'Jekyll and Hyde' is a great novel, one of the all time greats. If you've not read it you'll've heard of it. Everybody knows the story of Doctor Henry Jekyll....... don't they? Or do people just think they do? Commercialisation after commercialisation, retelling after retelling and reference after reference means that the actual story has been very much lost.
Jekyll and Hyde are not good and evil, god and the devil, your good side and your dark side. The story is something much more human than that.
Henry Jekyll is an upstanding member of the community, he is a good man that does good deeds. Respectable and polite, and must appear at all times to be so. So he takes a potion, and a madman appears, a monster takes over his consciousness and kills a man, right? No. Jekyll creates a potion that has the express intent of changing his physical appearance, and only his physical appearance. He still has the mind of Henry Jekyll, he is the same man in a different body. So why? What is Hyde?
Hyde is a disguise, the ultimate and perfect disguise. Hyde lets Henry be who he wants to be, but who society and social standing will not allow him to be. Hyde is rude and impertinent. He cares little, if anything, for social convention. When he tramples the small girl in the opening of the book, what offends the by passers is not the screaming child and the horror of his actions, but the fact that he makes no pretence of being sorry or offended. He doesn't care what people think of him!
The reason Jekyll stops being Hyde is because Hyde he kills a man and Jekyll does not wish to be imprisoned in his body (irony). Reading it, it is not hard to consider whether Jekyll would have struck out. Probably not killed him, he is stronger in Hyde's body, we know this, but you can't argue that it's Jekyll's temper on display. We know he's capable of being calm and thinking with the same genius he was using at the start of the book because when he is incapable of swapping bodies back, he works in his lab with the same fervour and intellect, just in the body of Hyde.
Hyde's body let's Jekyll be who he truly wants to be, where nothing is at stake, nothing can be lost. He can be as insulting and as rude as he pleases without fear of anyone besmirching his reputation. That's where retellings get it wrong, they tell the story of Hyde not Jekyll, of the monster, of the madman. Because we love that character. So why does everyone heart a Hyde? Because these are the characters that we fall in love with. Nobody wants to watch/listen to/read about somebody who follows social conventions at all times because they're boring. They're us. People who follow the rules and live ordinary live. Just ordinary. But somebody who breaks away from that. Who becomes Hyde, now they are well worth telly time.
Think of Banksy as the great example we have of Hyde. Whoever he is, by day he's just a bloke. Follows the rules and live his life. But then he changes, he changes into a deviant who is loved and loathed in equal measure, and as an audience, we love that! Hamlet no longer cares for his standing at the court, he wears his heart on his sleeve and we become enraptured by his story, he breaks the norms without care for convention. He's Hyde. A better Shakespeare example being Edmund ('King Lear') who when in public plays the perfect, clean son, with the perfect reputation, alone he becomes himself, an evil and manipulating man. Hyde! Comedians are loved because they tell the stories we want to hear about the conventions we're obligated to follow being broken. Everybody wants to tell the patronising bank manager to piss off, comedians tell the anecdote where that happens. Sitcoms put show us people breaking the conventions and the humour derives from the situation they are put in. Hydes one and all.
Every actor becomes Hyde the second they step onstage. The moment they become a character they can do anything they like without the fear of it damaging how people see them, what you do in character is not you, you are someone else. You can do anything without fear of it damaging your reputation as a human being. It's safe onstage, it's a place to be Hyde.
Everybody loves Hyde, because of who he is and who we want to be. What he represents is not evil, it's not bad. Stevenson puts forward a dark example, yes. It drives the narrative forward, it forces the audience to ask questions and it makes for a good book. But don't let people tell you that Jekyll and Hyde are good and evil, go and read the book. Think it through for yourself, see what you find instead of what you've been told to look for. Perhaps you'll agree with them, perhaps you'll agree with me; or perhaps you'll find something else, something beautiful and interesting that no one else has spotted. If you do, be sure to go against the social convention and tell the world about it.
