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation, that was adopted by a large portion of the Victorian middle class, affecting their habits and beliefs. By the 1820s, Benthamism gained a number of disciples who promoted his theories in theoretical debates. Supporters gained political power in the 1830s when approximately one hundred were elected to the first reformed Parliament in England.

At the core of this philosophy was the belief in "the greatest happiness for the greatest number," a phrase borrowed from Joseph Priestley, a late eighteenth-century Unitarian theologian. At the heart of this belief was the supposition that self-interest should be one's primary concern and that happiness could be attained by avoiding pain and seeking pleasure. In Victorian People and Ideas, Richard D. Altick explains that "utilitarianism was … wholly hedonistic; it made no allowance for the promptings of conscience, or for … the forces of generosity, mercy, compassion, self-sacrifice, love. Benthamite ethics had nothing to do with Christian morality."

Evangelicalism

Another equally important movement in the Victorian Age was Evangelicalism, a form of Protestant pietism. Evangelicalism focused less on doctrine and more on the day-to-day lives and eventual salvation of its followers. It set rigid patterns of conduct for its practitioners to follow in order that they might find atonement for their sins. Altick notes that "the Evangelical's anxious eye was forever fixed upon the 'eternal microscope' which searched for every moral blemish and reported every motion of the soul." The religion is also noted for its inspiration of humanitarian activities during the Victorian age.

London at the End of the Nineteenth Century

Michael Sadler describes London in the latter half of the nineteenth century in his Forlorn Sunset (1947):

London in the early sixties was still three parts jungle. Except for the residential and shopping areas … hardly a district was really "public" in the sense that ordinary folk went to and fro…. There was no knowing what kind of a queer patch you might strike, in what blind alley you might find yourself, to what embarrassment, insult, or even molestation you might be exposed. So the conventional middle class kept to the big thoroughfares, conscious that just behind the house-fronts to either side murmured a million hidden lives, but incurious as to their kind, and hardly aware that those who lived there were also London citizens."

Irving S. Saposnik in his article on Stevenson notes that during this period, London was

much like its inhabitants, a macrocosm of the necessary fragmentation that Victorian man found inescapable…. [It] represented that division-within-essential-unity which is the very meaning of The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. As both geographic and symbolic center, London exemplified what Stevenson called it in New Arabian Nights, "the great battlefield of mankind."

Reverend William Tuckniss describes London at the end of the nineteenth century as a place where

the seeds of good and evil are brought to the highest state of maturity, and virtue and vice most rapidly developed, under the forcing influences that everywhere abound…. London then may be considered as the grand central focus of operations, at once the emporium of crime and the palladium of Christianity. It is, in fact, the great arena of conflict between the powers of darkness and the ministry of heaven…. It is here that they join issue in the most deadly proximity, and struggle for the vantage-ground.

Critical Overview

When The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson was published in 1886, it quickly became a best seller in America and Great Britain and soon, its two main characters became part of the vocabulary of common speech. Whenever someone refers to a "Jekyll and Hyde personality," it is understood to mean someone with a combination of agreeable and disagreeable traits that appear in different situations. Since its initial publication, the work has appeared in several editions in print and has been adapted in various film, television, and audio versions. The novel has gained critical acclaim as well, especially for its narrative structure and its thematic significance.

Compare & Contrast

• 1886: Britain annexes upper Burma after the Anglo-Burmese war, but revolutionary forces will try to regain control for several years.
  
  Today: The British Empire exerts its influence over only a handful of colonies, protectorates, or trust territories.
• 1886: Das Kapital by Karl Marx is published in English.
  
  1887: "Bloody Sunday," a Socialist demonstration, erupts in Trafalgar Square.
  
  1926: Joseph Stalin becomes dictator of the Soviet Union. His reign of terror will last for twenty-seven years.
  
  1991: On December 17, president Mikhail Gorbachev orders the dissolution of the Soviet Union, and a new Commonwealth of Independent States is formed by the countries that formerly made up the USSR.
• 1882: The Married Woman's Property Act passes in England, granting women several important rights.
  
  Today: Women are guaranteed equal rights under the law.
• 1901: Queen Victoria dies and the Victorian Age ends. She is succeeded by Edward VII and the beginning of the Edwardian Age.
  
