Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde is one of the most impactful books I’ve ever read.
It consolidated a lot of ideas about the nature of evil and addiction, and moved me so much I was compelled to make the second video on the Hardcore Literature channel about the novella.
I’m still getting to grips with video creation, but please let me know what you think of it (and Stevenson’s story).
You can check out the first video here.
And if you haven’t read Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde yet, I implore you to pick up a copy. It’s a quick and thrilling read.
Here’s the transcript for the video.
Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde: The Evil In Us All – Transcript:
The line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either, but right through every human heart. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago
Many wonder how atrocities such as the Holocaust, the mass killings under Mao, the Cambodian killing fields, and the Rwandan genocide could have taken place.
How could humans who are your neighbours one day, good on the surface, civilized, turn into dictators and murderers the next?
This is the terror at the heart of Robert Louis Stevenson’s 1886 novella Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde – the fact that we are all capable of committing the grossest most heinous crimes against humanity because it is part of our humanity.
Our nature contains terrifying violent impulses and society is bustling with individuals who appear civilized on the surface but harbour dark desires.
In addition to seeing Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde as an exploration and anxiety of the split within oneself, ‘angel’ on one side, ‘fiend’ on the other, to use Dr Jekyll’s own words, I also see it as a tale about the horrors of drug addiction. Let’s explore both ideas, beginning with the conception of the tale.
Many believe that real life events inspired Stevenson’s story.
In the spring of 1878, Stevenson’s friend Eugene Chantrelle was convicted of killing his wife with opium. Before her death he took out a large life insurance policy on her and, after his hanging, many believed him to have poisoned many more victims.
Perhaps fearing the story to be too horrific, too close to life, Stevenson burned the manuscript.
Then, in a cocaine-fuelled frenzy, he rewrote the story in three days.
And thank god he did because the tale has endured for over a century. There have been countless film and stage adaptations, TV shows inspired by the story, heavy metal songs, musicals, graphic novels, and even video games.
The phrase has entered common parlance due its proliferation in pop culture. Even people who have never read the story speak of feeling like Jekyll and Hyde to indicate that one moment they feel like a good wholesome human being, the next they feel like some evil monster.
But despite Jekyll himself asserting that ‘man is not truly one, but truly two’ and recognising the ‘primitive duality of man’, perhaps this idea of a split is too simplistic.
Vladimir Nabokov, the author of Lolita, argues that there aren’t two personalities.
There isn’t Jekyll and Hyde, but rather Dr Jekyll who, being both good and evil, has a small percentage of the pure evil that is Hyde, then there is Hyde who is wholly evil, smaller than Jekyll, more compact, fitting within him like a Russian doll, then there is Hyde with a small amount of Jekyll reside left over.
If this makes your head spin, don’t worry. It’s supposed to.
Put simply, some days we are only a small percentage of evil, other days our darker impulses are closer to full capacity, but most days we’re a blend of the two, never wholly good, never wholly bad, but always in a state of tension between the two polar conditions.
Jekyll picks up on this constant battle between good and evil when he says:
It was the curse of mankind that these incongruous faggots were thus bound together – that in the agonised womb of consciousness these polar twins should be continuously struggling.
The fact that Hyde wants to change back to Jekyll, and Jekyll yearns for the freedom to indulge the evil pleasures of Hyde, is significant.
We are not witnessing a complete metamorphosis, with a good man transforming into an evil one, but rather we are seeing the evil already within Dr Jekyll brought to the surface by his drug of choice.
By the end of the story, we see that the figure we call Jekyll has now split into another entity and considers Jekyll and Hyde as both separate from him.
In this way, Stevenson anticipates the foundational theories of Freudian psychoanalysis.
Dr Jekyl is the ego, respectable, civilised, surface.
Mr Hyde is the id, impulsive, immoral, animalistic drive and desire.
And the rationalising entity is the superego watching the struggle between the two.
But we’re not simply watching one man’s descent into madness.
Stevenson wants us to see ourselves in Jekyll and Hyde.
I believe that message has long been lost on readers of the story.
The story’s stage adaption was pulled when Jack the Ripper began mauling women in London’s streets with many finding the depiction of Jekyll to be too much of a reminder that there were dangerous people in the city – many even suspected the actors who played Hyde to be the killer.
After all what man would choose such a role if he were not playing out his own murderous impulses?
A ridiculous assertion, for sure, because if that were the only criteria necessary to play Hyde anyone could fill that role, for we are all capable of murder.
Two symbols recur emphatically throughout the story – that of the ‘mist’ or ‘fog’ and that of the ‘mirror’.
Obviously London was a foggy, misty, grimy locale at time of writing. We see mist and fog in many Victorian novels, most notably in the beginning of Charles Dickens’ Bleak House with that famous paragraph in which ‘fog’ is mentioned thirteen times. But fog and mist works on the metaphorical level in Jekyll and Hyde.
What is lurking in the fog?
What is obscured from view by mist?
What’s in the shadows?
Our darker nature, our sadistic animal impulses. Jekyll talks about our ‘seemingly so solid’ bodies being a ‘mist-like transience’ in which we ‘walk attired’. But his drug allows him to ‘pluck back that fleshly vestment’.
That’s right – the body is the mist, the smoke-screen, the illusion, the ‘prison-house’, to use Jekyll’s description, hiding something more enduring, more startlingly real beneath the surface: the ‘lower elements’ of one’s soul.
When Jekyll becomes Hyde, he talks about being a ‘stranger’ in his ‘own house’ – he doesn’t just mean his physical house, but rather his body.
Indeed we’re all strangers in our own houses.
This body, the clothes we wear, the cordial appearance we display in public is a facade.
Why is the idea of ‘manner’ repeated so much in Stevenson’s story?
