Knowing and Not Knowing in Jekyll and Hyde

Notes from class: Thursday, October 25

In thinking about The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, and an earlier discussion we had about the book as a tragedy, it struck me that this book is in some ways similar to Oedipus Rex. In that play, there is a conflict between knowing and not knowing. Oedipus is put into a situation in which he has a great desire to acquire knowledge (discovering who killed the ex-King Laius will stop the town’s suffering). When characters begin to deduce that Oedipus himself is guilty, they begin counseling him against the acquisition of knowledge in this connection. They realize that, by his own edict, knowing this will be fatal to him. In Jekyll and Hyde, such a conflict is seen in the relationship between Lanyon and Jekyll/Hyde. For both Lanyon and Jekyll, coming to know what Jekyll discovers about the nature of humankind is fatal. They would have both been better not knowing.

A closer analogy, though, exists between this novel and a Christian idea about knowledge. In the following passage, Stevenson draws heavily upon the Biblical story of the temptation of Eve by the serpent:

"And now," said he, "to settle what remains. Will you be wise? will you be guided? will you suffer me to take this glass in my hand and to go forth from your house without further parley? or has the greed of curiosity too much command of you? Think before you answer, for it shall be done as you decide. As you decide, you shall be left as you were before, and neither richer nor wiser, unless the sense of service rendered to a man in mortal distress may be counted as a kind of riches of the soul. Or, if you shall so prefer to choose, a new province of knowledge and new avenues to fame and power shall be laid open to you, here, in this room, upon the instant; and your sight shall be blasted by a prodigy to stagger the unbelief of Satan."

"Sir," said I, affecting a coolness that I was far from truly possessing, "you speak enigmas, and you will perhaps not wonder that I hear you with no very strong impression of belief. But I have gone too far in the way of inexplicable services to pause before I see the end."

"It is well," replied my visitor. "Lanyon, you remember your vows: what follows is under the seal of our profession. And now, you who have so long been bound to the most narrow and material views, you who have denied the virtue of transcendental medicine, you who have derided your superiors -- behold!"

He put the glass to his lips and drank at one gulp. (p. 53)

Hyde, who is speaking to Lanyon in this excerpt, has been equated with Satan many times in the story to this point. He is the serpent to Lanyon’s Eve, and the terms of the two literary seductions are similar – a gain in knowledge and wisdom. Both “taste of the fruit”; both die as a direct result. The argument seems to be that there are some things that one shouldn’t know, and that Lanyon was wise in his earlier scientific disagreements with Jekyll, refusing to go with him into the realms of “transcendental medicine”.

The long passage just quoted has another important significance as well. At this point, even though Hyde is speaking, he is doing so from the perspective of Jekyll. Despite Jekyll’s explanation later that “Hyde was indifferent to Jekyll, or but remembered him as the mountain bandit remembers the cavern in which he conceals himself from pursuit” (p. 63), as Hyde speaks to Lanyon, it is with a full understanding and memory of the scientific dispute that has been simmering between them for years. Early in the story, Lanyon describes to Utterson his feelings about Jekyll:

"I suppose, Lanyon," said he, "you and I must be the two oldest friends that Henry Jekyll has?"

"I wish the friends were younger," chuckled Dr. Lanyon. "But I suppose we are. And what of that? I see little of him now."

"Indeed?" said Utterson. "I thought you had a bond of common interest."

"We had," was the reply. "But it is more than ten years since Henry Jekyll became too fanciful for me. He began to go wrong, wrong in mind; and though of course I continue to take an interest in him for old sake's sake, as they say, I see and I have seen devilish little of the man. Such unscientific balderdash," added the doctor, flushing suddenly purple, "would have estranged Damon and Pythias." (p. 12)

The sense of estrangement is, then, clear from Lanyon’s side. As for Jekyll -- just a few pages later he discusses his feelings for Lanyon with Utterson as well:

A close observer might have gathered that the topic was distasteful; but the doctor carried it off gaily. "My poor Utterson," said he, "you are unfortunate in such a client. I never saw a man so distressed as you were by my will; unless it were that hide-bound pedant, Lanyon, at what he called my scientific heresies. O, I know he's a good fellow -- you needn't frown -- an excellent fellow, and I always mean to see more of him; but a hide-bound pedant for all that; an ignorant, blatant pedant. I was never more disappointed in any man than Lanyon." (p. 19)

Jekyll speaks of a similar estrangement, then, though in stronger language. It is this background that underlies the sense of triumph as Hyde speaks to Lanyon about Jekyll’s discoveries, and that the knowledge he is about to reveal falls under the “seal of our profession” (p. 53). That profession is surely Jekyll’s, not Hyde’s, and the conflict with Lanyon concerns only Jekyll, not Hyde.

Why does Stevenson have Hyde speak so fully as Jekyll at this point? It seems to me there are two possible answers: he loses control of his characters with respect to what they should know, or, he is showing some kind of development in Hyde, who is becoming more fully Jekyll even as Jekyll is disappearing into thin air.

Jekyll and Hyde -- Ideas from class

I thought I’d put into writing the ideas we’ve been discussing for the last couple of classes. It seems to me that one of the things Stevenson is doing in this tale is looking at the ways it is possible to understand human behaviour. In doing so, he is shown to be a man of his times, as he demonstrates the conflict between a Darwinian and a Christian view of humanity.

