Two ideologies, utilitarianism and Evangelicalism, shaped the customs and mores of Victorian society in England during the nineteenth century. In Victorian People and Ideas, Richard D. Altick analyzes the impact of these two forces on Victorians, concluding "together they were responsible for much that was unappealing—to some Victorians as to us—in the age's thought and manners ... Both left their ineradicable imprint upon the whole of the Victorian period." They also left their mark on the literature of the age. In his classic tale The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Robert Louis Stevenson illustrates the destructive influence that utilitarian and Evangelical ideologies could have on the lives of the Victorians. In his complex characterization of Dr. Jekyll and his alter ego, Edward Hyde, Stevenson presents a critique of middle-class Victorian society and its adoption of the tenets of these two movements.

Utilitarianism, or Benthamism, was derived from the philosophy of Jeremy Bentham, expressed in his Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation. Utilitarians believed that self-interest should be one's primary concern and that happiness could be attained by avoiding pain and seeking pleasure. Evangelicalism, on the other hand, focused less on secular philosophy and more on the day-to-day lives and eventual salvation of its followers. In contrast to the hedonistic approach of Benthamism, Evangelicalism demanded a rigid code of conduct from its practitioners in exchange for the forgiveness of sin. It also sparked a wave of humanitarian reform that swept Great Britain during the mid-1800s.

Historian G. S. R. Kitson Clark, in his An Expanding Society, explains that the two ideologies:

are poles apart in their intellectual postulates, but in their methods of thought and in their practical results they are very much the same. In each case a hard dogmatic position is chosen and adhered to without the slightest concession to the fact that it is necessary sometimes to respect other people's opinions, and the implications of that position are put into effect remorselessly and coldly. They were fit creeds for a period of emotional tension and fanaticism.

Altick adds that in the commingling of these two ideologies in Victorian society, "a quasi-fundamentalist brand of Christianity was pitted against a vigorously skeptical, even downright anti-religious secular movement. Yet working from sometimes antithetical premises, they joined to create and rationalize what came to be known as middle-class values." Historian Elie Halevy in his England in 1815 argues, "The fundamental paradox of English society [in the Victorian age] ... is precisely the partial junction and combination of these two forces theoretically so hostile."

Readers first get a glimpse of one of these ideologies, Evangelicalism, in the character of Dr. Jekyll's friend and attorney Gabriel John Utterson. Stevenson describes him as "dry, cold, scanty and embarrassed in discourse," and "dusty, dreary," and notes that his face was "never lighted by a smile." His friends and acquaintances "liked to sit a while in his unobtrusive company, practicing for solitude, sobering their minds in the man's rich silence after the expense and strain of gaiety." Utterson's repressed personality and his friends' appreciation of it provide a good example of the rigid patterns of conduct followed by many middle-class Victorians who were influenced by the tenets of utilitarianism.

Yet Utterson has a human side that refuses to condemn others for not adhering to a strict code of conduct. Stevenson notes that "something eminently human beaconed from his eye; something indeed which never found its way into his talk ... but more often and loudly in the acts of his life." Although he judged himself harshly, "he had an approved tolerance for others," as evidenced through his patience with Jekyll in all of his dealings with him. Irving S. Saposnik, in his essay on the novel, argues that Stevenson presents Utterson as the novel's "moral norm." Saposnik decides that the novel opens with a focus on Utterson:

not only because he is Jekyll's confidant (the only one remaining) but because by person and profession he represents the best and worst of Victoria's social beings. Pledged to a code harsh in its application, he has not allowed its pressures to mar his sense of human need ... As a lawyer, he represents that legality which identifies social behavior as established law, unwritten but binding; as a judge, however, he is a combination of justice and mercy (as his names Gabriel John suggest), tempering rigidity with kindness, self-denial with compassion.

Richard Enfield, Utterson's relative and friend, has a similar temperament to that of Utterson. In his book on Stevenson, Saposnik finds Enfield "a strange, yet appropriate complement to his distant kinsman." This "well-known man about town" has a habit of "coming home from some place at the end of the world, about three o'clock of a black winter morning." Thus, according to Saposnik, he represents the "'other Victorian' side of Utterson's sobriety."

The negative influence of utilitarian and Evangelical ideologies becomes most apparent in Stevenson's characterization of Dr. Henry Jekyll, the novel's protagonist as well as its antagonist in his guise as Edward Hyde. Jekyll discovers within himself "those provinces of good and ill which divide and compound man's dual nature"—a state exacerbated and perhaps generated by these two main forces of Victorian society. Jekyll notes that throughout his life he was "inclined by nature to industry, fond of the respect of the wise and good among my fellowmen, and thus, as might have been supposed, with every guarantee of an honourable and distinguished future." He enjoys his relations with his friends and spends his time devoted to his charities and his church. Jekyll's dedication to humanitarian activities suggests his adoption of Evangelical doctrine. He seems also to adopt another tenet of that ideology—one that persuades followers to repress the "sinful" part of their nature. Thus when Jekyll admits to recognizing in himself a "certain impatient gaiety of disposition" and a failure to conquer his "aversions to the dryness of a life of study," his response is to try to repress those urges. His society encourages his "imperious desire to carry [his] head high and wear a more than commonly grave countenance before the public." Yet sometimes his "undignified" pleasures surface, and, as a result, he is filled "with an almost morbid sense of shame."

