The Strange case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde

(cfr. Spiazzi,Tavella, Only Connect, Bologna, Zanichelli, 1997, pp.673-674)

A two-sided nightmare

Some works of art born out of a nightmare continue to communicate fear through time. The universal nightmare is two-sided, with its external part caused by an indifferent hostile physical and social environment in which man must live, and its internal part which are derived from the contradictory impulses which live inside man. This conflict can be found in The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mister Hyde, a novel that has so struck the sense of nightmare with which men live, that its title has been absorbed into the English language as a commonplace expression to characterize a "two-faced" man.

The origin of the novel

This novel had an oneiric origin: afflicted with tuberculoses and haunted by sleeplessness and melancholy, Stevenson wrote down in his diary that he had dreamed of a man in a laboratory who had swallowed a drug and turned into a different being. It was the Gothic aspect of this story that excited him, and he produced a first draft.

Even if Gothic novels were despised by the great Victorian novelists, they constituted an important tendency in the 19^th century literature and became increasingly popular in the 1880s and 1890s. Many works of those years depicted the double nature of Victorian society, with its antithetical values and sexual repression, its virtuous angels of hearth and scarlet women, its monsters and psychopaths. Even Stevenson seems to have been concerned since his youth with the duality of man’s nature, the good and the evil sides; the Calvinism of his mother’s family not only gave him a sense of man’s divided self, but its pessimism moved him to rebel against religion, a trait which was to last his entire life.

Plot

The plot of Dr Jeky/l and Mr Hyde is quite simple: the protagonist is a man divided against himself in a. respectable being, Jekyll, and in an evil genius, Hyde; these two beings are in perpetual struggle and it is the same act of secret chemistry that releases Hyde and restores Jekyll. Once Hyde is released from hiding, he feeds his evil inclinations and conquers the entire respectable man. When the Hyde element has achieved domination over the Jekyll aspect, the individual has only two choices. On the one hand, the man may plunge into a life of crime and depravity, or, on the other hand, the Jekyll aspect, having once failed to suppress the raging violence of Hyde, must eliminate Hyde in the only way left: by killing him. Hence Jekyll’s self-murder, or suicide, is the final and only choice. Therefore, Stevenson implies that man’s salvation is based on the annihilation of one part of his nature if he lives in a civilized society.

Setting and characters

The setting of the novel seems to be halfway between England and Scotland, London and Edinburgh. Both capitals had a "double" nature and reflected the hypocrisy of Victorian society: London had the respectable West End and the appalling poverty of the East End slums; Edinburgh had the New Town with its wide squares, and the Old Town where crime thrived. This ambivalence is reinforced by the symbolism of Jekyll’s house (L> T 129) whose two façades are symbolically the faces of the two opposed sides of the same man: the front of this house, used by the Doctor, is fair, part of a square of ancient, handsome houses..."; while the rear side, used by Hyde, is part of a sinister block of buildings which "showed no windows". As Jekyll has lived a virtuous life his face is handsome, his hands white and well-shaped, his body larger and more harmoniously proportioned than Hyde’s. Edward Hyde is pale and dwarfish, his hands are dark and hairy, he gives an impression of deformity, and the good Mr Utterson, a friend of Jekyll’s, reads "Satan’s signature" in his traits. On several occasions Hyde is made to appear dressed in Jekyll’s fine clothes, which are too large for him; this fact points out how much smaller and uglier Hyde is than his alter ego. Though the evil side of Jekyll’s nature is initially less developed because most of his life has been devoted to "effort, virtue and control" as Hyde plunges into "the sea of liberty", he begins seriously to erode his good twin. The smaller, slighter Hyde begins to grow in stature and the original balance of good and evil in Jekyll’s nature is threatened with being permanently overthrown. Most scenes of the novel take place at night: there is no natural daylight, but only the artificial lighting of Jekyll’s house and of the nightmarish street lamps. The most important events are wrapped up in darkness and fog: when Hyde tramples over the child it is three in the morning; the murder of a respectable Member of Parliament, Sir Danvers Carew, happens at night; as well as Jekyll/Hyde’s suicide. The bleakness of this setting is reflected in the characters who inhabit it; there are no women, no wives and the only ties between people are professional ones. The men are all bachelors and belong to the same respectable world: one is a lawyer and two are doctors, so the story reflects the male patriarchal world of Victorianism.

Narrative technique

Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde has a multi-narrational structure, in which a complex series of points of view is presented. There are four narrators, through whom almost the whole action is seen and filtered: Enfield, Utterson, Lanyon and finally Dr Jekyll himself. Utterson has the role of a detective and he is very much in line with Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes, since he follows clues and draws hypotheses. He himself shows aspects of duality: he is the typical Victorian respectable man but there is a certain ambiguity in his soul, since he is tolerant towards evildoers. He has a strange relationship with his distant relative Enfield and all this is a symbolic foreshadowing of the central double; the walks of these two very different men may be a metaphor for the incongruous elements of their personality which men must accept to live with, and which Jekyll refuses. The other narrator Lanyon, superficially a good man, is also a kind of a mirror for Jekyll: his curiosity in the end prevails and allows him to be tempted by forbidden knowledge, and he dies. The last narrator is Jekyll himself, whose narrative and final confession takes up the last chapter.

Influences and interpretations

Stevenson drew inspiration for the description of Hyde from Darwin’s studies about man’s kinship to the animal world. Hyde’s small stature indicates that his body is not exercised; he is lame, "deformed", Lanyon calls him "abnormal" but what his deformity consists in, nobody is able to say. Hyde may be both the primitive, the evolutionary forerunner of civilized man, since he is described in terms of grotesque animal imagery, and the symbol of repressed psychological drives. Jekyll has, in fact, projected his hidden pleasures in Hyde, which turns to be part of his own being, so Dr Jekyll is as guilty as Mr Hyde. Thus, Jekyll is a kind of "Victorian Faust" and his awareness a sort of pact with an interior evil that controls him in the end. This novel may also be considered a reflection on art itself, as a kind of psychological search, and Jekyll’s discovery may symbolize the artist’s journey into the unexplored regions of the human psyche.