The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll & Mr Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson (first published in 1886) is a Gothic classic that I guarantee most would have at least heard of, if not read. For those that might have studied it for GCSE and are now cringing away out of fear of being resubjected to a book they have studied ad nauseum, I bid you to reconsider your dismissal. Despite being over a century old, this short novel (fitting in under sixty pages) still has a lot to tell us, especially regarding gender, morality, and the wars humans enact against themselves. 

Jekyll & Hyde is usually framed as a clash between progression and conservatism, ideas that remain topical today but verged on the heretical in Stevenson’s contemporary. It follows few characters, chiefly that of Jekyll’s friend and lawyer Utterson, who takes it upon himself to investigate a certain Mr Hyde stalking his comrade’s premises and person with alarming intimacy. Mr Hyde’s closeness to Jekyll transpires to be closer than anyone could have thought. Indeed, helped by chemical compounds and the Doctor’s characteristic arrogance, they are one and the same person, no matter how much the two themselves might disagree on the matter. 

Returning to this novella for the first time in nearly a decade, one of the things that most struck me was how much of Stevenson’s commentary on gender I had overlooked when reading it as a child. Jekyll and Hyde’s treatment of women is fairly typical of what one would expect from a male author in the Victorian age. Women are described either as meek and feeble, prone to fainting or outcry. Or, they are vicious, made sullen and bitter by age and circumstance: “as wild as harpies”¹. Arguably more surprising is what Stevenson has to say about masculinity. Utterson provides the template for the stoic masculinity that Stevenson’s society found desirable; rarely prompted to great outbursts of emotion, rational and with just enough outward veneer of philanthropy that he is able to conduct himself privately as he wishes. This masculinity fails to satiate Jekyll. Even before beginning to dream up his doppelgänger experiments, Jekyll makes it clear (when we at last hear from his own voice) that deception was his standard. Sombre minded and ambitious, he tells us how different from his peers he found himself. Not content with being a family man or a stolid servant of the law, Jekyll burns with a need for more that both frightens him and invokes a deep sense of shame. It is this shame that he tries to purge through the creation of Hyde. 

Hyde is distinctively and renownedly animalistic; Stevenson uses a litany of bestial comparisons to conjure the antagonist in our mind. Whether he be more monkey or rat, it is made quite clear that the man represents a primitive inhumanity that invokes a fathomless and almost ancestral disgust. Slight in stature, distinctively light footed and prone to “weeping like a woman” (make of this what you will), Hyde is a distinctive mirror to the broad shouldered, masculine handsomeness of his sire². Emotional where Jekyll and his friends are cold and calculating, wild where they are ‘civil’, Hyde is every condensed sin that ever crossed his creator’s mind. In a time where religion remained a dominant influence on societal behaviour, Jekyll’s inclinations towards science and testing the limits of body and mind become not just wild, but impious. Ungodly. In a way, his turning to science to rid him of temptation can be seen as Jekyll’s attempt at finding faith. By creating Hyde, the Doctor is pushing the limits of science and evolution, but also enacting an exorcism of the self. 

And yet, for all his moral quanderies, Jekyll is not a good man. He wants the privileges that come to him by being born in a masculine body, without having to continually opt into the system that regulates them. The separation of Hyde from Jekyll demonstrates these warring ideas perfectly. Repeatedly, Jekyll chooses to inhabit his supposedly inferior cloak, even knowing the series of crimes that Hyde leaves in his wake because of the freedom that he provides. But, this freedom does not come without consequences, with Hyde brutally murdering a respected gentleman and Sir of the realm. An explicit metaphor for his rejection of all that Jekyll represents. Rather than taking responsibility for the actions that he directly cultivated, the Doctor instead commits to a bout of philanthropy that is as unexpected for those who know him as it is brief. It becomes clear that Hyde is not an unfortunate consequence of a mission to eradicate evil, but rather a solution for the shame and bitterness that plagues Jekyll. 

In lieu of beginning a journey of self-reckoning, Jekyll instead opts to incite a body double that conveniently allows him to indulge in activities that the Victorian moral state would never allow a man of his stature to commit publicly. The physical demarcation of Jekyll’s soul allows for such a degree of separation that the Doctor can convince himself that Hyde is an autonomous being whose actions (however deplorable) cannot be laid at his feet. He even makes the humorous comment that no legal precedent exists that would allow the law to do so: “the situation was apart from ordinary laws”³. Hyde is not simply an unfortunate doppelgänger or a mere reversal of the self: instead, he is a crutch used by Jekyll to absolve him of an inclination towards abandoning the restrictive masculinity forced upon him since birth. Jekyll cannot countenance his own betrayal of a system that he in many ways depends upon, and with Hyde, he does not have to.

Whilst Stevenson may have intended his work as a warning against the dangers of human arrogance and escalation, it also highlights the often performative nature of masculinity. Rather than admit to his flaws, or even outrightly accept them, Jekyll instead turns to a prolonged period of self-mutilation with the intention of creating the ultimate cover for his inner ego. The stoic ideal of the automaton Victorian man that was supposed to reward Jekyll instead leads to his dissolution and a string of bodies never to be brought back. Stevenson demonstrates an uncanny knowledge of a fact that still haunts us - that to live is to perform - with Hyde's actions demonstrating that the only form of release is radical acceptance of our full self.