‘If a man harbours any fear, it percolates through all his thinking, damages his personality and makes him landlord to a ghost.’
Lloyd C. Douglas
It is widely rumoured that Robert Louis Stevenson had written The Strange case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde in a single six day-and-night cocaine binge. As much as I would like to credit cocaine for this work of genius (myself being an…ahem…use-), the fact is that Stevenson was a gifted writer even minus the powder and secondly, his own apparent use only adds to the strangeness of the strange case in the novel.
The term ‘Jekyll and Hyde’ has come down the decades as a very common one. Anyone with an unpredictable and altering personality is said to have a ‘Jekyll and Hyde’ syndrome. However, though the term and its eventual understanding has been portrayed in so many plays and movies (Fight Club, American Psycho, Nutty professor, The Hulk, Star wars to name a few…) most people don’t bother to read the novel that started it all because they think they already know the premise. Now this, I must say, is something that Hyde himself may have done.
It’s true that superficially the novel is about one Dr. Jekyll who is a respectable citizen of Victorian London and in good circles of the immediate society but who also has a secret alter-ego that is quite unlike him: Mr. Hyde. Thus, Jekyll = good while Hyde = bad. This is where most people who have been handed down the plot assume that there may be little to read between these lines. Actually, there is a lot.
The horror presented to readers in this short and clear tale is not of one man having two personalities but of two personalities having one man. Think about it. How many times have you told lies or caused harm to someone, all the time knowing that it was bad? The guilt of the doer hangs to him like a moth circles a light bulb. This guilt or conscience is the burning proof of man’s duality for if man didn’t have two natures then there would be no guilt. Like Jekyll himself comes to tell in the novel, ‘With every day, and from both sides of my intelligence, the moral and theintellectual, I thus drew steadily nearer to that truth, by whosepartial discovery I have been doomed to such a dreadful shipwreck: that man is not truly one, but truly two.’
It is one thing to wake up the next morning and face the remorse of a crime or an evil deed carried out by yourself but something quite another, and infinitely worse, to know that this evil has been carried out not by your own nature but another independent disposition of your spirit that just happens to share the body you inhibit as well. Two is company, three’s crowd but this simple phrase can’t be applied to the human body because here, even two is a crowd; a stampede of decisions and impulses. The strangeness of the case resides in the magical potion that is used by Jekyll to transform into Hyde.
In his younger days, Jekyll had questioned and then come to the conclusion that man has a dual nature and to take this theory into practice, he creates a potion that embodies the two aspects of a man into different mental and physical faculties. This brings out a metamorphosis of sorts that sees Edward Hyde getting a bigger share of the pie that is the shared body. Hyde goes out into the London night to commit all the anti-social pleasures that Jekyll cannot. Soon, the evil nature gets such a predominant role in Jekyll that he completely transforms into Hyde and has to lock himself away from the attendance of worried friends and staff. A conclusion or decision has to be arrived at to see what happens with the mental Siamese-twins that are Jekyll and Hyde and it is this conclusion that I will leave for you to find out.
If you have ever experimented with cocaine or even a little grass, you may find the tale rather interesting. While using these drugs (which for me substituted the magic potion cited in the tale), my interest into the subject matter was quadrupled with the common paranoia and artificial pleasures that these substances release. But of course, one need not participate in drugs to love the tale. The only potion you need is a little faith in yourself and the motion to destroy exactly that.
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