The sedulous ape: atavism, professionalism, and Stevenson's 'Jekyll and Hyde.' - Robert Louis Stevenson

Criticism, Spring, 1995 by Stephen D. Arata

By means of Mr. Hyde, Jekyll seeks of course to slough off these same burdens of respectability, reticence, decorum, self-censorship - of gentlemanliness - and "spring headlong into the sea of liberty" (86). In tracing the arc of Hyde's brief career, however, Stevenson shows how quickly he becomes simply one of the boys. Over the last half of the novel Stevenson links Hyde, through a series of verbal echoes and structural rhymes, to various bourgeois "virtues" and practices. Not only do we discover Hyde beginning to exercise remarkable self-control- that most middle-class of virtues and seemingly the furthest from his nature - but we hear him speaking confidently in Jekyll's tones to Lanyon concerning the benefits of science and the sanctity of "the seal of our profession" (80; my emphasis).(16)

The kind of structural rhyming I refer to is most noticeable during Hyde's death-scene, when Utterson and Poole, having violently burst in the door of the rooms above Jekyll's laboratory, are startled by what they find.

The besiegers, appalled by their own riot and the stillness that had succeeded, stood back a little and peered in. There lay the cabinet before their eyes in the quiet lamplight, a good fire glowing and chattering on the hearth, the kettle singing its strain, a drawer or two open, papers neatly set forth on the business table, and nearer the fire, the things laid out for tea; the quietest room, you would have said, and except for the glazed presses full of chemicals, the most commonplace that night in London. (69-70)

We are apt to share their bewilderment at first, since this is the last tableau we might expect Stevenson to offer us at this juncture in the story? Yet it has been carefully prepared for. The novel is full of similar domestic tableaux, invariably occupied by solitary gentlemen. When they are not walking or dining, it seems, these men sit at their hearths, usually alone. It is Utterson's "custom of a Sunday . . . to sit close by the fire, a volume of some dry divinity on his reading-desk" (35). When the lawyer visits Lanyon, he finds the doctor sitting alone over his wine after dinner (36). Later he finds Jekyll in nearly the same position (51). Utterson shares a friendly fireside bottle of wine with Mr. Guest, though their conversation leaves him singularly unhappy (54-55). It is one of Stevenson's triumphs that he transforms the hearth - that too-familiar image of cozy Victorian domesticity into a symbol of these men's isolation and repression. In turn, the most notable thing about the scene Utterson and Poole stumble upon is that it is empty of life. The lamplight soothes, the kettle sings, the chairs beckon - but no one is home. Recognizing this, we recognize too the stubtle irony of calling it "the most commonplace" sight to be seen in London. The outward forms remain in place, but the indwelling spirit has fled.

We next discover that the lifeless Hyde's "contorted and still twitching" body lay "right in the midst" of this scene (70). On the one hand, it is a fit setting for Hyde's last agony and suicide. The terrors suffered by Hyde during his final days arise in part from his surroundings: the very symbols of bourgeois respectability that he exists to repudiate do him in. On the other hand, he seems to feel bi-zarrely at home in these surroundings. If for instance we ask who set the table for tea on this final night, the answer has to be Hyde and not Jekyll, since Utterson and Poole, prior to breaking in the door, agree that they have heard only Hyde's voice and Hyde's "patient" footsteps from within the room that evening (69). (Poole insists that his master "was made away with eight days ago" [65].) Beside the tea things is "a copy of a pious work for which Jekyll had . . . expressed a great esteem, annotated, in his own hand, with startling blasphemies" (71). Generations of readers have assumed that Hyde is responsible for those annotations, but that is not what the sentence says.(18) These are not fussy or pedantic quibbles, but rather indicate how carefully Stevenson has blurred the boundary between the two identities. It is Jekyll who is now blasphemous and who violently berates the man at Maw's (66), Hyde who sets a quiet tea table and cries to heaven for mercy.(19) On adjacent tables Utterson and Poole discover two cups, one containing the white salt used in Jekyll's potion, the other containing the white sugar used in Hyde's tea (71). Both are magic elixirs: the first transforms a gentleman into a savage while the second performs the reverse operation. Having found his place by the hearth, Mr. Hyde also knows what posture to assume: "Thenceforward, he sat all day over the fire in the private room, gnawing his nails; there he dined, sitting alone with his fears" (94). If this sounds more like Utterson or Lanyon than the Hyde we first met, it is meant to. Bitter, lonely, frightened, nervous, chewing his nails (we recall that Utterson bites his finger when agitated [65]), and contemplating violence; Edward Hyde is now a gentleman.