Structurally speaking, the two personal narratives with which the story concludes resemble the inset stories of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) and James Hogg’s Private Memoirs and Confessions of a justified Sinner (1824), the latter an important Scottish novel that has a great deal in common with the story of Jekyll and Hyde. Stevenson was fascinated with the literature of the double, which includes (in addition to Hogg’s novel) Robert Burns’s “Holy Willie’s Prayer” (1799), Edgar Allan Poe’s “William Wilson” (1839), and Fyodor Dostoevsky’s “The Double” (1846) and Crime and Punishment (1866) . Stevenson read Crime and Punishment in 1884 and 1885 in French translation, referring to it in a letter as “the greatest book I have read easily in ten years”: “Henry James could not finish it: all I can say is, it nearly finished me. It was like having an illness” (Selected Letters, p. 310). Subsequent literary doubles, all probably influenced by Jekyll and Hyde, appear in Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890), Joseph Conrad’s “The Secret Sharer” (1910), and Henry James’s “The Jolly Corner” (1909).
Lanyon’s narrative, given first of the two, is akin to an affidavit and follows the form of written or verbal testimony, complete with dates and documents. It begins with the night when Lanyon receives from Jekyll a registered letter containing a most peculiar request: to break into his private cabinet, with the assistance of a locksmith, and retrieve a locked drawer and its contents, then to admit at midnight the man Jekyll will send to retrieve it. Lanyon follows his friend’s instructions. Though he fears that Jekyll has become insane, there is nothing terrifying in the drawer, just some wrapped powders, clearly “of Jekyll’s private manufacture” and containing “a simple crystalline salt of a white colour”; a phial “half full of a blood-red liquor, which was highly pungent to the sense of smell and seemed to ... contain phosphorus and some volatile ether”; and a “version book,” a sketchy record of scientific experiments with a list of dates (pp. 55-56). Increasingly sure that Jekyll must be suffering from “cerebral disease,” Lanyon loads an old revolver in case he needs to defend himself, then dismisses his servants for the night. At midnight, Lanyon finds outside his door a “small man crouching against the pillars of the portico” and avoiding the notice of an approaching policeman (p. 56) . Once they are inside the consulting room—chosen by Lanyon as the site of their conversation because it will let him protect himself psychologically against these extraordinary circumstances with “as fair an imitation of [his] ordinary manner to a patient, as the lateness of the hour, the nature of [his] preoccupations, and the horror [he] had of [his] visitor, would suffer [him] to muster” (p. 58)—Lanyon is able to see the visitor clearly:
He was small, as I have said; I was struck besides with the shocking expression of his face, with his remarkable combination of great muscular activity and great apparent debility of constitution, and—last but not least—with the odd, subjective disturbance caused by his neighbourhood. This bore some resemblance to incipient rigour, and was accompanied by a marked sinking of the pulse. At the time, I set it down to some idiosyncratic, personal distaste, and merely wondered at the acuteness of the symptoms; but I have since had reason to believe the cause to lie much deeper in the nature of man, and to turn on some nobler hinge than the principle of hatred (P. 57).
The clothes the visitor wears are “enormously too large for him,” and Lanyon sees “something abnormal and misbegotten in the very essence of the creature.”
The visitor takes the contents of the drawer and mixes a compound in a glass he then sets on the table, but before consuming it he issues to Lanyon a challenge that recalls the serpent’s temptation of Eve in the garden or Satan’s of Jesus in the wilderness:
“Will you be wise? will you be guided? will you suffer me to take this glass in my hand and to go forth from your house without further parley? or has the greed of curiosity too much command of you? Think before you answer, for it shall be done as you decide. As you decide, you shall be left as you were before, and neither richer nor wiser, unless the sense of service rendered to a man in mortal distress may be counted as a kind of riches of the soul. Or, if you shall so prefer to choose, a new province of knowledge and new avenues to fame and power shall be laid open to you, here, in this room, upon the instant; and your sight shall be blasted by a prodigy to stagger the unbelief of Satan” (p. 59).
