‘Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde’: A Study in Duplicity
A review of ‘Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde’, by Robert Louis Stevenson; Longmans, Green & Co., 1886.
Gabriel John Utterson is an upright man, a lawyer of sober habits. He and his cousin Richard Enfield are on their weekly walk when they come upon a mysterious house down a by-street. Enfield tells Utterson that a few months ago, at three o’clock in the morning, he saw a man named Edward Hyde trample an eight-year-old girl underfoot. Enfield forced Hyde to pay off the girl’s family, and it was to the door of this house that Hyde brought Enfield to give him the cheque. That cheque was signed by a Doctor Henry Jekyll, a respectable man and Utterson’s client and friend. Utterson fears Hyde is blackmailing Jekyll, for Jekyll recently made Hyde the sole beneficiary if he were to die. Jekyll is evasive when Utterson speaks to him about Hyde. He can rid himself of Hyde whenever he wants, Jekyll says.
Even if we have somehow succeeded in living our lives without ever encountering a mention of Jekyll and Hyde, we know what is going on in this book. We know that Jekyll and Hyde are the same man. Utterson hasn’t worked it out yet, and so, as in Oedipus Rex, we experience the story with a sense of impending disaster. Utterson is going to find out that his mild-mannered friend and the monstrous Hyde are one and the same man. One difference between Jekyll and Hyde and Oedipus Rex is that the fate of Oedipus is divinely ordained. The fate of Jekyll is entirely manufactured by him.
We know that Jekyll and Hyde are the same man.
The story has been taken to be dealing with the two-sidedness of human nature. Alexander Solzhenitsyn, in his Gulag Archipelago, invoked this idea in a celebrated passage, writing that the ‘line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either — but right through every human heart — and through all human hearts.’ But this is too simplistic. Stevenson’s book is more subtle. Jekyll is not purely good, nor Hyde purely evil. The real horror of the story is not that Hyde exists. It is that Jekyll enjoys him. For never did Jekyll set out to rid himself of evil: he created Hyde, or rather the means to become Hyde, so that he could enjoy his darker instincts without shame or consequence. The story, on this reading, is not about the duality of man but the impossibility of keeping sin in a separate box. Hence why Jung enjoins us to integrate our ‘shadow’. We do not (and cannot) rid ourselves of our capacity to do harm. We must keep it under control. ‘Speak softly and carry a big stick; you will go far,’ as Teddy Roosevelt put it. We keep our sword sheathed—but we still have the sword.
Another, I think more astute and insightful view, is that Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde concerns repression and its consequences. On Freud’s hydraulic model of emotions, when we push away feelings they build up like steam in a boiler, forcing their way out in unplanned and/or harmful ways. His theory, unscientific if common-sensical, inspired psychologists and neuroscientists, who found that the suppression of emotion turns on the part of the brain linked to stress and aggression, and chronic suppression weakens the area of the brain that regulates impulse control. Research into post-traumatic stress disorder, political repression, and the effects of chronic frustration confirm that it really isn’t healthy to keep things bottled up. It is perhaps not a coincidence that Stevenson wrote Jekyll and Mr. Hyde a year after the 1885 passage of the Labouchere Amendment, which made ‘gross indecency’—defined as any homosexual act—as a crime. It was under this law that Oscar Wilde was arrested and jailed ten years later.
Such a thing—to be exposed as wanting in respectability—was a peculiarly Victorian fear, and one that runs through Strange Case of Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. The Victorians were very concerned with appearances, and to a great extent reality was a secondary matter. What counts is not so much being virtuous, but seeming to me. The Victorian gentleman was expected to keep his vices hidden and to maintain outward forms of decency. Jekyll is no paragon of virtue: he is ambitious: he wants, through Hyde, the best of both worlds. Hyde is the manifestation of a cultural fear that the mask might slip. And his appearance hints at this. He is not a wicked villain, but something bestial. He is small, twisted, and deformed—though no one can say how. He provokes not fear or awe but disgust: ‘He is not easy to describe. There is something wrong with his appearance; something displeasing, something downright detestable.’
The Victorian gentleman was expected to keep his vices hidden and to maintain outward forms of decency
Much of the horror of the story grows out what is left unsaid. The cursory character of Hyde’s crimes — Hyde ‘trampled calmly over the child’s body and left her screaming on the ground’—give us the sense that the characters inhabit a wholly indifferent, amoral and meaningless world; it is worth noting that Stevenson was for a time an atheist who later returned to the church, and was animated by the question what it means to be good. Hyde has no motive beyond pleasure. But Stevenson does not moralise. Rather, he renders all this in a clinical way. The novel is not a fevered confession but comprises a series of documents—testimonies, letters, legal papers—which gives it the air of a medical or criminal inquiry. The supernatural is presented in the dry language of rational men, as though evil might be dissected and studied like a corpse in a laboratory.
This is a short book at barely a hundred pages. Its brevity is part of its power. There are no wasted words, no unneeded flourishes. It is a lean, mean, dispassionate anatomy of duplicity.
