Robert Louis Stevenson: Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde

It turned out to be a very good text for thinking about how the nineteenth-century novel thinks about selfhood. Dr. Jekyll is a nice man, well respected by his fellow doctors and other professional old single men in London (the character who spends a lot of time investigating his 'strange case' is his friend, the lawyer Mr. Utterson). But Jekyll also has strange tendencies that he worries are evil—he has 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" (ed. Emma Lately, 60). There's no way of telling what, actually, Jekyll's "impatient gaiety of disposition" leads him to do, although his singleness, and Victorian paranoia about London's moral and hygienic depravity, suggest that he may have a fondness for whores.

Anyway, his solution, as a doctor, is to find a medicine that will allow him to split his personality into two—when he's Dr. Jekyll, he's overwhelmingly good but also slightly bad; when he takes the drug, he's Mr. Hyde, and he's all bad. (Where does the good disappear to when he does this? Is the new Dr. Jekyll actually ALL good, since Mr. Hyde was ALL bad? The novella won't say, leaves it deliberately open. There are some interesting arguments about Calvinist stuff in here, I think—and Stevenson was raised in Scotland, so he certainly had room and biographical background to make these arguments. But he won't, because he's not from the seventeenth century—poo on him.) Mr. Hyde does several appalling things, like walking directly over a small child in the street when Mr. Utterson meets him for the first time. (It's not clear HOW you just walk over an 8-year-old, but because this is also a horror novel, the unimaginability of this act makes it terrifying.) But Jekyll learns that splitting himself is dangerous—shades of nuclear bomb-making, shades of Voldemort and his horcruxes (although of course the influence goes the other way—but it's what I'm thinking)—because eventually he can't stay Jekyll: he keeps turning involuntarily into Hyde. (It's not clear that Hyde really gets to have much fun when he's in that persona, either—mostly he seems to stay in his room, snapping at the servants, and making himself tea. When he goes out, he just walks over little kids, and once murders an M.P. Where are the whores? Where's the ludicly evil fun that being Hyde was supposed to allow???) Meanwhile, Jekyll/Hyde's building up a tolerance to the drug and needs more and more of it to switch, which is complicated by the fact that he can't get a supply of the precise strain of it he was using when he started all this mess. So on one level, this is just a story about opiate addiction (that was how I read it when I was ten—I'd picked the book up in the library, but understood it as an extension of the D.A.R.E. program). In the end, Jekyll can't hold off turning into Hyde any longer; he fixes himself a beaker of the stuff and is about to drink it, but dies in the process of his transformation.

So what happens to the self? When Jekyll is dead, so is Hyde (and had Hyde died, Jekyll would have to, too). Stevenson isn't going to offer any answers. Instead, I think, he wants to just set up something horrible—gothic—that's self-explanatory up to a certain point, but also has certain gaps in its explanation of things. These gaps are terrible, because they're spots where an explanation of the self should go, and instead there just isn't anything there.

Why the 19th C. Makes Me Sad

People keep disappearing in Copperfield.   First DC the elder dies, then DC is sent away from home, which he's young enough to experience as everyone he loves disappearing from his life.  When he comes home again, he sees his mother and baby brother briefly, but then they die, and he only sees them again lying in state in the parlor.  (By dying, they finally stop disappearing—they come to rest in the graveyard next to the church next to DC's father.  He always knows where to find them after that.)  

DC goes to school and sees Mr. Mell fired.  He leaves school, and doesn't see anyone from there for a long time.  He works, and seems to disappear from his own life; eventually, he runs away and really does disappear from it.  He finds his Aunt, and Mr. and Miss Murdstone come find him, but finally they leave again and he's glad, for the first time in the novel, to see anyone who leaves gone.  Later he sees Mr. Wickfield slowly losing his mind.  

The worst kinds of leaving for DC, though, seems to be committed by women.  When Emily Peggotty runs away from home with Steerforth, it's a HUGE problem.  Everyone is worried that Em'ly will become a whore in London, but no one will say this directly.  (Earlier, a woman--her friend Martha--ran away from home and seems to have become a whore in London, but she's also a very crazy and apparently unattractive whore, so it's hard to tell.) Pages and pages and pages are spent mourning Em'ly and worrying about her and wondering if she'll ever come back.   (Meanwhile, Mr. Spenlow and Mr. Barkis have both died, but their disappearances weren't nearly so hard.  DC seems more worried that Agnes is going to marry Uriah Heep and so disappear from his life, even though Agnes swears she'll never marry Uriah.)  Likewise, Dora is now about to die, too, which DC has to keep worrying over, hinting at it and alluding to it and anticipating it--then he takes a couple chapters to talk about other people, so that the narrative is left dreading her death.  

All the women are going away.  Men like Mr. Peggotty have to follow women around, to make sure they don't disappear, because leaving home, in any way, means becoming a whore.  (Whores are TERRIBLE, although the novel won't talk about this clearly enough for me to tell why.)   Death is probably whores too.