"This Last Re-read Of Jekyll & Hyde Really Entrenched Me In My Interpretation, That Jekyll And Hyde Are

im too lazy to find the image but i feel like that tiktok screenshot of someone pouring a shot and saying "i wasn't gonna drink tonight but man... im missing ___ like a mf" and i really feel like this about stanford pines i miss him

do people care about stanford like i do i miss him it is 3 am and i am not immune to sitting up in my bed right now and analyzing his character once again because i love his writing that much he makes me sick

I don't even hate Fiddlestan as a ship itself, but my opinion of it is definitely soured by the way fans of the ship treat Ford. Like, what the hell do you mean by "Stan would treat Fiddleford better," like no the fuck he would not??

big fan of liars. big fan of characters whose entire existence is a facade. love it when everything's stripped away from them and the lie is the only thing left of their identity. love it when the lines between an act and the truth are blurring. are they even them without the lie? the lie doesn't become the truth per se, but it's now such an intricate part of them it might as well be.

low lays the devil in me

*if you tag as ship it's an insta-block. not what this is. thanks

We as a society don’t talk about the “If I am a chief of sinners, I am the chief of sufferers” as often as we should

Still thinking about the night Utterson broke down the door/read the letters. To me it was all within the same 24 hours.

I’ve seen the idea here and there that Utterson read the letters there in Jekyll’s cabinet and then could look at Hyde’s body with realization and grief. However, I think it much more likely that he didn’t read Jekyll’s statement until at least a couple hours later, when he was at home alone. This would’ve been after searching for Jekyll or signs of where his body could be, notifying the police, telling them his statement (which includes however long they kept him hanging around before and after that), and going home and possibly processing this weird and distressing night for a bit.

While I definitely feel the appeal of wanting Utterson to have his closure to Jekyll by observing Hyde’s body with the knowledge, it’s so much more sad to think that he’s not going to get that chance. If there was a funeral for Jekyll (there probably was), it was with his body absent, because it was never found (unless there wasn’t a service because he would’ve been presumed missing).

By the time he’d read both letters, Hyde’s (Jekyll’s) body would’ve been in custody, waiting for autopsy, if not already begun. So then … what’s Utterson supposed to do? Tell people that’s actually Jekyll’s body? His friend since his youth whom he held dear to his heart and who deserves a proper burial and service? … No. He can’t do that. He’d be taken for having gone mad. Unless he showed the letters as proof.

But then, if they are believed, Jekyll’s reputation would be completely ruined. You know what people are like when someone they like/respect turns out to be a horrible person. And in a society when everyone puts on the facade in public … it would also haunt Utterson more out loud rather than just in his thoughts, and that’s horrible enough without making his everyday life worse.

No. There’s no saving Jekyll’s body. He died as Hyde and he can’t be recovered. His body will be subjected to whatever treatment the bodies of criminals were subjected to. And Utterson will likely keep quiet.

If there was a funeral service for Jekyll and Utterson went, he’d be surrounded by people who would know so little of the truth about the man they would be singing the praises of. And Utterson would have to be quiet and bear through it.

The main person he would’ve talked to about all this is already dead. From learning the truth firsthand. Anyone else he talks to would compromise Jekyll’s memory. What would finding out the truth do to Poole? Could Enfield keep his mouth shut? … Dare Utterson risk finding out?

I think he’d just keep it secret, keep it safe. If he did carry on through life, he’d be doing it with a new layer to the facade he already wore daily. He’d have to carry on, hear the platitudes—“Terribly sorry for your loss.” “Fine man, that Dr. Jekyll.” “London is all the poorer now.” “Good man, good man.” “How’ve you been holding up?”—and try to roll with it. Holding all that knowledge and emotion behind the facade. Confiding in no one.

Like his friend.

this is just my own interpretation of this scene, idk if i got it right a a a

Rouben Mamoulian: Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1931)

The feeling when you have just found out your theory of multiple personality is true, proven your scientific research by taking a drug that releases the evil side in yourself, felt great pride and joy in your work, laughed at your skeptics, and then your nosy servant interrupts and asks about strange noises.

Have you ever realized that Utterson treats Jekyll like a damsel in distress?

Like it's always like "I have to save Jekyll from the arms of this evil man". And like he's only interested in Hyde because he thinks that Jekyll is in danger. And just for record he even has a conversation with Jekyll from a window. Kind of, in Utterson's view Jekyll is a victorian 50-year-old damsel in distress

In the original novella, we only "see" three characters die. One is Hastie Lanyon, whose death isn't gruesome and startling like Carew's, but that meets an arguably violent end.

While Carew draws the ire of Hyde through simply being at the wrong place at the wrong time, being cordial to the wrong person, being, Lanyon rather doesn't. Instead, it is his act of loyalty towards Jekyll, the man he hasn't talked to in a decade and calls him a pedant when he isn't listening, what kills him. Once again good deeds are punished with death. The difference, though, doesn't just reside in the fact that Hyde never once needs to put a finger on Lanyon to kill him, but the fact that it is a deeply personal loss- on both sides.

