'The double' - Dr
Jekyll and Mr Hyde was not the only story which expressed Stevenson's fascination
with the dual personality of man. In two other works, the short story
'Markheim' and the play Deacon Brodie there are characters who also lead double
lives. In 1859 Charles Darwin, in On the Origin of Species, had thrust into the
Victorian consciousness his unpalatable theory that mankind was, in fact,
descended from apes. Stevenson would have been well aware of the controversy
which grew from these ideas and sought a vehicle on which to launch his ideas
about 'the beast in man' and the attempt to hide, if not to subdue, animal
passions. In Stevenson's words Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde is about 'that damned old
business of the war in the members' and because of the strictures of religion
and conventional morality, men were forced to hide their secret desires in
their public lives and indulge them at night in the darker, seedier parts of
the city.
Repressed sexual
desires - Those who were especially prey to these animal passions were men
who believed that they could exist perfectly well 'without the aid of women',
men like the characters in Stevenson's novel - Enfield (where exactly had he
been to come home 'about three o'clock of a black winter morning'?), Utterson,
Lanyon and Jekyll. There are repeated references to locked doors and cabinets
and secret chambers reinforcing the idea that the beast must not only be hidden
but imprisoned. It is clear that Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde is, at least partly,
about sexual repression, although the subject of sex itself is never explicitly
mentioned in the text.
Contemporary
psychology - Interestingly, at the same time as Stevenson was writing his
novel, the French neurologist Charcot was using hypnosis as a means of
revealing hidden aspects of the human personality. One of his public displays
was witnessed by Sigmund Freud whose Interpretation of Dreams, to be published
in 1901, argued that dreams were an expression of repressed sexual desires.
Published in 1886 Krafft-Ebing's Psychopathia
Sexualis attempted to analyse the war between man's basic, beastlike
instincts and the need to conform to conventional moral standards and presented
a series of case studies of sexual perversion. Although Stevenson may not have
read this study, it does serve to illustrate some of the intellectual and
psychological concerns of the time. The fact that he presents part of his novel
as a casebook provides another link with contemporary thinking.
The Beast of
Whitechapel - It is interesting to note that the notorious 'Jack the
Ripper' crimes, in which five prostitutes were brutally murdered and mutilated
in Whitechapel in the East End of London, took place within two years of the
publication of Stevenson's novel and at the same time as a dramatised version
was running in the West End.
Art mirrors life -
At the time, these events and Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde became confused in the
public consciousness. People were not really sure which had come first and some
of those who did know accused Stevenson of putting ideas in the murderer's
mind. One journalist writing at the time concluded that, 'There seems to be a
tolerably realistic impersonation of Mr Hyde at large in Whitechapel'. What the
murders did reveal, however, was the land of world that Stevenson was well
aware of in the Old Town of his native Edinburgh, a world of poverty and
despair where the rich and powerful would prey on the weak and defenceless.
