Dr Jekyll is a respectable single man who has secret desires, Stevensons introduces him early on as ‘smooth-faced’ seeming to present an inscrutable exterior and there fore an air of mystery, and ‘a sylish cast perhaps, but every mark of capacity and kindness’, revealing to us the many layers of the characters personality, ‘ a slyish cast’ opens a crack in this polished facade through which the reader begins to see him true nature. This also says how good Jekyll was and so it provides a contrast to Hyde the beast. Jekyll wants to achieve perfect dual personality where he wants to split the good and bad completely. He wants ‘good’, where there is no ‘bad’ and no shame and guilt and the other ‘bad’ without any shame or conscience and following destinal instincts e.g. apes:
‘if each, I told myself, could but be housed in separate identities, life would be relieved of all that unbearable; the unjust might go his way, delivered from aspirations and remorse of his more upright twin; and just could walk steadfastly and securely on his upward path, doing the good things in which he found his pleasure’
so Jekyll had led to a double life where the equal enthusiasm into both light and the dark side, Jekyll comes to the realisation of the ultimate truth: ‘man is not truly one but truly two’
Stevensons childhood was shaped by the strict code of ‘respectability’ of the Victorian middle-class in Edinburgh, where it is church going, and was brought up, with no drinking, to have sex within marriage and thrift. This was all self-control. At his childhood, Stevenson suffered numerous health problems, a condition which was to plague him through out his life. His father was often on business an d is mother herself suffered from an illness of the lungs, rendering her unable to care for her son, so the role of the mother was given to a ‘fundamentalist Christian’ nurse, Alison Cunningham or ‘Cummy’, where she taught Stevensons the difference between the pursuit of ‘life of good and evil’, where she try to convince to him that you always need to look out for evil part, so try to defeat it, or you would go to ‘everlasting torments of Hell, where its eternal, once you are there no coming back. ‘Cummy’, with whom he developed his closet relationship.
Mr Hyde clearly represents ‘the beast in man’ and significance symbolism of the name ‘Hyde’ (hide) he is described in a number of animal images. Poole, Jekyll’s faithful butler describes him as a ‘thing’, which cries out ‘like a rat’, and screams in ‘mere animal terror’. The Victorian theory at the time contradicted to Stevensons idea. He insinuated that if humans de-involved we would revert to monkeys ‘ thickly shaded with swart growth of hair’. Victorians believed they were above animals, so could d not accept this. Hyde was the evil man, and this shows that Stevensons believe that if left to our own devices the bad side would cause us to rebel against our authorities. Hyde is a very enigmatic character because rather being completely described to us we are left to imagine how evil and beast looking he could be.
Utterson is very like Jekyll and Stevensons himself because he is self denying to strong morals growing up. ‘ He was undemonstrative at the best, and even his friendships seemed to be founded in a similar catholicity of good nature’. Like Stevenson and Jekyll he goes out at night to for fill his secret desires and he is single. All the main characters are single man. Stevensons world does not include intimate relationship with women such as marriage but prostitutes may have been need for sexual release which again equals ‘hypocrisy’ the only two women were maid and the witness. Hyde’s servants face was described as being ‘smoothed by hypocrisy’, so she too is two-faced. Stevensons thinks all humans are. The second servant is a maid who witnesses the Carew Murder. Both women take minor parts because Stevensons think women are socially important. ‘The important man of the book …are all unmarried, intellectually barren, emotionally stifled, joyless’, therefore Stevensons world view id therefore male, white, upper class and European, as Hyde is like a ‘primitive’ i.e. Africans are looked as ‘savages’. So it is also racist.
Overall, I think Stevenson's command of the English language is excellent. The complex sentence structure and vocabulary of classic literature can sometimes turn reading into hard work, but I found Stevenson's style reasonably easy to master.
People who like their fiction to stay firmly in the real world might view Jekyll and Hyde as a load of old fluff. But if you read between the lines, what you have here is a very intelligent dissection of temptation and evil. I found Stevenson's observations on the coarser side human nature to be very true to life, and it's a rare experience to find this sort of barefaced frankness in fiction.
If there's one point that grates on me, it's Stevenson's too-casual association of deformity with evil character. Those two things are completely unrelated and promote an unnecessary stigma on people who genuinely do suffer with deformity. However, the novel was fully entertaining and at the same time very insightful about human nature - a rare combination.
