The Thing With Hyde's Personhood Is That From The Moment It's Revealed He's Not "real", He As A Character

Pines Family + The Four Loves

Here’s to ten years of weird!

“To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly be broken.”  — C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves

ID check at the bank

(coughing and sputtering) we are so back

The hate that Stanford gets low-key feels like people who hated Mabel growing up to hate Ford ngl.

there are so many possibilities when it comes to other symptoms of HJ7 that isnt told to us and i cannot stop thinking about it

vomiting, distorted vision, twitching, breathing problems, increased appetite, muscle numbness, false memories, auditory hallucinations, increased heart beat, hypersensitivity, lack of sensitivity, stretch marks, damaged vocal chords, memory loss, increased blood loss, swollen muscles, tics, abnormal pain, poor circulation, dizziness, nose bleeds, peeling skin, weight loss

Oh God help me

God have mercy

maybe it’s just me but Jekyll and Hyde loses something when it doesn’t have Jekyll’s first person narration (or other equivalent narration tool) (and it has to be book accurate) because you really can’t understand what Jekyll is going through unless we really get in his head. Even if he lies. if anything the lies are even more revealing. watching it from the outside you can see what his situation looks like, but not what it is. only when you understand him, his motives, his thoughts, the horror and the tragedy reveal themselves- the layers of metaphor are peeled back and we can really see Jekyll’s fear, confusion, hurts, losses- his shame, his guilt, the sort of person he is, the sort of person he wants to be, and how all that sent him down a spiral of self-destruction so bizarre it can only be truly understood from within, and even then, we’re at the mercy of his narration, of his denial, of his torment. only he can explain what is what makes this story scary, and he will control what we know of it.

Jekyll and Hyde looks like a typical character vs own dark impulses gothic tale but it’s actually a very biting psychological horror story centered around the loss of identity and mental illness as a form of death.

Lanyon gives up on life after witnessing something he believes to be impossible (and that he even doubts was real), and only physically dies after he’s been left a husk of himself. Jekyll gradually loses the grip on reality and eventually dissociates to the point he can’t even see himself in his own fabricated identity, and only physically dies after he loses most of his personality and sense of self.

For all the waxing about these two being scared of death, they experienced it while they were still alive, and what ultimately died were the closest thing to an empty shell of a body you can get in a semi-realistic setting. Both characters‘ ultimate fate is underlined by a passage in which Jekyll describes himself dissociating after telling Lanyon the truth. As much as one believes and the other doesn’t, both are left traumatized by something that, in real life, is impossible.

It has been argued that rather than good vs evil the book touches on repression vs indulgence but I think it also has a layer of reality vs unreality. By the end of Henry’s narration, we don’t quite know how much of it was true and how much of it was lies or delusions. Either way, the main conflict in the last chapter isn’t one of man vs man, but rather man vs self, man vs perception, man vs mental decay, and not in a traditional “darkness inside” way but in one that is deliberately similar to real life struggles with addiction and psychosis.

"This last re-read of Jekyll & Hyde really entrenched me in my interpretation, that Jekyll and Hyde are the same person."

"Well. Duh. That's the point of the story."

"No, you don't get it."

"..."

"I mean well, yes, technically, it's the point of the story that they are the same person, and most people get that - but they get it wrong."

"...you are overthinking this so hard."

"No! Listen. Ok maybe i am but- listen. Most pop culture interpretations give Jekyll as the full good side and Hyde as the full bad one, which we can both agree is a gross oversimplification."

"Yeah, obviously. Hyde is all evil, but Jekyll is not all good. He is a mixed bag like all humans are. He wouldn't even think of creating Hyde otherwise. He says as much himself."

"See! That's exactly my point! That's what Jekyll says!"

"...what?"

"When we get Hyde's full story, it's not Hyde telling it. It's Jekyll, a man who is characterised as caring so much about his own legacy that he went as far as doing all of this to not risk it. In other words, someone who has all the interest in the world to depict Hyde as somehow wholly other than himself."

"But he doesn't."

"Doesn't he? You said it yourself. He says: I am a mixed bag, like all humans are, while Hyde is not. He is something else."

"Well, that's confirmed by others, though. Poole calls Hyde an 'it'."

"It's 19th century England and Poole is an old man, he probably talks about chimney sweepers the same way."

"OK, but what about Enfield and Utterson and Lanyon and everyone else being repulsed by Hyde? That all points to him having something deeply inhuman about him."

"Inhuman, I'm not sure. Unnatural, definitely. He is a creation of science, like the Creature from Frankenstein, and as such he is deeply uncanny - I don't need to break out the freudian unheimleich, do I, you got what I meant. But would you say that the Creature is not human? The whole point is that he is."

"Ok, then what about Jekyll talking about how his perceptions and ideas and ways of thinking changed when he was Hyde? Or how Hyde grew with the passing of time?"

"Ah! See! That's the thing. That's Jekyll saying that. But hear me out. What's more probable: that whatever radical physical change that brought on Hyde's appearance brought on also some changes in brain chemistry that could feel as if one's thought patterns had transformed? Or that Jekyll truly managed to create a chemical sieve to separated good and evil, and put only the second to the forefront?"

"See, you ARE overthinking this. You talk about brain chemistry and probability, but this isn't a scientific paper. It's a parable. Do you think deteriorating lead white is the cause of Dorian Grey's portrait changing? Of course not. It's not chemistry. It's philosophy."