Lanyon can’t resist the temptation to knowledge, and his visitor holds him to professional secrecy: “ ‘what follows is under the seal of our profession,’ ” he insists. That word “our” is already a giveaway as to the identity of the visitor, who must be another doctor, and as the visitor drinks the potion, Lanyon witnesses Hyde’s monstrous transformation back into Henry Jekyll, “pale and shaken, and half fainting, and groping before him with his hands, like a man restored from death” (p. 60) . Lanyon does not choose to pass on to Utterson the account Jekyll provides of the whole affair. His soul is “sickened” by what he has seen, and the letter ends here.
The key to the mystery is provided by “Henry Jekyll’s Full Statement of the Case”—the chapter title evokes both a doctor’s case and a legal case—and Stevenson’s decision to let the narrative speak for itself proves extremely effective. It opens with these words:
I was born in the year 18- to a large fortune, endowed besides with excellent parts, inclined by nature to industry, fond of the respect of the wise and good among my fellowmen, and thus, as might have been supposed, with every guarantee of an honourable and distinguished future. And indeed the worst of my faults was a certain impatient gaiety of disposition, such as has made the happiness of many, but such as I found it hard to reconcile with my imperious desire to carry my head high, and wear a more than commonly grave countenance before the public. Hence it came about that I concealed my pleasures; and that when I reached years of reflection, and began to look round me and take stock of my progress and position in the world, I stood already committed to a profound duplicity of life. Many a man would have even blazoned such irregularities as I was guilty of; but from the high views that I had set before me, I regarded and hid them with an almost morbid sense of shame (p. 61).
Jekyll is thus the victim of society’s restrictive moral codes. He emphasizes that none of his faults was inherently immoral or wicked (the defensive implication is that he enjoyed “normal” sex outside of marriage), but that his desire to appear virtuous led him to suppress this so-called vice, committing him to the “profound duplicity of life” that will find its logical outcome in the splitting of Jekyll into two separate physical and moral bodies: “It was thus rather the exacting nature of my aspirations than any particular degradation in my faults, that made me what I was, and, with even a deeper trench than in the majority of men, severed in me those provinces of good and ill which divide and compound man’s dual nature” (p. 61) .
Stevenson had long been interested in the phenomenon of the double, coauthoring (with W. E. Henley) a play called Deacon Brodie (1880) and subtitled The Double Life. Set in late-eighteenth-century Edinburgh, the play recounts the exposure and execution of a real-life historical figure who was deacon of the joiners’ guild by day and a notorious house-breaker by night. Stevenson had been fascinated by this character since childhood, when his nurse Alison Cunningham (known as “Cummy”) told him stories about Brodie, who supposedly made the bookcase and chest of drawers in the child’s bedroom. Deacon Brodie—as the use of his professional title suggests—is oppressed by his respectable station in life; he covers his nocturnal absences with the alibi of serious headaches to justify his locking himself into a darkened room, from which he escapes by a secret passage. Outside, Brodie drinks, has sex, gambles, and steals, all activities incompatible with his daytime identity. Brodie utters this heartfelt plea in the play’s central scene (act 1, scene 9): “Shall a man not have half a life of his own?—not eight hours out of twenty-four?”
Jekyll not only chooses his terms more carefully than Brodie, he also offers a far more complex theorization of hi
s own situation. “Though so profound a double-dealer, I was in no sense a hypocrite,” Jekyll says; “both sides of me were in dead earnest; I was no more myself when I laid aside restraint and plunged in shame, than when I laboured, in the eye of day, at the furtherance of knowledge or the relief of sorrow and suffering” (pp. 61-62). Here Stevenson explodes the conventional assumption that hypocrisy involves a mask of false virtue covering up the real sinner behind it. Both sides of Jekyll are “in dead earnest,” even as the pressure to conceal sexual impulses corrodes the integrity of the self: Jekyll has already split himself—or perhaps been split by the destructive conventional imperative to appear virtuous—into two separate selves.
