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Reviewing? Rambling? I am not entirely sure what to call this, but seeing as I've finished...

The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde

A lot of what I'd heard before reading this was secondhand, or having seen League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. ;p And mostly the impression I'd gotten was that it was supposed to be an angel/devil split, but that's not what happens.

What actually happens here is a great deal more subtle, and doesn't actually deal with Hyde that much at all.

The story revolves around three friends, all of whom are approaching middle age or past it - I don't find it specifically said, but I think Dr. Jekyll is actually the youngest of them. The other two are Dr. Lanyon and Mr. Utterson, who is a lawyer. It is Mr. Utterson who is the chief narrator of the story, and is Dr. Jekyll's own lawyer as well as his friend - and who also seems to be nursing an unrequited thing for Henry Jekyll.

Seriously. Or maybe it's just me reading into this, but dude the subtext.

Setting that aside... it's during a walk with another friend that Mr. Utterson hears the name Hyde for the second time in his life, the first having been in the terms of Henry Jekyll's will. Which the man wrote himself, because Utterson refused to have anything to do with it. So he hears this horrible tale of Hyde walking over a young child and then having to pay her family, being blackmailed into it, and is struck by the disturbingly familiar name as well as the way his friend describes Hyde - `He is not easy to describe. There is something wrong with his appearance; something displeasing, something downright detestable. I never saw a man I so disliked, and yet I scarce know why. He must be deformed somewhere; he gives a strong feeling of deformity, although I couldn't specify the point. He's an extraordinary- looking man, and yet I really can name nothing out of the way. No, sir; I can make no hand of it; I can't describe him. And it's not want of memory; for I declare I can see him this moment.'

Right off, he assumes that Jekyll, who was apparently a bit wild in his youth - I say a bit, because Mr. Utterson is specifically described 'a lover of the sane and customary sides of life, to whom the fanciful was the immodest' - he assumes something out of Jekyll's past has caught up with him, in the form of blackmail from Hyde. So he sets off to talk to Dr. Lanyon, to discover that the Drs. have had a falling out which seems to have predated Hyde; thus he can get no information from the Dr.

So he ends up obsessing about it, imaging Hyde waking Jekyll - Or else he would see a room in a rich house, where his friend lay asleep, dreaming and smiling at his dreams; and then the door of that room would be opened, the curtains of the bed plucked apart, the sleeper recalled, and, lo! there would stand by his side a figure to whom power was given, and even at that dead hour he must rise and do its bidding.

And he keeps obsessing about this until he must meet Hyde, must see this person who's stolen is threatening his friend. So he starts hanging around the neighborhood of the incident until one day he does meet Hyde. This meeting does not come off so well, but confirms for Mr. Utterson that Hyde is a totally despicable sort. And so he nobly determines to go to Jekyll and say, essentially 'Look here. The man reeks of evil, he's done things a thousand times worse than anything you've ever, and has no ground to stand on blackmailing you. Trust me, I'm a lawyer, I can get you out of this.'

Of course, it doesn't quite come off that way. For some reason, Jekyll seems rather attached to the man, which Mr. Utterson can't understand at all. But he is convinced to back off, and then there is a time-lapse of about a year.

Hyde has killed a man, a man who turns out also to be a friend of Utterson's. So he's brought in to identify the body, and hearing the description of the murderer from a young woman who happened to witness it, he knows who's done this. And takes them to his apartment's. Which he recognizes a piece of art that is rather to Jekyll's taste and assumes his friend gave it to the man as a gift. Not that this has anything to do with anything. Except me squeeing once again at the subtext, although I am willing to admit the possibility of bias here.

So, after the police have been let into Hyde's place, and all is set up to capture him, Mr. Utterson once again goes after Jekyll, very concerned about his friend - he might be hiding the murderer, or something equally insane. Once again, Jekyll puts him off, this time saying he's broken all ties with the man and no one will ever hear of Hyde again. Which he means literally, but of course Mr. Utterson is still lacking a certain knowledge that I came in with... and he shows him a letter Hyde wrote, to help put his mind at ease : The lawyer liked this letter well enough; it put a better colour on the intimacy than he had looked for, and he blamed himself for some of his past suspicions.

Except that he has a chance to have someone versed in recognizing handwriting look at both it, and a piece of mail from Jekyll, and is told they are the same except for a certain slant to Hyde's. And Mr. Utterson's conclusion is that Jekyll forged for Hyde. Which, while it is in a sense exactly what happened... the man is persistent in believing in Jekyll's essential innocence of character.

