It's So Funny To Me When I See People Claiming That Ford Fans Treat Ford As If He Has Done Nothing Wrong

Dr Jekyll voice hey sorry for roping you into my horrors those were meant for my eyes and my eyes only

1995 Pre Broadway Tour: Philip Hoffman as Utterson, Robert Cuccioli as Edward Hyde

(click image for better quality)

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.

Hyde as a metaphysical anomaly. He shouldn’t exist. Hyde as an infohazard. You will never understand him or describe him. Hyde as a hole ripped into the fabric of reality, a bending of physics and biology. He carries outliers with him. Coins fall on their edge. Cats hiss. Milk curdles. Hyde as a supernatural entity in all but name, making you doubt what the true limits of science are. A fae of the modern era, a spirit of the laboratory, a spell conjured not by magic but reason. Jekyll as a willing vessel of a knowledge so troubling it’s corrosive, the poisonous influence of Hyde and the distortion he brings onto natural law seeping out of him and peeking out not with life of its own but a mockery of it. His fingers brush the Bible, and the paper withers.

This is something that only comes up briefly twice in the final statement, but it would be interesting to discuss what ideas everyone has about Jekyll's father and their relationship based on those lines.

The first mention of his father is when he has changed back into Jekyll after murdering Sir Danvers —

The pangs of transformation had not done tearing him, before Henry Jekyll, with streaming tears of gratitude and remorse, had fallen upon his knees and lifted his clasped hands to God. The veil of self-indulgence was rent from head to foot. I saw my life as a whole: I followed it up from the days of childhood, when I had walked with my father’s hand, and through the self-denying toils of my professional life, to arrive again and again, with the same sense of unreality, at the damned horrors of the evening.

The next reference is during his final days as Hyde engages in destructive behaviour, which Jekyll describes as if Hyde is a separate entity who hates and harms him —

His terror of the gallows drove him continually to commit temporary suicide, and return to his subordinate station of a part instead of a person; but he loathed the necessity, he loathed the despondency into which Jekyll was now fallen, and he resented the dislike with which he was himself regarded. Hence the ape-like tricks that he would play me, scrawling in my own hand blasphemies on the pages of my books, burning the letters and destroying the portrait of my father; and indeed, had it not been for his fear of death, he would long ago have ruined himself in order to involve me in the ruin.

There's a lot of room for interpretation, as it's very little information to work off, but my personal reading is that Jekyll had a complicated relationship with his father where he loved and adored him as a child, but his father may also have played a role in his repression and perfectionism - the childhood moment is evoked both as a starting point of life in the context of the horrors and alongside memories of self-denial in adulthood - that led to his choosing to turn into Hyde and everything that followed; so when Hyde destroys the portrait, it's both Jekyll's unrestrained self lashing out at his dead father and a form of self-harm borne out of self-hatred perceived as Hyde hating Jekyll for resenting him.

“Stevenson’s story is one which chronicles Jekyll’s self inflicted and protracted destruction of his body and mind in an attempt to rid his life of internal conflict.” Pg 235

The thing with Hyde's personhood is that from the moment it's revealed he's not "real", he as a character becomes more blurry. Is Hyde a person because at his core he's still Jekyll despite wearing a disguise, or is Hyde a person because he's trascended his original purpose of being Jekyll's disguise and has, ultimately, become Jekyll by virtue of occupying all his physical and mental space?

on a meta level I think the hyde-as-addiction reading of strange case is about the mistake in thinking of addiction as a matter of purely recreative vs purely medicinal use.

the potion jekyll uses to change his appearance -and with it his identity and the roles assigned to it- is designed as medicinal (a potential cure for cognitive incongruence), then used recreatively, then its use becomes medicinal as jekyll loses the balance of his psyche and therefore control over his body. hyde was never devised to be anything other than a clever chemical disguise… but by the end of jekyll’s narration he has become what he is, soon to be all he can ever be for the rest of his life, which will end soon (“thank god”, Jekyll says). and so as the mask becomes the real face, recreative use becomes medicinal.

But! was it ever recreative at all? doesn’t jekyll suffer due to his hypocrisy, the flaw he had to make the foundation of his personality in order to sustain his position in society? doesn’t he say he was ashamed to do things other men would openly do, doesn’t he imply the evil he’s capable of started as barely nothing and later escalated into murder as he loses sight of his original goal?

Didnt he want to cure incongruence, lift a weight from the soul via disassociation, and fail there, as the closest thing he gets to that is simply putting a mask on his psyche, so to speak?

Oh, and speaking of masks- doesn’t hyde have to put on a mask to leave the laboratory? doesn’t he have to pretend to still be jekyll -even when that part of him is functionally dead- in order to survive? isn’t one of the last things he does before dying setting a teapot on the fire? in pretending to be hyde, jekyll becomes hyde, but in pretending to be jekyll, hyde becomes jekyll- so, recreational use was never such, and mask becomes face, face becomes mask, but thing is. the mask or the face never existed at all. there was never a “become”, there’s only “is”, there’s only “appears to be”.

I don’t know to what point Stevenson wanted to say this, but I do know he struggled with cocaine addiction as he wrote the novella. but I find it interesting that the same way jekyll’s constantly shifting narration cements that there is no Jekyll or Hyde, only a bizarre Jekyll-Hyde continuum, it also cements that his metaphorical and literal drug use (of the potion; of evil; of the Hyde persona) can’t be solely described as recreational or medicinal. Such matters, like the human psyche, are too complex to be described in binary terms.

Utterson and Enfield: "Hey buddy, want to talk for a bit?"

Jekyll: "Oh, I'd love to. But the Horrors say no."

Utterson and Enfield: "What?"

Jekyll: "Yeah, bad case of the Horrors right now. Sorry :(" -barrel rolls away from the window-

"If I am the chief of sinners, I am the chief of sufferers also."

— Dr. Jekyll, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson