Althought I had never read The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, I thought I had a basic understanding of the storyline about a man who through a series of events creates a split personality within himself, one good and one evil. Imagine my surprise when I actually read this book and I discovered I was very wrong about most of this story, and my understanding of what it was about was heavily influenced by the Jekyll and Hyde musical. There is no romantic love interest, the experiment that created Mr. Hyde was done intentionally by Dr. Jekyll and was not an accident, and most importantly, Dr. Jekyll was lowkey an asshole.
I’ll elaborate on my last revalation here. I always assumed that the experiement that created Mr. Hyde was an accident that occured in Dr. Jekyll’s lab, kind of how the Hulk was a mistake that came during David Banner’s experimenting. That is not the case. Per my understanding, Dr. Jekyll viewed himself as an all around moral individual whose conscious would not allow him to delve into his repressed desires. It is at the end of this short story in which a letter written Jekyll discloses the nature of his experiment and the events which followed.
In this letter, Jekyll confesses that he created Hyde as a way to divulge in vices his moral character would not let him experience. During his transformations, in which he drank a serum of his own creation to become Hyde, he committed attrocious crimes such as rape and assault without detection or regret, because Hyde acted on impulse and without concious. But after one too many transformations, Jekyll was horrified to discover that he was involuntarily turning into this alterego without the use of the serum, and he had no recollection of the events that had taken place as Hyde. The criminality escalates more and more until finally Hyde commits murder. The only way Jekyll sees an end to this madness is by taking his own life, as it will also end Hyde’s life.
There have been manyh interpretations of this novel, including it being an alegory for repressed homosexuality; an example of the Id, Ego and Super Ego; and addiction. Personally, I think this is an example of the displeasure a very successful man had with his own life, even though he literally had it all. Jekyll is a well respected doctor in London, a self made man who lives comfortably with a home full of servants and staff, and yet this life becomes mundane for him. He creates Hyde as a way to become part of the seedy underworld without connecting himself to it, as a way to bring new excitement into his life even at the detriment of others. I think many people would call this a midlife crisis, and I believe Stevenson may have written this while very ill and high on drugs, which explains the beats it takes in such few pages. I’m not sure if I fully recommend reading this, unless like me you are trying to distinguish this plot from the musical.