The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886) by Robert Louis Stevenson


The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886) by Robert Louis Stevenson

I wasn’t aware that Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde was a novella, or even that it was written by Robert Louis Stevenson. But I saw it in my library and thought it would be a perfect Halloween read.


Stevenson was known to write many of his stories from vivid dreams, and draw from his traumatic childhood fear of hell and damnation. Jekyll and Hyde is a telling example of this, with its fixation on morality and distanced storytelling style. Most of the plot is revealed at a degree of removal through Mr. Utterson, a lawyer and friend to Jekyll. And beyond that - many events are described by witness accounts rather than directly, lending to the dreamlike abstraction of the story. I appreciate how this also has the effect of piecing together the narrative, slowly through vague details, until the final chapter’s explicit “big reveal” in Jekyll’s own letter to Utterson.


I found this “big reveal” much more disturbing than I anticipated, even with a cursory knowledge of the Jekyll and Hyde premise. And that’s due to the moral implications behind it. Jekyll is an upstanding scientist who goes to great lengths to establish himself as a good man. But a fixation on the lifelong smothering of his baser desires in this pursuit bleeds into his work - resulting in an ill-fated experiment to separate his immoral half entirely from his righteous one. The experiment is successful in that it allows this ignoble persona to manifest independently as Mr. Hyde, but unsuccessful in that the reverted Dr. Jekyll remains unchanged, rather than becoming entirely pure. What’s more, Jekyll takes to using Hyde as a scapegoat to indulge his sinful, violent instincts - to the extent that Hyde inadvertently becomes the “default” state for Jekyll, who ultimately has no choice but to succumb to his depraved half.


As wild as Jekyll’s experiment is, it resonates clearly with the universal struggle against evil instincts. And its most striking commentary on those instincts is how they follow the law of inertia. Once indulged, the grip of vice seems to grow stronger. But Jekyll’s misfortune also shows that suppressing the darkness can even have the effect of bolstering it, too. He describes it as a caged animal, whose ferocity is even greater upon release after prolonged captivity. This is most defeating revelation of Stevenson’s story, in my opinion. I hoped that it would ultimately provide remediating insight to this ubiquitous conflict of smothering sinful desires, but instead it shows there is no true escape, short of ensuring you don’t provide that fatal “first push” to initiate the inertia of your own vice. Maybe that’s just the reality of the human condition, though. And maybe that’s where the glory of virtue is found - not in the impossible task of defeating your own evils once and for all, but in the endurance of a lifelong battle to rise above them.

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