L2 Littérature britannique /

Cours Stevenson (F. Garcier)

CM 5

The Self and the double in Strange Case ofDr Jekyll and Mr Hyde

A fellow-countryman of James Hogg[1], Stevenson shared his Scottish Presbyterian theological heritage and his sense of the sharply defined opposition between good and evil. In addition, he regarded Dostoevsky[2] as the greatest of contemporary novelists. He was impressed by both writers’ exploration of mental and moral duality. Among other literary precedents one could mention E.T.A. Hoffmann’s tales, Heinrich Heine’s TheDoppelgänger[3], E.A. Poe’s “William Wilson”, Guy de Maupassant’s Le Horla.

Stevenson was also deeply interested in the new discoveries of scientific psychology, he had read the work of the French psychologists Charcot and Bernheim, and towards the end of his life he carried on a correspondence with F.W.H. Myers, a reputable Victorian psychologist who authored many articles on personality throughout the 1880s (see “Multiplex Personality” in N. 134-136).

During the 1880s and 1890s, as Karl Miller notes in his essay, “a hunger for pseudonyms, masks, new identities, new conceptions of human nature declared itself” and doubles evolved from “supernatural .... harbingers of evil and death” into “an element of individual psychology.” (N. 125) The double then became the one who dwells inside us, externally conforming to culture, yet internally lusting for liberty: “man is not truly one, but truly two. I say two, because the state of my own knowledge does not pass beyond that point. (...) I hazard the guess that man will be ultimately known for a mere polity of multifarious, incongruous and independent denizens.” (N. 48). Indeed, Stevenson invented such a man in Dr Jekyll a decade before Freud analyzed him in psychological discourse.

  1. Multiple personality

Stevenson dramatizes the story of one man with multiple selves and conflicting impulses roaring to be heard inside him, by projecting two men who are in fact one man and by structuring his novella as a mystery plot. Jekyll’s self-splitting is effected in three stages:

  1. sense of inner division

It is apparent from Jekyll’s confession that, from his youth, he was troubled by certain instincts which he could not satisfy because they were in contradiction with his reputation as a respectable doctor about town: “my imperious desire to carry my head high ... I stood already committed to a profound duplicity” (N. 48). He first uses his scientific knowledge in “transcendental medicine” (as opposed to Dr Lanyon’s “narrow and material views” N. 47) to “learn to recognise, in my own person, the thorough and primitive duality of man” (N. 49). This arouses in him the desire to “dissociate.... the polar twins” (49). He then “puts theory to the test of practice” (50) and compounds the drug that will effect the hoped-for dissociation. Jekyll, like Goethe’s Faust and Wilde’s Dorian Gray, gambles on the possibility of self-splitting. In Goethe, Faust makes the admission of a divided self: two souls dwell inside him  one seeks the depths, the other the heights. He makes a compact with Mephistopheles, his shadow-self, and tries to integrate self and shadow, the energy of the depths and the virtue of the heights. On the contrary, Jekyll uses his science to separate them. Faust will be redeemed through love, Jekyll commits himself to damnation. As to Dorian Gray, he wishes recklessy that his portrayed self would get old and withered while he himself remains immune to old age: “ If it were I who was to be always young, and the picture that was to grow old! For that – I would give everything! I would give my soul for that!’[4] There is in Wilde’s tale no extra-human intervention or scientific knowledge to explain the mysterious fulfilment of his wish.

  1. dissociation

The potion which Jekyll makes by mixing some powders allows him to separate his “good” from his “bad” side. The metamorphosis proves painful and sickening (“The most racking pangs...” 50) but it fulfills his yearnings: his good side can prosper without burden of shame and his bad without the restrictions of morality and conformity. He believes he has released “a sea of liberty” (N. 52) in complete safety, in the secrecy of his laboratory. The drug allows Jekyll to become Hyde and almost instantly to become Jekyll again, back to “genial respectability” (52), without the least trace of guilt: “It was Hyde, after all, and Hyde alone, that was guilty.” (N. 53). Jekyll believes he has projected his evil nature outside himself, in the character of Hyde. Hyde is “a concentrate of pure evil” (Nabokov, (“A Phenomenon of Style”, N. 185): that is why all those who meet him hate him at first sight. He is smaller than Jekyll to indicate that the amount of good in Jekyll is larger; he is younger and more energetic because the long-repressed drives he embodies have come to the surface only recently and all the more forcefully. Eventually, Jekyll can no longer control his other self’s energy, and two months before the murder of Carew, the change, at first voluntary, becomes involuntary. One day, Jekyll who had gone to bed as Jekyll awakes, without the help of the potion, as Hyde (N. 54). One of the most fascinating developments in the story is Hyde’s growing malice, his increasing premeditation as he also grows in stature (N.55) and indulges his sadistic drives (the trampled child, the murder of Sir Danvers Carew) while J.’s conscience “slumbered” (53). The double’s “bestial avidity” (53) echoes the post-darwinian theories of the ape within (see Gould’s essay, N. 132). Hyde combines in himself the traits of the anthropomorphous ape from which man descended, according to Darwin’s evolutionary theory in The Descent of Man (1871), and those of a creature from Hell in the Christian tradition (“the slime of the pit” N. 60).