In response to this situation Jekyll makes the discovery “that man is not truly one, but truly two” (p. 62). Is this insight endorsed by Stevenson, or does Jekyll display a pathological understanding of his own relation to society? Both may be true, as the sentence that follows suggests a grandiose, even monstrous but nonetheless persuasive vision of the fragmentation of personality in the modern world. Jekyll speculates that his discovery that man is two will be followed by far more extraordinary developments: “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” (p. 62). Jekyll’s conviction of “the thorough and primitive duality of man” leads him to a new understanding of the relationship between his own two selves. “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,” he writes. “I had learned to dwell with pleasure, as a beloved daydream, on the thought of the separation of these elements” (p. 62). If only the elements “could be housed in separate identities,” then “the unjust might go his way, delivered from the aspirations and remorse of his more upright twin; and the just could walk steadfastly and securely on his upward path, doing the good things in which he found his pleasure, and no longer exposed to disgrace and penitence by the hands of this extraneous evil” (p. 62).
This is a Calvinistic fantasy, and a deluded one at that, based on the false premise that evil is extraneous rather than a quality woven in with the other strands of the self. The passages that follow fudge the physical details of the transformation, but as Jekyll informs the reader, “[I] managed to compound a drug by which these powers should be dethroned from their supremacy, and a second form and countenance substituted, none the less natural to me because they were the expression, and bore the stamp of lower elements in my soul” (p. 63). It is a revolutionary discovery in more senses than one, and the language of toppling or dethroning powers clearly suggests the Oedipal appeal of an act of transformation by which the son may destroy his despised father. Daring at last to drink the potion, Jekyll experiences an agonizing transformation followed by a kind of delight:
I felt younger, lighter, happier in body; within I was conscious of a heady recklessness, a current of disordered sensual images running like a millrace in my fancy, a solution [i.e., dissolution or dissolving] of the bonds of obligation, an unknown but not an innocent freedom of the soul. I knew myself, at the first breath of this new life, to be more wicked, tenfold more wicked, sold a slave to my original evil; and the thought, in that moment, braced and delighted me like wine (p. 64) .
Without a mirror in the cabinet to observe the physical aspects of this transformation—a situation later remedied by the addition of the cheval-glass, a full-length mirror that enables Jekyll to take in the full effects of his metamorphosis—Jekyll ventures out to his bedroom and catches his first sight of Edward Hyde. Hyde is “smaller, slighter and younger than Henry Jekyll” because the “evil side” of Jekyll’s nature is “less robust and less developed” than the good: Jekyll’s has been “nine tenths a life of effort, virtue and control” (pp. 64-65). He is attracted to the image of Hyde, despite its “imprint of deformity and decay”: “In my eyes it bore a livelier image of the spirit, it seemed more express and single, than the imperfect and divided countenance I had been hitherto accustomed to call mine” (p. 65). Everyone else experiences revulsion at the sight of Hyde, and Jekyll speculatively assigns this to the fact that while the rest of the world mingles good and evil, “Edward Hyde, alone in the ranks of mankind, was pure evil.”
In retrospect, Jekyll argues that the drug itself is not inherently evil, but that it rather reflects the spirit of the experiment : He could have come forth an angel rather than a devil, under different stars. This projection, however, emerged all devil, without the angel to balance it out; moreover, of his two characters, “the other was still the old Henry Jekyll, that incongruous compound of whose reformation and improvement I had already learned to despair.” In his self-diagnosis, Jekyll reports that the discovery of how to release an evil second self came at an all-too-opportune time, the crisis of late middle age: “I would still be merrily disposed at times; and as my pleasures were (to say the least) undignified, and I was not only well known and highly considered, but growing towards the elderly man, this incoherency of my life was daily growing more unwelcome.” He continues, “It was on this side that my new power tempted me until I fell in slavery” (p. 66).
