How Does Stevenson Present Evil in Jekyll and Hyde

Prediction for 2023

The Power of Dictation

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This leads me to a long essay, but if forces me to articulate my ideas. As a way to revise, it is brilliant training in essay writing, and much, much quicker than writing.

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The Essay

Stevenson focuses on Hyde's evil in order to expose the hypocrisy of middle-class men and undermine their Christian beliefs, while at the same time giving his Christian audience a tale with Christian morals they can believe in. However, this is a dual narrative with a dual purpose, which will also undermine Christian beliefs because Stevenson was an atheist.

We are first introduced to Hyde by Jekyll as “pure evil”. This, however, satisfies the Christian audience who are looking for a morality tale. However, Jekyll's next description of him is that when he was Hyde, he had a “livelier image of the spirit”. This implies that Hyde was possibly a superior experience to live in than Jekyll. Jekyll creates Hyde as a “bravo” in order to enjoy the pleasures of life. Stevenson could be suggesting that if we gave in to our natural human pleasures, our lives would be better. The Christian message is that we must repress our desires because they are inherently evil. Stevenson might disagree.

We can explore this further when Jekyll describes being Hyde as “springing headlong into the sea of liberty”. This metaphor suggests that Jekyll feels liberated, released, perhaps his true self. If we consider “man's dual nature", perhaps Stevenson is suggesting that our true selves are pleasure-seekers, and seeking pleasure is not in itself “sinful”. It is only society's rules that force us to view them as evil, and those views in Victorian society are shaped by Christian belief, which we know Stevenson opposed.

The next character to describe Hyde says he was like some “damned juggernaut”. This quote reveals the Christian prejudice of the time. Hyde is “damned” just on his appearance; he's being judged and sent to hell. He is described as a “juggernaut” because this was the British way of changing the pronunciation of Jagannath, the Hindu god. This description reveals Victorian prejudice against other cultures and religions, which is part of the dual narrative that Stevenson is writing. He is showing that the Christian tradition is only one possible moral construct for societies to follow. Other societies, much greater in numbers than our own, might choose different religions and belief systems. The prejudice towards Hinduism here is the same prejudice that the characters will have towards Hyde, reflected in the word "damned."

In fact, we find out that when Hyde trampled on this young girl, she was not “much the worse”. In other words, all he had done was bump into her and carry on; she was not harmed, and there was no damage done. Therefore, seeing Hyde as “truly evil” is a hyperbolic reaction. Yes, he is unpleasant and hasn't stopped for this girl, but this is not “evil”. When Utterson first sees Hyde, he's performed no evil act, yet he describes Hyde as having "Satan's signature upon his face," a phrase that is hyperbolic and prejudiced. It uses the language of Christianity to show how evil Hyde is. This satisfies a Christian reader who knows they're in for a morality tale and expects this satanic figure to be punished by the end of the novel. However, Stevenson's more subtle point is that there is nothing inherently evil and satanic about this character; it's only society's prejudice that makes it so. In fact, Enfield and the doctor immediately want to kill Hyde, and Stevenson shows us this because he wants to show that it is society that is evil for repressing natural human desires.

Hyde, however, does commit a very “evil” act in killing Sir Danvers Carew. Jekyll describes this as "my devil came out roaring". Again, using Christian symbolism of the “devil” suggests that this is a satanic figure who must be stopped, who must be punished by the end of the novel.

However, Jekyll is an unreliable narrator. He has a vested interest in showing Hyde as the most evil character, but there is an alternative possibility. The “ape-like fury” that Hyde uses in killing Sir Danvers Carew suggests that Hyde is evil because the theory of evolution is evil. This plays with the real context of the time where Christians were worried that evolution threatened their religion because the Bible states that the world was created in seven days, including every animal in it. The theory of evolution suggests the opposite happened. Evolution took millions of years, and no being was created as it is now; it has evolved from earlier forms. This challenge to Christian belief upset many in society because their certainties were no longer trustworthy.

Of course, Stevenson is very happy with these scientific discoveries because he is an atheist. However, he can't rub this atheism metaphorically in the face of his readers because he knows they are Christian, and so he still has to offer them Christian redemption in the novel, while at the same time hinting that this is a fantasy.

What we are never told is why Hyde kills Sir Danvers Carew. This is a deliberate ambiguity. Some readers decide that it is because Stevenson is writing about homosexuality in 1885. This was the year in which homosexuality was outlawed. This perhaps explains why all the men in this novel are single and apparently attracted to each other. Whether or not we accept that the hidden secret of Hyde is homosexuality, we certainly don't know why he killed Carew. This introduces another possibility. Let's go back to why Hyde was created. He was created as a “bravo” for Jekyll. This means he existed “for his pleasures”, “his” being Jekyll's. Hyde was only created so that Jekyll can enjoy what Hyde enjoys without being exposed because he's doing it in the form of Hyde.

This invites us to suppose that he therefore wanted to enjoy the killing of Sir Danvers Carew. The real evil is the civilized man. It is Jekyll, not Hyde. Hyde is acting on an instruction, but Jekyll keeps that from us or rather keeps it from Utterson in his confession at the end. We can infer it, however, from his description of how Jekyll reacted to the murder. Once Jekyll has escaped back into his own form due to using the potion again, he describes himself as "the animal within me licking the chops of memory." This sensual and animalistic imagery is not describing Hyde. It is describing Jekyll, to show that he is the “true evil” in the novel. He is the one enjoying reliving the memory of having killed Carew. He is licking his own lips at the idea that he has extinguished this man's life in such a violent “ape-like” manner. This is not Hyde.

So now we can clearly see the dual purpose of the narrative. Stevenson is suggesting that we are actually all inherently evil, but he's still not a Christian. He's saying this “devil came out roaring” not because we are all evil, but because Hyde has been repressed. If we return to the theme of homosexuality, Stevenson might be suggesting that if we repress natural desires, we automatically make people into hypocrites, we automatically make them less moral. However, if we did not repress those desires, metaphorically speaking, our inner “devils [would not] come out roaring” because they would not be treated as “devils”. We would simply be acting on our own pleasures and could make better moral choices without damaging others.

Jekyll's rage would appear to be the result of having to repress his own desires in the form of Hyde. The next thing we need to consider is whether all middle-class men are being described as evil, and Stevenson achieves this by placing Jekyll's house in Leicester Square, adjacent to “Soho.” Soho was code for an area of debauchery and sin in Victorian times. However, this is where he places Hyde. To the Christian audience, this obviously signifies Hyde's “evil” and “sinful” nature.

The video of the whole of this essay is here.

The rest of the essay is transcribed below.