Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. Robert Louis Stevenson
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is particularly striking in Dostoevsky’s psychological novella The Double (1846), while it also features in the relationship between Raskolnikov and Svidrigaylov in Crime and Punishment (1866), and in the German tales of E. T. A. Hoffman, especially The Devil’s Elixirs (1813-16). Most powerful of all these forerunners was James Hogg’s Confessions of a Justified Sinner (1824), for although he owes a debt to Hoffman, Hogg moved beyond supernatural and psychological romance to place his vision of duality firmly within the darker prospects of Scottish Calvinism.
Of course Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde is set in the squares and alleyways of London, and there is no doubt that it also tells us something about Victorian society and its anonymous cities where respectability and depravity rub shoulders without acknowledging one another, but the story’s roots are deeply Scottish. Stevenson knew the pressures of godliness at first hand, after all, for had he not, like Hogg himself, been weaned on tales of the Covenanters? And then again, as a Bohemian student he had pursued a Villonesque career in the narrow streets of old Edinburgh, to the entire horror of his proper, professional and God-fearing parents. ‘Men have before hired bravos to transact their crimes,’ wrote Henry Jekyll, ‘while their own person and reputation sat under shelter. I was the first that ever did so for his pleasures ‘(my italics). The puritan Scottish connection could not be more clear.
It is not duality, however, so much as a misconceived notion of unity which drives Dr Jekyll to his frightful experiments. At the age of fifty, after a life of’effort, virtue and control‘, he is still not satisfied with the ’incoherency’ of his nature, not to mention a certain ‘impatient gaiety of disposition’. The desire ‘to carry my head high and wear a more than commonly grave countenance before the public’ finally prompts his recourse to ‘transcendental medicine’, by which he attempts to filter out his psyche as if it were some sort of chemical suspension of ‘just’ and ‘unjust’ ingredients. The experiment succeeds after a fashion, for Mr Hyde, ‘so much smaller, slighter and younger than Henry Jekyll,’ is certainly ‘more express and single, than the imperfect and divided countenance, I had been hitherto accustomed to call mine’. But the good Doctor himself remains mixed, as all people must be, and it is his weaknesses as ‘an ordinary secret sinner’ which draw him back to Mr Hyde, as if that personality were some addictive drug, all the more potent for its terrible purity. — ‘I was the first that could thus plod in the public eye with a load of genial respectability, and in a moment, like a schoolboy, strip off these lendings and spring headlong into a sea of liberty.’ This passage reintroduces the sea as an existential symbol, spiked with erotic overtones in this case, even as it echoes another line about the dissolution of responsibility, ‘civilisation’ and identity, as when King Lear throws his garments to another storm, crying ‘Off, off you lendings’.
It’s worth reflecting for a moment that chemistry was the most potent of the sciences in the 1880s, and that Stevenson’s fascination with the physical aspects of Jekyll’s potion is more profound in its implications than the foaming and fizzing special effects which have featured in so many film versions might at first suggest. First of all, his tale takes on the possibility that the roots of behaviour might be physically or chemically determined, rather than a matter of education or the presence (or absence) or moral strength. Then again, what Jekyll discovers is that we are made of malleable stuff, that our sense of self, and even our very flesh, can melt and change with terrible speed. In late Victorian times, sexual disease, alcohol abuse and drug addiction – from genteel doses of laudanum to the stupor of opium− were as vivid a nightmare for many citizens as ever AIDS, crack or heroin might be today. The outwardly visible and physical dangers of ‘pleasure’ added more than a frisson to the power of moralising from the pulpit; and there was always a sense – made more vivid by popular (mis) interpretations of Darwin’s theory of natural selection – that we do cling to a cliff, barely balanced between our ideals and our appetites, only just above a fall which would indeed ‘dash us out of every feature of humanity’. At such times one drink, one step, might make all the difference.