For about two months, it seems things are going to be okay. The death of Sir Danvers was, to his way of thinking, more than paid for by the disappearance of Mr. Hyde. Now that that evil influence had been withdrawn, a new life began for Dr Jekyll. He came out of his seclusion, renewed relations with his friends, became once more their familiar guest and entertainer; and whilst he had always been known for charities, he was now no less distinguished for religion. He was busy, he was much in the open air, he did good; his face seemed to open and brighten, as if with an inward consciousness of service; and for more than two months the doctor was at peace.

And then Mr. Utterson goes to call and is refused. And again, and again, and again. And so he goes to see Dr. Lanyon, and learns the man is dying for reasons he will not disclose. And he refuses to speak of Jekyll at all. But when he does die, he leaves a letter for Utterson that is only to be opened when/if Jekyll dies or disappears.

Then, one dark and windswept night, Dr. Jekyll’s servant Poole comes to get him, terrified out of his wits, and convinced that Dr. Jekyll has been killed or something awful, which eventually ends with their agreeing to break into the room in the conviction that they're going to be confronting Hyde.

And Hyde was in there, right enough. But he'd committed suicide. And no trace could they find anywhere of Jekyll, except a package which contained his will, a small note saying to read what Lanyon said he was going to give him first, and then another larger envelope.

What follows after that, is the reading of Dr. Lanyon's letter. The letter tells him how Lanyon had gotten a letter asking him to get some things from Jekyll's place and bring them home, where a caller would show up for them at midnight. Which he did, and the man who showed up was Hyde, and Lanyon saw the transformation. This would be the shock that killed him, having seen Hyde become Jekyll being too much for him. Hyde gave him the chance to back out of it, though. Mockingly, and in such a way as to make it sound tempting, the lure of knowledge? But it was there.

And then he reads Henry Jekyll's letter.

The tale, told in brief and from Henry's side, is of a man who was not so much a good man as he was single mindedly determined to be good. And no matter how successful he was at it, because coming into from Utterson's view, he was very good at it? He never managed to satisfy himself:

And indeed, the worst of my faults was a certain impatient gaiety of disposition, such as has made the happiness of many, but such as I found it hard to reconcile with my imperious desire to carry my head high, and wear a more than commonly grave countenance before the public. Hence it came about that I concealed my pleasures; and that when I reached years of reflection, and began to look round me and take stock of my progress and position in the world, I stood already committed to a profound duplicity of life.

Though so profound a double-dealer, I was in no sense a hypocrite; both sides of me were in dead earnest; I was no more myself when I laid aside restraint and plunged in shame, than when I laboured, in the eye of day, at the furtherance of knowledge or the relief of sorrow and suffering.

It was thus rather the exacting nature of my aspirations, than any particular degradation in my faults, that made me what I was and, with even a deeper trench than in the majority of men, severed in me those provinces of good and ill which divide and compound man's dual nature.

And as he continues on, the idea comes to him that if he could split himself, house both impulses in their own person, then the sinner and the saint could go their separate ways in peace. That was the plan. Well, as far as the sinner went it turned out well.

I felt younger, lighter, happier in body; within I was conscious of a heady recklessness, a current of disordered sensual images running like a mill race in my fancy, a solution of the bonds of obligation, an unknown but not an innocent freedom of the soul. I knew myself, at the first breath of this new life, to be more wicked, tenfold more wicked, sold a slave to my original evil; and the thought, in that moment, braced and delighted me like wine.

That night I had come to the fatal cross roads. Had I approached my discovery in a more noble spirit, had I risked the experiment while under the empire of generous or pious aspirations, all must have been otherwise, and from these agonies of death and birth I had come forth an angel instead of a fiend. The drug had no discriminating action; it was neither diabolical nor divine; it but shook the doors of the prison house of my disposition; and, like the captives of Philippi, that which stood within ran forth. At that time my virtue slumbered; my evil, kept awake by ambition, was alert and swift to seize the occasion; and the thing that was projected was Edward Hyde. Hence, although I had now two characters as well as two appearances, one was wholly evil, and the other was still the old Henry Jekyll, that incongruous compound of whose reformation and improvement I had already learned to despair. The movement was thus wholly toward the worse.

The problem then becomes obvious - he has not got rid of his baser impulses, but made of them a more convenient drug to use - so that as the first moment of rapture and acceptance passes, he starts to disassociate his selves, to slide towards thinking of Hyde as a separate being and a game rather than a part of himself.