In preparation for the arrival of his new son, so to speak, Jekyll sets up the house in Soho and paves the way for Hyde’s acceptance, even as Jekyll’s own lawful heir. There is something perverse about this delegation of vice, as Jekyll himself comments: “Men have before hired bravos to transact their crimes, while their own person and reputation sat under shelter. I was the first that ever did so for his pleasures” (p. 66) . Yet just as a hired assassin might go well beyond the mandate of his employer, so pleasures merely “undignified” as transacted by Jekyll turn in the hands of Hyde “toward the monstrous.” Hyde’s physical separation from Jekyll, however, allows the doctor to rationalize away his own responsibility for Hyde’s actions, preventing him from feeling the pangs of anything like conscience about Hyde’s misdeeds (and he writes about both selves here in the third person): “It was Hyde, after all, and Hyde alone, that was guilty. Jekyll was no worse; he woke again to his good qualities seemingly unimpaired; he would even make haste, where it was possible, to undo the evil done by Hyde. And thus his conscience slumbered” (p. 67) . Yet the balance between Jekyll and his other self is inherently unstable. Perhaps the most uncanny moment in the story comes when Jekyll describes waking one morning at home, after a night out for one of his “adventures,” with the strange sense that despite the familiarity of his surroundings, he must be in Hyde’s room in Soho. Still half asleep, his eyes fall upon his own hand:
Now the hand of Henry Jekyll (as you have often remarked) was professional in shape and size: it was large, firm, white and comely. But the hand which I now saw, clearly enough, in the yellow light of a mid-London morning, lying half shut on the bedclothes, was lean, corded, knuckly, of a dusky pallor and thickly shaded with a swart growth of hair. It was the hand of Edward Hyde (p. 68).
Jekyll henceforth abjures the drug, realizing that the “part of me [Hyde] which I had the power of projecting, had lately been much exercised and nourished”; “I began to spy a danger that, if this were much prolonged, the balance of my nature might be permanently overthrown, the power of voluntary change be forfeited, and the character of Edward Hyde become irrevocably mine” (p. 69).
The initial difficulty was in changing from Jekyll to Hyde, but gradually it has become harder and harder to cast off Hyde and return to his public life. Jekyll now realizes “that I was slowly losing hold of my original and better self, and becoming slowly incorporated with my second and worse” (p. 70) . This prompts a moment of choice: Which person will he become?
My two natures had memory in common, but all other faculties were most unequally shared between them. Jekyll (who was composite) now with the most sensitive apprehensions, now with a greedy gusto, projected and shared in the pleasures and adventures of Hyde; but Hyde was indi
fferent to Jekyll, or but remembered him as the mountain bandit remembers the cav ern in which he conceals himself from pursuit. Jekyll had more than a father’s interest; Hyde had more than a son’s indifference (P. 70).
The language here invokes an Oedipal struggle between son and father, one that critics have linked to Stevenson’s own struggles against his father and all he represented. Jekyll chooses to remain the respected doctor, but doesn’t have the strength to keep to his resolution, a reservation foreshadowed by his decision not to give up the house in Soho or the clothes of Hyde. Through these months of single identity Jekyll “began to be tortured with throes and longings, as of Hyde struggling after freedom; and at last,” he continues, “in an hour of moral weakness, I once again compounded and swallowed the transforming draught.” Jekyll explicitly compares this to an alcoholic unable to leave off the thing that will kill him: “I do not suppose that, when a drunkard reasons with himself upon his vice, he is once out of five hundred times affected by the dangers that he runs through his brutish, physical insensibility” (p. 71). When Hyde comes, of course, he comes with a vengeance: After two months’ respite, the potion transforms Jekyll into the monster who kills Sir Danvers Carew. The return to Jekyll’s body prompts remorse and self-revelation. “I saw my life as a whole,” Jekyll says, and “Hyde was thenceforth impossible” (p. 72).
Resolving to redeem the past by relieving the suffering of others, Jekyll knows nonetheless that the beast inside him is not satisfied:
I was still cursed with my duality of purpose; and as the first edge of my penitence wore off, the lower side of me, so long indulged, so recently chained down, began to growl for licence. Not that I dreamed of resuscitating Hyde; the bare idea of that would startle me to frenzy: no, it was in my own person that I was once more tempted to trifle with my conscience; and it was as an ordinary secret sinner that I at last fell before the assaults of temptation (p. 73).
Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and Other Stories (Barnes & Noble Classi Page 4