Yet Jekyll’s old pleasures were hardly extreme. At worst they had been undignified – ‘I would scarce use a harder term’. But in the hands of Edward Hyde, they quickly become ‘monstrous’; nor does the Doctor accept responsibility for his alter ego’s actions, for ‘it was Hyde, after all, and Hyde alone, that was guilty’. In the same fashion he confuses being beyond detection and the law with being beyond fate itself – sure evidence that he has confused morality with respectability from the very start. In this context it is very important that even old Utterson, through whose investigations the tale unfolds, can be seen as a better balanced man, for despite his dry and dusty lawyer’s nature and a positively Caledonian dedication to austerity, the old fellow keeps in touch with the bon viveur Enfield, admits to a love of good wine, and is generally tolerant of the failings of his fellow men. (He does mortify his pleasures a little, mind you, by choosing to drink gin when alone, saving his finer vintages for company.)
In the early stages of the mystery, Utterson, Enfield, and Lanyon are convinced that Hyde is somehow blackmailing Jekyll for some misdemeanours in his past. They think none the worse of their old friend, but seek to help him as best they can. The whole story is told through the overlapping reports of other people, a remarkable device which serves to create a social web of concern around Jekyll’s trials, while he alone insists on setting himself apart, in pursuit of a tragically mistaken notion of singleness and consistency in his own life.
Stevenson’s narrative, on the other hand, introduces hints of duality from the very start, with Utterson’s joking reference to Cain and Abel; or that sinister courtyard, the back door to Jekyll’s laboratory, situated in the midst of a cheerful street of little shops; or Jekyll’s own house, which shows a wealthy and comfortable front in a square of much decayed grandeur; or Hyde’s lair in a dreadful Soho slum, which turns out to be comfortably appointed and tastefully furnished. Even in moments of action Stevenson shows his extraordinary gift for unsettling contrasts, as when Utterson and the butler burst into Jekyll’s laboratory, the source of so many strange groans and cries and desperate footsteps, only to find a cheerful fire with a kettle singing on the hearth, books and paper neatly laid by the chair, and all the things laid out for tea – ‘the quietest room, you would have said … that night in London’. And then of course, in the middle of it all, they find the twitching body of Edward Hyde, with a phial of poison still in his hand.
In his darkest hour, Henry Jekyll longs for what he has lost and imagines himself once more restored, resting safely in ‘all men’s respect, wealthy, beloved – the cloth laying for me in the dining room at home’. It is a poignant vision, but a revealing bourgeois and materialistic one. This is a man who feels that his own nature is like a bundle of ‘incongruous faggots’, bound together by someone else’s hand, but capable of being split up and more fittingly rearranged. On behalf of this narrow concept of consistency, and on the principle, perhaps, that tidiness is next to Godliness, he was ready to shake ‘the very fortress of identity’, admitting that ‘I for my part, from the nature of my life, advanced infallibly in one direction and one direction only.’
Jekyll pursues this exclusive definition of the whole spirit only to discover – and he cannot conceal his distaste – that ‘man will be ultimately known for a mere polity of multifarous, incongruous and independent denizens’. In the last analysis, the old Calvinist constructions of duality are not enough to catch the multiplicity and the incoherent, inchoate nature of being. It is Jekyll’s tragedy, and our warning, that in the attempt to deny human nature and to refine himself into a unique and unmixed subject, he releases only the pure and single-minded self of Edward Hyde with a mindless ‘love of life’, which is as terrible in its indifference as the ‘joviality’ which young Charles Darnaway heard in the voices of the merry men. The final twist to the tale comes when we realise that it was an unpredictable (and unrecoverable) impurity in one of the drugs in Jekyll’s potion that actually released the terrible singleness of Mr Hyde in the first place.
Old Utterson recognises a much better model of human assimilation, coherence, and release, as he sits by the fire with a very different elixir – no dualistic ‘transcendental medicine’ for him – but a bottle of vintage wine made fine by humble craft, and time, and a thousand untraceable steepings:
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