The pleasures which I made haste to seek in my disguise were, as I have said, undignified; I would scarce use a harder term. But in the hands of Edward Hyde they soon began to turn towards the monstrous. When I would come back from these excursions, I was often plunged into a kind of wonder at my vicarious depravity. This familiar that I called out of my own soul, and sent forth alone to do his good pleasure, was a being inherently malign and villainous; his every act and thought centred on self; drinking pleasure with bestial avidity from any degree of torture to another; relentless like a man of stone. Henry Jekyll stood at times aghast before the acts of Edward Hyde; but the situation was apart from ordinary laws, and insidiously relaxed the grasp of conscience. It was Hyde, after all, and Hyde alone, that was guilty. Jekyll was no worse; he woke again to his good qualities seemingly unimpaired; he would even make haste, where it was possible, to undo the evil done by Hyde. And thus his conscience slumbered.

The further he goes along that path, the more readily he denies the monster in himself while still continuing to use it, the more balance begins to shift and then :

Some two months before the murder of Sir Danvers, I had been out for one of my adventures, had returned at a late hour, and woke the next day in bed with somewhat odd sensations. It was in vain I looked about me; in vain I saw the decent furniture and tall proportions of my room in the square; in vain that I recognized the pattern of the bed curtains and the design of the mahogany frame; something still kept insisting that I was not where I was, that I had not wakened where I seemed to be, but in the little room in Soho where I was accustomed to sleep in the body of Edward Hyde. I smiled to myself, and, in my psychological way, began lazily to inquire into the elements of this illusion, occasionally, even as I did so, dropping back into a comfortable morning doze. I was still so engaged when, in one of my more wakeful moments, my eye fell upon my hand. Now, the hand of Henry Jekyll (as you have often remarked) was professional in shape and size; it was large, firm, white and comely. But the hand which I now saw, clearly enough in the yellow light of a mid-London morning, lying half shut on the bed-clothes, was lean, corded, knuckly, of a dusky pallor, and thickly shaded with a swart growth of hair. It was the hand of Edward Hyde.

This is the first moment of panic.

Between these two I now felt I had to choose. My two natures had memory in common, but all other faculties were most unequally shared between them. Jekyll (who was a composite) now with the most sensitive apprehensions, now with a greedy gusto, projected and shared in the pleasures and adventures of Hyde; but Hyde was indifferent to Jekyll, or but remembered him as the mountain bandit remembers the cavern in which he conceals himself from pursuit. Jekyll had more than a father's interest; Hyde had more than a son's indifference. To cast in my lot with Jekyll was to die to those appetites which I had long secretly indulged and had of late begun to pamper. To cast it in with Hyde was to die to a thousand interests and aspirations, and to become, at a blow and for ever, despised and friendless. The bargain might appear unequal; but there was still another consideration in the scales; for while Jekyll would suffer smartingly in the fires of abstinence, Hyde would be not even conscious of all that he had lost. Strange as my circumstances were, the terms of this debate are as old and commonplace as man; much the same inducements and alarms cast the die for any tempted and trembling sinner; and it fell out with me, as it falls with so vast a majority of my fellows, that I chose the better part and was found wanting in the strength to keep to it.

It strikes me in that sentence - is he implying that the balance weighs in favor of Hyde at first - that it is only Hyde's lack of awareness of everything Jekyll is that tips the scales? In any case, what he's tried to do is quit cold turkey - as if he has completely forgotten that an excess of abstinence drove him into this in the first place. But.

For two months, however, I was true to my determination; for two months I led a life of such severity as I had never before attained to, and enjoyed the compensations of an approving conscience. But time began at last to obliterate the freshness of my alarm; the praises of conscience began to grow into a thing of course; I began to be tortured with throes and longings, as of Hyde struggling after freedom; and at last, in an hour of moral weakness, I once again compounded and swallowed the transforming draught.

I do not suppose that when a drunkard reasons with himself upon his vice, he is once out of five hundred times affected by the dangers that he runs through his brutish physical insensibility; neither had I, long as I had considered my position, made enough allowance for the complete moral insensibility and insensate readiness to evil which were the leading characters of Edward Hyde. Yet it was by these that I was punished. My devil had been long caged, he came out roaring. I was conscious, even when I took the draught, of a more unbridled, a more furious propensity to ill.

And this is the point where Hyde commits his first and as far we ever see, only murder. And Jekyll finally freaks, finally and really becomes afraid of Hyde and is rather happy about it. He's still tripping on that idea of quitting completely, of not sinning at all ever, and what luck! Now he has every reason to never ever take the potion again.

Jekyll was now my city of refuge; but let Hyde peep out an instant, and the hands of all men would be raised to take and slay him.

Nor can I truly say that I wearied of this beneficent and innocent life; I think instead that I daily enjoyed it more completely; but I was still cursed with my duality of purpose; and as the first edge of my penitence wore off, the lower side of me, so long indulged, so recently chained down, began to growl for licence. Not that I dreamed of resuscitating Hyde; the bare idea of that would startle me to frenzy no, it was in my own person that I was once more tempted to trifle with my conscience; and it was as an ordinary secret sinner that I at last fell before the assaults of temptation.