While Stevenson keeps the explicit nature of these "undignified" pleasures hidden, he clearly shows the effect of their existence on Jekyll, who considers them to be sinful and an expression of the "evil" side of his personality. Jekyll provides readers with a clue as to the nature of these hidden desires when he transforms into Hyde, who becomes the embodiment of his darker side. He notes with repugnance that Hyde's "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." Hyde clearly reflects the utilitarian devotion to hedonism and its lack of allowance for compassion, mercy, and love.

When Jekyll first considers conducting experiments in order to rid himself of his evil side, he appears to be motivated more by altruistic impulses. He considers that if the evil impulses could be separated from the good,

if each ... could be housed in separate identities, life would be relieved of all that was unbearable; the unjust might go his way, delivered from the aspirations and remorse of his more upright twin; and the just could walk steadfastly and securely on his upward path, doing the good things in which he found his pleasure, and no longer exposed to disgrace and penitence by the hands of this extraneous evil. It was the curse of mankind that these incongruous faggots were thus bound together—that the agonized womb of consciousness, these polar twins should be continuously struggling.

The more utilitarian side of his nature, however, soon emerges and overtakes his prudence as evidenced by his admission that "the temptation of a discovery so singular and profound at last overcame the suggestions of alarm." Looking back on the consequences of his actions, Jekyll claims, "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, [but] at that time my virtue slumbered; my evil, kept awake by ambition, as alert and swift to seize the occasion."

The pressure Jekyll feels to conform to the dictates of society and thus to suppress his desires becomes overwhelming and inspires his decision to tamper with nature. Saposnik concludes that:

Victorian man was haunted constantly by an inescapable sense of division. As rational and sensual being, as public and private man, as civilized and bestial creature, he found himself necessarily an actor, playing only that part of himself suitable to the occasion. As both variables grew more predictable, his role became more stylized; and what was initially an occasional practice became a way of life. By 1886, the English could already be described as "Masqueraders," ... and it is to all aspects of this existential charade that The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde addresses itself.

This duplicity continually troubles Jekyll. He explains, "I was no more myself when I laid aside restraint and plunged in shame, than when I laboured, in the eye of day, at the furtherance of knowledge or the relief of sorrow and suffering." His scientific background seems to offer him a way out.

When Jekyll takes the potion and transforms into Hyde, he experiences, for the first time, a free expression of his desires. He admits, "I felt younger, lighter, happier in body; within I was conscious of a heady recklessness, a current of disordered sensual images running like a millrace in my fancy." Even though he confesses, "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," he also cannot deny that "the thought, in that moment, braced and delighted me like wine." This new freedom after such a lifetime of repression becomes too intoxicating for Jekyll. Expressing his joy over his new state, he reveals that he "could plod in the public eye with a load of genial respectability, and in a moment ... strip off these lendings and spring headlong into the sea of liberty." He admits Hyde is "pure evil," and that he feels pangs of conscience after Hyde's nighttime acts of "vicarious depravity." Yet he also confesses, "when I looked upon that ugly idol in the glass, I was conscious of no repugnance, rather of a leap of welcome. This too was myself. It seemed natural and human. In my eyes it bore a lovelier image of the spirit, it seemed more express and single, than the imperfect and divided countenance I had been hitherto accustomed to call mine."

Ironically, while Jekyll suffers from having to live a double life before the transformations, he enjoys his duplicity after them. When he can give free expression to each side of his nature, he is content, even though as Hyde, his urges are becoming more and more depraved. Saposnik argues that Jekyll's continued transformations reveal his moral weakness. He concludes,

Dedicated to an ethical rigidity more severe than Ut-terson's, because solely self-centered, he cannot face the necessary containment of his dual being. However he may attempt to disguise his experiments under scientific objectivity, and his actions under a macabre alter-ego, he is unable to mask his basic selfishness ... He has thrived upon duplicity; and his reputation has been maintained largely upon his successful ability to deceive.

When Hyde starts to appear without the aid of the potion, he suspects that if this were "much prolonged, the balance of [his] nature might be permanently overthrown, the power of voluntary change be forfeited, and the character of Hyde become irrevocably" his. He recognizes that he is slowly losing hold of his "original and better self," and gradually becoming incorporated with his "second and worse." Yet Hyde, along with Jekyll's unacceptable desires, has been repressed too long, and so takes control of Jekyll's better side.

