Andrew Motion was appointed Poet Laureate in 1998. He is Professor of Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia and his previous publications include A Writer's Life (1993), a biography of Philip Larkin and most recently the Invention of Dr Cake (2003), a short novel.
The title of R.L. Stevenson’s best-known short fiction, The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, has been worn smooth by time. But what appears plain and straightforward is really meant to be ambiguous and suggestive. It introduces a story that is at once a ‘case’ – a work of detection – and a ‘strange case’ – a mystery. It leads readers to expect something in which the visible world of crime and punishment is mingled with the interior world of motive and pathology.
There’s something else too. The title has a skip to it, a self-relishing which admits to something sensational. Stevenson himself made no bones about this. When the novella first appeared in 1886 he and his publisher variously referred to it as ‘a fine bogey tale’, a ‘crawler’ and ‘a shilling shocker’. They meant that it should be a money-spinner (they weren’t disappointed), and also that readers should place it in the tradition of Gothic thrillers initiated by Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764).
Stevenson had toyed with these conventions before, first in a story about Burke and Hare called The Body Snatcher in 1884, and then in the equally bizarre Olalla in 1885. But in Jekyll and Hyde the greater complexity of his technique gave an additional depth to his imagining. The continuing debts to Walpole (the use, for instance, of several different kinds of manuscript within a single tale) are no longer deployed merely to create a variety of perspectives, but to suggest different levels of understanding and insight. They keep the surface-narrative alive, while drawing readers down into the body of the drama.
Specifically, into the drama of doubleness. Thanks partly to the success of filmed versions of Jekyll and Hyde, its main ingredient (the transformation of the good doctor into his murderous ‘other’) has become one of the most celebrated moments in all fiction; indeed, the names themselves have become a short-hand for virtue and vice. But here too time has simplified Stevenson’s original intentions, and distorted his achievement. The story’s twin states are generally described in terms of opposition – of being distinctly divided states, which Jekyll moves between as the result of a moral collapse. On close inspection, it turns out that Stevenson’s ideas about doubleness have as much to do with integration as they do with opposition. It is not so much a story about how unlike themselves characters might become, as a story about what characters carry within themselves. In this respect, once again, it significantly deepens the mine of Gothic horror.
The very first chapter heading tells us what to expect: ‘Story of the Door’. This particular door is set in the back wall of Jekyll’s house, and is used by Hyde as his exit into the world of violence, and his entry back into respectability. It is both a point of change and a form of concealment – and as such is a prototype for the many other doors which appear in the story. The door, for instance, to the ‘old dissecting room’ in which Jekyll conducts his experiments; or the ‘red baize door’ to his ‘cabinet’, which the lawyer Utterson and the servant Poole break down with an axe to discover Hyde’s body. As each opens or closes, it leads characters into different parts of themselves – into extreme states sometimes, but never into something absolutely remote and separate.
Virtually every character has some experience of this kind of development, but the most intense – of course – belongs to Jekyll himself. According to received wisdom, he is first introduced to us as a model of decency, a cartoon ‘good citizen’ who is in every sense the antithesis of the gruesome Hyde. In fact Stevenson is at pains to say something more complicated. Jekyll, we hear from Utterson, ‘was wild when he was young; a long while ago to be sure; but in the law of God, there is no statute of limitations’. Later we find Jekyll himself admitting ‘the worst of my faults was a certain impatient gaiety of disposition, such as has made the happiness of many, but such as I found it hard to reconcile with my imperious desire to carry my head high, and wear a more than commonly grave countenance before the public’.
The point of this confession is not that the pre-Hyde Jekyll has been a great sinner, but that he is someone who understands that to be human is to be a mixture. However deeply he is repelled by Hyde’s murderous ways, however sincerely he regrets them, he cannot say that he is wholly detached from them. In his closing confession he says plainly ‘man is not truly one but truly two. I say two, because the state of my own knowledge does not pass beyond that point. Others will follow, others will outstrip me on the same lines; and I hazard the guess that man will be ultimately known for a mere polity of multifarious, incongruous and independent denizens.’
Such blunt expressions of a main theme can be dangerous in novels; the more clearly we see authors wagging their finger at us, telling us what to think, the less inclined we are to believe them. Jekyll and Hyde remains credible because its central preoccupation – however boldly stated – is surrounded by sympathetic uncertainties. Indeed, almost the entire book is shrouded in fog, which turns gas-lit London into a flickering miasma: solid things become insubstantial, and thin vapours become actual veils. Not only does this cast a shadow of doubtfulness over everything we see; it actually seeps into the minds of characters, so that their ‘true’ natures are continually put in doubt. (Notice the artful deployment of the word ‘mist’ in Jekyll’s confession, for instance: ‘I began to perceive more deeply than it has ever yet been stated, the trembling immateriality, the mist-like transience, of this seemingly so solid body in which we walk attired’.) In such an unstable environment, it’s hardly surprising to find that people are generally loath to look into one another’s faces, and also slow to ask questions. That’s to say: what is unclear in the town-scape is matched by what is evasive in human behaviour. Utterson’s friend Enfield says ‘I feel very strongly about putting questions; it partakes too much of the style of the day of judgement’ – which Jekyll bears out at the end of his confession, when he admits ‘It is useless, and the time awfully fails me, to prolong this description; no one has ever suffered such torments, let that suffice’.
This doesn’t mean the hard argumentative core of the book is surrounded by a nimbus of vagueness. It means that its centre and peripheries are all intended to make the same point: appearances are not to be trusted, and neither are ready answers. Strikingly, many people in the book are worried about their reputations, and have some sort of secret to protect: Utterson (what is he doing withholding evidence from the police?); the MP Carew (why is he wandering in such an unsavoury part of town late at night?); Jekyll himself – whom Utterson initially believes is being blackmailed. A reputation, after all, is something that most people only maintain by denying or suppressing certain uncomfortable truths about themselves. Specifically, by denying the duality (at least) of their motives.
It would be perverse to argue that Hyde’s inability to dissemble makes him a sort of hero: he is a distillation of evil – and ‘ape-like’ demon. (The repeated comparison of his figure to some form of primate is interesting: it winds a Darwinian thread around the story, and makes us think about its evolutionary component at the same time as we ponder its moral code.) And yet in the context of the book as a whole he seems more than merely repellent. He is, in his disgusting and reprehensible way, a form of truth-telling – the means by which we can hear Stevenson saying ‘This is what human beings contain, whether we like it or not’, then asking ‘Is it better to deny it, and let it rampage when it chooses, or is it better to acknowledge it and learn to contain it?’
We need not go so far as to sympathise with Hyde (though Jekyll does at one point say that he ‘pities’ him), and it would be simply wrong to admire him. But we can say that he is the cornerstone of Stevenson’s appeal for honesty. In a book crammed with buried histories, obscure objects, and all manner of duplicities, he offers us a starkly terrifying vision of the truth about human nature. In this respect he has the force of an archetype – something which connects him not just with other great characters in fiction, but with the fundamental templates of analysis. No wonder his name, and the name of his other self, have escaped the bounds of Stevenson’s story and become a part of the way we explain ourselves to one another, and one another to ourselves.
Andrew Motion
Links
The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson
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