There comes an end to all things; the most capacious measure is filled at last; and this brief condescension to my evil finally destroyed the balance of my soul. And yet I was not alarmed; the fall seemed natural, like a return to the old days before I had made my discovery. It was a fine, clear January day, wet under foot where the frost had melted, but cloudless overhead; and the Regents Park was full of winter chirrupings and sweet with Spring odours. I sat in the sun on a bench; the animal within me licking the chops of memory; the spiritual side a little drowsed, promising subsequent penitence, but not yet moved to begin. After all, I reflected, I was like my neighbours; and then I smiled, comparing myself with other men, comparing my active goodwill with the lazy cruelty of their neglect. And at the very moment of that vainglorious thought, a qualm came over me, a horrid nausea and the most deadly shuddering. These passed away, and left me faint; and then as in its turn the faintness subsided, I began to be aware of a change in the temper of my thoughts, a greater boldness, a contempt of danger, a solution of the bonds of obligation. I looked down; my clothes hung formlessly on my shrunken limbs; the hand that lay on my knee was corded and hairy. I was once more Edward Hyde.

In the middle of a park. Where anyone could see him. The panic before was as nothing to this, because he'd known he could reach the potion and Hyde would be gone. Now, Hyde is in a position of being unable to reach the potion, and, well...

Hyde in danger of his life was a creature new to me: shaken with inordinate anger, strung to the pitch of murder, lusting to inflict pain.

A change had come over me. It was no longer the fear of the gallows, it was the horror of being Hyde that racked me.

This, then, is the point in which Hyde comes up with the plan to have Lanyon get ahold of his potion for him - and I wondered at this at first, why he would want the man to see him transform? I think it was, deliberately, to destroy him. To inflict pain.

Unfortunately, the last trip was quite literally the fall - Hyde is now the dominant personality, like it or not.

At all hours of the day and night I would be taken with the premonitory shudder; above all, if I slept, or even dozed for a moment in my chair, it was always a Hyde that I awakened. Under the strain of this continually impending doom and by the sleeplessness to which I now condemned myself, ay, even beyond what I had thought possible to man, I became, in my own person, a creature eaten up and emptied by fever, languidly weak both in body and mind, and solely occupied by one thought: the horror of my other self. 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 power of Hyde seemed to have grown with the sickliness of Jekyll. And certainly the hate that now divided them was equal on each side. With Jekyll, it was a thing of vital instinct. He had now seen the full deformity of that creature that shared with him some of the phenomena of consciousness, and was co-heir with him to death: and beyond these links of community, which in themselves made the most poignant part of his distress, he thought of Hyde, for all his energy of life, as of something not only hellish but inorganic. This was the shocking thing; that the slime of the pit seemed to utter cries and voices; that the amorphous dust gesticulated and sinned; that what was dead, and had no shape, should usurp the offices of life. And this again, that that insurgent horror was knit to him closer than a wife, closer than an eye; lay caged in his flesh, where he heard it mutter and felt it struggle to be born; and at every hour of weakness, and in the confidences of slumber, prevailed against him, and deposed him out of life. The hatred of Hyde for Jekyll was of different order. His terror of the gallows drove him continually to commit temporary suicide, and return to his subordinate station of a part instead of a person; but he loathed the necessity, he loathed the despondency into which Jekyll was now fallen, and he resented the dislike with which he was himself regarded. Hence the ape-like tricks that he would play me, scrawling in my own hand blasphemies on the pages of my books, burning the letters and destroying the portrait of my father; and indeed, had it not been for his fear of death, he would long ago have ruined himself in order to involve me in the ruin. But his love of life is wonderful; I go further: I, who sicken and freeze at the mere thought of him, when I recall the abjection and passion of this attachment, and when I know how he fears my power to cut him off by suicide, I find it in my heart to pity him.

And so they come to the end, as the salt which was the final ingredient runs out, and it turns out he had been dealing with a flawed supply - and it was whatever was wrong with that batch that made the thing work. Unable to get more and with his supplies of the original salt running crucially low, Hyde gets panicky, Jekyll's servant Poole sees and recognizes him, and we come to the point where Mr. Utterson is brought in to save poor Dr. Jekyll.

Even towards that end, he seems to have thought of his selves as being separate, that he would be going to one judgment and Hyde to another. Delusion or sheer bloody pride, I don't know, but I really doubt it would work that way - myself? I have to side with Hyde in terms of anger at the man’s attitude - as if he weren’t responsible for everything in the first place, as if he’d not chosen to become what he became.

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