In his final assessment of Henry Jekyll, Saposnik concludes that the doctor is a "complex example of his age of anxiety: woefully weighed down by self-deception, cruelly a slave to his own weakness, sadly a disciple of a severe discipline, his is a voice out of De Profundis, a cry of Victorian man from the depths of his self-imposed underground." Stevenson's characterization of Jekyll is so compelling to readers because it not only reflects the interaction between a man and his society, but also because it illuminates the complexity of human psychology. Henry James notes in his review of the novel that its "subject is endlessly interesting, and rich in all sorts of provocation, and Mr. Stevenson is to be congratulated on having touched the core of it ... There is a genuine feeling for the perpetual moral question, a fresh sense of the difficulty of being good and the brutishness of being bad."

Source: Wendy Perkins, in an essay for Novels for Students, Gale Group, 2001.

Like such mythopoetic figures as Frankenstein, Dracula, and even, Alice ("in Wonderland"), Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde has become, in the century following the publication of Robert Louis Stevenson's famous novella, what might be called an autonomous creation. That is, people who have never read the novella—people who do not in fact "read" at all—know by way of popular culture who Jekyll-Hyde is. (Though they are apt to speak of him, not altogether accurately, as two disparate beings: Dr. Jekyll, Mr. Hyde.) A character out of prose fiction, Jekyll-Hyde seems nonetheless auto-genetic in the way that vampires and werewolves and (more benignly) fairies seem autogenetic: surely he has always existed in the collective imagination, or, like Jack the Ripper, in actual history? (As "Dracula" is both the specific creation of the novelist Bram Stoker and a nightmare figure out of middle European history.) It is ironic that, in being so effaced, Robert Louis Stevenson has become immortalized by way of his private fantasy—which came to him, by his own testimony, unbidden, in a dream.

The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886) will strike contemporary readers as a characteristically Victorian moral parable, not nearly so sensational (nor so piously lurid) as Stoker's Dracula; in the tradition, perhaps, of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, in which a horrific tale is conscientiously subordinated to the author's didactic intention. Though melodramatic in conception it is not melodramatic in execution since virtually all its scenes are narrated and summarized after the fact. There is no ironic ambiguity, no Wildean subtlety, in the doomed Dr. Jekyll's confession: he presents himself to the reader as a congenital "double dealer" who has nonetheless "an almost morbid sense of shame" and who, in typically Victorian middle-class fashion, must act to dissociate "himself” (i.e., his reputation as a highly regarded physician) from his baser instincts. He can no longer bear to suppress them and it is impossible to eradicate them. His discovery that "Man is not truly one, but two" is seen to be a scientific fact, not a cause for despair. (And, in time, it may be revealed that man is "a mere polity of multifarious, incongruous and independent denizens"—which is to say that the ego contains multitudes: multiple personalities inhabit us all. It cannot be incidental that Robert Louis Stevenson was himself a man enamoured of consciously playing roles and assuming personae: his friend Arthur Symons said of him that he was "never really himself except when he was in some fantastic disguise.")

Thus Dr. Jekyll's uncivilized self, to which he gives the symbolic name Hyde, is at once the consequence of a scientific experiment (as the creation of Frankenstein's monster was a scientific experiment) and a shameless indulgence of appetites that cannot be assimilated into the propriety of everyday Victorian life. There is a sense in which Hyde, for all his monstrosity, is but an addiction like alcohol, nicotine, drugs: "The moment I choose," Dr. Jekyll says, "I can be rid of him." Hyde must be hidden not simply because he is wicked but because Dr. Jekyll is a willfully good man—an example to others, like the much-admired lawyer Mr. Utterson who is "lean, long, dusty, dreary and yet somehow [improbably?] lovable." Had the Victorian ideal been less hypocritically ideal or had Dr. Jekyll been content with a less perfect public reputation his tragedy would not have occurred. (As Wilde's Basil Hallward says in The Picture of Dorian Gray: "We in our madness have separated the two [body and soul] and have invented a realism that is vulgar, and an ideality that is void." The key term here is surely "madness.")

Dr. Jekyll's initial experience, however, approaches ecstasy as if he were, indeed, discovering the Kingdom of God that lies within. The magic drug causes nausea and a grinding in the bones and a "horror of the spirit that cannot be exceeded at the hour of birth or death." Then:

I came to myself as if out of a great sickness. There was something strange in my sensations, something indescribably new and, from its very novelty, incredibly sweet. I felt younger, lighter, happier in body; within I was conscious of a heady recklessness, a current of disordered sensual images running like a mill race in my fancy, a solution of the bonds of obligation, an unknown but not an innocent freedom of the soul. 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; and the thought, in that moment, braced and delighted in me like wine.

