Books Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde

Read online Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.pdf PDF, EPUB, MOBI, TXT, DOC Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde I had to read Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde a few times before I could expel the legion of Dr. Jekylls and Mr. Hydes that infested my imagination. Countless pop culture references have robbed the story of the suspense and surprise that early readers must have enjoyed. But suspense and surprise are cheap pleasures compared to the richness that lies in the text. Stevenson has written a perfect nightmare. Everything about the story is dream-like. It begins with Utterson crossing into liminal space while taking a Sunday afternoon stroll with his cousin Enfield. One moment they are passing bright, clean, inviting shop fronts. The next, they come upon a dark and squalid building. Utterson doesn’t know it yet, but he has just entered the Twilight Zone. From this point on, the atmosphere is relentlessly and preternaturally gloomy. There’s a perpetual fog. The labyrinthine streets are sinister in the gaslight. This is not just nineteenth century London. This is a “city in a nightmare” (71). The night after a brutal murder, Utterson escorts the police to Hyde’s house. It is nine o’clock in the morning, but it might as well be nighttime. Even when the darkness lifts, it is brief. And these glimpses of light only serve to better highlight the darkness. The story of the Carew murder evokes more horror because it follows an illusory return to light and ordinary life.Like a dream, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde is many-layered. There are dreams within the dream. Narratives within the narrative. Communication is oblique. Lanyon will not speak to Utterson about Jekyll. Jekyll will not reveal his reasons for avoiding Utterson. When Lanyon and Jekyll finally tell their stories, it is from the grave.Utterson both keeps secrets and has secrets kept from him. The secrecy and silence create a mental claustrophobia. The anxiety of not knowing what is going on. The anxiety of knowing too much. Of being dangerously close to the arcane machinery that lurks behind the façade of the workaday and ordinary. His isolation is palpable.Also like a dream, no time seems to pass between the scenes. It is simply a “fortnight later” (65). “Nearly a year later” (68). Scenes recur. A second Sunday stroll leads Utterson and Enfield to Jekyll’s window just as their stroll had previously led them to Hyde’s door. Windows and doors are liminal places. Portals into other worlds. Private worlds. Forbidden worlds. Utterson and Enfield see Jekyll at his window at the moment he begins his involuntary transformation into Hyde. A maid looks through her window and sees Hyde murder Carew. Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde begins with Hyde’s door and ends with Jekyll’s door. The pièce de résistance of this nightmare is the nebulous yet persistent impression that something isn’t quite right about Hyde. He inspires repugnance in everyone who sees him. Enfield says it best: “he gives a strong feeling of deformity, although I couldn’t specify the point” (53). Though reason cannot specify the point, something deeper and more instinctual within us recoils in disgust and horror. When I first read Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, I read it as a psychological and moral story. Jekyll’s story. But later it was the dream-like quality of the book that took hold of my imagination. Then I read it as a nightmare. And it is Utterson’s nightmare, not Jekyll’s. Everything in a dream is so much more than it seems. And that is true of Stevenson’s nightmare as well by Robert Louis Stevenson