  Today: The British monarchy has been damaged by several scandals including the reported infidelities of Prince Charles and Lady Diana, their subsequent divorce, and her subsequent death.

James Ashcroft Noble, in his 1886 review of the book for The Academy, writes, "It is, indeed, many years since English fiction has been enriched by any work at once so weirdly imaginative in conception and so faultlessly ingenious in construction as this little tale." Celebrated novelist Henry James comments in his 1888 review for The Century that it has "the stamp of a really imaginative production." James praises Stevenson's artful construction of the "short, rapid, concentrated story, which is really a masterpiece of concision," and its consequential ability to sustain the reader's interest. Critic Leslie Stephen, in his 1902 assessment of the novel, finds it "able to revive the old thrill of delicious horror in one who does not care for psychical research; it has the same power of carrying one away by its imaginative intensity." In his piece on Stevenson for Dictionary of Literary Biography, Robert Kiely explains, "Readers of [Stevenson's] own time were exhilarated by the freshness, the unexpected directness in the midst of luscious paragraphs in which he had seemed only to be marking time…. Part of the appeal of the tale is, as the title suggests, its strangeness. It has its own obses-sive logic and momentum that sweep the reader along." Stewart F. Sanderson in his overview of the novel argues, "The pace of the narration, the deft way in which details supporting both the action and its unravelling are interwoven throughout the narrative, and the economy with which the story's terrifying atmosphere is created, combine to form a work of extraordinary psychological depth and powerful impact." Stephen Gwynn, in his book on Stevenson, praises the novel's style, insisting that it is "a fable that lies nearer to poetry than to ordinary prose fiction." Vladimir Nabokov, in his lecture on the book, considers it "a phenomenon of style" with "its own special enchantment."

Several critics have also celebrated Stevenson's psychological portrait of the novel's central character and his struggles with "those provinces of good and ill which divide and compound man's dual nature." Commenting on one of the novel's themes, Sanderson writes,

the notion of evil and the frailty of conscience coincides here with Stevenson's imaginative treatment and literary craftsmanship to form a work of remarkable power; so much so, particularly as the pace quickens with Jekyll's desperate attempts to replace the failing supply of his drug, that the reader is swept forward without questioning the premises of the allegory or the credibility of this strange but realistic tale.

Noble echoes this assessment when he concludes that the novel has a "much larger and deeper interest than that belonging to a mere skilful narrative. It is a marvelous exploration into the recesses of human nature; and though it is more than possible that Mr. Stevenson wrote with no ethical intent, its impressiveness as a parable is equal to its fascination as a work of art." Kiely notes the allegorical nature of the story with its "warnings against intellectual pride, hypocrisy, and indifference to the power of the evil within," but claims that "the continuing attraction of The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde is of an adult's nightmare of disintegration."

James praises Stevenson's exploration of the duality that exists in human nature, commenting that "the subject is endlessly interesting, and rich in all sorts of provocation, and Mr. Stevenson is to be congratulated on having touched the core of it…. There is a genuine feeling for the perpetual moral question, a fresh sense of the difficulty of being good and the brutishness of being bad."

Other critics have noted how successfully the novel illuminates Victorian sensibilities. Irving S. Saposnik, in his essay on the novel, applauds its "formal complexity and its moral depth" and its intricate portrait of Victorian mores: "With characteristic haste, it plunges immediately into the center of Victorian society to dredge up a creature ever present but submerged; not the evil opponent of a contentious good but the shadow self of a half man." Focusing on Stevenson's characterization of Henry Jekyll, Saposnik notes that he is "a complex example of his age of anxiety: woefully weighed down by self-deception, cruelly a slave to his own weakness, sadly a disciple of a severe discipline, his is a voice out of 'De Profundis,' a cry of Victorian man from the depths of his self-imposed underground." Saposnik concludes, "Victorian anxieties contributed greatly to The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde's success. The fictional paradox revealed the social paradox; Jekyll's dilemma spoke for more of his countrymen than many were willing to admit."

