Ah…duality; it gets me every time. Stevenson wrote this book on the basis that every human has two sides to them (Good and Evil), and it’s certainly an interesting contrast to texts from Freud, Nietzsche, Hobbes, and Rousseau (well, maybe not Rousseau). The syntax and vocabulary are okay, the pacing is horrendous, the main plot device ridiculous, and the climax is more of an anticlimax than anything. Maybe it’s because I had an idea of the plot beforehand, but I doubt that Stevenson was trying very hard to keep us from guessing the twist (the title makes it pretty obvious). So…with that said, how am I going to fill the rest of this blog? Hmm…
Society, as Freud, Hobbes, Rousseau, and probably Nietzsche says, is a restraint of natural freedoms. We allow ourselves to be constrained under laws and customs, depriving ourselves of much as a result. The two payoffs for this, however, are significant: in exchange for our freedom, we gain security and the ascetic ideal of morality. The first is a strong shelter that gives us the confidence to go about our lives in a way that would be impossible in an openly hostile environment, while the second is a source of pleasure and contentment that can only be achieved in a commonwealth. For Dr. Jekyll, however, these two benefits are not enough. He is a prominent man—strong, smart, wealthy—and has grown up in such a way that his fear of losing security has weakened. He takes pleasure in the ascetic ideal, but that pleasure is no longer enough. He needs something else, and yet, he also wants to keep what he already has. Sound selfish? It most certainly is—and he pays the price for that selfishness in the end. Putting that aside for now, though, what drives him to take such a suspicious drug? Couldn’t he just wear a trench coat or something and do his “bad” things under cover of darkness? No, he can’t…because then, he would lose his ascetic ideal. He would know that it is “him” doing the bad things, not the “other guy” who is undoubtedly also him but is not identified as him. He wants the best of both worlds without the consequences of either, and it is this denial of responsibility that ultimately leads to his downfall. Because Jekyll and Hyde are essentially the same person, it’s only natural that the boundary between them isn’t absolute (the boundary between Good and Evil is hardly absolute either). A reversal occurs in which Hyde becomes the undrugged form and Jekyll the drugged one, resulting in a fitting and cliché end to a moral tale. What’s interesting, however, is that there is an appearance of different personalities associated with the change in form. Is this true? Does the drug really create this “Hyde” persona, or does it, in fact, only facilitate a biological shift in its user? Is not “Hyde,” then, just a figment of the imagination? Does Jekyll have a split personality disorder? Who, in the end, was the one that committed suicide?
