Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (Criticism)

Criticism

Wendy Perkins

Perkins is an associate professor of English at Prince George's Community College in Maryland and has published several articles on British and American authors. In the following essay, she examines how The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde reflects the influence of two important ideological forces in Victorian England: utilitarianism and Evangelicalism.

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 im-pulses. 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 "Mas-queraders," 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 Utterson'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 self-ishness. 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.

What Do I Read Next?

• Mary Reilly (1990), by Valerie Martin, tells the fictional story of the young maid, Mary Reilly, sent to live and work in the house of Dr. Jekyll/Mr. Hyde.
• Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus (1818), by Mary Shelley, focuses on another man who tries to alter nature and, as a result, destroys himself.
• For another complex study of good and evil, turn to Stevenson's Treasure Island (1884), his first bestseller.
• Bram Stoker's classic Dracula, published in 1897, presents a penetrating commentary on Victorian society as well as the nature of evil.
• The psychological studies of the criminal mind presented in Edgar Allan Poe's short stories like "The Tell-Tale Heart" and "The Cask of Amontillado" also reveal the author's mastery of the detective fiction form. A good collection of his works is The Complete Stories and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe, published by Doubleday in 1966.