F. Garcier
Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde
COMMENTAIRE 3
p. 61-62 (Norton edition), from «It is useless, and the time …» to the end of the novella.
Providing the last pieces of the narrative puzzle, Jekyll’s “Full Statement” claims final authority: it supposedly brings the story to an end and solves all the preceding mysteries, while “stating” Jekyll’s real identity and his authorship of the final narrative. The ending of the novella proves all these assumptions to be utterly wrong.
As the text nears its end, unanswered questions become more and more urgent: how come that Jekyll’s body could not be found by Utterson and Poole? What has Hyde, “the self-destroyer”, done to his creator? Has he murdered him as he murdered Carew? Much remains to be solved, but Jekyll, the first-person narrator of this account and only possessor of the key to the mystery, is himself under strong pressure and eager to hasten to his conclusion. He is now unable to transform himself at will as he used to, thanks to the “drug”; his self-division seems to have reached a point of no-return: he is no longer master in the house of his own self[1], and the narrator’s self-division is reflected in the impressive reflexive structure of the text. Given the predicament of the narrator, can the story of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde be brought to a ‘real’ end? Does the way out selected by Stevenson make the ending satisfactory and conclusive?
(1.Sense of emergency / imminent doom)
A sense of emergency is conveyed throughout by recurring haste-connoting time-markers and the lexical field of threat: “the time awfully fails me”(l. 1), “the last calamity” (l. 5), “the last time that H.K. can think his own thoughts” (l. 17), “the doom closing in on us”(l. 26), “menace” (l. 31) .
The threat that imparts the sense of doom and emergency to the text is three-fold:
- Jekyll has exhausted his provisions of the”old powders”, the only ones that wera able to effect the change successfully. His last attempts with the newly-purchased ones have proved useless (l. 10-11), because the new salt is pure, whereas it was thanks to the “impurity” of the old one that separation had first been effected, bringing to life “impure” Hyde (l. 13-14). The irony of the explicit parallel between the “impurity” of the salt and the ‘iniquity” of the creature it has produced is increased by a more covert irony: the now “pure” salt cannot bring back “pure” Jekyll. The apprentice sorcerer is victimized by his own creation, in very much the same way as overreaching Dr Frankenstein was ultimately overpowered and defeated by his monster in Mary Shelley’s tale. As a consequence, Jekyll has “regressed” to ape-like Hyde (“ape-like spite”, l. 25), reversing Darwin’s evolutionary theory of man being “descended” from the anthropomorphous ape (The Descent of Man, 1871). The released beast, Hyde, is day after day “pacing the room up and down” like a caged animal, shuddering at “every sound of menace”. (l. 30-31).
- Since the murder of Sir Danvers Carew, Hyde has been a hunted-down criminal. He cannot venture outside the cabinet-laboratory for fear of the servants delivering him to the police and of his being committed to the “scaffold” or “the gallows” (N. 58 and 59). Jekyll-Hyde’s life is that of a recluse and a pariah, cast off from the society of men and incurring the worst kind of retribution for his crimes if he gets caught.
- The “full statement of the case” is written by Dr Jekyll as a testimony to his scientific experiments (in keeping with the medical meaning of the word “case”), as an acknowledgment of his accountability for Hyde’s crimes (legal meaning of “case”), and as a “confession” (l. 35). This statement is the way by which Jekyll settles his accounts with science (as a medical professional), society (as a legally responsible citizen) and morality (as a Christian tortured by pangs of conscience). For all these reasons or simply out of sheer malice, Hyde would tear Jekyll’s manuscript to pieces if by chance (and chances are growing every minute) he should take Jekyll “in the act of writing it” (l. 22). It is only by virtue of a “miracle” (l. 17) that the manuscript has not been destroyed yet. Aware that the miracle will not last, Jekyll makes haste to finish it and seal it before helplessly turning into Hyde for good and ever.
