Dr Jekyll Voice Hey Sorry For Roping You Into My Horrors Those Were Meant For My Eyes And My Eyes Only

It’s very late so I’m a bit delirious, but I feel like both the musical, and just ignoring details in Jekyll and Hyde have really dumbed down just how HIGH society Dr Jekyll is. He literally has an account at COUTTS (a detail which I didn’t notice until many re-reads lowk), but also the fact that he was friends with Utterson and shared him as a lawyer with a member of parliament…like! Not to mention his calculated worth and then kinda basic, but Enfield knows of him without knowing him personally despite utterson being besties w Jekyll which is also a bit crazy…

Idk I fink too many adaptations js say “respectable” and leave it at that w out saying just how much so…

"This last re-read of Jekyll & Hyde really entrenched me in my interpretation, that Jekyll and Hyde are the same person."

"Well. Duh. That's the point of the story."

"No, you don't get it."

"..."

"I mean well, yes, technically, it's the point of the story that they are the same person, and most people get that - but they get it wrong."

"...you are overthinking this so hard."

"No! Listen. Ok maybe i am but- listen. Most pop culture interpretations give Jekyll as the full good side and Hyde as the full bad one, which we can both agree is a gross oversimplification."

"Yeah, obviously. Hyde is all evil, but Jekyll is not all good. He is a mixed bag like all humans are. He wouldn't even think of creating Hyde otherwise. He says as much himself."

"See! That's exactly my point! That's what Jekyll says!"

"...what?"

"When we get Hyde's full story, it's not Hyde telling it. It's Jekyll, a man who is characterised as caring so much about his own legacy that he went as far as doing all of this to not risk it. In other words, someone who has all the interest in the world to depict Hyde as somehow wholly other than himself."

"But he doesn't."

"Doesn't he? You said it yourself. He says: I am a mixed bag, like all humans are, while Hyde is not. He is something else."

"Well, that's confirmed by others, though. Poole calls Hyde an 'it'."

"It's 19th century England and Poole is an old man, he probably talks about chimney sweepers the same way."

"OK, but what about Enfield and Utterson and Lanyon and everyone else being repulsed by Hyde? That all points to him having something deeply inhuman about him."

"Inhuman, I'm not sure. Unnatural, definitely. He is a creation of science, like the Creature from Frankenstein, and as such he is deeply uncanny - I don't need to break out the freudian unheimleich, do I, you got what I meant. But would you say that the Creature is not human? The whole point is that he is."

"Ok, then what about Jekyll talking about how his perceptions and ideas and ways of thinking changed when he was Hyde? Or how Hyde grew with the passing of time?"

"Ah! See! That's the thing. That's Jekyll saying that. But hear me out. What's more probable: that whatever radical physical change that brought on Hyde's appearance brought on also some changes in brain chemistry that could feel as if one's thought patterns had transformed? Or that Jekyll truly managed to create a chemical sieve to separated good and evil, and put only the second to the forefront?"

"See, you ARE overthinking this. You talk about brain chemistry and probability, but this isn't a scientific paper. It's a parable. Do you think deteriorating lead white is the cause of Dorian Grey's portrait changing? Of course not. It's not chemistry. It's philosophy."

"No, you don't get it. We know Jekyll omits or glosses over parts of the narrative that are painful to him. He doesn't say what happened with Lanyon after he transformed, for example. He says that he shares a memory with Hyde yet the memories of the murder are hazy. Jekyll is trying to say: all of my evil instincts, and nothing else, were Hyde. What else could Hyde be if not evil? But if we assume that the Hyde persona was just as double as Jekyll's, just as filled with the potential for good and evil - that it was just Jekyll, only younger and more wild... that means that it's not just the original sin of creating Hyde that belongs to Jekyll. It means that every time he did something wrong, it was him, actively choosing to do so, because he knew it would be without social consequence."

"Ok, let's say i buy that. Is it that big of a difference? It doesn't seem so to me."

"But it is! Because it changes the meaning of the story radically."

"How?"

"Look. We are having this whole conversation, right? And people who are reading follow the turns, maybe even read them in two different voices. But it's just one person writing. There's the illusion of a conversation, of an exchange of ideas, but actually the decision on who is right is taken, because there is only one person writing."

"Like Jekyll writing about Hyde, I get it."

"But that is also the situation for Hyde! That's why his character is so full of rage and rebellion and hatred towards Jekyll - because he *is* Jekyll. Jekyll takes all the parts of himself that he wishes to hide and puts them on Hyde. But that's not who Hyde is. Hyde is Jekyll as much as Jekyll is Hyde, and Jekyll trying to confine Hyde to the realm of the evil and wrong is just Jekyll trying to get away with murder, again, if not physically, at least in the memory of posterity."

"You are saying that, what, Jekyll killed Carew?"

"Of course Jekyll killed Carew. He also stepped on the girl. Hyde is small, and has a light step. He wouldn't have managed either of those things if he wasn't still Jekyll, with all of his weight and strength. Jekyll himself uses the first person when he describes the murder."

"So Hyde destroying Jekyll's things and putting blasphemous words in his holy books..."

