Jekyll and Hyde

Jekyll is wealthy, admired and charitable: ‘a large, well-made, smooth-faced man of fifty’ (Chapter 3) with ‘every mark of capacity and kindness’ (Chapter 3).

But he has a secret. In his statement he admits that as a young man he had ‘a certain impatient gaiety of disposition’ (Chapter 10): a desire for pleasures that a respectable gentleman had to hide. Rather than give them up, he lived a double life.

Jekyll is not simply good. He is an ordinary mix of good and bad who wants to enjoy his bad side without anyone knowing.

Nobody can say exactly what is wrong with Hyde. Enfield says ‘He must be deformed somewhere’ (Chapter 1) but can't name how. After meeting him, Utterson thinks:

Mr. Hyde was pale and dwarfish, he gave an

impression of deformity without any nameable malformation, he had a

displeasing smile, he had borne himself to the lawyer with a sort of

murderous mixture of timidity and boldness, and he spoke with a husky,

5whispering and somewhat broken voice; all these were points against

him, but not all of these together could explain the hitherto unknown

disgust, loathing and fear with which Mr. Utterson regarded him. “There

must be something else,” said the perplexed gentleman. “There is

something more, if I could find a name for it. God bless me, the man

10seems hardly human! Something troglodytic, shall we say? or can it be

the old story of Dr. Fell? or is it the mere radiance of a foul soul

that thus transpires through, and transfigures, its clay continent? The

last, I think; for, O my poor old Harry Jekyll, if ever I read Satan’s

signature upon a face, it is on that of your new friend.”

The list of details still can't explain the ‘disgust, loathing and fear’. The word ‘troglodytic’ means like a cave-dweller: primitive and less than human. To Utterson, Hyde's face shows ‘Satan’s signature’.

Hyde's violence is sudden and pitiless. He ‘trampled calmly over the child's body’ (Chapter 1); Enfield says ‘It wasn't like a man; it was like some damned Juggernaut’ (Chapter 1).

He murders Sir Danvers Carew ‘with ape-like fury’ (Chapter 4), beating him until ‘the bones were audibly shattered’ (Chapter 4).

Stevenson often describes Hyde as an animal: he snarls, and moves ‘like a monkey’ (Chapter 8). To Victorian readers who knew Darwin's ideas, this suggested a man who had slipped back down the scale of evolution.

In his statement, Jekyll explains his discovery:

With every day, and from 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 to such a dreadful

shipwreck: that man is not truly one, but truly two. I say two, because

5the state of my own knowledge does not pass beyond that point. Others

will follow, others will outstrip me on the same lines; and I hazard

the guess that man will be ultimately known for a mere polity of

multifarious, incongruous and independent denizens. I, for my part,

from the nature of my life, advanced infallibly in one direction and in

10one direction only. It was on the moral side, and in my own person,

that I learned to recognise the thorough and primitive duality of man;

I saw that, of the two natures that contended in the field of my

consciousness, even if I could rightly be said to be either, it was

only because I was radically both

Jekyll's potion separated out his evil side, Hyde. But Jekyll himself stayed a mixture: ‘man is not truly one, but truly two’ (Chapter 10).

At first Jekyll loves being Hyde. He can ‘strip off these lendings and spring headlong into the sea of liberty’ (Chapter 10), free from the rules of respectable life.

But Hyde grows stronger. Jekyll starts changing in his sleep, waking up as Hyde. When he tries to stop, ‘My devil had been long caged, he came out roaring’ (Chapter 10), and Carew is murdered. In the end the transformations happen without the potion.

Why Stevenson uses them: Jekyll and Hyde show what happens when people repress their darker side instead of facing it. The more Jekyll hides Hyde, the stronger Hyde becomes.