A brief reminder of the chronology of the novella’s events will help us appreciate the scope of the “miracle” indeed: Jekyll’s statement was the third “enclosure”, along with Jekyll’s letter and Jekyll’s will in Utterson’s name, which Utterson found on Jekyll’s desk when he broke open the door of the cabinet with Poole (“The Last Night”, p. 40-41). Considering that it was Hyde’s voice they heard before breaking into the cabinet, and Hyde’s body they found in there, nothing short of a “miracle” can explain why and how the manuscript might have escaped Hyde’s notice. The reader is certainly required to “suspend his disbelief” when he ponders over such incongruities. Suspension of disbelief is all the more necessary as he is let into a gothic locus conclusus (enclosed space), a (“bogey”) world of dizzying reflections and self-splitting, miles away from the normal, rational world.
(2.Reflexivity)
(1) The mirror, which has seen many “strange things”, as Poole puts it (N. 40), is still there as Jekyll writes his account: “Henry Jekyll can ... see his own face (now how sadly altered!) in the glass.”(l. 18). The glass reflects an “altered” Jekyll: the word should be understood literally and metaphorically, since not only his face but his entire self have undergone repeated changes of identity, from Jekyll into Hyde and back again. Alteration, however, has not changed only Jekyll; by a mirror-effect, it has changed Hyde too: “The doom ... has already changed and crushed him.” (l. 26). Hyde’s triumphant evil may have become more human by taking over more from Jekyll as Jekyll sickened, and by “sharing ... some of the phenomena of consciousness with him” (N. 60). At any rate, the mirror stands as a symbol of Jekyll’s unstable identity. Moreover, Jekyll’s confused sense of his own self contaminates the text, as the handling of pro-forms shows: “Half an hour from now, when I [Jekyll] shall again and forever reindue that hated personality, I[Jekyll] know how I [Hyde] shall sit shuddering and weeping in my chair” (l. 27-29). Though Jekyll can see himself clearly as Hyde in half an hour’s time, he still retains the “I” pronoun, thus blurring all boundaries between his two selves, more completely and more absolutely than when he wrote: “He, I sayI cannot say, I” (N. p. 59). Then, he could not bring himself to speak of Hyde as “I” yet, but now a further step is taking Jekyll-Hyde towards total integration –or disintegration.
(2) The framing situation itself has Utterson discovering “a considerable packet” (N. 41) in Jekyll’s cabinet and taking it to his office to read it, along with Lanyon’s narrative, in order to see “how the mystery was to be explained” (N. 41). In other words, Jekyll’s statement is an “enclosure”in the packet, but it is also “enclosed”, i.e. embedded in the main narrative (whose focalizer and protagonist is Utterson). Furthermore, it is to be read in an enclosed space, Utterson’s office, mirroring the locus conclusus of Jekyll’s cabinet, the enclosure where unheard-of Gothic monstrosities have taken place and are now going to seep from, by being read about.
(3) The mirror also reflects the act of writing, as was proleptically stated a few pages before: “the mirror ... which stands beside me as I write” (N. 50). In so doing, it questions the origin of utterance. Is Dr Jekyll himself writing the account, or is it his double-in-the mirror, or his double nature, Jekyll-Hyde, as a third entity, as the use of pronouns would show (“us both”l. 26)? Who owns the “hand” (=the hand that writes and the handwriting) is a recurrent question that links the themes of identity and writing, from the cheque Hyde signs as Jekyll to the signature that Jekyll creates for Hyde by “sloping my own hand backwards” (N. 53) to the “startling blasphemies” written in Jekyll’s pious books “in his own hand” (N. 61). Then there has been the letter to Lanyon, written by Hyde, but its tone, as can be observed from Lanyon’s transcription, “seems entirely and convincingly Jekyll’s” (P. Garrett N. 192). From the start, inscribed in each of Jekyll’s texts, then, is the impending disappearance of its author.
