Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde

Such surrogation can be distinguished from dissociation , a more dramatic type of doubling represented in Robert Louis Stevenson's The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr, Hyde (1886). Jekyll and Hyde are like a dual personality, a single entity dissociated into two. They have become what Otto Rank calls opposing selves, According to Rank, the double in primitive societies is conceived of as a shadow, representing both the living person and the dead. This shadow survives the self, insuring immortality and thus functioning as a kind of guardian angel. In modern civilizations, however, the shadow becomes an omen of death to the self-conscious person. Doubles become opposites and demons rather than guardian angels (Rank, 71-76). This is particularly true in inhibited or self-restrained modern societies like that of Victorian Britain.

In Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Hyde thus becomes Jekyll's demonic, monstrous self. Certainly Stevenson presents him as such from the outset. Hissing as he speaks, Hyde has "a kind of black sneering coolness . . . like Satan" (32). He also strikes those who witness him as being deformed -- "pale and dwarfish" (SC, 40) and simian like. He is both monster and shadow par excellence -- another self not only for Jekyll but for all the presumably upright Victorian bachelors of the story who perceive his deformities and for whom he becomes both devil and death knell. The Strange Cafe unfolds with the search by these men to uncover the secret of Hyde. As the narrator/lawyer, Utterson, says, "If he be Mr. Hyde . . . I shall be Mr. Seek" (SC, 38), and so will they all. Utterson begins his quest with a cursory search for his own demons. Fearing for Jekyll because the good doctor has so strangely altered his will in favor of Hyde, Utterson examines his own conscience, "and the lawyer, scared by the thought, brooded a while in his own past, groping in all the corners of memory, lest by chance some Jack-in-the-Box of an old iniquity should leap to...