August 20, 2013
Yup, it's another double-entry day! In my defense, reading this book was somewhat a part of my curriculum planning. See, it's one of the thirty or so "public domain classics" that I downloaded for free on my Kindle (the only book I've paid for at this point is Atlas Shrugged...and why pay for ebooks if you can get them or rent them for free?), so eventually I was planning to get to it. Well, it's also a book that I saw in my new classroom. When I saw how thin it was, I at first assumed it was some condensed version, and would have never considered it for use if that were the case. I could have read Atlas Shrugged, for example, as a condensed text, rather than the huge original...but that wouldn't have felt right. If you're going to read a book, might as well read the real thing.
Well, when I examined the book, I saw that it was an "unabridged" text. I verified the short length with the version on my Kindle. So it was a very quick read, took me something like two hours, so I figured I might as well just knock it out. I didn't really sit and take any notes for my lesson planning...with a unit for Into Thin Air completed planned out, I've got my first month and a half of that class complete for the time being, so I will have time to go back and make notes on my ebook for this text. I just sat and enjoyed the story.
So again, this is a classic with a well-known basic premise: Dr. Jekyll, a chemist, creates this potion or drug or what have you that turns him into someone else, Mr. Hyde, who is an asshole. So anyone reading this book today would experience a sense of dramatic irony; like, as Utterson, the attorney who is a good friend of Dr. Jekyll, is trying to sort the whole situation out, the reader already knows what's up. So it's interesting to see how it all unfolds.
This snappy read is appropriately paced. It follows over a course of a few months. Utterson, an upstanding and well-regarded man, reminded me at the beginning of Nick Carraway from The Great Gatsby. Utterson is described as being someone who doesn't judge others; as a result of this, he often stays in contact with people even as they've started to drift into bad habits, and as their reputations around London start to suffer. This is meant to explain Utterson's involvement in the whole story, the same way that Fitzgerald justifies Carraway's access to intimate information to such a character trait. In contrast to Utterson, who seems to be a very together sort of person, there is Dr. Jekyll.
He explains, in what basically amounts as a suicide letter to Utterson, that he'd always felt this sort of split in his personality. On the one hand, he succumbed to society pressure, or the necessity of his profession as a doctor and professor, to live a pious and respectable life. On the other hand, he sometimes found pleasure into dabbling in taboo activities: drinking, it would seem, maybe gambling, things that would hurt his conscience. Nowadays, people would say, hey, you gotta have your fun sometimes, right? They'd probably advise Jekyll to spend a weekend in Vegas. Well, he kind of does what he would consider to be the equivalent in his time and situation. He figures out a way to make a drug that actually causes his personality to split, and he becomes the personification of his dark temptations to vice. That would be Mr. Hyde, of course.
As Mr. Hyde, he explains, he can indulge in those forbidden pleasures without feeling any guilt afterward...because it's not really him, right? Jekyll doesn't take responsibility for Hyde's actions, not even when he knocks down some little girl on the streets and hits or tramples on her. So he's not just an outlet for enjoying himself in a way that society would be frowned upon, but also a way for him to indulge in just being "bad." Hyde is smaller in statue than Jekyll, which would imply that Jekyll's "good" side outweighed his "bad" side. Ah, but as the story goes, as Jekyll uses more and more of the drug to become his other persona, Hyde becomes stronger...and becomes the dominant one.
The rest of the story is familiar, I guess. Jekyll realizes that he can't live his life as Hyde, who is wanted for murder (he kind of turns out to be 'pure evil,' as Jekyll calls him), and has such a rage that he fears Hyde will continue to physically harm and kill others. So he commits suicide; or maybe at that point, Hyde had taken over and decided to do it himself.
I wonder if the message that I get from the story is different than what Stevenson intended. I think that having a happy medium, indulging oneself in moderation, is not a bad thing in the least. I have not read up much on Stevenson, nor have I read any of his other works, so I don't know where he would lean on that issue. But I think (and it would be practical for today's world) that allowing yourself to be "bad" sometimes is a good thing, a healthy thing...I mean, obviously Dr. Jekyll was not happy when he felt he had to be "good" ALL the time, because he set out on this experiment in the first place, and enjoyed it so much (initially) when he was successfully in becoming Hyde. Dr. Jekyll had a lot of friends, when he was "normal," and was highly regarded...what happened to make him so unhappy? Maybe the 'evil' part of him was really stronger than he wanted to believe...
I would venture to say that this story has had about as many remakes/modernizations done to it as A Christmas Carol, probably the most prominent one being those terrible Nutty Professor movies with Eddie Murphy. Man, there's an actor whose career has taken a serious nosedive in recent years. He seems to have stepped back, and I think that's for the best. Apparently, the novel Mary Reilly by Valerie Martin is a different take on the story, told from a new character's perspective and I suppose adding some more depth to the situation. After all, we don't really SEE the things that Hyde does (besides the murder, and assaulting a young girl, and later a woman). It looks interesting, and that may be another book to add to my ever-growing list.
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The concept of having "dual personalities," or a "good and evil side" is certainly nothing new. I guess I can relate to that aspect of it; we all have our secrets, things that we definitely don't go around telling everyone. It was shame, guilt, and an oppressive society, not his temptations, that doomed Dr. Jekyll.
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