"The Prisonhouse of My Disposition": A Study of the Psychology of Addiction in 'Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.' (1994)

Robert Louis Stevenson's gothic novel, Dr. Jekyll and Hyde, often has been classified as a literary study in divided or personality. Indeed, given Jekyll's own profession that his life is one best defined by commit[ment] to a profound duplicity (p. 122),(1) such subsequent readings of the character of Dr. Jekyll ought not much surprise us. The reduction of Jekyll's character to one of simple duality, however, is to oversimplify and misapprehend the enormity of the psychological affliction of Stevenson's tortured physician, for Dr. Jekyll is not so much a man of conflicted personality as a man suffering from the ravages of addiction. He is a man of destructive attachments,(2) a man victimized by a chemical dependency that is aggravated both by a pre-existing psychopathology and maladaptive behaviors which follow his repeated consumption of the undisclosed psychoactive substance that turns him into Edward Hyde. Stevenson's short novel does not reveal much to us of Jekyll's character history, but that Jekyll is a tormented man long before he becomes captive to his novel drug is evident from the doctor's own narrative;(3) indeed, when discover that Jekyll is but the public persona of a man who is much moreand other--than he appears to be, realize that it is the doctor's addiction that offers the means by which the character of Henry Jekyll is to be definitively understood, for Henry Jekyll, apart from whatever else he may be, is an addict.(4) The history of Jekyll and criticism suggests, however, that many readers of the novel have seen in the tale little more than a simple exposition of two-sidedness in the human condition.(5) Andrew Lang, for example, one of the first reviewers of Stevenson's story, announced to the audience of the Saturday Review in 1886 that Mr. Stevenson's idea ... is that of the double personality in every man,(6) and Richard Gaughan, over a century later, has attested that such a conclusion among readers remains common even today; he reminds us, for example, that even in the late twentieth century, we use the term Jekyll and casually to suggest a split personality or some conflict between someone's and sides.(7) Similarly, for David Daiches, Dr. Jekyll and is one of Stevenson's fascinating experiments the ambivalence of character,(8) and to Irving Saposnik, the novel is a colloquial metaphor for the good-evil antithesis that lurks in all men.(9) Hyde ... is in fact merely Jekyll's unrepressed spontaneous existence,(10) contends Victorian scholar Masao Miyoshi, and to Ralph Tymms, Stevenson's exposition of Henry Jekyll is typical of many writers' reliance on the concept of the Doppelganger to express a conviction of dualism in men, a thesis with which Douglas Thorpe, too, substantially concurs.(12) Doubtless, as Joyce Carol Oates points out, Dr. Jekyll and strike contemporary readers as a characteristically Victorian moral parable(13)--a conclusion first articulated by reviewers in the years immediately following the publication of Stevenson's novel(14)--but any assumption of easy identification attending such broad, culturally-normed, and morally ambiguous qualities as those that ostensibly define and (and which, presumably, too, are separate and distinctly evident in the persons of Jekyll and Hyde) presumptively reduces highly equivocal categories of value to easy division and classification according to specific categories of behavior. In any case, to assume that Jekyll represents human good while embodies that which is evil is to forget that is but the consequence of Jekyll's experiments in forbidden science; he exists only by the will of Jekyll; he has no independent being. is not other than Jekyll; he is Jekyll. The assumption, however, that one possesses a darker side that somehow is other than what one realty is is not just an exercise in simplistic moralism:, it is characteristic of the flawed appraisal and unnatural division of human personality that an addict indulges in the attempt to excuse his addiction or mistakenly regard himself as one who is not addicted. …