Title: The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde
Author: Robert Louis Stevenson
Type: Short Story

The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde is a classic tale written by Robert Louis Stevenson. This book is structured as a mystery/thriller, told from the perspective of a lawyer named Utterson.
Utterson’s steady, rational approach to life lends credibility to the strange and ultimately horrifying events he reports. Utterson is a lifelong friend of the famed surgeon Dr. Henry Jekyll, who has some deep, inexplicable association with a mysterious sociopath who goes by the name of Hyde. Utterson is bothered by a will written by his friend that completely benefits the strange fellow named Mr.
Hyde. Utterson believes Hyde is blackmailing Jekyll and tries to persuade Jekyll to confide in him, so that he might help free his friend from this baleful influence. But Jekyll refuses to reveal anything of his relationship with Hyde. Utterson relates the progression of Hyde’s criminality, and the effect this has on Jekyll. One mystery piles on another as Jekyll breaks his association first with another physician friend, and then isolates himself entirely from the outside world. In a climactic scene at the end, Utterson breaches the walls surrounding Jekyll, and learns the truth. The Strange Case of Dr.
Jekyll and Mr. Hyde is a mystery that brings into question the basic duality of the human personality.
The character which I found the most fascinating was Dr Henry Jekyll’s alter ego Mr Edward Hyde. A peculiar, distasteful man who looks faintly pre‐human. Hyde is violent and cruel, and everyone who sees him describes him as ugly and deformed—yet no one can say exactly why. Language itself seems to fail around Hyde: he is not a creature who belongs to the rational world, the world of conscious articulation or logical grammar. Hyde is Jekyll’s dark side, released from the bonds of conscience and let loose into the world by a mysterious potion. Since Hyde represents the purely evil in man (or in Dr. Jekyll), he is, therefore, symbolically represented as being much smaller than Dr.
Jekyll — Jekyll's clothes are far too large for him — and Hyde is also many years younger than Jekyll, symbolically suggesting that the evil side of Jekyll did not develop until years after he was born. Hyde also creates terror; the servants are extremely frightened of him. When they think he is around the house, the servants cringe in horror, and some go into hysterics. As the novel progresses, Hyde's evil becomes more and more pronounced. He bludgeons Sir Danvers Carew to death for absolutely no reason other than the fact that Sir Danvers appeared to be a good and kindly man — and pure evil detests pure goodness. A conflict between Jekyll and Hyde erupts, as though the older Dr. Jekyll is a father to the errant and prodigal son. He wants to punish this son, but at the same time, he recognizes that Hyde is an intimate part of himself. Ultimately, when Jekyll commits suicide in order to get rid of Hyde (suicide is an evil act in the eyes of the church), this allows Hyde to become the dominant evil figure, and the dying Jekyll becomes Hyde in the final throes of death. I personally find Hyde to be one of literatures most complex and malevolent character. There is hardly any reason or rational to his actions. His name I believe is also significant, as he is both a hidden man and a persona that Dr. Jekyll hides behind. Mr. Utterson notes the significance of the name in Chapter
Two: "‘If he be Mr. Hyde,’ he had thought, ‘I shall be Mr. Seek.’"
The scene in this novel which I believe to be the most important scene is in the last chapter “Henry
Jekyll’s Full Statement of the Case,". This chapter offers a transcription of the letter Jekyll leaves for
Utterson in the laboratory. Jekyll writes that upon his birth he possessed a large inheritance, a healthy body, and a hardworking, decent nature. His idealism allowed him to maintain a respectable seriousness in public while hiding his more frivolous and indecent side. By the time he was fully grown, he found himself leading a dual life, in which his better side constantly felt guilt for the transgressions of his darker side. When his scientific interests led to mystical studies as to the divided nature of man, he hoped to find some solution to his own split nature. Jekyll insists that
“man is not truly one, but truly two,” and he records how he dreamed of separating the good and evil natures. The letter allows us finally to glimpse the events of the novel from the inside. In this passage, Jekyll discusses the years leading up to his discovery of the potion that transforms him into
Hyde. He summarizes his theory of humanity’s dual nature, which states that human beings are half virtuous and half criminal, half moral and half amoral. Jekyll’s goal in his experiments is to separate these two elements, creating a being of pure good and a being of pure evil. In this way he seeks to free his good side from dark urges while liberating his wicked side from the pangs of conscience.
Ultimately however I believe that Jekyll succeeds only in separating out Hyde, his evil half, while he himself remains a mix of good and evil. And eventually, of course, Hyde begins to dominate, until
Jekyll ceases to exist and only Hyde remains. This outcome suggests a possible misconception in
Jekyll’s original assumptions. Perhaps he did not possess an equally balanced good half and evil half, as he thought. In my opinion the events of the novel imply that the dark side (Hyde) is far stronger than the rest of Jekyll—so strong that, once sent free, this side takes him over completely. Jekyll’s initial delight whenever he becomes Hyde seems to support this viewpoint, as does the fact that, no matter how appalling the crimes Hyde commits, Jekyll never feels guilty enough to refrain from making the transformation again as soon as he feels the urge. “Henry Jekyll stood at times aghast before the acts of Edward Hyde,” Jekyll writes, “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.”
To me this just supports the fact that Jekyll wasn’t wholly good but instead a mixture of both good and evil unlike Hyde who I viewed as the embodiment of pure evil.
An important theme in this novel would be the theme The Duality of Human Nature. We can clearly see that this account of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde is an examination of the duality of human nature, as most clearly expressed in the revelation that Mr. Hyde is in fact Dr. Jekyll, only transformed into a personification of Jekyll's sinful characteristics. While pursuing his scientific exploits and trials Jekyll asserts that “man is not truly one, but truly two,” and he imagines the human soul as the battleground for an “angel” and a “fiend,” each struggling for mastery. But his potion, which he hoped would separate and purify each element, succeeds only in bringing the dark side into being—Hyde emerges, but he has no angelic counterpart. Once unleashed, Hyde slowly takes over, until Jekyll ceases to exist. According to Jekyll’s theory, I believe that the potion simply just strips away the civilized veneer, uncovering man’s essential nature. Certainly, the novel goes out of its way to paint Hyde as animalistic—he is hairy and ugly; he conducts himself according to instinct rather than reason; Utterson describes him as a “troglodyte,” or primitive creature. In contrast, Jekyll is described in the most gentlemanly terms ‐ tall, refined, polite and honourable, with long elegant fingers and a handsome appearance. Thus, perhaps Jekyll's experiment reduces his being to its most basic form, in which evil runs freely without considering the constraints of society and civilization. Yet if Hyde were just an animal, we would not expect him to take such delight in crime. Indeed, he seems to commit violent acts against innocents for no reason except the joy of it—something that no animal would do. He appears deliberately and happily immoral rather than amoral; he knows the moral law and basks in his breach of it. I found it unusual that for an animalistic creature, Hyde seems oddly at home in the urban landscape. All of these observations imply that perhaps civilization, too, has its dark side.
On the whole if found The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde to be very intriguing. This story got my heart pumping with its brutal murders, magical potions, inexplicable events, game‐changing documents, and, of course, the evil‐oozing Mr. Hyde. At the core of this novella is a mystery: who exactly is this Mr. Hyde and what is the nature of his relationship to the benevolent and wonderful
Dr. Jekyll?