Jekyll-as-Hyde correctly assesses that Lanyon will help a friend in need. He himself says that Lanyon would gladly sacrifice his right arm to save him in body and mind, and with those words he convinces him to come to the rescue via bringing Hyde the serum's ingredients from the cabinet, now forbidden to him. And Lanyon is a good man. He's sensible enough to bring a gun with himself, he's kind enough to help Jekyll even though he believes he's finally lost it -and he's not entirely wrong-, and he's open-minded enough to not only chalk up his supernatural hatred of Hyde to a silly personal bias rather than dismiss him as "deformed", but to also fight against it and be nice to him.

No, Lanyon doesn't meet his violent end through physical violence. All he does is fall into Hyde's trap and give in to curiosity. And that's how, in his narration, Chapter 9, we learn what really killed him in Chapter 6, weeks after the events transpired. His mysterious "disease", the thing eating up at him, is the revelation. One of his closest friends -despite it all- has placed his trust upon him, and his reward is to see him at his pettiest, his cruelest, his worst. To learn that his friend was a monster, all along. No. That he turned into one, on his own volition. The choice was his. And now that he's realized it was a dark path to walk, he can't un-walk it. He can't stop, even if he wanted to, cursing himself with a monstrousness that fights back at any attempt at a fix and yet needs to be fixed to save its skin.

There is no "normal" to recover. Jekyll had always carried with him the elements of his destruction- his arrogance and his bile. The revelation that Hyde never really existed destroys Lanyon's static and material worldview, smashing the orderly world he lives in to bits. The revelation that Hyde was created for a specific purpose, and what it was, destroys Lanyon's view of Jekyll as an eccentric but harmless man, a good person with misguided opinions and fanciful theories.

Does Jekyll ever learn of Lanyon's death? Does Utterson ever bring it up behind the scenes, out of the third-person narrator's scope? Will he ever know that his last crime was killing the man that saved his life?

Well... Ironically, Lanyon didn't really save Jekyll's life. He only extended it for a couple of months, prevented Hyde from being arrested and tried and executed for God knows how many crimes of indeterminate nature. After all, if his criminal record killed him of shock, or at least poured salt into the wound, it had to be gruesome. Thanks to Lanyon's intervention Hyde can return to the house as Jekyll and attempt at resuming a normal life, without success. Soon enough he transforms again, and runs out of salts, and is found dead on the floor with the vial he just emptied of cyanide still in his cold hand.

How do we define violence in a world in which body and mind are one? In the world of Jekyll and Hyde, thoughts and ideas are physical, real, tangible. Hyde is, ultimately, a concept, the sketch of a person disguising a fractured mind disguising a sad mad genius that desires to not desire. We can consider Lanyon one of Hyde's victims, but can we call Lanyon's death violent? I would say so. Like Carew, all he ever did, at least within the constraints of the story -a snapshot of a disjointed Gothic world-, was being kind to someone who didn't deserve it.

At the beginning of this post, I said there were three on-page deaths, three deaths we got to "see" in Stevenson's novella. The third death would be Jekyll's. And it is violent, as well- first his original identity dies, unable to be present, made physical, made real, by want of not being able to manifest itself, or rather, by want of not being able to not manifest Hyde's. In a sense, he's run out of opportunities to be "good". If Jekyll can no longer be Jekyll-as-Jekyll, and only has Jekyll-as-Hyde left, Jekyll no longer exists. As he puts it, he's forced to resume Hyde's personality for the last time- to put on a costume that has turned into himself. Hyde never existed as a person, and in the last eight days of his life he has to be, because Hyde is all he's got left of a person.

It's impossible to not think of a suicide, even a suicide by poison, as violent. But Jekyll's death is violent not just because he eventually goes through with his "promise" of sorts that he'll have to die to rid the world of Hyde (and so we have Hyde killing himself if only to not end up in the gallows, fullfilling his ultimate desire, because that's what he, as a concept, was designed to do). It is also violent because by the time he physically dies, he's long gone. He's committed enough violence against himself already, destroying his belongings and thinking of himself as either his oppressive father or his idiot son, depending on what body he's been thrown into at the time.

The horror of Jekyll and Hyde is the horror of the perversion of the intimate, on all levels. Your best friend is not who he claimed to be. Your body as an extension of yourself isn't to be trusted. Helping others gets you killed. Edward Hyde pollutes everything he touches- breaks into a homicidal rage at someone being polite at him, accidentally curses his savior with the decay of the soul, self harms in the most twisted way possible and dies two times, brings the worst in all those that look at him, brings terror into your house, ruins the night, and breaks the peace.

It is only logical that something -someone?- that ruins everything to its very core comes from within, and is ultimately the cause for three very twisted, and violent, forms of death.