Thinking About Dr. Jekyll And The War He’s Fighting Within Himself And How He’ll Always Lose Because

The cheval glass scene completes the mirror imagery in Jekyll and Hyde, with the third incident highlighting the cruel irony of Jekyll’s fate. The cheval glass, displaying the hellish glow of the fire while facing heavenward, mocks Jekyll’s statement that the potion is “neither diabolical nor divine.” The mirror appears both diabolical and divine in this moment; the potion, in being merely a chemical mixture and not a magical cure, is too exactly the opposite of the diabolic or divine—it has no power whatsoever over the self. Just as the mirror distorts the laboratory room, failing to accurately reflect Poole’s and Utterson’s images, so has the potion warped Jekyll’s reality, driving him to suicide. What Jekyll has mistaken to be a problem of industrial commodity standardization—an inconsistent batch of chemical salts—actually demonstrates, through his inability to divorce his addictive desires from his otherwise respectable identity, the self’s fundamentally unitary nature. Stevenson positions this basic human truth as the ironic tragedy of Jekyll and Hyde, using addiction to establish that despite discordant desires, on a fundamental level the self is inescapably unitary.

-Jessica Cook, The Unitary Self in Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde

this is such an unserious take for me to post but like. stan did not teach himself all sorts of super-advanced experimental physics to rebuild the portal.

stan had the portal that was already complete and functional but broken. and repaired it enough to turn it back on. which he did by following the instructions in the journals. like. cmon man. no, stan is not an epic supergenius who without any instruction, education, or outside help built an entire interdimensional portal from scratch. like. why would he even need the journals if the "stan single handedly taught himself how to build a portal" take was true. cmon man be fr

Do you get it now? Without due process, everyone is at risk. How are you going to prove your citizenship otherwise?

not over the fact that Jekyll only cries after having committed bloody murder but straight up dissociates after having traumatized Lanyon…

"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."

The thing with Hyde's personhood is that from the moment it's revealed he's not "real", he as a character becomes more blurry. Is Hyde a person because at his core he's still Jekyll despite wearing a disguise, or is Hyde a person because he's trascended his original purpose of being Jekyll's disguise and has, ultimately, become Jekyll by virtue of occupying all his physical and mental space?

I've seen a few people questioning if Jekyll knew about Lanyon's death at all seeing as it's never mentioned. I feel that as a long-time friend, there's no way he'd never find out what with people probably sending their condolences his way. I'd say a reason why he wouldn't mention it is that it's unspeakable.

He's rather blasé about his other known crimes. Trampling a child? Dammit, the family saw, but this is easily solved with money. Murdering a man? This is awful, but he didn't know him, he could just as well be any other man. And besides, this provides the perfect excuse to abandon the experiment forever.

Causing the death of one of his best friends? Unspeakable.

This is when he starts disassociating from Hyde altogether, trying to convince himself that he isn't Hyde, that no part of him is Hyde. He didn't just fatally shock his friend for a gloat! That was Hyde.

He won't even mention the consequences of Lanyon's horror, he cannot bear to think of it. He refuses to think of it because it wasn't him- it wasn't even real, it was a dream where Hyde acted of his own accord to turn one of Jekyll's dearest friends against him. The disdain with which Hyde treated Lanyon wasn't his own, he swears.

He doesn't attend the funeral- he's too worried that he'll turn into Hyde in public and doom himself. But the real reason is that he's afraid of facing the truth. If he doesn't attend the funeral, if he rejects visits from people trying to give their condolences, if he refuses to even write the words on paper, he never has to live in the reality where he killed his friend. Instead, he can pretend that Lanyon is just angry at him again, but it soon shall pass. It always does.

Utterson visits. He comes too often to be bearable, he's too genuine in his grief. He's breaking the illusion, send him away, Poole! He stands outside Jekyll's door, begging him to come out.

"He's gone, Henry. It's only the two of us now."

And Jekyll does not answer. Utterson stops visiting.

In an alternate universe where the classic barbie movies were based off gothic/horror public domain works instead of fairytales

Dr Jekyll voice hey sorry for roping you into my horrors those were meant for my eyes and my eyes only

Utterson: I incline to Cain’s heresy; I let my brother go to the devil in his own way.

Jekyll: *leaves all his earthly goods to Hyde in the case of his disappearance*

Utterson: ...Nevermind I'm gonna hunt down this devil and tear Henry Jekyll out of its grasp with my own bare hands