"No, you don't get it. We know Jekyll omits or glosses over parts of the narrative that are painful to him. He doesn't say what happened with Lanyon after he transformed, for example. He says that he shares a memory with Hyde yet the memories of the murder are hazy. Jekyll is trying to say: all of my evil instincts, and nothing else, were Hyde. What else could Hyde be if not evil? But if we assume that the Hyde persona was just as double as Jekyll's, just as filled with the potential for good and evil - that it was just Jekyll, only younger and more wild... that means that it's not just the original sin of creating Hyde that belongs to Jekyll. It means that every time he did something wrong, it was him, actively choosing to do so, because he knew it would be without social consequence."

"Ok, let's say i buy that. Is it that big of a difference? It doesn't seem so to me."

"But it is! Because it changes the meaning of the story radically."

"How?"

"Look. We are having this whole conversation, right? And people who are reading follow the turns, maybe even read them in two different voices. But it's just one person writing. There's the illusion of a conversation, of an exchange of ideas, but actually the decision on who is right is taken, because there is only one person writing."

"Like Jekyll writing about Hyde, I get it."

"But that is also the situation for Hyde! That's why his character is so full of rage and rebellion and hatred towards Jekyll - because he *is* Jekyll. Jekyll takes all the parts of himself that he wishes to hide and puts them on Hyde. But that's not who Hyde is. Hyde is Jekyll as much as Jekyll is Hyde, and Jekyll trying to confine Hyde to the realm of the evil and wrong is just Jekyll trying to get away with murder, again, if not physically, at least in the memory of posterity."

"You are saying that, what, Jekyll killed Carew?"

"Of course Jekyll killed Carew. He also stepped on the girl. Hyde is small, and has a light step. He wouldn't have managed either of those things if he wasn't still Jekyll, with all of his weight and strength. Jekyll himself uses the first person when he describes the murder."

"So Hyde destroying Jekyll's things and putting blasphemous words in his holy books..."

"It's all Jekyll, acting in self-hatred. That's the whole secret. Jekyll hates himself because he is a coward. He wishes he had the courage to be the person he wants to be out in the open, but he doesn't. So he creates a mask for himself, one that grants him total freedom. And in that total freedom he is also free to hate himself and his own legacy and all the ways being Henry Jekyll has him trapped. But its all him, all the way, making the decisions."

"Alright, I guess. I don't see how this is radically different from my interpretation."

"You believe Jekyll when he says-"

"I believe Jekyll believes that. You dislike Jekyll because you recognise in him your same desire for a flawless, composed life, and this brings you to automatically treat him as a liar who knows he's lying. But you and I both know that a lie one tells to oneself becomes a truth soon enough. I think Jekyll truly believes Hyde to be all evil, and I think Hyde believes it, as well. It explains why the gravity of his sins escalates so rapidly, and why he never tries to reach out or form human connection as Hyde, although his appearance probably didn't help. And if someone thinks that they have no choice, isn't that the same as having no choice at all?"

"So your point is..."

"You don't believe Jekyll's last confession. I do, in the measure that I believe that he believes it."

"...but we are the same person."

"Yes. Well. We are all a mixed bag, aren't we."

Still thinking about the night Utterson broke down the door/read the letters. To me it was all within the same 24 hours.

I’ve seen the idea here and there that Utterson read the letters there in Jekyll’s cabinet and then could look at Hyde’s body with realization and grief. However, I think it much more likely that he didn’t read Jekyll’s statement until at least a couple hours later, when he was at home alone. This would’ve been after searching for Jekyll or signs of where his body could be, notifying the police, telling them his statement (which includes however long they kept him hanging around before and after that), and going home and possibly processing this weird and distressing night for a bit.

While I definitely feel the appeal of wanting Utterson to have his closure to Jekyll by observing Hyde’s body with the knowledge, it’s so much more sad to think that he’s not going to get that chance. If there was a funeral for Jekyll (there probably was), it was with his body absent, because it was never found (unless there wasn’t a service because he would’ve been presumed missing).

By the time he’d read both letters, Hyde’s (Jekyll’s) body would’ve been in custody, waiting for autopsy, if not already begun. So then … what’s Utterson supposed to do? Tell people that’s actually Jekyll’s body? His friend since his youth whom he held dear to his heart and who deserves a proper burial and service? … No. He can’t do that. He’d be taken for having gone mad. Unless he showed the letters as proof.

But then, if they are believed, Jekyll’s reputation would be completely ruined. You know what people are like when someone they like/respect turns out to be a horrible person. And in a society when everyone puts on the facade in public … it would also haunt Utterson more out loud rather than just in his thoughts, and that’s horrible enough without making his everyday life worse.

No. There’s no saving Jekyll’s body. He died as Hyde and he can’t be recovered. His body will be subjected to whatever treatment the bodies of criminals were subjected to. And Utterson will likely keep quiet.

If there was a funeral service for Jekyll and Utterson went, he’d be surrounded by people who would know so little of the truth about the man they would be singing the praises of. And Utterson would have to be quiet and bear through it.

The main person he would’ve talked to about all this is already dead. From learning the truth firsthand. Anyone else he talks to would compromise Jekyll’s memory. What would finding out the truth do to Poole? Could Enfield keep his mouth shut? … Dare Utterson risk finding out?

I think he’d just keep it secret, keep it safe. If he did carry on through life, he’d be doing it with a new layer to the facade he already wore daily. He’d have to carry on, hear the platitudes—“Terribly sorry for your loss.” “Fine man, that Dr. Jekyll.” “London is all the poorer now.” “Good man, good man.” “How’ve you been holding up?”—and try to roll with it. Holding all that knowledge and emotion behind the facade. Confiding in no one.

Like his friend.