At the time of his death in 1894, Stevenson's literary reputation was firmly established. During the 1920s and 1930s, however, his works fell out of favor with scholars who considered them to be derivative and affected. Two decades later, critics and the public alike again praised his works. Today, the novel continues its popularity, even though Stevenson admitted that he thought it to be the worst piece he ever wrote.

Criticism

Wendy Perkins

Perkins is an associate professor of English at Prince George's Community College in Maryland and has published several articles on British and American authors. In the following essay, she examines how The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde reflects the influence of two important ideological forces in Victorian England: utilitarianism and Evangelicalism.

Two ideologies, utilitarianism and Evangelicalism, shaped the customs and mores of Victorian society in England during the nineteenth century. In Victorian People and Ideas, Richard D. Altick analyzes the impact of these two forces on Victorians, concluding "together they were responsible for much that was unappealing—to some Victorians as to us—in the age's thought and manners…. Both left their ineradicable imprint upon the whole of the Victorian period." They also left their mark on the literature of the age. In his classic tale The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Robert Louis Stevenson illustrates the destructive influence that utilitarian and Evangelical ideologies could have on the lives of the Victorians. In his complex characterization of Dr. Jekyll and his alter ego, Edward Hyde, Stevenson presents a critique of middle-class Victorian society and its adoption of the tenets of these two movements.

Utilitarianism, or Benthamism, was derived from the philosophy of Jeremy Bentham, expressed in his Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation. Utilitarians believed that self-interest should be one's primary concern and that happiness could be attained by avoiding pain and seeking pleasure. Evangelicalism, on the other hand, focused less on secular philosophy and more on the day-to-day lives and eventual salvation of its followers. In contrast to the hedonistic approach of Benthamism, Evangelicalism demanded a rigid code of conduct from its practitioners in exchange for the forgiveness of sin. It also sparked a wave of humanitarian reform that swept Great Britain during the mid-1800s.

Historian G. S. R. Kitson Clark, in his An Expanding Society, explains that the two ideologies

are poles apart in their intellectual postulates, but in their methods of thought and in their practical results they are very much the same. In each case a hard dogmatic position is chosen and adhered to without the slightest concession to the fact that it is necessary sometimes to respect other people's opinions, and the implications of that position are put into effect remorselessly and coldly. They were fit creeds for a period of emotional tension and fanaticism.

Altick adds that in the commingling of these two ideologies in Victorian society, "a quasi-fundamentalist brand of Christianity was pitted against a vigorously skeptical, even downright anti-religious secular movement. Yet working from sometimes antithetical premises, they joined to create and rationalize what came to be known as middle-class values." Historian Elie Halevy in his England in 1815 argues, "The fundamental paradox of English society [in the Victorian age] … is precisely the partial junction and combination of these two forces theoretically so hostile."

Readers first get a glimpse of one of these ideologies, Evangelicalism, in the character of Dr. Jekyll's friend and attorney Gabriel John Utterson. Stevenson describes him as "dry, cold, scanty and embarrassed in discourse," and "dusty, dreary," and notes that his face was "never lighted by a smile." His friends and acquaintances "liked to sit a while in his unobtrusive company, practicing for solitude, sobering their minds in the man's rich silence after the expense and strain of gaiety." Utterson's repressed personality and his friends' appreciation of it provide a good example of the rigid patterns of conduct followed by many middle-class Victorians who were influenced by the tenets of utilitarianism.

Yet Utterson has a human side that refuses to condemn others for not adhering to a strict code of conduct. Stevenson notes that "something eminently human beaconed from his eye; something indeed which never found its way into his talk … but more often and loudly in the acts of his life." Although he judged himself harshly, "he had an approved tolerance for others," as evidenced through his patience with Jekyll in all of his dealings with him. Irving S. Saposnik, in his essay on the novel, argues that Stevenson presents Utterson as the novel's "moral norm." Saposnik decides that the novel opens with a focus on Utterson

not only because he is Jekyll's confidant (the only one remaining) but because by person and profession he represents the best and worst of Victoria's social beings. Pledged to a code harsh in its application, he has not allowed its pressures to mar his sense of human need…. As a lawyer, he represents that legality which identifies social behavior as established law, unwritten but binding; as a judge, however, he is a combination of justice and mercy (as his names Gabriel John suggest), tempering rigidity with kindness, self-denial with compassion.

