Latest Posts by estelleuse - Page 4

In an alternate universe where the classic barbie movies were based off gothic/horror public domain works instead of fairytales

“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.

"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

Jekyll: Utterson, I have to tell you something... I am Hyde. I made a potion in my laborator-

Utterson: Henry, you can tell me if you're gay, don't make things up

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

***Vaguely Implied J&H spoilers***

->

Rather quaint

***Spoilers proper under cut***

I thought I'd made a post about this before but I can't find it on the old blog so maybe it never made it out of my brain?? Anyway Jekyll is so very normal about Utterson.

The repetition of "good" in the Ch 3 quote reads to me either as a genuine strong reaction to how loyal and willing Utterson's comment is about his certainty he can help. Akin to a "you're too good to me" type comment. But it also kind of comes off, as repetition often does, as the speaker convincing themselves of something or refusing to hear otherwise. That's not to say Jekyll doesn't believe Utterson is Good Tm; I think he probably does to an excessive degree, to the point of seeing him as a model of restraint, reliability, trustworthiness... A way of thinking that makes Utterson's dodgy, deceitful behaviour in Ch 2 all the more unsettling.

There's a sense of that fear of how people actually act behind your back, yet the weird desire to see it too, to be sure; Jekyll gets to see Utterson for the first time without Utterson knowing it's him, and Utterson stalks him and lies to his face. That wouldn't be dealt well with by anyone. It's especially wouldn't be dealt well with by a man who is notably just the worst at dealing with multiplicity. It's Utterson's deceit that is the final straw, because it's not only a personal betrayal but a threat to who Jekyll envsions Utterson to be, and thus what he represents.

In that state, the reminder of Utterson's Goodness, the attempt to continue upholding him as Oh So Good and slide anything counter to that off to the side - it's very comforting.

henry jekyll & edward hyde // @screenshotsofdespair​

"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."

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.

This line fucks me up actually.

the fact that hyde is short because jekyll didnt let him grow. that hyde is rail-thin and underdeveloped because jekyll never fed him. that hyde is unhealthily pale because jekyll never allowed for him to see the light.

jekyll spent all of his life shunning a side of himself that had he let it develop naturally would have become fully part of him. but he didn't because as an upper class man without a nobility background, it's his reputation what keeps him at the top.

what happens when you lock a part of yourself up, forever in darkness?

the darkness won't let you see how ugly it has gotten.

hyde is an entire lifetime's worth of all the evil jekyll could have gotten away with. the desires he has to keep locked. all the things he's done and later recalled in shame, like a vicious circle. hyde is this vicious circle, once again, only this time jekyll doesnt need to cover up after himself, because who could ever trace a straight line from the gentleman scientist to the monstrous gentleman?

and so, precisely because jekyll wants to live this contradictory life, he suffers a contratictory fate. he gets further and further away from humanity, but at the same time, he comes to embody that humanity in the most twisted ways. so, then, is hyde more or less human than he ever was?

does it matter? hyde is jekyll, anyway.

no wonder he was so hungry; he had been starving himself.

thinking about Dr. Jekyll and the war he’s fighting within himself and how he’ll always lose because all he can do is desire the lack of desire. Anyway.

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?

No one:

Describing Mr. Hyde:

Victor Frankenstein learning all he needs to from college and leaving early vs Dr. Jekyll collecting degrees like a pokemon trainer.

Dr. Jekyll

Now, sad thought, but Poole never gave a date as to when he heard Hyde "Weeping like a woman or a lost soul" and I know Jekyll and Lanyon had a falling out with the whole HJ-7 thing but like...decades of friendship and the attachment that comes with it doesn't just fly out the door.

Even if he didn't (or couldn't) attend the funeral, I'm sure Jekyll must have gotten a letter (possibly from Utterson) or possibly word of mouth saying that his old childhood friend died.

With the stress of not being able to return to his original state added on to the tragedy of that scuffle being their last argument, it's possible that he had reached a breaking point when he received that information.

The two types of Humanity majors:

-

Either way both their science major friends died

Dr. Jekyll studying for his 20+ college degrees circa 18xx

(Dr Jekyll voice) nothing a nap and a cigarette and a glass of wine and a line of coke and a joint and a lobotomy and the scary potion and murdering someone and killing myself can’t fix

Decided to do my annual Jekyll and Hyde reread and only now chose to look up the story of Damon and Pythius that Lanyon mentions. I'm in shambles.

Basically, Pythius was sentenced to death for conspiring against the tyrant king of Syracuse, and he requested to see his family one last time before his execution. Damon offered himself to take Pythius' stead as a hostage, and the king said that if Pythius did not return within a specific time, Damon would be executed instead. The king fully believed that Pythias wouldn't return and would leave Damon to die, but Pythias swam his ass to shore after he was thrown overboard by pirates to ensure he made it back to Syracuse in time. The king was so impressed by Pythias' fidelity and Damon's trust that he pardoned both of them.

Their relationship is like the Good Ending to Lanyon and Jekyll's. Even after being separated by differing scientific opinions, Lanyon continued showing an interest in Jekyll's wellbeing. He agrees to help Jekyll get the ingredients for the potion despite having no idea what it's for, only knowing his friend was in significant distress. Even with distance between them, Jekyll knows he can depend on Lanyon to help him. Pythias and Jekyll are also uncannily similar: Pythias challenged a tyrant, and Jekyll challenged God. Where Pythias/Damon and Jekyll/Lanyon differ, however, is that this implicit trust leads to Jekyll and Lanyon's downfall-- not just of their relationship, but of themselves.

I will never get over how tragic their relationship was (whether you see it as romantic or platonic). Both of them (and Utterson) loved and trusted each other so much it's sickening. I will never get over these old men who were supposed to live and die together.

hmmmmm thinking that Jekyll and Hyde stablishes that the price to pay for getting the best of both worlds is getting the worst, too… just… thinking of this tormented man, locked in his lab, feeling Jekyll’s shame and Hyde’s anger. getting to use shame and anger against that which he hates the most, and that being himself. Becoming his own father, literally.

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: I incline to Cain’s heresy; I let my brother go to the devil in his own way.

Jekyll: *leaves all his earthly goods to Hyde in the case of his disappearance*

Utterson: ...Nevermind I'm gonna hunt down this devil and tear Henry Jekyll out of its grasp with my own bare hands

"That night I had come to the fatal cross-roads. Had I approached my discovery in a more noble spirit, had I risked the experiment while under the empire of generous or pious aspirations, all must have been otherwise, and from these ago- nies of death and birth, I had come forth an angel instead of a fiend."

I just reread the text and found this.

Actually kinda gutting to me how Jekyll just got super unlucky with his potion and ended up splitting himself to the evil rather than good side of himself. Angel Jekyll is quite the interesting concept though. Would he be at complete peace with his 'sins'? Would he ever need to change back to his 'compounded' self?

there are so many possibilities when it comes to other symptoms of HJ7 that isnt told to us and i cannot stop thinking about it

vomiting, distorted vision, twitching, breathing problems, increased appetite, muscle numbness, false memories, auditory hallucinations, increased heart beat, hypersensitivity, lack of sensitivity, stretch marks, damaged vocal chords, memory loss, increased blood loss, swollen muscles, tics, abnormal pain, poor circulation, dizziness, nose bleeds, peeling skin, weight loss

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

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.