| Duality of Being... or a Monster Within? | |
He put the glass to his lips, and drank at one gulp. A cry followed; he reeled, staggered, clutched at the table and held on, staring with infected eyes, gasping with open mouth; and as I looked, there came, I thought, a change - he seemed to swell - his face became suddenly black, and the features seemed to melt and alter - and the next moment I had sprung to my feet and leaped back against the wall, my arm raised to shield me from that prodigy, my mind submerged in terror.
Chapter 9, Dr. Lanyon's Narrative,
"Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
"Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-1894)
Have you ever wished you could become somebody else... Have you dreamed that you could somehow change your face and name... Pretend just for a moment. Who would you become? Or would you still be yourself... with a different face and personality?
Robert Louis Stevenson brings the possibility of another self in one person to life in his creation of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. He uses three narrators in the book to depict the tale of Dr. Jekyll, a respected, very "good" doctor who creates an alter ego of himself -- in the form of Mr. Hyde. The most suspenseful part of the book, though, is that the full details of the story are not revealed until the very end of the novel. Until we learn the ultimate truth from Dr. Jekyll's confession, we try to decipher (along with the main characters) who Mr. Hyde is... and how he relates to Dr. Jekyll.
At the end of the book, we discover that Dr. Jekyll had reasoned for some time that there are two natures in himself. For years, he has repressed the more impulsive side in an effort to . At length, he came to the conclusion: "If each, I told myself, could but be housed in separate identities, life would be relieved of all that was unbearable; 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" (Chapter 10).
Unfortunately, Dr. Jekyll could not have possibly foreseen what problems his dissociation would cause. The coexistence of an evil and a good soul in one body presents a whole host of problems. The "good" -- in the form of Dr. Jekyll -- is soon overpowered by the "evil," animal nature of Mr. Hyde. Good and evil can no longer be clearly delineated. When Mr. Hyde commits a crime, Dr. Jekyll tries to make up for the evil, but the situation is morally ambiguous. The question we must ask ourselves is whether Dr. Jekyll isn't just as much to blame as Mr. Hyde; or whether he is "innocent," since he can't control Mr. Hyde's actions. Dr. Jekyll's possible innocent becomes more ambiguous since the two identities are two halves of the same self... and it was Dr. Jekyll's eagerness to put on a mask and taste life to its fullest that has produced these horrible results in the first place.
As Stevenson probes the depths of human psychology and challenges our perceptions of good and evil in society, we are struck by the disturbing face of evil. Dr. Jekyll tries to repress and/or kill off the Mr. Hyde in himself, but that alter ego is a part of who he is. He cannot renounce or destroy that part of himself.
As time goes on, however, Mr. Hyde's appearance becomes even more troublesome. In his confession, Dr. Jekyll writes: "But when I slept, or when the virtue of the medicine wore off, I would lead almost without transition (for the pangs of transformation grew daily less marked) into the possession of a fancy brimming with images of terror, a soul boiling with causeless hatreds, and a body that seemed not strong enough to contain the raging energies of life."
The final end to both Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde is death by poison. They could not live together, but they could not be fully separated. Dr. Jekyll says, in his final confession: "Will Hyde die upon the scaffold? or will he find the courage to release himself at the last moment? God knows; I am careless; this is my true hour of death, and what is to follow concerns another than myself. Here, then, as I lay down the pen, and proceed to seal up my confession, I bring the life of that unhappy Henry Jekyll to an end."
Stevenson once wrote to a friend, "I send you herewith a Gothic gnome, interesting I think, and he came out of a deep mine, where he guards the fountain of tears." To another friend, he wrote: "Jekyll Is a dreadful thing, I own, but the only thing I feel dreadful about is this damned old business of the war in the members. This time it came out; I hope it will stay in, in future."
