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that-spider-witch · 3 years

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On the topic of Book!Edward Hyde

Or rather: The topic of his existence (or lack thereof).

Browsing through the J&H tag, I’ve seen a lot of book readers be spiteful of every single adaptation of the character and its pop culture version because it misses the moral of the book: That Hyde and Jekyll were just one and the same, and that Jekyll was the one doing all the bullshit that went down and that Hyde was just a mask to keep his reputation intact.

Most of these rants go on to imply or outright accuse of any author doing the split personality take on the plot to have never actually read the original book, or that Edward Hyde never existing is something that the book leaves loud and clear, something irrefutably canon.

Having read the book too, I’m here to say: Yes and no. You could read the book and still get a “two character, one body” impression from it. Allow me to explain...

While the plot of “Jekyll is Good, Hyde is Bad” is truly bullshit and the very thing that the original novel rips into pieces, whether Hyde could be considered to have a will of his own is a little more ambiguous and it can actually be interpreted either way.

Note that I’m using the word “will” and not “personality”: Hyde is still Jekyll, they both have the same personality, but while Jekyll is a rational human being, Hyde is Jekyll but without the strings of societal norms, morals and impulse control holding him down.

Book readers who go by the take that Hyde never existed also claim that the book is very clear that the changes brought by the formula are just external: Jekyll is completely himself the whole time and “Hyde” is just a mask.

And this is true... At first. Depending on how you interpret Jekyll’s unrealiable narration, “Hyde” actually slowly develops something of a will of his own as Jekyll’s evil nature, given a body of its own by his dumb experiment, continues to develop.

Here’s a fragment of how Jekyll describes the experiment and the very first transformation:

“That night I had come to the fatal cross-roads. Had I approached my discovery in a more noble spirit, had I risked the experiment while under the empire of generous or pious aspirations, all must have been otherwise, and from these agonies of death and birth, I had come forth an angel instead of a fiend. The drug had no discriminating action; it was neither diabolical nor divine; it but shook the doors of the prisonhouse of my disposition; and like the captives of Philippi, that which stood within ran forth. At that time my virtue slumbered; my evil, kept awake by ambition, was alert and swift to seize the occasion; and the thing that was projected was Edward Hyde. Hence, although I had now two characters as well as two appearances, one was wholly evil, and the other was still the old Henry Jekyll, that incongruous compound of whose reformation and improvement I had already learned to despair. The movement was thus wholly toward the worse.”

“Edward Hyde” (who at this point still doesn’t truly exist as his own being and it’s just a mask for Jekyll to use) is evil because Henry Jekyll himself is evil. But while Jekyll-as-Jekyll has good personality traits as well as bad, Jekyll-as-Hyde is just everything that Jeyll finds evil about himself and nothing else. This paragraph also states very clearly that Jekyll’s intentions were never good.

If this was the only instance in which anything along the lines of “two characters as well as two appearances” was mentioned, then yes, there would be no room for debate on the whole “Hyde is just a fake identity and nothing else” because there wouldn’t be evidence of the contrary. It would be clear text.

Except that Jekyll, unreliable narrator that he is or not, also gives us evidence to support the theory that Hyde, while still not being a completely separate split personality on his own right, does develop a certain awareness of himself and a will to act somewhat separate from Jekyll’s.

Of course, this all still falls on Jekyll’s own fault, and even if we consider Hyde as something of an alter, he’s still nothing but the scapegoat that Jekyll uses:

“The pleasures which I made haste to seek in my disguise were, as I have said, undignified; I would scarce use a harder term. But in the hands of Edward Hyde, they soon began to turn toward the monstrous. When I would come back from these excursions, I was often plunged into a kind of wonder at my vicarious depravity. This familiar that I called out of my own soul, and sent forth alone to do his good pleasure, was a being inherently malign and villainous; his every act and thought centered on self; drinking pleasure with bestial avidity from any degree of torture to another; relentless like a man of stone. Henry Jekyll stood at times aghast before the acts of Edward Hyde; but the situation was apart from ordinary laws, and insidiously relaxed the grasp of conscience. It was Hyde, after all, and Hyde alone, that was guilty. Jekyll was no worse; he woke again to his good qualities seemingly unimpaired; he would even make haste, where it was possible, to undo the evil done by Hyde. And thus his conscience slumbered.”

Something all book readers will be familiar with is that Jekyll’s narration uses “I” when writing about most of Hyde’s actions, while also mentioning both Henry Jekyll and Hyde on third person. Jekyll tries to dissociate himself from his crimes this way.

But... Whether also done by Jekyll to still reflect guilt from himself or not, the text also refers to Hyde as having a nature of his own, albeit one irreversably connected to Henry Jekyll’s own hidden desires.