(3.Disappearance, writing and self-effacement)
(1) Jekyll’s will was “holograph” (N. 12) i.e. was entirely written by Jekyll, because the lawyer, suspecting forgery, would not give his legal sanction to the document (“It offended ....the sane and customary sides of life” N. 13). But the real sticking point was not so much the matter of the handwriting but the wording of the will that provided for its author’s “disappearance”. When Utterson is instructed later that the letter he receives from Lanyon is to be opened only in the case of Jekyll’s “death or disappearance” (N. 30), he becomes concerned that “the idea of disappearance and the name of Henry Jekyll” always seemed to be “bracketed together” (ibid.). Next, the note enclosed with Jekyll’s statement and addressed to Utterson declares that when this text falls into Utterson’s hands, “I shall have disappeared” (N. 41). As he “brings the life of that unhappy Henry Jekyll to an end” (l. 35-36) conspicuously speaking of himself in third person, Jekyll’s life is doubled and replaced by “the life of ... Henry Jekyll”, the written account replacing the man (see Garrett stressing “a poignant effect of narrative reflexivity”, N. 191). What remains, he says, does not concern him; it “concerns another than myself” (l. 34). Jekyll withdraws from the text: he does not die, he vanishes, as he “lays down the pen” (l.35). What remains to take the place of the vanished narrator is the narrative itself and “the body of the self-destroyer” (N. 39).
(2) Writing plays a complex part in the Jekyll-Hyde relation. Jekyll brings Hyde to life by writing out a chemical formula in his notebook. He sustains him by writing out cheques for him. But while Hyde’s existence depends on these texts, he relentlessly tries to destroy, alter or disfigure them: see the charred remains of the account-books in Hyde’s Soho rooms, or the scrawlings in J.’s pious books, or the permanent threat to the “statement” being written. The Jekyll-Utterson relation where writing is concerned is quite as complex. Utterson reads and deciphers Jekyll’s texts to the best of his (limited) ability: he makes wrong assessments, takes reckless decisions (as when he breaks open the cabinet door) and at the end, when we would expect a return to the main narrative, with his reactions to his reading, he, too, has vanished from the text.
(3) For this reason (the confessor has vanished) and some others, Jekyll’s “confession” is a failure. He begins by promising that it will be comprehensive, as any confessional life-story would be: “I was born, etc.” (N. 47). But by the third page of his “full” confession, Jekyll admits that it cannot be full because his own knowledge of what he has done is incomplete (N. 48). Moreover, as a confession, it seems to be uttered in bad faith since this penitent casts the blame for his sins on “another than myself” (l. 34) or “that hated personality” (l. 28). This confession has value only as a legal or therapeutic operation intended to elucidate a case of law or medicine.
The ending also defeats the reader’s expectations of a solved mystery at the end. First of all, in terms of chronology, this ending is not the end of the novella, since it precedes, by a matter of minutes, the end that has taken place before in the narrative, in “The Last Night” section (p. 40). There, the text ended, in fact, as a detective novel customarily begins – with the disappearance of a body and the appearance of an enigmatic text (a will clouded by uncertain intentions, disputed authenticity, and an alteration of the heir’s name). The absent body, in this case, happened to be that of the text’s author. In the place of that absence there remained the unexplained mystery: the corpse of the malignant monster Jekyll called Hyde.
Even though Jekyll’s disappearance was a foregone conclusion, impending as it was in all the texts “in his own hand”, the ending of Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde nevertheless defeats the reader’s expectations by opting for a gothic escape into thin air rather than a neat detective-fiction-like explanation. Or perhaps, it could be said that, in modernist fashion, the ending reflexively reproduces Jekyll’s fragmented self in its structure, questioning the very notion of character in fiction. However frustrating this ending may be to readers, we can but admire the performance of the scriptor (Jekyll and/or Stevenson?) literally and performatively writing himself out of the text: “I bring the life of that unhappy Henry Jekyll to an end”.
1
[1] Cf. Freud saying that the subject is no longer the master in his own house.