"It's all Jekyll, acting in self-hatred. That's the whole secret. Jekyll hates himself because he is a coward. He wishes he had the courage to be the person he wants to be out in the open, but he doesn't. So he creates a mask for himself, one that grants him total freedom. And in that total freedom he is also free to hate himself and his own legacy and all the ways being Henry Jekyll has him trapped. But its all him, all the way, making the decisions."

"Alright, I guess. I don't see how this is radically different from my interpretation."

"You believe Jekyll when he says-"

"I believe Jekyll believes that. You dislike Jekyll because you recognise in him your same desire for a flawless, composed life, and this brings you to automatically treat him as a liar who knows he's lying. But you and I both know that a lie one tells to oneself becomes a truth soon enough. I think Jekyll truly believes Hyde to be all evil, and I think Hyde believes it, as well. It explains why the gravity of his sins escalates so rapidly, and why he never tries to reach out or form human connection as Hyde, although his appearance probably didn't help. And if someone thinks that they have no choice, isn't that the same as having no choice at all?"

"So your point is..."

"You don't believe Jekyll's last confession. I do, in the measure that I believe that he believes it."

"...but we are the same person."

"Yes. Well. We are all a mixed bag, aren't we."

assigning gravity falls characters fnaf 1 animatronics

mabel is chica. she's a party girl, she loves confetti, and who else would be the one carrying around a cupcake sidekick?

stan is freddy. leader of the group, not as active, but will b-line it to you if you lose power

dipper is bonnie. blue and purple, matches with chica, teleports because he's anxious about being seen moving

fiddleford is foxy. it's possible to forget he's there, but he's unpredictable and you need to keep an eye on him without keeping too close an eye on him. he scurries REAL quick

ford is golden freddy because

he doesn't exist. it's just a hallucination, sherm. it's me, it's not me, don't pay him any mind. look away. look anywhere else. pretend he isn't there cause he isn't. just focus on your job

low empathy henry jekyll. low empathy jekyll who always shows compassion and kindness because he chooses to. low empathy jekyll with a very strong moral code. low empathy jekyll seeing empathy as a performance and a duty (one that he must excel in, as in all things). low empathy jekyll who knows how society expects him to feel and on most good days can half-convince himself he genuinely does. low empathy jekyll thinking there’s something inherently wrong with him. low empathy jekyll thinking he can cut the bad parts out. low empathy jekyll becoming hyde, who is much the same, but has no morals, logic, societal expectation, or interpersonal connection to make him behave kindly. low empathy henry jekyll/edward hyde.

I wonder what it was like for Jekyll to grow up around a man as well-rounded as Utterson. You have this guy who loses sleep over his friends' wellbeing and does anything to help them, a man who *looks forward to* a quiet life, and above all, a man that takes genuine pleasure in doing good and actively suppresses his bad habits. He doesn't partake in gossip; he uses everything he learns to help Jekyll. He admits to doing a few unsavory things when he was young, but still less than the average person. He is, overall, the very man Jekyll wishes he could be. Jekyll wants to do good, and he wants that altruistic proclivity to come naturally. He wants to accept the dry life ahead of him as a doctor, knowing that Utterson has readily accepted his own fate. He just wants to be normal (or rather, his perception of normal). But Hyde will always be in him because he's human. Everyone has their own Hyde, but no one admits to it. So rather than discuss his feelings, he just grows more and more frustrated with himself for not being like those around him.

“No, sir, that thing in the mask was never Dr. Jekyll—God knows what it was, but it was never Dr. Jekyll”.

This quote hit me like a ton of bricks on this read. The image of a masked “thing” moving about the room is chilling in itself, but also because. I mean. In a way it’s true. It was never Jekyll. “It”, what’s behind that door, was never the Henry Jekyll that Poole and Utterson knew because that person never existed, and it was never simply Edward Hyde either, it was literally a mask. A thing with a mask. Whether the mask was Jekyll or Hyde, it was a mask. The good doctor was a performance, and the eerie man from Soho was a physical alteration with a fake name… It was never Dr. Jekyll.

It's just. Edward Hyde is an incredibly violent person with no sense of shame or morals or limits, but he still is polite enough to have breakfast at your home and be an unremarkable guest. He's a soft-spoken young man with good taste and nerves of steel and a crazed homicidal maniac getting hard over turning a defenseless old man into an unrecognizable pile of offal. He's a monster in every sense of the word and yet he perfectly blends into the crowd and can afford to be called a gentleman. Do you see it.

So it ends like this. Your contorted cold body is not even touched, barely grazed by disgusted eyes. Stretched out, lay on the floor, described with the words you'd use not for a human cadaver, but for the carcass of a vermin. Utterson simply inspects it close- overturns it, watches your lifeless face twitch- and after the cause of death is ruled, they look for you, the real you, the one that was loved and wanted, somewhere else.

RIP EDWARD HYDE

1883-1887

“Everybody hated him.”

Henry Jekyll, M.D., D.C.L., L.L.D., F.R.S.

VS

Abraham Van Helsing, M. D., D. Ph., D. Lit., etc., etc.

VS

Patrick Hennessey, M. D., M. R. C. S. L. K. Q. C. P. I., etc.

FIGHT!

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

(click image for better quality)