Abstract
Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde is hierarchical in its very title—alphabetically Hyde precedes Jekyll, but Jekyll’s superior education and culture are associated with social status whereas Hyde’s ‘Mr.’ is a courtesy title often hedged in with demonic or animalistic terms. But despite the division insisted on in the title, Jekyll’s wilful complicity in the fate that overtakes him is suggested in a series of clues, ranging from his symbolic association with vivisection to the ostentatious exclusion of a female voice (typically the source of spiritual guidance or inspiration in Victorian fiction). As Hyde engages in an ascending scale of brutal acts, beginning with the assault of a child, the middle-class male peer group attempts to exculpate or protect Jekyll from association with this rebarbative and criminal figure. But following the murder of Sir Danvers Carew, the climactic discovery of Hyde’s body provides the final evidence against Jekyll himself—in rejecting the possibility of religious salvation, he has deliberately chosen the evil that his final statement presents as the ‘assault’ of an ungovernable temptation.
Highlights
Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde is hierarchical in its very title—alphabetically Hyde precedes Jekyll, but Jekyll’s superior education and culture are associated with social status whereas Hyde’s ‘Mr.’ is a courtesy title often hedged in with demonic or animalistic terms
For Kristen Guest, Hyde has little need to ‘pass’ as the gentleman whose unexamined behaviour he makes more visible, ‘that gentlemen as a class are implicated in the expressions of economic subjectivity associated with Jekyll and Hyde seems to be the novel’s most anxious focus of wilful not knowing, even as it is its most prominent open secret’ (Guest 2016, p. 325)
O’Dell sees ‘the red herring of Jekyll’s criminal desires’ as subordinate to ‘the novel’s interest in the production and maintenance of class privilege’ (O’Dell 2012, p. 511). Such readings move past the obvious resonance of Jekyll and Hyde as individual characters, to show the story’s metaphorical use of evil as a distorted mirror held up to the fragile construction of middle-class masculinity
Summary
Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde is hierarchical in its very title—alphabetically Hyde precedes Jekyll, but Jekyll’s superior education and culture are associated with social status whereas Hyde’s ‘Mr.’ is a courtesy title often hedged in with demonic or animalistic terms. Such readings move past the obvious resonance of Jekyll and Hyde as individual characters, to show the story’s metaphorical use of evil as a distorted mirror held up to the fragile construction of middle-class masculinity.
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