Unlike Frankenstein's monster, who is nearly twice the size of an average man, Jekyll's monster is dwarfed: "less robust and less developed" than the good self since Jekyll's rigorously suppressed life has been the consequence of unrelenting "effort, virtue and control." (Stevenson's anatomy of the human psyche is as grim as Freud's—virtually all a "good" man's waking energies are required in beating back and denying the "badness" in him!) That Hyde's frenzied pleasures are even in part specifically sexual is never confirmed, given the Victorian cast of the narrative itself, but, to extrapolate from an incident recounted by an eyewitness, one is led to suspect they are: Hyde is observed running down a ten-year-old girl in the street and calmly trampling over her body. Much is made subsequently of the girl's "screaming"; and of the fact that money is paid to her family as recompense for her violation.

Viewed from without Hyde is detestable in the abstract: "I never saw a man I so disliked," the lawyer Enfield says, "and yet I scarce know why. He must be deformed somewhere ..." Another witness testifies to his mysteriously intangible deformity "without any nameable malformation." But when Jekyll looks in the mirror he is conscious of no repugnance, "rather of a leap of welcome. This, too, was myself. It seemed natural and human." When Jekyll returns to himself after having been Hyde he is plunged into wonder rather than remorse at his "vicarious depravity." The creature summoned out of his soul and sent forth to do his pleasure is 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." Yet Hyde is safely other—"It was Hyde, after all, and Hyde alone, that was guilty."

Oscar Wilde's equally didactic but far more suggestive and poetic The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890) makes the disturbing point that Dorian Gray, the unblemished paragon of evil, "is the type of which the age is searching for, and what it is afraid it has found." (Just as Wilde's Lord Henry defends insincerity "as a method by which we can multiply our personalities.") By contrast Jekyll's Hyde is a very nearly Bosch-like creature, proclaiming his wickedness to the naked eye as if, in Utterson's words, he is a "troglodyte ... the mere radiance of a foul soul that thus transpires through, and transfigures, its clay continent." One is reminded of nineteenth-century theories of criminology advanced by C. S. Lombroso and Henry Maudsley, among others, who argued that outward physical defects and deformities are the visible signs of inward and invisible faults: the criminal is a type that can be easily identified by experts. Dr. Jekyll is the more reprehensible in his infatuation with Hyde in that, as a well-trained physician, he should have recognized at once the telltale symptoms of mental and moral degeneracy in his alter ego's very face. By degrees, like any addict, Jekyll surrenders his autonomy. His ego ceases being "I" and splits into two distinct and eventually warring selves, which share memory as they share a common body. Only after Hyde commits murder does Jekyll make the effort to regain control; but by this time, of course, it is too late. What had been "Jekyll"—that precarious cuticle of a self, that field of tensions in perpetual opposition to desire—has irrevocably split. It is significant that the narrator of Jekyll's confession speaks of both Jekyll and Hyde as if from the outside. And with a passionate eloquence otherwise absent from Stevenson's prose:

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.

"Think of it," Jekyll had gloated at the start, "—I did not even exist!" And the purely metaphorical becomes literally true.

The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, through stimulated by a dream, is not without its literary antecedents: among them Edgar Allan Poe's "William Wilson" (1839), in which, paradoxically, the "evil" self is the narrator and the "good" self, or conscience, the double; and Charles Dickens' uncompleted The Mystery of Edwin Drood (1870), in which the Choirmaster Jack Jasper, an opium addict, oscillates between "good" and "evil" impulses in his personality with an anguish so convincingly calibrated as to suggest that, had Dickens lived to complete the novel, it would have been one of his masterpieces—and would have made The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde redundant. Cautionary tales of malevolent, often diabolical doubles abound in folklore and oral tradition, and in Plato's Symposium it was whimsically suggested that each human being has a double to whom he was once physically attached—a bond of Eros that constituted in fact a third, and higher, sex in which male and female were conjoined.

The visionary starkness of The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde anticipates that of Freud in such late melancholy meditations as Civilization and Its Discontents (1929-30): there is a split in man's psyche between ego and instinct, between civilization and "nature," and the split can never be healed. Freud saw ethics as a reluctant concession of the individual to the group, veneer of a sort overlaid upon an unregenerate primordial self. The various stratagems of culture—including, not incidentally, the "sublimation" of raw aggression by way of art and science—are ultimately powerless to contain the discontent, which must erupt at certain periodic times, on a collective scale, as war. Stevenson's quintessentially Victorian parable is unique in that the protagonist initiates his tragedy of doubleness out of a fully lucid sensibility—one might say a scientific sensibility. Dr. Jekyll knows what he is doing, and why he is doing it, though he cannot, of course, know how it will turn out. What is unquestioned throughout the narrative, by either Jekyll or his circle of friends, is mankind's fallen nature: sin is original and irremediable. For Hyde, though hidden, will not remain so. And when Jekyll finally destroys him he must destroy Jekyll too.

