Hyde is the Freudian Id, or maybe a stoner on a bad trip, or perhaps Nietzsche's Superman.....
Reading Robert Louis Stevenson's Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde , I couldn't help but recall the classic justification of druggie burnout behavior. Usually, it came from the mouths of parents. Their children weren't really stoners, you see, but just “experimenting with drugs.”
I always wondered about these folks experimenting with drugs . Did they put a white lab coat on? Was a Bunsen burner and microscope nearby? Could I take a peek at their lab notes?
Well, Dr. Jekyll, in Robert Louis Stevenson’s famous book, did just that. He had the Bunsen burner and microscope. The lab notes even show up in the novel.
So I’m hardly surprised that some have compared Dr. Jekyll to Albert Hoffmann, the Swiss scientist who made the first batch of LSD, and sampled it himself. Now there was a bloke who really did experiment with drugs . Or perhaps the real-life Dr. Jekyll was Timothy Leary, the acid-inspired former Harvard prof who advised people: "Turn on, tune in, drop out."
Dr. Jekyll followed that inju n ction….though with some unfortunate consequences. If the good doctor had been around during the Summer of Love, h is mates would have called it a bad trip. At least that would be the 1960s interpretation of Robert Louis Stevenson’s book.
But there’s also a 1950s version. This view of the novel would draw on the fashionable Freudian terminology and obsession with psychiatry of that era. Dr Jekyll, from this perspective, is simply tapping into his subconscious. Those aligned with this interpretation will point out that Robert Louis Stevenson first got the idea for this book from a dream—the time-honored source of messages from our repressed mind, at least according to eminent Viennese doctors with couches in their examination rooms.
But in the 1970s, this same story could serve as the perfect platform for a structuralist reading, with Jekyll and Hyde standing in for signifier and signified (remember that Saussurean admonition about the “arbitrary nature of the sign!”). In the 1980s, as Nietzschean readings got fashionable again, under the impetus of Foucault and Deleuze , Hyde now strutted the stage as a kind of unfettered Übermensch, but in the 1990s he was ready to emerge as a gender studies topic, the outed male whose closet life is suddenly exposed to public view.
And what about an interpretation of this novel for o ur times ? What would a professor say about the Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde in the current day? Well, I could tell you, but I would first need to issue a trigger warning.
I’d prefer to ask a different question. How did the Robert Louis Stevenson, the author of this classic work, view his protagonist’s double character? The answer can be clearly read in his novel, for Stevenson leaves no room for doubt that he saw Jekyll undermined by moral weakness . Our good doctor has invented a potent concoction that, when swallowed, removes all ethical and religious constraints. Instead of a typical human nature, in which good and evil are balanced against each other, the latter now predominates, the former dispatched from the scene. "I knew myself, at the first breath of this new life, to be more wicked, tenfold more wicked, sold a slave to my original evil," Jekyll explains. "All human beings, as we meet them, are commingled out of good and evil," he adds. "Edward Hyde, alone in the ranks of mankind, was pure evil."
The physical, in this charged space, becomes the visible exponent of the metaphysical. When Dr. Jekyll drinks his potion, his body also changes, to mirror the viciousness now unleashed in his soul. Jekyll shrinks into the figure of Hyde, who appears "small, slighter, and younger" than Jekyll. "Evil was written broadly and plainly" on Hyde’s face. His body wears “an imprint of deformity and decay.” People who encounter Hyde, even in situations where they can’t get a good look at his features, feel instinctively a repulsion, a fear of his moral contagion.
When John Barrymore played Jekyll in the 1920 film version, he managed the change to Hyde on-screen without any make-up, relying simply on his facial contortions and acting bravado to effect the transformation. I suspect Stevenson would have been very pleased with this approach. The reader is expected to see Hyde as latent in Jekyll, not his opposite but one of his constituent parts.
At times this book almost reads like a parable, a lesson from a sacred text. Now that isn’t a trendy interpretation of the book. When is the last time you’ve even encountered the word ‘wicked’ in a work of literary criticism? (I note that, according to Google, the frequency of use of that word peaked around 1810.) Who even dares talk about literature as a moral phenomenon? Freud would not approve. Nietzsche would throw a fit. Yet such is how Robert Louis Stevenson presented his most famous character. And the author’s own attitude will appeal to those who subscribe to the view, as expressed in the words of novelist John Gardner (in his book On Moral Fiction ), that "art is essentially and primarily moral—that is, live-giving—moral in its process of creation and moral in what it says."
Frequency of use of the word 'wicked' in publications since the year 1800
I don’t go quite so far as Gardner, but I do believe that storytelling originated as a Darwinian mechanism for passing collective wisdom from generation to generation. The audience who heard the Iliad , when it was first recited, was filled with future soldiers who prepared themselves for military endeavors by learning about the exploits of Homer’s heroes. The Odyssey , in contrast, featured a different hero, who preferred to apply intelligence rather than brute force to situations, but those imaginary incidents also provided what we would today call “teachable moments.” If you look at the full range of ancient literary works, from The Egyptian Book of the Dead to Sappho’s poetry, you encounter the same thing, again and again—these were admonitory works that aimed to instruct. Stories delighted, but also taught. They prepared the young for adult life, preserved community values, and served as a storehouse of knowledge.
We are familiar with other purposes of storytelling nowadays. We even have ‘learned’ (if that is, in fact, the right word) to embrace novels that deliberately undermine moral precepts—celebrating authors who offer piquancy by envisioning a brutal fight club or the sadistic impulses of a serial killer . Yet such books would not have the power to shock if not for thousands of years of a pre-existing paradigm, in which protagonists were heroes and both those who told these tales and those who listened believed that the behaviors described could serve, in some degree, as guideposts to the good life.
This previous paradigm has never been refuted, even if it is no longer fashionable. Yet it still haunts our psyches….and even our popular culture. That’s why audiences still crave the happy ending, that’s why those blockbuster superhero movies might make a villain —the Joker, say—look cool for most of the movie, but still allow good to triumph over evil in the end. This desire for moral outcomes is probably hardwired into our systems.
So I am hardly surprised that Jekyll and Hyde often show up in the writings of people who care not a whit for literary criticism, but have embarked upon a personal voyage of dramatic proportions. Every day a marriage counselor somewhere hears complaints about the spouse with a "Jekyll and Hyde" personality. You will find references to Stevenson’s story in accounts of recovered alcoholics, former drug addicts and a host of other individuals who have triumphed over their own weaknesses and failings. They understand that this story is their story, and not a platform for fashionable lit crit.
Such successes provide much more powerful testimony to Stevenson’s importance than anything someone might say at the MLA. I don’t doubt that academic interpretations of this book will continue to morph in response to the latest trends in the ivory tower. Digital humanities are hot nowadays, so in the next phase of their post-history Jekyll and Hyde will no doubt get turned into bits and bytes, translated into an algorithm or an app, and reveal their secrets through regression analysis. But will these new tools bring us any closer to the heart of this old novel?
Stevenson was interested in the soul. And that’s still something that doesn’t get easily reduced to a digital medium. Y eah, that might change—who knows what digital storage devices will actually store a century from now? We all might end up as digital downloads. In the meantime, read the book. And perhaps even mull over Jekyll’s tragedy in the very terms that Stevenson laid out for us. You might find a lesson in it.
Ted Gioia writes about music, literature and popular culture. His latest book is How to Listen to Jazz from Basic Books.
I am hardly surprised that Jekyll and Hyde often show up in the writings of people who care not a whit for literary criticism, but have embarked upon a personal voyage of dramatic proportions.
When John Barrynore played Jekyll in the 1920 film, he managed the change to Hyde without the use of makeup