Short Questions
1. How does Utterson perceive the relationship between Jekyll and Hyde for
most of the novel? Is his interpretation understandable? What are the limits
of his knowledge?
Ans: Utterson spends much of the novel gathering evidence, in an informal
fashion, about the Jekyll-Hyde relationship. All the evidence he collects points to
the idea that Hyde is blackmailing Jekyll, which would explain why Jekyll turns
pale whenever Hyde is mentioned. It would also explain why Hyde uses a
personal check from Jekyll to pay off the parents of the girl he tramples and why
Jekyll seems to be protecting Hyde after the Carew murder. Most important, it
would explain why Jekyll has made a will that leaves his money to Hyde in the
event of his death or “disappearance.” Indeed, the will’s reference to
disappearance leads Utterson to assume that Hyde plans to murder the Jekyll;
there seems little else that could cause a respectable doctor simply to vanish. All
of Utterson’s deductions fit the facts at hand. They construe the Hyde-Jekyll
connection as nothing more than the grip of a common criminal on his victim.
They serve to make sense of a baffling situation, and they are reasonable.
But, of course, the reasonable nature of Utterson’s deductions proves precisely
their downfall. Utterson remains so adamantly rational and sensible that he never
once admits the possibility of a supernatural explanation. He is the embodiment
of the Victorian mind, which is either unable or unwilling to acknowledge the
existence of the perverse or transgressive.
2. Paying particular attention to Stevenson’s descriptions of the city at night,
discuss how Stevenson uses descriptive passages to evoke a mood of dread.
Ans: At various junctures in Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Stevenson uses vivid
descriptions to evoke a sense of the uncanny and the supernatural, and of looming
disaster. He first employs this technique in the opening scene, when Enfield
relates his story of witnessing Hyde trample a little girl—a night when the streets
were so empty that he began “to long for the sight of a policeman.”
This notion of the city as a fearful landscape recurs throughout the novel. After
hearing the tale of Mr. Hyde, Utterson suffers from dreams in which Hyde stalks
through “labyrinths of lamp-lighted city,” crushing children and whispering evil
into Jekyll’s ears. In Utterson’s vision, London becomes a nightmare city, a place
of terror where Hyde can perpetrate his crimes unchecked. The nightmare city
reappears in Utterson’s later, waking description of London. Leading the police
to Hyde’s apartment through a foggy pre-dawn, Utterson watches the mist swirl
and transform the neighborhood into “a district of some city in a nightmare,”
bringing a “touch” of “terror” even to the stolid policemen.
By the novel’s final scene, these cityscapes connote not only terror but also
foreboding of even more horrifying dangers. When Poole fetches Utterson to
Jekyll’s house, the wildness of the night and the empty streets fill the lawyer with
“a crushing anticipation of calamity.” In all these descriptions, Stevenson creates
a perceptual dread that reinforces the conceptual horror of his subject matter.
3. Discuss the narrative approach in the novel. What characterizes the way that events
are reported? How does this method of narrative contribute to the thematic
development of the novel?
Ans: Much of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde is written in a brisk, businesslike, and
factual way. Dry and forthright, the text often resembles a police report more than
a novel. This colorlessness derives in part from the personality of Mr. Utterson,
through whose eyes most of the story is told. Proper and upright, Utterson
approaches the events with a desire to preserve any possible trace of orderliness
or rationality in them. But the narrative’s dry manner also seems to arise from the
text itself. The original title of the novel, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr.
Hyde, as well as chapter headings—including “Incident of the Letter” and
“Incident at the Window”—seem to reveal an attitude of scientific detachment
within the very structure of the novel. When the text presents the letters of Lanyon
and Jekyll almost as if they were pieces of evidence, the story itself seems to
become something of a scientific proof.
The attitude of formality and propriety in the narrative contrasts sharply with its
mystical and uncanny content. With its prim demeanor, the text could be seen as
attempting to repress or deny the subject matter that lurks inside it. Stevenson
implies that a similar dynamic is at work in the Victorian Britain that he inhabits
and portrays. The phenomenon plays itself out on the individual scale as well, of
course—the existence of Hyde in the novel testifies to the existence of an evil or
primitive aspect within each one of us, just barely hidden beneath a polite,
unruffled exterior.