It’s repeated fluidly to describe not only Mr Hyde and Dr Jekyll but almost every character, even the victim of Hyde’s murder, Carew, which suggests an interchangeability, one always within the other.
To use Kahlil Gibran’s maxim from The Prophet:
The murdered is not unaccountable for his own murder.
Carew, kind and ‘innocent’ on the surface, could have just as easily been the killer because every Dr. Jekyll has a Mr Hyde lurking within him.
French law recognises this, even using the word ‘mist’, in making concessions when a crime is committed in a red mist of passion.
If you haven’t seen the evil in you yet, Stevenson implores you to look in the mirror.
Utterson says, ‘If he be Mr Hyde,’ ‘I shall be Mr Seek’ – and seek he does, but does he find?
What do they see when they search Jekyll’s chamber?
A ‘cheval-glass’. An antiquated phrase meaning a full-length mirror.
Jekyll himself would have looked into that mirror and seen how low he could shrink in becoming Hyde.
Why is Hyde smaller than Jekyll, like a “dwarf” instead of growing into a monster like the Hulk (the character which was actually inspired by Hyde and Frankenstein)?
Because the smaller version fits within the bigger one – the evil is not something we become but rather something already housed within us.
Why is imagery of doors, gaining access and entry to buildings, and keys so abundant in this novella?
Because our bodies and souls are like buildings and there is a darker impulse locked away behind cobwebs like the cobweb that had ‘for years sealed up the entrance’ to Jekyll’s chamber.
Evil is lying dormant in all of us.
And when we look into the mirror, the most terrifying thing we could consider, if we had the guts to face this fact, is that the one gazing back at us is capable of true evil.
And a foolproof way of accessing that evil?
Develop a drug addiction.
Anyone who has lived with an addict or alcoholic is all too familiar with the devastating double life they lead.
On hearing about the murder, Jekyll says:
I cannot say that I care what becomes of Hyde; I am quite done with him. I was thinking of my own character.
This sounds like a drug addict rationalising prior bad behaviour and asserting that he is done with his drug for good. Tomorrow’s a brand new day.
But this also highlights the addict’s fleeing from responsibility.
Jekyll has ‘black secrets’, namely his ‘lusting to inflict pain’, but creates an entirely separate identity so as to relish them and enjoy playing them out without guilt or shame. But Hyde is part of his character.
Hyde is his character.
Just because you dislike the darker side of yourself doesn’t mean you can discard responsibility for the actions committed as that self. “That’s not me”, “you know that’s not my character, that’s not what I’m like” criminals, alcoholics, and drug addicts often say when they’re trying to sober up – they try to distance themselves from their dark side, make it a whole different person completely.
Indeed, when someone drinks or takes drugs, many will comment that they become another person.
Really they are just stripping away the surface manner and politeness needed to fit into society and what’s left when social pleasantries are removed?
Hyde.
And if you can’t look in the mirror and see yourself when you are bad as equally as when you’re not, you can’t say to know yourself well at all.
Speaking to Utterson, Jekyll says,
to put your good heart at rest, I will tell you one thing: the moment I choose, I can be rid of Mr Hyde.
Again, this sounds like a drug addict, one who is in denial of his problem.
The first step in the Alcoholics Anonymous 12 step program is to admit you are powerless over alcohol.
But instead of doing so, Jekyll actually longs to be Hyde, romanticises that state, glorifies it in saying ‘his love of life is wonderful’ – another hallmark of the drug addicted is that, even years after recovery, they continue to yearn for the freedom they felt as their intoxicated self.
In writing to Utterson, Jekyll says:
‘You must suffer me to go my own dark way.’
Then he proceeds to isolate himself from friends and wider society, hiding himself away, relishing chaos, getting sick pleasure from destruction, like an addict who wants to hit bottom, who wants to see just how devastatingly bad they can make their lives.
And we also see what happens when the drugs don’t work.
With drug addiction, you take the drug to become something monstrous that gives you pleasure, then the drug loses its efficacy, you need more of it, you doubt its potency, and then you need to take the drug simply to avoid turning into the monster.
This is Jekyll’s character arc and it’s a downward spiral to oblivion.
When describing Hyde, Stevenson could be describing any drug addict:
the cords of his face still moved with a semblance of life, but life was quite gone; and by the crushed phial in the hand and the strong smell of kernels that hung upon the air, Utterson knew that he was looking on the body of a self-destroyer.
That is what drug addicts are, self-destroyers who bear the semblance of life but with their life quite gone.
But we must be careful not to judge drug addicts, alcoholics, murderers, and criminals too harshly.
As Jesus says:
‘He who is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone.’
We may not have a problem with addiction or rage, but an honest look in the mirror reveals one capable of those conditions.
Even more terrifying is the idea that we may enjoy them.
As Jekyll says, when he ‘looked upon that ugly idol in the glass’, he ‘was conscious of no repugnance, rather a leap of welcome.’
As human beings, we are ‘commingled out of good and evil’, and the Hyde part of ourselves takes great delight in evil.
Once we recognise the capacity for evil in ourselves, it’s terrifying to consider that we are sharing this world with others just like us.
Take to the streets of London like William Blake and you will mark in every face you meet, ‘Marks of weakness, marks of woe.’
As Jekyll says, ‘I was like my neighbours’.
Look at how Stevenson describes the signatures of Jekyll and Hyde:
the two hands are in many points identical; only differently sloped.
That’s because this ‘murderer’s autograph’, Satan’s signature, is written in the same hand as man’s.
And the terrifying thing is that the line between them is closer than you think, closer than many can bear to admit.
If you check out the video, let me know your thoughts. And if you enjoy this sort of thing, you’ll probably enjoy the online learning platform Skillshare. You can get two months free through this link.