Source: Joyce Carol Oates, "Jekyll/Hyde," in Hudson Review, Vol. XL, No. 4, Winter 1988, pp. 603-08.

We can now see that for the Victorians, Stevenson's story expressed the anguish of humanity's compliance with the Law of Polarity, which states that all matter is a manifestation of positive and negative forces. Attempts to apply this law to the human soul stretch back at least as far as the ancient Greeks. By the mid-nineteenth century, the theory of the divided soul was complicated by Charles Darwin's popularization of evolutionary theory in The Origin of Species (1859) and The Descent of Man (1871). (Darwinism challenged the Judaeo-Christian notion that man's immoral or passionate impulses were God's device for testing human will. If human beings had direct kinship with beasts, the passions would have to be as much part of human nature as of animal nature. They would have to exist for their own fulfillment, without a divine purpose.) Among Darwin's opponents, a common reaction to this was to deny the kinship, reaffirming man's place above the beasts and the bestial, as described in the Book of Genesis. Perhaps the excesses of Victorian restraint that followed, represented a frantic attempt to restore mankind's previous disassociation with animal origins. The impact of Darwinism did not always produce denial and disgust, however. Stevenson's contemporary, the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, insisted that "man is something that must be overcome," not by self-restraint, but by continued evolution resulting in the creation of an overman (superman). The essence of overman is described in the very title of Beyond Good and Evil, a work Nietzsche published in the same year as Dr. Jekyll and Hyde. In fact, the overman's rejection of mankind's moral values is not altogether dissimilar to Hyde's, although Hyde does not have the overman's power of creative imagination to use his rejection to further his own interests.

Nevertheless, the Stevenson story alone was able to produce an immediate response of mass dread. Doubtless the public angst was in part a reaction to the theme of scientific experimentation in the story. The age of modern science—and particularly modern medical science—had progressed considerably in the five years preceding the publication of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. In 1881, both the germ theory and the principle of immunization were demonstrated, and between 1882 and 1885, the causes of and/or inoculations against tuberculosis, diphtheria, cholera and hydrophobia were discovered. By 1886, any medical advance by serum seemed possible. In Modern Discoveries in Medical Psychology (1937), Dr. Clifford Allen notes the influence this possibility had on the public's reception of Stevenson's story:

The suggestion that there might be a drug which would enable the "good" personality to be separated from the "bad" so that sometimes the evil one was predominant and sometimes the kindly one ruled, was a new and, to most people, a horrible idea. So much excitement did the story cause that sermons were preached about it, and the more timid of the Victorians fervently hoped that the doctors who at that time seemed to be discovering everything would not unearth the mysterious drug which Stevenson made Dr. Jekyll use to free the unpleasant Mr. Hyde.

The collective fear that a Jekyll-Hyde split might really happen was based on more than medical progress. Psychology, too, was fast becoming a science in which anything was possible. A case of split personality had been reported as early as 1816, and by the turn of the century, such cases and their treatment were widely known. But studies of patients suffering from multiple personalities were merely symptomatic of the unsettling facts emerging about the nature of mental functioning. Although there had long been serious speculation about a two or three part structure of the mind, there had been virtually no scientific investigation of it until the mid-nineteenth century.

In the 1840s a group of English physicians renewed scientific interest in hypnotism, a phenomenon which had been in and out of favor as a medical procedure since Mesmer's demonstration of "animal magnetism" in the eighteenth century. As hypnotism increased in popularity, so did attempts to understand it and submit it to scientific examination. One young researcher who studied the phenomenon was Sigmund Freud who went to Paris in 1885 to see the public exhibition of hypnotism by the famous neurologist, Charcot. However, it was Charcot's colleague, Pierre Janet, who first attempted to find a psychological theory that would explain hypnosis. He noted that there was a correspondence between hypnosis and hysteria, the neurosis most frequently cured by hypnosis. Hysterical symptoms, he found, could be induced as well as cured by hypnotic suggestion. Therefore, hypnosis was nothing but artificially induced hysteria. Janet concluded that hypnosis and hysteria were caused by a piece of "consciousness" that had split off from the rest of the mind. In both cases, the field of consciousness was totally absorbed by the smaller, split-off piece, while the larger bulk remained unavailable for perception. Janet thought this occurred because he believed consciousness to be composed of a multitude of sensations that are only perceived as unified during the most alert periods of mental health. Janet's ideas were developed further by the Swiss psychiatrist, Bleuler, who observed that psychotics suffer from the splitting up of consciousness into many disintegrating pieces rather than the two parts experienced by hysterics. His findings supported Janet's theory of the multiple structure of the mind.