Richard Enfield, Utterson's relative and friend, has a similar temperament to that of Utterson. In his book on Stevenson, Saposnik finds Enfield "a strange, yet appropriate complement to his distant kinsman." This "well-known man about town" has a habit of "coming home from some place at the end of the world, about three o'clock of a black winter morning." Thus, according to Saposnik, he represents the "'other Victorian' side of Utterson's sobriety."

The negative influence of utilitarian and Evangelical ideologies becomes most apparent in Stevenson's characterization of Dr. Henry Jekyll, the novel's protagonist as well as its antagonist in his guise as Edward Hyde. Jekyll discovers within himself "those provinces of good and ill which divide and compound man's dual nature"—a state exacerbated and perhaps generated by these two main forces of Victorian society. Jekyll notes that throughout his life he was "inclined by nature to industry, fond of the respect of the wise and good among my fellowmen, and thus, as might have been supposed, with every guarantee of an honourable and distinguished future." He enjoys his relations with his friends and spends his time devoted to his charities and his church. Jekyll's dedication to humanitarian activities suggests his adoption of Evangelical doctrine. He seems also to adopt another tenet of that ideology—one that persuades followers to repress the "sinful" part of their nature. Thus when Jekyll admits to recognizing in himself a "certain impatient gaiety of disposition" and a failure to conquer his "aversions to the dryness of a life of study," his response is to try to repress those urges. His society encourages his "imperious desire to carry [his] head high and wear a more than commonly grave countenance before the public." Yet sometimes his "undignified" pleasures surface, and, as a result, he is filled "with an almost morbid sense of shame."

While Stevenson keeps the explicit nature of these "undignified" pleasures hidden, he clearly shows the effect of their existence on Jekyll, who considers them to be sinful and an expression of the "evil" side of his personality. Jekyll provides readers with a clue as to the nature of these hidden desires when he transforms into Hyde, who becomes the embodiment of his darker side. He notes with repugnance that Hyde's "every act and thought centered on self; drinking pleasure with bestial avidity from any degree of torture to another; relentless like a man of stone." Hyde clearly reflects the utilitarian devotion to hedonism and its lack of allowance for compassion, mercy, and love.

What Do I Read Next?

• Mary Reilly (1990), by Valerie Martin, tells the fictional story of the young maid, Mary Reilly, sent to live and work in the house of Dr. Jekyll/Mr. Hyde.
• Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus (1818), by Mary Shelley, focuses on another man who tries to alter nature and, as a result, destroys himself.
• For another complex study of good and evil, turn to Stevenson's Treasure Island (1884), his first bestseller.
• Bram Stoker's classic Dracula, published in 1897, presents a penetrating commentary on Victorian society as well as the nature of evil.
• The psychological studies of the criminal mind presented in Edgar Allan Poe's short stories like "The Tell-Tale Heart" and "The Cask of Amontillado" also reveal the author's mastery of the detective fiction form. A good collection of his works is The Complete Stories and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe, published by Doubleday in 1966.

When Jekyll first considers conducting experiments in order to rid himself of his evil side, he appears to be motivated more by altruistic im-pulses. He considers that if the evil impulses could be separated from the good,

if each … could be housed in separate identities, life would be relieved of all that was unbearable; the unjust might go his way, delivered from the aspirations and remorse of his more upright twin; and the just could walk steadfastly and securely on his upward path, doing the good things in which he found his pleasure, and no longer exposed to disgrace and penitence by the hands of this extraneous evil. It was the curse of mankind that these incongruous faggots were thus bound together—that the agonized womb of consciousness, these polar twins should be continuously struggling.

The more utilitarian side of his nature, however, soon emerges and overtakes his prudence as evidenced by his admission that "the temptation of a discovery so singular and profound at last overcame the suggestions of alarm." Looking back on the consequences of his actions, Jekyll claims, "Had I approached my discovery in a more noble spirit, had I risked the experiment while under the empire of generous or pious aspirations, all must have been otherwise, [but] at that time my virtue slumbered; my evil, kept awake by ambition, as alert and swift to seize the occasion."