In the following quotation, in fact, he presents a third possibility as well, though it’s not taken as seriously as the other two: "There is something more, if I could find a name for it. God bless me, the man seems hardly human! Something troglodytic, shall we say? or can it be the old story of Dr. Fell? or is it the mere radiance of a foul soul that thus transpires through, and transfigures, its clay continent? The last, I think; for, O my poor old Harry Jekyll, if ever I read Satan's signature upon a face, it is on that of your new friend." (p. 16) The quotation present three possible understandings of Enfield’s dislike of Hyde. The first is that Hyude is “hardly human”, “troglodytic” – that is, cave-man like or ape like. With this possibility, Enfield alludes to Darwin and his Origin of Species, conceiving of Hyde as a throwback, or a not-fully-evolved human being. This isn’t a moral judgment, but rather one of scientific classification. And if that, then it’s difficult to justify hatred based on such difference, isn’t it?

The second possible reason for his dislike of Hyde isn’t really a reason at all. In fact, it’s quite unreasonable by design. I don’t like him because I don’t like him, as the reference to Dr. Fell establishes: “I do not like thee Dr. Fell/The reason why I cannot tell/But this alone I know full well/I do not like thee Dr. Fell”.

The third reason is rather more complicated than it at first appears. Simply, Enfield reads “Satan’s signature” upon the face of Hyde, and, therefore, hates him as he would hate Satan; the reason must be, then, moral – hating the embodiment of evil (which is, in fact, how Jekyll himself refers to Hyde repeatedly). But it’s the language Stevenson uses to introduce the idea of Satan that complicates this simple moral judgment – and it’s a complication that seems to me fatal to it. References to “radiance” and “transfigures” are clearly to Christ’s transfiguration in the gospels of Matthew, Mark and Luke in the Bible. In this story, Christ’s divinity illuminates his physical body (“clay continent”) such that his radiance shines forth to the apostles attending him – Peter, James and John. The allusion to Christ’s transfiguration in the description of the Satan-like Hyde is important, in that it tends to equate his culture’s most important symbols of good and evil. In doing so, Stevenson might be suggesting that moral judgments are not, then, justifiable – Christ might be considered indistinguishable from Satan if moral judgments don’t apply.

The idea that Stevenson wants to level any distinctions between “good” and “evil” is supported many times in the story. One way this occurs is in the profound doubt about “good” evident throughout the tale. When Enfield refers to Jekyll as “one of your fellows who do what they call good”, he places the idea of the good as being relative. The phrase “one of your fellows” makes this relativity the general condition of goodness. It comes down to personal opinion only, to personal whim. One can sense Stevenson working through the intricacies of this argument in the following paragraph: “I not only recognised my natural body from the mere aura and effulgence of certain of the powers that made up my spirit, but managed to compound a drug by which these powers should be dethroned from their supremacy, and a second form and countenance substituted, none the less natural to me because they were the expression, and bore the stamp of lower elements in my soul.” (p. 57) This presents a clear argument about the idea of moral judgment. Jekyll speaks of his “natural body” as having two equally natural “elements”. Neither better nor worse, but natural. His science concerns separating these elements – the two constituent parts of his being. It’s pure science (and math – division, I guess). But he can’t really stick to science in his description. Mixed up with the value-neutral phrases of science and math (“natural body”, “powers”, “form and countenance”, “elements”) are such words as “supremacy”, “lower”, implying value. He’ll continue throughout his narrative to conflate these two ways of looking at human life – and the two ways are not compatible. He will call Hyde “pure evil” in one paragraph, refer to his own “original evil” in another (of course, suggesting the Christian doctrine of original sin), and then he’ll say “I learned to recognize the thorough and primitive duality of man; I saw that, of the two natures that contended in the field of my consciousness, even if I could rightly be said to be either, it was only because I was radically both … I learned to dwell with pleasure … on the thought of the separation of these elements.” (p. 56) This is scientific self analysis, devoid of judgment. Jekyll cannot escape being a man of his times – the conflict between the scientific and the Christian is revealed repeatedly in his language.

With this understood, the pervasive logic of the book’s argument becomes clear. When Jekyll comments in his letter, “My devil had long been caged, he came out roaring” (p. 64), not only does he return to the language of moral judgment, but he also suggests that, if you control your vices and don’t act upon them, they will explode with more violence – that is, it’s bad to be good. In his letter, Jekyll states that “It was thus rather the exacting nature of my aspirations than any particular degradation in my faults, that made me what I was”, earlier describing “what [he] was” as a man “committed to a profound duplicity of life” (p. 55) It is his aspirations to be good, his constant practice of having “concealed” desires not in keeping with those aspirations, that lie at the heart of his failure. This failure is a moral one. However, when Jekyll casts his life in a scientific light, this is not failure at all, but simply the human condition more fully understood. Promptings toward socially acceptable behaviour are not “better” or “worse” than promptings towards behaviours that are not socially acceptable. Both are natural expressions of the basic human duality.

When Lanyon comes to understand that Jekyll’s science is “true” – that humans are comprised equally of two conflicting tendencies – he literally dies of the shock. Like Jekyll, Lanyon thought himself to be a scientist, but he had rejected Jekyll’s science on moral and religious grounds. His repeated references to “God” in his interjections shows that his habit of mind is still essentially Christian. In Lanyon, Stevenson suggests that the scientific and Christian cannot co-exist. I’ve tried to demonstrate that they still co-exist in Jekyll, but of course that co-existence is very limited, as Jekyll/Hyde die very quickly.