Janet's descriptive psychology paved the way for Freud's dynamic theories of consciousness and the unconscious. Contemporaneously with Freud, although in ignorance of Freudianism, the American physician Morton Prince elaborated Janet's descriptive technique. In 1908, Prince published The Dissociation of a Personality, the most thorough account yet of a case of multiple personality. The patient was Sally Beauchamp who had been under treatment by Prince for seven years. She was a nurse who splintered into four personalities. The direct cause of her illness had been the trauma of seeing the face of a man she had been infatuated with—in another city—appear in a high hospital window where she worked. The sight was not an hallucination. Apparently, the man had travelled to her city, unaware that Sally Beauchamp lived there, and seeing a ladder resting against the hospital wall, had impulsively climbed up and looked in the window. (It is an interesting coincidence that Stevenson's inspiration to write the Jekyll-Hyde story also came from a dream of seeing a face in a window.) Prince used hypnosis to treat and reintegrate the shattered woman, without ever really understanding the reasons for his method's effectiveness. He used the term "co-consciousness" to describe the collections of split-off pieces of consciousness thought to embody each of his patient's separate personalities. Like Janet, he considered cases of split personalities to be extreme forms of hysteria. (In more recent times, dual and multiple personalities have been viewed as symptoms of paranoid psychosis, in which the superego is dissociated and projected in conjunction with severe psychosomatic changes in the patient's appearance. The popular confusion of multiple personality and schizophrenia is incorrect, although a schizophrenic may experience splitting as one of a variety of possible symptoms.) In any event, cases like that of Sally Beauchamp and such well-known twentieth-century examples as the cases studied in the book and screen version of The Three Faces of Eve (1957) and in F. R. Schreiber's 1974 novel, Sybil, share with the Jekyll-Hyde prototype the alternations between a puritanical personality that wants to be "good" and a childish, impulsive personality that wants to be "bad." These are generally the first two kinds of personalities to appear, even if other types eventually emerge.

Sigmund Freud published his first paper on hysteria, co-authored by Josef Breuer, in 1893. In this and the papers that followed, Freud examined the reasons why hysterics split off pieces of consciousness and forget them: the pieces contain painful or socially unacceptable or infantile ideas and wishes. (Clearly, in this instance, Stevenson anticipated Freud by allowing Hyde to represent the unacceptable ideas of Jekyll.) From this observation, Freud went on to describe the process by which an idea is forgotten or repressed as well as the process by which it might be recalled again. In later works, he developed his own theory of the mind's structure: the horizontal division between conscious and unconscious and the vertical division between ego, id, and superego.

Freud's theories were not to have any impact on the theatrical and filmic adaptations of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde until Freudianism became current in America in the late 1930s and 1940s. But since the MGM film version of 1941, almost all productions have taken at least a crude Freudianism into account. The MGM version notably contains a surrealistic dream sequence that accompanies Jekyll's transformation and indicates that he is in the grip of an irrational, unconscious force. Freudian sexual theory provided justification for the sexual content of many versions, although Freud's theory of infantile sexual fixations is barely suggested by the brutality of Hyde's heterosexuality. The most explicitly Freudian version of Stevenson's story to date is I, Monster (1971), in which the Dr. Jekyll character is a British psychoanalyst who has studied with Freud in Vienna and whose experiments are an attempt to replace psychoanalysis with a drug.

One of the most profound cultural contributions of popularized Freudianism is that it enabled society to accept the moral consequences of Darwinism. In the post-Victorian age, the sense of inner division, particularly when sexual needs are involved, has come to be regarded as normal. Hysteria is no longer the most prevalent form of neurosis, in part because sexuality no longer has to be so forcefully repressed. Our more permissive society encourages us to recognize and enjoy our kinship with animals. Sexual gratification is recommended for good mental and physical health. This has changed the modern audience's response to Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. We now know that drugs can cause extreme personality changes, and we worry about the attractiveness of these drugs to the millions of young people who use them regularly. Yet, the problem posed by Stevenson's story can still have meaning for modern audiences if the split between Jekyll and Hyde is redefined. Today, one of our pressing psychological problems concerns the duality of sex and aggression. Our desire for sexual openness (the demand of the sexual revolution) may be in conflict with our desire to suppress all hostile impulses (the demand of the cultural revolution). Whether we accept Freud's earlier theory, that aggression is a component of the sexual instinct or his later theory, published in Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920), that aggression is a separate instinct coexisting with the sexual instinct, sex and aggression seem to be inextricably linked. It may well be impossible to loosen sexual inhibitions without loosening aggressive inhibitions at the same time.

The movie Dr. Jekyll and Sister Hyde (1971) takes this instinctual duality into account by showing that the bisexual-in-us-all (represented by the alteration of male and female personalities) also awakens the murderer-in-us-all. Thomas Berger's story "Professor Hyde" (1971) is an admission of the failure of our modern consciousness to cope with the aggressive emotions boiling over in even the weakest of us. The Hyde-in-us-all may no longer resemble Stevenson's Hyde in every respect, but the wish to separate him from our uninhibitedly humane selves may be as powerful for us as it once was for Stevenson's Jekyll.

