Studies in Scottish Literature Volume 23 | Issue 1 Article 8 1988 "Closer than an Eye": The nI terconnection of Stevenson's Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde Colin Manlove Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarcommons.sc.edu/ssl Part of the English Language and Literature Commons Recommended Citation Manlove, Colin (1988) ""Closer than an Eye": The nI terconnection of Stevenson's Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde," Studies in Scottish Literature: Vol. 23: Iss. 1. Available at: https://scholarcommons.sc.edu/ssl/vol23/iss1/8 This Article is brought to you by the Scottish Literature Collections at Scholar Commons. It has been accepted for inclusion in Studies in Scottish Literature by an authorized editor of Scholar Commons. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Colin Manlove "Closer than an Eye": The Interconnection of Stevenson's Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde One could say of many works that the more one looked at them the more complex they became, but the remark would have peculiar relevance with R.L. Stevenson's Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. The basic movement of the narrative is itself towards increasing complexity. At first it seems that Hyde has the pull of a blackmailer on Jekyll, in order to explain his ability to draw a cheque against Jekyll's name to buy off the family of a girl he injures; yet as the narrative proceeds we are to find that the relation of the two is much closer and more problematic than could ever have been imagined. Here we can start with another aspect of the narrative: the way seemingly unrelated or separate people and incidents are brought together. Throughout the story Jekyll and Hyde are shown to be increasingly involved with one another to the point where they merge: first we have the connection via the cheque, then the fact that the worthy Jekyll has made a will in favour of the repulsive Hyde; then Jekyll's asking the lawyer Utterson to look after Hyde's interests should he, Jekyll, disappear; then Hyde being given a key and free access to Jekyll's house; then the degeneration in Jekyll's appearance and health, the recognition of a similarity between the handwriting of Hyde and of Jekyll, and so on. This is strikingly seen also in the way that the 'blind' house identified early on as the resort of Hyde, is not till 88 Colin Manlove later revealed to be closely linked to the house of Jekyll, of which it in fact forms the laboratory (pp. 4-8, 20-2, 26- 8):1 previously we had no reason to believe other than that Jekyll's house was elsewhere in London; and one character specifies that Jekyll does not live at this blind house, but 'in some square or other' (P. 10). The narrative itself as outlined in the chapter titles on the contents page might be mistaken for a collection of separate short stories rather than a sequence of events: 'Story of the Door'; 'Search for Mr. Hyde'; 'Dr. Jekyll Was Quite at Ease'; 'The Carew Murder Case'; 'Incident of the Letter'; 'Remarkable Incident of Dr. Lanyon'; 'Incident at the Window'; 'The Last Night'; 'Henry Jekyll's Full Statement of the Case'. Indeed the last title reads like a lawyer's summing up, and the whole could be seen as a legal presentation of a case, with apparently separate pieces of evidence brought together to argue a position which only becomes fully evident at the last: we recall that much of the story is told through the lawyer Utterson, and that his concern for most of the time is with investigation into particular evil deeds of Hyde's and their possible relation to Jekyll. Yet it is not as static as that sounds, for all the evidence is not available to Utterson at the start, but comes piecemeal: and he himself is not directed to one particular objective from the outset, but moves from casual interest to vital concern as the narrative proceeds; nor does he ever unearth the full truth for himself, but is told it in Jekyll's last letter. Here again the seemingly random or disconnected come together to make a coherent sequence: the story of the door, accidentally told, links with Hyde and Hyde with Jekyll. There are two sides to the narrative: the seen and the unseen. On the one hand there are the investigations of Utterson; and on the other is the story of Jekyll's relations with Hyde. The two sides compare almost as conscious and unconscious. In a sense they never meet: Jekyll develops on his own, and his development and no other person determines his fate, while the other characters try by indirections to find directions out and operate more or less in isolation from Jekyll. The narrative seen through Utterson, Enfield, Lanyon and the objective narrator himself is effectively the public world, of society and London itself, where that seen through Jekyll is essentially private. Little is said within Jekyll's narrative of the actual deeds of Hyde when abroad in London, for these are recounted by the public figures: what is at issue is the effect of these deeds on Jekyll. The irony of Jekyll's situation is that his normal public self Interconnections in Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde 89 is seen as shut away -- as the chapter 'Incident at the Window' conveys -- while for all his name, and fundamentally anti-social self, Hyde inhabits the streets and acts and speaks. The two narratives are related in another way. The narrowing investigations of Utterson and others can be seen as the outside world working in; they end by symbolically breaking down the door to the inner sanctum of Jekyll's house: but in the Jekyll-Hyde narrative the case is rather one of the inside working out, of Hyde, whom Jekyll constantly images as something violent locked with him, breaking out to the point where he engulfs Jekyll. The story thus has a network of oppositions informing and playing through it, which suggests a far tighter bonding between the various aspects of the tale than might at first sight appear. This is illustrated in the description by Utterson's friend Enfield of the bustling London by-street with its one strange building: The street was small and what is called quiet, but it drove a thriving trade on the week-days. The inhabitants were all doing well, it seemed, and all emulously hoping to do better still, and laying out the surplus of their gains in coquetry; so that the shop fronts stood along that thoroughfare with an air of invitation, like rows of smiling saleswomen. Even on Sunday, when it veiled its more florid charms and lay comparatively empty of passage, the street shone out in contrast to its dingy neighbourhood, like a fire in a forest; and with its freshly painted shutters, well­ polished brasses, and general cleanliness and gaiety of note, instantly caught and pleased the eye of the passenger. Two doors from one corner, on the left hand going east, the line was broken by the entry of a court; and just at that point, a certain sinister block of building thrust forward its gable on the street. It was two storeys high; showed no window, nothing but a door on the lower storey and a blind forehead of discoloured wall on the upper; and bore in every feature, the marks of prolonged and sordid negligence. The door, which was equipped with neither bell nor knocker, was blistered and distained. Tramps slouched into the recess and struck matches on the panels; children kept shop upon the steps; the schoolboy had tried his knife on the mouldings; and for close on a 90 Colin Manlove generation, no one had appeared to drive away these random visitors or to repair their ravages. (pp. 3-5) The streets of shops looks outward to a public; it is concerned with putting on a fine front and drawing people in. The building that juts forward has only an unopened door, no windows, and neither bell nor knocker on the door: its preoccupation is with exclusion, its ruinous appearance an indication that it would invite no one. Yet it is part of the street, even if it is not integrated with it but thrusts its way forward. Both the street and the house are personified: the street drives a thriving trade, the shop fronts invite 'like rows of smiling saleswomen' and veil their more florid charms on Sundays; while the 'sinister block of building' (which 'sinister' may be the left hand to the street's right, and certainly is 'on the left hand going east'), 'thrust[s] forth its gable on the street', has 'a blind forehead of discoloured wall' and bears 'the marks of negligence in every feature'. It is not too much of a leap to see the shops as suggestive of the respectable, ambitious, civil area of mind -- in short, all that Jekyll is to seem to be, if on a higher class level -- and this bare block of building (with its 'blind forehead') in its midst as the intrusive and unfathomable unconscious area of that same mind. Enfield goes on to say of this building that whether anyone lives there is obscure, '''for the buildings are so packed together about that court, that it's hard to say where one ends and another begins'" (p. 11 ). The street and the building together seem almost to form a composite whole, the one, by the extremity of its cheer and vitality, seeming almost to beget the other -- variety spawning uniformity, care neglect, light darkness.