Dr Henry Jekyll

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Jekyll and Society

Dr Henry Jekyll is a well-respected doctor and friend of Lanyon, a fellow physician, and Utterson, a lawyer.

Jekyll has always tried to put on a façade for his society - he worries about his hidden desires.
He over-dramatises how bad his desires are because his inner desires contrast to the character he appears to be. He puts on “a more commonly grave countenance before the public”.

Jekyll’s hidden desires cause him to feel guilt, so he tries to repress these desires and he feels a “morbid sense of shame” - this shows how he feels he has dishonoured the society that he lives in, and he feels embarrassed of his secret activities.

His engagement with science, and his guilt thereafter, is often linked to the rigorous Christian ideals that citizens were expected to uphold, causing guilt and shame for those who did not conform to the Victorian ideals prescribed to them.
As a result of his dual interests, Jekyll finds himself committed “to a profound duplicity of life” which is why making a potion to split his two sides appeals to him so much, and he pursues the transformation into Hyde as a result.
"Duplicity" means to be disloyal, or to be unfaithful- so this implies that Jekyll is disloyal to the Christian upper-class community he lives in.

Jekyll is a man of science who wants to experiment with the human psyche.

During the 1800s, science challenged religious ideas and beliefs.
Jekyll’s science challenges the religious belief that humans should try to lead a life free from sin.
Stevenson wanted to show the audience that it is impossible to do so, and that repression only leads to excessive corruption.

Jekyll decides he wants to experiment to divide the two sides of the human psyche. He experiments on himself. Jekyll’s experiments in “transcendental medicine” show that he is a revolutionary scientist, who is not afraid to pursue controversial research.
Jekyll believed that “man is not truly one but truly two.”
Jekyll is so desperate to split the two sides of the human psyche that he “risked death” to transform into Hyde. However, the experiments do not go as planned: he only succeeds in releasing his bad side, and he remains undivided as he was before - with both good and bad qualities.

Jekyll and Lanyon do not agree on their scientific theories, and Dr Lanyon refers to Jekyll’s science as “unscientific balderdash”.
- This means that his theories are nonsense and pollute the field of material medicine with the supernatural and mystical theories that Lanyon and other doctors at the time shunned with resentment.

When Jekyll transforms into Hyde, he feels immense pleasure. The long-term effects of transforming into Hyde cause him to feel shame.

Jekyll gains pleasure from transforming and he is unable to tear himself away from his darker side once the experiments begin.
He says: “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” (10).
This quote suggests he enjoys the transformations, and he feels released from the heavy restraints of the external society.

Jekyll writes in chapter 10 how his experiments have failed, and he is ashamed of his failures.
His former self cannot be recreated, because we cannot exist without having both good and evil within us: “Both sides of me [good and evil] were in dead earnest; 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".