The pressure Jekyll feels to conform to the dictates of society and thus to suppress his desires becomes overwhelming and inspires his decision to tamper with nature. Saposnik concludes that

Victorian man was haunted constantly by an inescapable sense of division. As rational and sensual being, as public and private man, as civilized and bestial creature, he found himself necessarily an actor, playing only that part of himself suitable to the occasion. As both variables grew more predictable, his role became more stylized; and what was initially an occasional practice became a way of life. By 1886, the English could already be described as "Mas-queraders," … and it is to all aspects of this existential charade that The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde addresses itself.

This duplicity continually troubles Jekyll. He explains, "I was no more myself when I laid aside restraint and plunged in shame, than when I laboured, in the eye of day, at the furtherance of knowledge or the relief of sorrow and suffering." His scientific background seems to offer him a way out.

When Jekyll takes the potion and transforms into Hyde, he experiences, for the first time, a free expression of his desires. He admits, "I felt younger, lighter, happier in body; within I was conscious of a heady recklessness, a current of disordered sensual images running like a millrace in my fancy." Even though he confesses, "I knew myself at the first breath of this new life, to be more wicked, tenfold more wicked, sold a slave to my original evil," he also cannot deny that "the thought, in that moment, braced and delighted me like wine." This new freedom after such a lifetime of repression becomes too intoxicating for Jekyll. Expressing his joy over his new state, he reveals that he "could plod in the public eye with a load of genial respectability, and in a moment … strip off these lendings and spring headlong into the sea of liberty." He admits Hyde is "pure evil," and that he feels pangs of conscience after Hyde's nighttime acts of "vicarious depravity." Yet he also confesses, "when I looked upon that ugly idol in the glass, I was conscious of no repugnance, rather of a leap of welcome. This too was myself. It seemed natural and human. In my eyes it bore a lovelier image of the spirit, it seemed more express and single, than the imperfect and divided countenance I had been hitherto accustomed to call mine."

Ironically, while Jekyll suffers from having to live a double life before the transformations, he enjoys his duplicity after them. When he can give free expression to each side of his nature, he is content, even though as Hyde, his urges are becoming more and more depraved. Saposnik argues that Jekyll's continued transformations reveal his moral weakness. He concludes,

Dedicated to an ethical rigidity more severe than Utterson's, because solely self-centered, he cannot face the necessary containment of his dual being. However he may attempt to disguise his experiments under scientific objectivity, and his actions under a macabre alter-ego, he is unable to mask his basic self-ishness…. He has thrived upon duplicity; and his reputation has been maintained largely upon his successful ability to deceive.

When Hyde starts to appear without the aid of the potion, he suspects that if this were "much prolonged, the balance of [his] nature might be permanently overthrown, the power of voluntary change be forfeited, and the character of Hyde become irrevocably" his. He recognizes that he is slowly losing hold of his "original and better self," and gradually becoming incorporated with his "second and worse." Yet Hyde, along with Jekyll's unacceptable desires, has been repressed too long, and so takes control of Jekyll's better side.

In his final assessment of Henry Jekyll, Saposnik concludes that the doctor is a "complex example of his age of anxiety: woefully weighed down by self-deception, cruelly a slave to his own weakness, sadly a disciple of a severe discipline, his is a voice out of De Profundis,' a cry of Victorian man from the depths of his self-imposed underground." Stevenson's characterization of Jekyll is so compelling to readers because it not only reflects the interaction between a man and his society, but also because it illuminates the complexity of human psychology. Henry James notes in his review of the novel that its "subject is endlessly interesting, and rich in all sorts of provocation, and Mr. Stevenson is to be congratulated on having touched the core of it…. There is a genuine feeling for the perpetual moral question, a fresh sense of the difficulty of being good and the brutishness of being bad."

Source: Wendy Perkins, in an essay for Novels for Students, Gale Group, 2001.

Joyce Carol Oates

In the following review, Oates discusses how Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde illustrate the Victorian dichotomy of good versus evil.

