Retour à l'accueil

This excerpt from the novella Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde deals with Dr. Jekyll’s first encounter with Mr. Hyde. At the end of a scientific experiment, Jekyll has obtained a potion that transforms him into somebody else, endowing him with a new body, a new mind, a new name, and new freedom, not experienced before, since Hyde is allowed to transgress social conventions of respectability. This change of identity and physical appearance is explored in the passage under scrutiny, with gothic undertones. In its extended meaning, gothic fiction refers to certain macabre, morbid or dark phenomena that arouse terror or horror. Here, Dr. Jekyll attempts to investigate the human mind by focusing on himself, more precisely on what he calls the “evil side of my nature”. The passage focuses on the double or alter ego of Dr. Jekyll both from a descriptive and a philosophical point of view, allowing the narrator to move from his own individual case to the formulation of a general statement about human nature (“all human beings are commingled out of good and evil”).

The narrative. We are dealing with a first person narrative through the voice of Dr. Jekyll himself, who is both narrator and protagonist. As an autodiegetic narrative, his story is characterized by subjectivity, by a deeply personal perspective on a totally new event/person: Jekyll’s discovery of the incarnation of his evil side reflected in a mirror. The narrative captures his sense of wonder and the shock at the contemplation of his other self, whom he had never seen before. The narrative combines an internal and an external perspective. It offers both a description marked by observation, the recording of details (Hyde’s ugliness) and an introspection of Jekyll’s own feelings and sensations while he is contemplating Hyde. This combination of internal and external perspectives is due to the fact that Dr. Jekyll is both the object and the subject of his experiment (in other words he is experimenting on himself while also being the scientist conducting the experiment). The passage also offers a lucid evaluation of the implications that the embodiment of evil in the person of Mr. Hyde might have for his own understanding of human nature.

How do Jekyll and Hyde complete each other? What does that tell Jekyll about human nature?

Although Jekyll and Hyde might look like they are complementary, things are not as simple. A superficial examination might lead one to conclude that Jekyll is purely good and Hyde is bad, but such a conclusion is wrong. Jekyll has led a life made of nine tenths effort and control, but he is far from being purely good. Jekyll is actually a combination of good and bad, dominating his passions and impulses in a way that conforms to the social ideal of virtue. Hyde is part of Jekyll, which means that Hyde has “hidden” inside him all along (the homonymy between Hyde and “to hide” is quite obvious). The text advances a theory of the human mind that talks both about duality (good and bad) and the combination of extremes (“commingling”). What Jekyll claims is that moral and psychological polarities do not actually exist in pure form, they are rather mixed up in shades that live in the minds of individual persons. What Jekyll’s experiment achieves is a separation of these two moral and psychological states: thus, evil is incarnated in Hyde.

By establishing a correspondence between evil and ugliness (Hyde is regarded with disgust by the people who come in contact with him), between goodness and beauty/attractiveness, the text builds upon the traditional parallel between body and soul: moral traits are supposedly inscribed in the body and can be read on a person’s face. We can infer that criminality is written on Hyde’s face, which makes people shudder. Such theories of correspondence body-soul, which imply a criminal determinism, were very popular in the 19^th century, but have since been rejected by science and psychology.

What is extremely interesting to notice in the text is that Jekyll himself is not repelled by Hyde, but rather recognizes and welcomes him as part of himself. Hyde looks strangely familiar to him in an uncanny way. Moreover, it is not clear at this point whether he will be able to go back to his Jekyll shape again. Even more, Jekyll confesses a fascination with Hyde as his evil other that is not in keeping with the ideal of decency and virtue he has obeyed so far. This fascination with what he calls “evil” is simply a recognition of the darkness within, what later will be called the unconscious by Sigmund Freud.

Science and magic.

The passage combines elements of science and magic, and it is impossible to tell them apart. Gothic fiction sometimes relies on a scientific framework, with the scientific details remaining extremely vague (Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is another example). Here, Jekyll is a doctor who experiments with a magic potion in his cabinet, which is a version of the scientific laboratory. The word “potion” reminds one of magic and witchcraft (also possibly of alchemy), but the secret of the potion is kept intact. The reader is not told what the ingredients of the potion are, how it is obtained etc. Only its result is described: the birth of Hyde out of Jekyll (accompanied by the replacement of Jekyll by Hyde). The potion acts both upon the body and the soul: Jekyll changes into another person, with a distinct set of values, impulses and a different body. Such a radical transformation has all the attributes of magic, although it happens in a medical context. Jekyll is a doctor, but comes close to a magician or an alchemist.

Retour à l'accueil

©2008-2012 Monica Manolescu-Oancea. Dernière mise à jour : 9 novembre 2012.