Jekyll is held in high regard by his peers and begins to feel trapped by the constant expectations he is forced to conform to, he longs to walk amongst those who carouse and womanise in the name of good fun and high spirits and be excepted as one of them. Yet he still wishes to reap the rewards of a powerful social standing. In short, he craves the best of both worlds. He fulfils his needs in the concoction of a draught that changes his mental and physical state to that of Mr Edward Hyde, a foul and loathsome being with no care or love of the purity of the soul or well being of his fellow man, a being often described as “Satan like”. As he spends more and more time in the savage world of Hyde, Jekyll begins to lose control and finds himself changing when his mind is most vulnerable, when he is asleep. The experience of going to sleep as one person and waking up another is incomprehensible to any reader of this book and the closest that any person could ever come to it is schizophrenia. This inability to identify with Jekyll’s character distances the readers from him and enables Stevenson to build an aura of mystery around him. As an audience we have no real idea of what Jekyll is going through and therefore cannot even attempt to predict his actions. An unpredictable character is invaluable in a novel that relies so heavily on uncertainly and the unknown. Jekyll is not the only mysterious character in the novel, Hastie Lanyon is a fellow scientist and friend of both Jekyll and Utterson. He accused Jekyll of delving into “such unscientific balderdash that would have estranged Damon and Pythias” and has clearly been less of a familiar face around the social gatherings of Dr Jekyll than of ten years prior. Lanyon went from sharing Jekyll’s experiences to keeping an eye on them “for old times sake” which suggests to me that he learnt something about his companion which drove a stake through the heart of his loyalty. We know that it was not the knowledge of the Hyde experiment that appalled Lanyon so much as he learns of this for the first time later in the novel, and the shock eventually brings about his demise. The fact that the audience never discovers what initially pulled Lanyon from Jekyll’s side serves to heighten their interest in the trio’s past. This curiosity which is never satisfied is used to great effect by Stevenson as he plays upon it at several stages through out the novel, encouraging the audience to read on, should they discover some of what is being kept from them.
The original purpose of Dr Henry Jekyll’s experiment was to create for himself an alter ego or more precisely to unleash the other side of his personality, to un-cage a variation of his consciousness that could fulfil his deepest desires and needs without burdening his mind with the guilt of his actions. What he in fact achieved was a personification of the opposite of all he embodied, where Jekyll was kind Hyde was cruel, where one was decent the other was despicable, the doctor was loved but the daemon was loathed. Jekyll hoped for a loveable rogue but received a bloodthirsty beast who could repulse at first sight without the onlooker quite knowing why they were disgusted so. At the end of the book Jekyll has revealed this, through a series of letters, to all other character but in the midst of the novel many of the letters have been delivered but not opened or at least not divulged to the readers. It is this chain of unrevealed knowledge that lends so much mystery to the novel as the readers are aware that the details of the plot are merely waiting to be uncovered.
The tone of Stevenson’s writing couples with the secretive plot to form a sinister and deceitful world in which Utterson, Lanyon, Jekyll and Hyde weave a web of mystery and uncertainty through which the reader tries to peer in order to gain insight into the story. Yet when reading the novel I felt it easy to be carried along by Stevenson’s writing as he sets moods and feelings subtly and gently. The novel was written in such a way that the readers are unravelling the plot along with Utterson so we share his emotions and experiences. This draws the audience deep within the novels itself and allows you to feel you are not just reading about what is happening but actually taking part. As you are so close to the occurrences of the plot the sense of mystery and suspense becomes first hand and is so much greater than if you felt the emotions were just being dictated to you.
I am of the opinion that Dr Jekyll represents a side of Stevenson that wished to break away from the restraints of Victorian society and live a life of sheer enjoyment and carefree actions, but as he never had the courage to do so he used the medium of his novels to quench his desires much as Oscar Wild used “The importance of being Earnest”. This venting of his feelings through text allows us an insight into Robert Louis Stevenson that other novels such as “Treasure Island” would not. We are given the benefit of seeing what Stevenson would most like to achieve, freedom from the shackles of high society but with the option of returning to it at any time, but also of seeing that he was aware of the consequences should things go wrong. The fate of Jekyll was decided by Stevenson to be a sour one to show what can happen when greed overcomes restraint, when curiosity overpowers caution.
One of the most important statements this novel made to me was that no one person can be wholly good or wholly evil. A good person will always have the desire to throw off the burden of reputation once in a while and duck below the bar of expectation to the other side. An evil person will always feel the want, no matter how faint, to step out from the shadow and into the light and once more be counted as a human being. Stevenson knew this and put on full display what might happen if a mere mortal could tamper with Gods delicate mixture of Good and Evil.