Like such mythopoetic figures as Frankenstein, Dracula, and, even, Alice ("in Wonderland"), Dr.-Jekyll-and-Mr. Hyde has become, in the century following the publication of Robert Louis Stevenson's famous novella, what might be called an autonomous creation. That is, people who have never read the novella—people who do not in fact "read" at all—know by way of popular culture who Jekyll-Hyde is. (Though they are apt to speak of him, not altogether accurately, as two disparate beings: Dr. Jekyll, Mr. Hyde.) A character out of prose fiction, Jekyll-Hyde seems nonetheless autogenetic in the way that vampires and werewolves and (more benignly) fairies seem autogenetic: surely he has always existed in the collective imagination, or, like Jack the Ripper, in actual history? (As "Dracula" is both the specific creation of the novelist Bram Stoker and a nightmare figure out of middle European history.) It is ironic that, in being so effaced, Robert Louis Stevenson has become immortalized by way of his private fantasy—which came to him, by his own testimony, unbidden, in a dream.

The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886) will strike contemporary readers as a characteristically Victorian moral parable, not nearly so sensational (nor so piously lurid) as Stoker's Dracula; in the tradition, perhaps, of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, in which a horrific tale is conscientiously subordinated to the author's didactic intention. Though melodramatic in conception it is not melodramatic in execution since virtually all its scenes are narrated and summarized after the fact. There is no ironic ambiguity, no Wildean subtlety, in the doomed Dr. Jekyll's confession: he presents himself to the reader as a congenital "double dealer" who has nonetheless "an almost morbid sense of shame" and who, in typically Victorian middle-class fashion, must act to dissociate "himself" (i.e., his reputation as a highly regarded physician) from his baser instincts. He can no longer bear to suppress them and it is impossible to eradicate them. His discovery that "Man is not truly one, but two" is seen to be a scientific fact, not a cause for despair. (And, in time, it may be revealed that man is "a mere polity of multifarious, incongruous and independent denizens"—which is to say that the ego contains multitudes: multiple personalities inhabit us all. It cannot be incidental that Robert Louis Stevenson was himself a man enamoured of consciously playing roles and assuming personae: his friend Arthur Symons said of him that he was "never really himself except when he was in some fantastic disguise.")

Thus Dr. Jekyll's uncivilized self, to which he gives the symbolic name Hyde, is at once the consequence of a scientific experiment (as the creation of Frankenstein's monster was a scientific experiment) and a shameless indulgence of appetites that cannot be assimilated into the propriety of everyday Victorian life. There is a sense in which Hyde, for all his monstrosity, is but an addiction like alcohol, nicotine, drugs: "The moment I choose," Dr. Jekyll says, "I can be rid of him." Hyde must be hidden not simply because he is wicked but because Dr. Jekyll is a willfully good man—an example to others, like the much-admired lawyer Mr. Utterson who is "lean, long, dusty, dreary and yet somehow [improbably?] lovable." Had the Victorian ideal been less hypocritically ideal or had Dr. Jekyll been content with a less perfect public reputation his tragedy would not have occurred. (As Wilde's Basil Hallward says in The Picture of Dorian Gray: "We in our madness have separated the two [body and soul] and have invented a realism that is vulgar, and an ideality that is void." The key term here is surely "madness.")

Dr. Jekyll's initial experience, however, approaches ecstasy as if he were, indeed, discovering the Kingdom of God that lies within. The magic drug causes nausea and a grinding in the bones and a "horror of the spirit that cannot be exceeded at the hour of birth or death." Then:

I came to myself as if out of a great sickness. There was something strange in my sensations, something indescribably new and, from its very novelty, incredibly sweet. I felt younger, lighter, happier in body; within I was conscious of a heady recklessness, a current of disordered sensual images running like a mill race in my fancy, a solution of the bonds of obligation, an unknown but not an innocent freedom of the soul. I knew myself, at the first breath of this new life, to be more wicked, tenfold more wicked, sold a slave to my original evil; and the thought, in that moment, braced and delighted in me like wine.

Unlike Frankenstein's monster, who is nearly twice the size of an average man, Jekyll's monster is dwarfed: "less robust and less developed" than the good self since Jekyll's rigorously suppressed life has been the consequence of unrelenting "effort, virtue and control." (Stevenson's anatomy of the human psyche is as grim as Freud's—virtually all a "good" man's waking energies are required in beating back and denying the "badness" in him!) That Hyde's frenzied pleasures are even in part specifically sexual is never confirmed, given the Victorian cast of the narrative itself, but, to extrapolate from an incident recounted by an eyewitness, one is led to suspect they are: Hyde is observed running down a ten-year-old girl in the street and calmly trampling over her body. Much is made subsequently of the girl's "screaming"; and of the fact that money is paid to her family as recompense for her violation.