“Between these two, I now felt I had to choose. My two natures had memory in common, but all other faculties were most unequally shared between them. Jekyll (who was composite) now with the most sensitive apprehensions, now with a greedy gusto, projected and shared in the pleasures and adventures of Hyde; but Hyde was indifferent to Jekyll, or but remembered him as the mountain bandit remembers the cavern in which he conceals himself from pursuit. Jekyll had more than a father’s interest; Hyde had more than a son’s indifference. To cast in my lot with Jekyll, was to die to those appetites which I had long secretly indulged and had of late begun to pamper. To cast it in with Hyde, was to die to a thousand interests and aspirations, and to become, at a blow and forever, despised and friendless. The bargain might appear unequal; but there was still another consideration in the scales; for while Jekyll would suffer smartingly in the fires of abstinence, Hyde would be not even conscious of all that he had lost. Strange as my circumstances were, the terms of this debate are as old and commonplace as man; much the same inducements and alarms cast the die for any tempted and trembling sinner; and it fell out with me, as it falls with so vast a majority of my fellows, that I chose the better part and was found wanting in the strength to keep to it.”

There’s a clear divide here, with Jekyll and Hyde having something of a different outlook on life, something that outright doesn’t make sense if we are to consider Edward Hyde as just Jekyll’s alias.

Something to note here is that the divide between the two personas is not of a moral nature, but something much more mundane and selfish: To Henry Jekyll, his social status is everything, and his main drive to keep transforming into Hyde again and again is to enjoy a life of sin without repercussions. To Hyde, said social status can go to hell for all he cares, but still keeps the ruse because his concealment is ultimately necessary for his continued existence, something that the narration will go back to later.

After this point of the book, which is when Jekyll goes to sleep and wakes up transformed on his other body the next morning, the doctor becomes scared and goes cold turkey for two months, having decided to stop being Hyde forever and return to a normal life. It doesn’t lastlonger than that: Hyde returns not because he takes control, but because Jekyll turns himself into Hyde on purpose once again, by his own free will.

“I do not suppose that, when a drunkard reasons with himself upon his vice, he is once out of five hundred times affected by the dangers that he runs through his brutish, physical insensibility; neither had I, long as I had considered my position, made enough allowance for the complete moral insensibility and insensate readiness to evil, which were the leading characters of Edward Hyde. Yet it was by these that I was punished. My devil had been long caged, he came out roaring. I was conscious, even when I took the draught, of a more unbridled, a more furious propensity to ill. It must have been this, I suppose, that stirred in my soul that tempest of impatience with which I listened to the civilities of my unhappy victim; I declare, at least, before God, no man morally sane could have been guilty of that crime upon so pitiful a provocation; and that I struck in no more reasonable spirit than that in which a sick child may break a plaything. But I had voluntarily stripped myself of all those balancing instincts by which even the worst of us continues to walk with some degree of steadiness among temptations; and in my case, to be tempted, however slightly, was to fall.“

Something fun to note here: Jekyll describes Hyde, and/or himself when he’s Hyde, as being comparable to a child. First by merely noting that Hyde’s body is younger than Jekyll’s, then by comparing him to a “son” and Jekyll as the “father”, and now comparing the murder of Danvers Carew to a child breaking a toy.

Speaking of the murder, Jekyll is 100% guilty of it: Even if Hyde was a completely different being with his own traits and goals, which he is not, Jekyll would still be responsable by virtue of willingly going through the transformation again like an idiot.

That being said, the text continues to give Hyde some semblance of personality:

“Hyde had a song upon his lips as he compounded the draught, and as he drank it, pledged the dead man. The pangs of transformation had not done tearing him, before Henry Jekyll, with streaming tears of gratitude and remorse, had fallen upon his knees and lifted his clasped hands to God. The veil of self-indulgence was rent from head to foot.“

From this point on, everything goes to hell: Henry Jekyll is relieved that now that Hyde is a wanted murderer, he now has no choice but to stay as Jekyll and leave that sinful double life of his finally behind (”Jekyll is the Good half” my ass!). But, surprise surprise! He starts to transform unwillingly, and now he needs to constantly drink the potion to stay as Jekyll.

Fun fact: Do you remember which thoughts are the ones that trigger the first unwilling transformation after the murder?

“I sat in the sun on a bench; the animal within me licking the chops of memory; the spiritual side a little drowsed, promising subsequent penitence, but not yet moved to begin. After all, I reflected, I was like my neighbours; and then I smiled, comparing myself with other men, comparing my active good-will with the lazy cruelty of their neglect. And at the very moment of that vainglorious thought, a qualm came over me, a horrid nausea and the most deadly shuddering. These passed away, and left me faint; and then as in its turn faintness subsided, I began to be aware of a change in the temper of my thoughts, a greater boldness, a contempt of danger, a solution of the bonds of obligation. I looked down; my clothes hung formlessly on my shrunken limbs; the hand that lay on my knee was corded and hairy. I was once more Edward Hyde.“

The thought that he, too, was just like any other man. Something that his Hyde half knows as a fact, but that Henry “I’m superior than all these lazy peasants around me because I’m rich... I mean, because I have active good-will” Jekyll considers undignified, and therefore, cruel or evil. O Sweet, sweet Victorian hypocresy.

And it is from here on out that the narration acknowledges Edward Hyde as being his own character somewhat, somehow, at least as part of Jekyll’s conciousness.

