DR JEKYLL AND MR HYDE

By the end of the 19^th century the great period of realism in the novel had come to an end. Darwin’s theories on man’s place and significance in the universe had suddenly made man infinitely small. The loss of spiritual certainty and questioning on a more metaphysical level, together with the Decadent movement with its emphasis on art at the expense of Life, meant the insufficiency of Realism, and the popularity of the “romance”.

Realistic novel vs Romance

The novelist of realism depends on “real life”, from which his overall meaning will grow; the romance writer starts from an idea, a thesis, which his work will then illustrate.

Truth for the writer of romance means essentially truth to the human heart, not to real facts. Characters in the romance are less “real” and closer to stylized stereotypes.

So the gothic and the supernatural lie at the very heart of the romance

The novel does not deal with a simplistic opposition of good and evil in man, but is rather an inquiry into how these terms are connected with public virtue and false respectability, revealing the unreliability of Victorian society.

Imagery and Symbolism

The setting is halfway between England and Scotland. Both capitals have a “double” nature. London has the respectable West End and the appalling poverty of the East End.; Edinburgh has the New Town with its spacious squares and geometrical order, and the Old Town with its criminal underworld. They both reflect the hypocrisy to be found in Victorianism.

In Stevenson’s works exterior setting often reflects interior psychological reality. This can be seen in the symbolism of houses and passageways. There is a hint of all not being what it seems. This ambivalence is reinforced in the description of Jekyll’s house. It stands in a square which, again, seems to symbolize Jekyll’s moral nature, the two parts of the house with its two entrances reflecting his dual nature. The setting prepares us symbolically for the central core of meaning of the novel: a world of duplicity in which social acceptability disguising evil and hypocrisy are shown to exist in as close proximity as Hyde’s door to Jekyll’s.

This architectural dimension becomes very important in the allegorical structure of the novel: a series of doors are opened, barriers are overcome, and passageways crossed, all symbolically marking successive phases of knowledge. The opening of each door takes us further and further away from the brightly-lit hearth of Jekyll’s mansion, his outward, official public self, in which he indulges in dinner parties with his other professional friends over wine ( knowledge of vintages is a powerful symbol of class), to the darker, unknown side of Jekyll, the study, the symbol of Jekyll’s attempt to “dissect” (sezionare) his own personality, a laboratory whose appearance reveals the confusion of Jekyll’s troubled soul.

The narrators

There are four narrators that fall into patterns of doubles, all mirroring in some way Jekyll and Hyde. Utterson’s strange relationship with his distant relative Enfield is a symbolic foreshadowing of the central ”double”. The walks of these two men so different one from the other – dull but necessary to them – may be a metaphor for the incongruous elements in personality which man must accept to live with, and which Jekyll refuses.

Lanyon is also a kind of mirror-figure for Jekyll. His curiosity in the end has the better of him  and he allows himself be tempted by forbidden knowledge and he dies.

This is an intensely masculine novel: there are no women and the only ties are professional ones. In its male centeredness, the story reflects the exclusively male professional, patriarchal world of late Victorianism.

Levels of interpretation

Any approach to the dual nature of man in the late 19^th century could not but take into account the teaching of Darwinism that is man’s kinship to the animal world. Such a description of man is concentrated in Hyde. When he first appears he is described as a “little man”; Utterson calls him ”dwarfish”. Hyde’s small stature indicates that he is relatively unexercised. But Utterson uses also the term “troglodytic” that brings us directly up against the question of the primitive nature of man.

Man is essentially made up of at least two different components, the primitive and the civilized, the primitive forces from man’s evolutionary past pushing up against the civilized form which he has built over the generations. Hyde is the primitive, the evolutionary forerunner of civilized man. He is described in terms of grotesque animal imagery. (ape-like). Hyde’s brutal violence is a metaphor of one of Darwin’s central ideas: the struggle for existence on the part of species: he is the total sum of the primitive forces in man, evolutionary forces.

Hyde might also be read as a symbol of fundamental, repressed, psychological drives. The Freudian psychological framework of the id, the ego and super-ego may briefly be described as follows. The id is the dark, inaccessible part of the personality, devoid of ethical and moral values, centre of the primitive instinctual drives, the passions, energy, love of life, the mainspring of creation but also violence. The id is vitality, but it also the destructive, primeval forces; it is “energy of life” as Jekyll says of Hyde. The ego and super-ego are the controlling forces of this violent subconscious. The ego is the will or consciousness, while the super-ego represents the moral precepts of the mind as well as its ideal aspirations, the controlling agents of the satisfaction of needs , order, discipline and duty. Together they sublimate the forces of the id into civilization, social structure, rationality, creative activity (art, science) and so on. They keep this dark primitive energy in check.

On this psychological plane, Hyde may be considered a kind of literary metaphor for the Freudian id and the libido force, detached from Jekyll, who is the whole man, id, ego and super-ego. In Hyde a deep primitive layer of the personality – Jekyll’s hidden drives – has been isolated and brought out into the open. Hyde literally brings out the most primitive and worst in the people around him. Jekyll describes the release of his libidinous self as the casting off the bonds of obligation, the restrictions of social rules and moral decision.

But how are we to interpret Hyde?

Hyde is initially a kind of moral zombie, the evolutionary and psychological primitive side of man, unfeeling rather than cruel, amoral rather than immoral. Hyde is not initially evil; he only becomes evil as he is allowed to develop independently, unhindered by his moral counterpart, as his immoral creator uses him for his own depraved purposes. Thus he develops from primitiveness to evil, a development that can also be seen in the changing nature of his violence (the murder of Sir Carew).

Jekyll is identified more and more with Hyde: his evil deeds are perpetrated now as the whole figure of Jekyll. Dr Jekyll is as guilty as Mr Hyde. Jekyll admits his failure to split his personality into two halves, good and bad.

The more freedom Hyde obtains, the less control there is, the more he becomes impatient. As Hyde is refused by Jekyll, he becomes more violent and cruel. “ The powers of Hyde seem to have grown with the sickliness of Jekyll”. Inexorably he takes over the whole of Jekyll. Hyde is portrayed in terms of vampirism. The initial father and son relationship is now of mutual hate: Jekyll hates the ascendancy that Hyde has over him, and Hyde hates Jekyll because of Jekyll’s hatred But also because Hyde knows that Jekyll can destroy him by committing suicide.

Jekyll can be defined as a lonely Victorian Faust, who has sold his soul to the devil of his pride and hypocrisy, and overreaching presumption, has underestimated the strength of the forces he is unleashing and therefore has to pay.