Viewed from without Hyde is detestable in the abstract: "I never saw a man I so disliked," the lawyer Enfield says, "and yet I scarce know why. He must be deformed somewhere …" Another witness testifies to his mysteriously intangible deformity "without any nameable malformation." But when Jekyll looks in the mirror he is conscious of no repugnance, "rather of a leap of welcome. This, too, was myself. It seemed natural and human." When Jekyll returns to himself after having been Hyde he is plunged into wonder rather than remorse at his "vicarious depravity." The creature summoned out of his soul and sent forth to do his pleasure is a being "inherently malign and villainous; his every act and thought centered on self; drinking pleasure with bestial avidity from any degree of torture to another; relentless like a man of stone." Yet Hyde is safely other—"It was Hyde, after all, and Hyde alone, that was guilty."

Oscar Wilde's equally didactic but far more suggestive and poetic The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890) makes the disturbing point that Dorian Gray, the unblemished paragon of evil, "is the type of which the age is searching for, and what it is afraid it has found." (Just as Wilde's Lord Henry defends insincerity "as a method by which we can multiply our personalities.") By contrast Jekyll's Hyde is a very nearly Bosch-like creature, proclaiming his wickedness to the naked eye as if, in Utterson's words, he is a "troglodyte … the mere radiance of a foul soul that thus transpires through, and transfigures, its clay continent." One is reminded of nineteenth-century theories of criminology advanced by C. S. Lombroso and Henry Maudsley, among others, who argued that outward physical defects and deformities are the visible signs of inward and invisible faults: the criminal is a type that can be easily identified by experts. Dr. Jekyll is the more reprehensible in his infatuation with Hyde in that, as a well-trained physician, he should have recognized at once the telltale symptoms of mental and moral degeneracy in his alter ego's very face. By degrees, like any addict, Jekyll surrenders his autonomy. His ego ceases being "I" and splits into two distinct and eventually warring selves, which share memory as they share a common body. Only after Hyde commits murder does Jekyll make the effort to regain control; but by this time, of course, it is too late. What had been "Jekyll"—that precarious cuticle of a self, that field of tensions in perpetual opposition to desire—has irrevocably split. It is significant that the narrator of Jekyll's confession speaks of both Jekyll and Hyde as if from the outside. And with a passionate eloquence otherwise absent from Stevenson's prose:

The powers of Hyde seemed to have grown with the sickliness of Jekyll. And certainly the hate that now divided them was equal on each side. With Jekyll, it was a thing of vital instinct. He had now seen the full deformity of that creature that shared with him some of the phenomena of consciousness, and was co-heir with him to death: and beyond these links of community, which in themselves made the most poignant part of his distress, he thought of Hyde, for all his energy of life, as of something not only hellish but inorganic. This was the shocking thing; that the slime of the pit seemed to utter cries and voices; that the amorphous dust gesticulated and sinned; that what was dead, and had no shape, should usurp the offices of life. And this again, that that insurgent horror was knit to him closer than a wife, closer than an eye; lay caged in his flesh, where he heard it mutter and felt it struggle to be born; and at every hour of weakness, and in the confidence of slumber, prevailed against him, and deposed him out of life.

"Think of it," Jekyll had gloated at the start, "—I did not even exist!" And the purely metaphorical becomes literally true.

The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, through stimulated by a dream, is not without its literary antecedents: among them Edgar Allan Poe's "William Wilson" (1839), in which, paradoxically, the "evil" self is the narrator and the "good" self, or conscience, the double; and Charles Dickens' uncompleted The Mystery of Edwin Drood (1870), in which the Choirmaster Jack Jasper, an opium addict, oscillates between "good" and "evil" impulses in his personality with an anguish so convincingly calibrated as to suggest that, had Dickens lived to complete the novel, it would have been one of his masterpieces—and would have made The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde redundant. Cautionary tales of malevolent, often diabolical doubles abound in folklore and oral tradition, and in Plato's Symposium it was whimsically suggested that each human being has a double to whom he was once physically attached—a bond of Eros that constituted in fact a third, and higher, sex in which male and female were conjoined.