After the transformation and the visit to Lanyon:

“My reason wavered, but it did not fail me utterly. I have more than once observed that in my second character, my faculties seemed sharpened to a point and my spirits more tensely elastic; thus it came about that, where Jekyll perhaps might have succumbed, Hyde rose to the importance of the moment.”

“Then I remembered that of my original character, one part remained to me: I could write my own hand; and once I had conceived that kindling spark, the way that I must follow became lighted up from end to end.“

“He, I say—I cannot say, I. That child of Hell had nothing human; nothing lived in him but fear and hatred.“

“When I came to myself at Lanyon’s, the horror of my old friend perhaps affected me somewhat: I do not know; it was at least but a drop in the sea to the abhorrence with which I looked back upon these hours. A change had come over me. It was no longer the fear of the gallows, it was the horror of being Hyde that racked me.“

It’s curious how Jekyll’s narration uses “I” when looking back at Carew’s murder, and yet it is just from here on out that he’s oh so repulsed by Hyde than he uses He/Him pronouns for him.

And, most of all, when he has locked himself up:

“The powers of Hyde seemed to have grown with the sickliness of Jekyll. And certainly the hate that now divided them was equal on each side. With Jekyll, it was a thing of vital instinct. He had now seen the full deformity of that creature that shared with him some of the phenomena of consciousness, and was co-heir with him to death: and beyond these links of community, which in themselves made the most poignant part of his distress, he thought of Hyde, for all his energy of life, as of something not only hellish but inorganic. This was the shocking thing; that the slime of the pit seemed to utter cries and voices; that the amorphous dust gesticulated and sinned; that what was dead, and had no shape, should usurp the offices of life. And this again, that that insurgent horror was knit to him closer than a wife, closer than an eye; lay caged in his flesh, where he heard it mutter and felt it struggle to be born; and at every hour of weakness, and in the confidence of slumber, prevailed against him, and deposed him out of life. The hatred of Hyde for Jekyll was of a different order. His terror of the gallows drove him continually to commit temporary suicide, and return to his subordinate station of a part instead of a person; but he loathed the necessity, he loathed the despondency into which Jekyll was now fallen, and he resented the dislike with which he was himself regarded.”

And what immediately follows is my favorite part of the book:

“Hence the ape-like tricks that he would play me, scrawling in my own hand blasphemies on the pages of my books, burning the letters and destroying the portrait of my father; and indeed, had it not been for his fear of death, he would long ago have ruined himself in order to involve me in the ruin. But his love of life is wonderful; I go further: I, who sicken and freeze at the mere thought of him, when I recall the abjection and passion of this attachment, and when I know how he fears my power to cut him off by suicide, I find it in my heart to pity him.”

This petty behavior of supposedly destroying and vandalizing Jekyll’s stuff to spite him is mentioned yet again just a few sentences later,along with the following line:

“This, then, is the last time, short of a miracle, that Henry Jekyll can think his own thoughts or see his own face (now how sadly altered!) in the glass. Nor must I delay too long to bring my writing to an end; for if my narrative has hitherto escaped destruction, it has been by a combination of great prudence and great good luck. Should the throes of change take me in the act of writing it, Hyde will tear it in pieces; but if some time shall have elapsed after I have laid it by, his wonderful selfishness and circumscription to the moment will probably save it once again from the action of his ape-like spite.“

This assertion from Jekyll that, as far as he’s concerned, he will be already dead when he transforms for the last time, is what closes the book:

“And indeed the doom that is closing on us both has already changed and crushed him. Half an hour from now, when I shall again and forever reindue that hated personality, I know how I shall sit shuddering and weeping in my chair, or continue, with the most strained and fearstruck ecstasy of listening, to pace up and down this room (my last earthly refuge) and give ear to every sound of menace. Will Hyde die upon the scaffold? or will he find courage to release himself at the last moment? God knows; I am careless; this is my true hour of death, and what is to follow concerns another than myself. Here then, as I lay down the pen and proceed to seal up my confession, I bring the life of that unhappy Henry Jekyll to an end.“

If taken at face value, these lines actually paint Edward Hyde as being somewhat able to think his own thoughts and do his own actions, while still just being the childish, “ape-like” part of Henry Jekyll’s mind. Emphasis on childish, not evil, the evilness is all on Henry. Edward Hyde is still nothing but Henry Jekyll’s psychological scapegoat, and the one that Jekyll technically leaves behind to deal with the mess he himself created by “dying”.

I’m not trying to get more people to interpret the book this way nor am I saying that the ”Hyde is not real and Jekyll is a lying bitch” take is actually wrong, because it is not. I’m just pointing out the book could actually be interpreted differently by different readers, and they’d still have sentences in the book to back their interpretation on.

Now, if we could all stop hating and throwing shade on every content creator out there who “got the book wrong”, that’d be peachy.

#let people have fun. its not that hard.#the strange case of dr. jekyll and mr. hyde #edward hyde #henry jekyll #dr. jekyll and mr. hyde #literature #gothic lit #this came out longer than I thought it would be

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