However, Jekyll has a dark side to him, which he chooses to express in the person of Mr. Hyde. He tries to keep Mr. Hyde bottled up inside him, but soon the dark side of his personality wins out, threatening his wellbeing and even his life.
Jekyll reflects a typical Victorian male throughout this novel – he shows qualities of being a “Gentleman” - charming, respectful and polite. He was staid, stable and stodgy. Stevenson believed that his novel explored the hypocrisy of his time as well as the innate evilness that occurred in society.
Hyde is a small man who commits acts of brutality and murder throughout the novel. Mr. Hyde is created when Dr. Jekyll drinks a special chemical solution that he created, subsequently turning himself into his other character. Mr. Hyde is hated by everyone he meets, even at first glance. Although they can’t name it, those around him sense something profoundly evil about him. The sence of him being completely undescriptive evokes a feeling of horror around him, making him seem incredibly abnormal and giving the feel of being completely unpredictable.
In the novel he is described as:
“Mr. Hyde was pale and dwarfish, he gave an impression of deformity without any nameable malformation, he had a displeasing smile… and he spoke with a husky, whispering and somewhat broken voice…"There must be something else," said the perplexed gentleman. "There is something more, if I could find a name for it. God bless me, the man seems hardly human! Something troglodytic, shall we say? …O my poor old Harry Jekyll, if ever I read Satan's signature upon a face, it is on that of your new friend."
Hyde’s physical ugliness and deformity symbolizes his moral hideousness. The connection between such ugliness and Hyde’s wickedness may have been seen as more of symbolic during that time. During that period of time people believed that you could determine a criminal by his physical appearance, hence Hyde’s ugliness.
When Hyde is trampling over the girls body in “Story of the Door” the novel reads:
“It wasn’t like a man; it was like some damned Juggernaut. I gave a view-halloa, took to my heels, collared my gentleman, and brought him back to where there was already quite a group about the screaming child. He was perfectly cool and made no resistance, but gave me one look, so ugly that it brought out the sweat on me like running…We told the man we could and would make such a scandal out of this, as should make his name stink from one end of London to the other… I never saw a circle of such hateful faces .”
In The Carew Murder Case the novel reads:
“…a very small gentleman, to whom at first she paid less attention…. Presently her eye wandered to the other, and she was surprised to recognise in him a certain Mr. Hyde, who had once visited her master and for whom she had conceived a dislike. He had in his hand a heavy cane, with which he was trifling; but he answered never a word, and seemed to listen with an ill-contained impatience. And then all of a sudden he broke out in a great flame of anger, stamping with his foot, brandishing the cane, and carrying on (as the maid described it) like a madman…And next moment, with ape-like fury, he was trampling his victim under foot and hailing down a storm of blows.”
Hyde is referred to a “troglodyte” or “apes” as his appearance visually is like an ape. He is also referred to this for his quick temper and tantrums that he can suddenly throw, just like many species of apes do. An ape can also be known as person who resembles a non-human primate – which describes Mr. Hyde. This suggests that Hyde’s murders may have resulted from his animal like inflict. The horror from this comes from the fact that violence is within him, something he cannot control.
Jekyll and Hyde are both completely different visually and mentally. Hyde is dark and gruesome. No one seems to favor him, finding him weird and mysterious. Jekyll is known as a charming, sincere, good-looking man with everything going for him.
The novel is set in nineteenth-century London, during this time London was Protagonist, polluted, dark and gloomy. Dead bodies and the removal of waste was increasingly becoming a problem. Graveyards were overflowing and the population of the city was rapidly increasing. London was known for its filth and its disordered and chaotic politics. At the time crime was high due to the high population.
This extract is from “Story of the Door” describing the entrance to Hyde’s home:
“Two doors from one corner, on the left hand going east, the line was broken by the entry of a court; and just at that point, a certain sinister block of building thrust forward its gable on the street. It was two stories high; showed no window, nothing but a door on the lower story and a blind forehead of discoloured wall on the upper; and bore in every feature, the marks of prolonged and sordid negligence”
Stevenson uses words such as discoloured, blistered and distained to describe Hyde’s home. He makes sure the house appears as poor and gloomy as he can describe. It reflects feelings of freakishness and abnormality, a building of which bad things or actions take place.
Stevenson has used a lot of words which contain a lot of meaning, words such as Sinister can give a feeling of something may be potentially threatening, Thrust forward gives a slightly aggressive tone, Discoloured describes an ugly image Sordid negligence gives the image of something being dirty and un-cared for, Blistered and distained gives off images of pain, wear and tear, Tried his knife could display potential violence and Ravages could portray an image of destruction and needless vandalism.
…he reeled, staggered, clutched at the table and held on, staring with injected eyes, gasping with open mouth…he seemed to swell—his face became suddenly black and the features seemed to melt and alter… before my eyes—pale and shaken, and half fainting, and groping before him with his hands, like a man restored from death—there stood Henry Jekyll!
This quote is in Chapter 9, "Dr. Lanyon's Narrative," as Lanyon describes the moment when Hyde, drinking the potion, transforms himself back into Jekyll. Lanyon, who earlier ridicules Jekyll's experiments as "unscientific balderdash," now sees the proof of Jekyll's success. The sight horrifies him that he dies shortly after this scene. The transformation completes the climactic moment in the story, when all the questions about Jekyll's relationship to Hyde suddenly come to a resolution. Stevenson heightens the effect of his climax by describing the scene with intensely vivid language. When he describes Hyde as "staring with injected eyes" and suggests the dreadful deformity of his features as they "melt and alter," he evokes the ghastliness of the moment of transformation.
Lots of hyperbolic words are used within this description, words such as gasping, swell, sprung and leaped. These create an atmosphere of intensity and horror creating an intense atmosphere to the situation.
As this passage emphasizes, the true horror of Jekyll and Hyde's secret is not that they are two sides of the same person, but that each person is actually trapped within the other, fighting for dominance. The transformation process appears fittingly violent and ravaging, causing the alteration of the body to "reel," "stagger," and "gasp." Indeed, by this point in the novel, Jekyll is losing ground to Hyde, and, consequently, appears "half fainting," as if "restored from death."
This novel shows us that true horror comes from the idea that we all have an element of Hyde within us, it just depends whether we choose to show it to the outside world.
Yet Stevenson’s story doesn’t have a happy ending. Indeed Satan’s dominance over the body of Dr. Jekyll eventually takes its toll. Jekyll is able to admit that after a few months of experimenting with Hyde, eventually the little man’s demands became increasingly extreme, seeking more and more power. Soon Jekyll has no control over Hyde, who appears by himself whenever Jekyll dozes off to sleep. He admits, "I was slowly losing hold of my original and better self, and becoming slowly incorporated with my second and worse." Finally Hyde causes Jekyll to commit the ultimate act of self-destruction: suicide. In short, Stevenson is trying to say that horror can come from an individual, and with the evil inside us.