Source: Harry M. Geduld, "Introduction," in The Definitive Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde Companion, Garland Publishing, Inc., 1983, pp. 8-10.

Since Robert Louis Stevenson first published Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde almost a century ago, critics have generally regarded the work as moral allegory, a dramatization of the conflicts between Jekyll and Hyde, good and evil, split parts of a dual personality. Recent scholarship, however, disputes this reading approach, focusing on the contradictions within Jekyll's own personality, which eliminate him as a symbol of pure respectability, and on the importance of secondary characters. While Edwin Eigner (in Robert Louis Stevenson and the Romantic Tradition) notes that Utterson and En-field are the first doppelgängers encountered in the novel, Masao Miyashi states that Jekyll is not really committed to goodness but to mere respectability. Miyashi further suggests that the secondary characters, formerly thought to contrast and intensify Jekyll's downfall, are in reality all "barren of ideas," "joyless," and inherently corrupt ("Dr. Jekyll and the Emergence of Mr. Hyde," College English, 27, 1966).

While Jekyll and Hyde are obviously disparate segments of the human personality, they are still integral parts of the whole, and Lanyon's and Utterson's failure to recognize this fact figures importantly in the novel. In Novelists in a Changing World Donald Stone states that there is a "buried theme" in Jekyll and Hyde, its key lying in the secondary characters, who are unable "to deal with the 'monster' Hyde in a normal manner." In keeping with Eigner's, Miyashi's, and Stone's revisionist focus on secondary characters, my purpose in the following paragraphs will be to discuss the novel's presentation of the two major secondary characters, Lanyon and Utterson, as they confront the truth of Jekyll and Hyde's single identity. For Stevenson's penetrating examination into his characters constitutes one of the novel's major themes: the formative and often distorting effects of language and society on man's perception of himself and his world.

Dr. Hastie Lanyon is described by Jekyll as "long ... bound to the most narrow and material views," and Stevenson seems to have selected his first name to suggest this defect. A "hide-bound pedant," Stevenson puns, Lanyon's clear intention is to block out the bimorphous reality of Hyde—the dual nature of man—so as to preserve his own social sense of man as inherently perfectible. For Lanyon man's social character is synonymous with man's essential self, hence he views Dr. Jekyll's excursion into Faustian metaphysics as a sign of moral perversion. Significantly, Lanyon is the only character in the novel who has no knowledge of Hyde's existence prior to his one fatal encounter. In a sense, Lanyon has completely alienated himself from the Hyde within him, hence his life is shaken "to its roots" when he witnesses Hyde's metamorphosis and realizes the latter's source in Jekyll. Ironically, Lanyon's ignorance culminates in his own destruction.

Like its literary heir Heart of Darkness, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde suggests that society purposely cultivates self-deceit in obscuring from its Lanyons the truth about themselves. But Stevenson implies, again like Conrad, that life is not redeemable without its illusions. After his fatal encounter with Hyde, when he finally recognizes the real duality of man, Lanyon states: "I have had a shock ... and I shall never recover. It is a question of weeks. Well, life has been pleasant; I liked it; yes, sir, I used to like it. I sometimes think that if we knew all, we should be more glad to get away."

Like his friend Lanyon, Utterson is a kind of guardian of orthodox knowledge. As a lawyer he has specialized knowledge of the laws by which society operates and exists. But unlike Lanyon, Utterson's recognition of Jekyll and Hyde's single identity is more gradual and narrated in greater detail. When he first hears Enfield's account of the trampling incident, Utterson becomes obsessed with seeing Hyde's face. His first response to Enfield's story is to ask, "What sort of man is he to see?" This incipient mania is described at length:

And still the figure had no face by which he might know it; even in his dreams, it had no face, or one that baffled him and melted before his eyes; and thus it was that there sprang up and grew apace in the lawyer's mind a singularly strong, almost an inordinate, curiosity to behold the features of the real Mr. Hyde. If he could but once set eyes on him, he thought the mystery would lighten and perhaps roll altogetheraway, as was the habit of mysterious things when well examined. He might see a reason for his friend's strange preference or bondage (call it what you please) and even for the startling clause of the will. At least it would be a face worth seeing: the face of a man who was without bowels of mercy: a face which had but to show itself to raise up, in the mind of the unimpressionable Enfield, a spirit of enduring hatred. (emphasis supplied)

Utterson's obsession derives from his assumption that reality can be known by its outward form, an assumption perhaps rooted in his belief in the credibility of social appearances. Accordingly, after staking out Hyde's doorway, Utterson first asks to "let me see your face." In view of Hyde's bimorphous nature, Utterson's query is ironic, and his statement that he will now "know" Hyde somewhat absurd. In the dualistic world of Jekyll and Hyde nothing can be known for sure, appearances being often misleading.