  1. consequences

Jekyll is terrified at the implications and consequences of his transformation. He discovers that he can no longer handle Hyde as a personal instrument of “liberty” and gratification, but that he must bear the moral pangs of his depravity and live in the fear of being found out. He is afraid of retribution both in the form of mortal punishment (“the gallows” (58)), and of eternal damnation. He is “possessed” by the double and disempowered, weakened by him as are Dracula’s victims after the vampire has sucked their blood: “a creature eaten up and emptied by fever, languidly weak both in body and mind” (N. 60).

Though at first Jekyll celebrated the duality of his life with satisfaction, the doom of the end is inevitable. When it is clear to him that he can no longer escape the identity of his double, nor keep his acquaintances in the ignorance of his connection to Hyde, he longs for self-destruction, knowing that to destroy Hyde, he must also destroy himself. But the irony of the end is that Jekyll is no longer Jekyll but Hyde when Utterson and Poole break open the door of his cabinet:

“ ‘Utterson,’ said the voice, ‘for God’s sake, have mercy!’

‘Ah, that’s not Jekyll’s voice – it’s Hyde’s!’ cried Utterson. ‘Down with the door, Poole.’” (N. 38).

It is Hyde who makes the choice of self-destruction, as Jekyll wished he would in the last words of his confession, just before writing himself off: “will Hyde die upon the scaffold? Or will he find the courage to release himself at the last moment?”(N. 62).

  1. Figures of the double in JH
  1. Jekyll’s house

One of the most powerful metaphors of doubleness in the novella is the contrast between the rear and the front entrances to Dr Jekyll’s house. The front door wears “ a great air of wealth and comfort”, the hall and dining room are warm and well-furnished (N. 18). This is where Jekyll shows his public face. The rear door is dingy and dilapidated and leads to the gloomy “dissecting rooms” inside of which is Jekyll’s laboratory where he performs his chemical experiments and the separation of his two selves. Hyde is always seen there, never at the front of the house. The two entrances clearly epitomize Jekyll’s dual nature.

  1. Mirror

Jekyll’s “cheval-glass”/ mirror is brought into the room to witness his transformations (N. 50). And Poole, the choric character in the story, remarks in “The Last Night”: “This glass have seen some strange things, sir.” (N. 40). Jekyll seeks out the mirror as a test of his identity; he rushes to it when he feels he has been transformed into Hyde: “Yes, I had gone to bed Henry Jekyll, I had awakened Edward Hyde.” (54). The mirror symbolizes Jekyll’s unstable self-image.

3. Couples

Even before the central connection Jekyll-Hyde is revealed, characters go in pairs: Utterson and Enfield are united by a “bond” (N. 8), Jekyll and Hyde by “bondage” (N. 19). Utterson is also a parallel to Jekyll: a repressed bachelor wearing an air of professional respectability (see Linehan, N. 210). Lanyon and Jekyll are two doctors and were friends once: “I thought you had a bond of common interest” (N. 14). Hyde and Utterson form another pair from the moment Utterson declares: “”If he be Mr. Hyde, I shall be Mr. Seek” (N. 15). According to Linehan: “Stevenson allows such parallels to intensify the atmosphere of slippery surface appearances” (N. 210). Indeed, all those bachelors have contradictions, things to hide. Even Utterson, when looking back, “was humbled to the dust by the many ill things he had done.” (N. 19

Stevenson diagnosed “multiple personality disorder” in his literary “case” study. What he saw as the inevitable state of man, duality or “a polity of multifarious denizens”, was confirmed by Freud’s theory of divided personality in “The Ego and the Id” and his study of “repression”, the cornerstone on which the whole structure of psychoanalysis rests.

In JH, rather than a character’s gradual integration (cf. Faust), we witness his sudden disintegration. Rather than progress, regression. Dr Jekyll is at the outset a respected member of his society, but over the course of the story we watch him become a recluse, a murderer and finally a suicide. By the end of the book, he no longer exists. He has lost his will, surrendered his moral agency, and shaken the “very fortress of identity” (N. 50)

1

[1] James Hogg, The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner (1824). See Norton, p. 125, note 4 and p. 49, note 6.

[2] F. Dostoevsky, The Double (1846).

[3]A doppelgänger is the ghostly double of a living person.

[4] Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891. Wordsworth Classics, 1992) p. 40.