The visionary starkness of The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde anticipates that of Freud in such late melancholy meditations as Civilization and Its Discontents (1929–30): there is a split in man's psyche between ego and instinct, between civilization and "nature," and the split can never be healed. Freud saw ethics as a reluctant concession of the individual to the group, veneer of a sort overlaid upon an unregenerate primordial self. The various stratagems of culture—including, not incidentally, the "sublimation" of raw aggression by way of art and science—are ultimately powerless to contain the discontent, which must erupt at certain periodic times, on a collective scale, as war. Stevenson's quintessentially Victorian parable is unique in that the protagonist initiates his tragedy of doubleness out of a fully lucid sensibility—one might say a scientific sensibility. Dr. Jekyll knows what he is doing, and why he is doing it, though he cannot, of course, know how it will turn out. What is unquestioned throughout the narrative, by either Jekyll or his circle of friends, is mankind's fallen nature: sin is original and irremediable For Hyde, though hidden, will not remain so. And when Jekyll finally destroys him he must destroy Jekyll too.

Source: Joyce Carol Oates, "Jekyll/Hyde," in Hudson Review, Vol. XL, No. 4, Winter 1988, pp. 603-08.

Harry M. Geduld

In the following essay excerpt, Geduld traces the intellectual and psychological environment in which Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde was first published.

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Source: Harry M. Geduld, "Introduction," in The Definitive Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde Companion, Garland Publishing, Inc., 1983, pp. 8-10.

Daniel V. Fraustino

In the following essay. Fraustino explores how two of the characters in Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde overcome both social and language convention to discover the secret of Dr. Jekyll-Mr Hyde.

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Source: Daniel V. Fraustino, "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde: Anatomy of Misperception," in Arizona Quarterly, Vol. 38, No. 3, Autumn 1982, pp. 235-40.

Sources

Altick, Richard D., Victorian People and Ideas: A Companion for the Modern Reader of Victorian Literature, Norton, 1973.

Gwynn, Stephen, Robert Louis Stevenson, Macmillan, 1939.

Halevy, Elie, England in 1815, Barnes and Noble, 1968.

James, Henry, "Robert Louis Stevenson," in The Century, Vol. XXXV, No. 6, April 1888, pp. 868-79.

Kiely, Robert, "Robert Louis Stevenson," in Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume 18: Victorian Novelists after 1885, Gale, 1983, pp. 281-97.

Nabokov, Vladimir, "Robert Louis Stevenson," in Reference Guide to English Literature, 2d ed., edited by D. L. Kirkpatrick, St. James Press, 1991.

Noble, James Ashcroft, Review, in The Academy, Vol. XXIX, No. 716, January 23, 1886, p. 55.

Sadler, Michael, Forlorn Sunset, Constable, 1947.

Sanderson, Stewart F., "Dr. Jekyll And Mr. Hyde: Overview," in Lectures on Literature, edited by Fredson Bowers, Harcourt, 1980.

Saposnik, Irving S., "Robert Louis Stevenson, Chapter 6: The Anatomy of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde," in Twayne's English Authors Series Online, G. K. Hall & Co., 1999.

Smith, Curtis C., "Robert Louis Stevenson," in Supernatural Fiction Writers Vol. 1, Scribner's, 1985, pp. 307-13.

Stephen, Leslie, "Robert Louis Stevenson," in Studies of a Biographer, Duckworth and Co., 1902, pp. 206-46.

Stern, G. B., Robert Louis Stevenson, British Writers Vol. 5, British Council, 1982, pp. 383-98.

Tuckniss, Reverend William, Introduction to London Labour and the London Poor Volume IV, 1862.

For Further Study

Charyn, Jerome, "Afterword: Who Is Hyde," in The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Bantam, 1981.

Charyn offers a psychological study of Jekyll/Hyde and concludes that the character remains ambiguous.

Daiches, David, Robert Louis Stevenson, 1947.

An early work on Stevenson. Daiches provides a penetrating analysis of several of Stevenson's works including The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, focusing on the author's technique.