Unable to understand the enigma with which he is confronted, Utterson attempts to arbitrate reality by means of language, an act as perennial as art and as primitive as magic formula. Accordingly, Utterson's initial response to Enfield's narrative about the trampling is to "ask the name of that man who walked over the child." And this same preoccupation with definition underlies his need to find a name for Hyde's vague deformity. The lawyer is therefore in great "mental perplexity" because Hyde's strange physical "impression" created on onlookers is not a "nameable malformation." He ponders: "There is something more if I could find a name for it." Although Utterson suffers from a common human need to name and thereby control, his linguistic obsession is chronic, and, as in the case of Hastie Lanyon, his name suggests his proclivity. Perhaps used to the changeless regularity of legal language, Utterson may have forgotten that there is no value to words other than their arbitrary man-made one. Thus, pledging to search out Hyde, Utterson says, "If he be Mr. Hyde ... I shall be Mr. Seek." Similarly, he dubs Jekyll "Dr. Fell" and declares to Poole, "let our name be vengeance." Finally, the lawyer's obsession with words is underlined by his concern for Hyde's lack of "fitting language" at their first interview.

For Utterson, the purely social man, words are surrogates for reality, manipulation of the former representing control of the latter. While the use of language in this way is common enough, Utterson chronically fails to discriminate between the symbol and the reality. Hence, in his utter confusion over the perplexing relationship between the respectable Dr. Jekyll and the sinister Mr. Hyde, Utterson with great wonderment reads: "Henry Jekyll, M.D., D.C.L., LL.D., F.R.S., etc." To Utterson, the words encompass the total reality, and in these symbols there is clearly no room for Hyde. But Stevenson clearly implies that words cannot satisfactorily communicate reality and that reality is not answerable to language. Thus Lanyon declares after his fatal encounter with Hyde, "I have brought on myself a punishment and a danger that I cannot name," Jekyll states that his "affairs cannot be mended by talking," and he writes in his suicide note that his situation is "nameless." Finally, prior to killing the eminent Sir Danvers, Hyde appropriately says "never a word."

Implicitly, the reality of Hyde and his relationship with Jekyll are beyond the scope of Utterson's language. If it does anything, language, a man-made apparatus, obfuscates reality rather than clarifies it. Though man's linguistic attempts to understand and control constitute an artistic activity with sources deep in the human unconscious, man deceives himself when rendering in the artificial constructs of language that which is essentially chaotic. The impossibility of the purely "social" man ever coming to grips with life's formless diversity and illogic is comically paradigmed by Utterson' s ineffectual explanation to Poole of how the man behind the door writing in Jekyll's hand could be both Jekyll and someone else. The impeccable logic which Utterson uses to explain erroneously the enigma of the familiar hand and strange voice (an argument made even more farcical by the convincing repetition of hence) satirizes his methodology and ultimately his basic grasp of reality:

"These are all very strange circumstances," said Mr. Utterson, "but I think I begin to see daylight. Your master, Poole, is plainly seized with one of those maladies that both torture and deform the sufferer; hence, for aught I know, the alteration of his voice; hence the mask and the avoidance of his friends; hence his eagerness to find this drug, by means of which the poor soul retains some hope of ultimate recovery— God grant that he be not deceived! There is my explanation; it is sad enough, Poole, ay, and appalling to consider; but it is plain and natural, hangs well together, and delivers us from all exorbitant alarms."

Utterson's attempt to place experience within the narrow confines of a world artificially ordered by language is what underlies his concern that his explanation be "plain," "natural," hang "well together," and deliver him from "all exorbitant alarms." Poole's reply to this last grasp at order and sanity is even more absurd in its complete lack of sophistication, yet it is not basically different from Utterson's tendency to interpret reality in the narrow terms in which he has been conditioned to think: "'O, sir,' cried Poole ... 'Do you think I do not know where his head comes to in the cabinet door, where I saw him every morning of my life?'" Clearly, if truth can be known it is not found by the same measure which defines the external limits of a cabinet door. Here, Stevenson's satire on man's proclivity for concretion and hence distortion may be unmerciful but is probably directed at himself as well.

Perhaps Stevenson suggests that, unlike his early ancestors, modern man suffers from an ever-widening split in his consciousness, and we are all Lanyons, Uttersons, and Jekylls who have repressed, alienated, or otherwise estranged the Hyde within us—acts which doom us to inhabit the outskirts of reality as well as those of our own personalities. However, even this seems too optimistic for those of us who regard Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde as Stevenson's dim statement on man's perpetual unfitness for life. An artist by nature, man is chiefly an imaginative animal who will always filter his experience through his symbols, impotently manipulating these out of a primitive impulse to control, perceiving structure where there is only the illusion of structure, and meaning where there is only fact.

Source: Daniel V. Fraustino, "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde: Anatomy of Misperception," in Arizona Quarterly, Vol. 38, No. 3, Autumn 1982, pp. 235–40.