What are you Hyde-ing?
“Which self? A man has two — as he has two hands. Because I use my right hand, should I never use my left?” — Robert Louis Stevenson
When an author nails an idea it is as if the thought ascends into the pantheon of consciousness. The model of Zeus still resonates with the image of God. Cupid’s arrow still hits the mark as does Superman and all of his descendents.
Yet, the darker elements of myth capture our imagination as much as the light. Macbeth and Richard III are as monstrous as the likes of Frankensteinand Dracula if not more. It’s astounding when a bard drafts something that ascends beyond fiction and into the collective imagination.
In 1885 Robert Louis Stevenson did just that when he created a character that so uniquely defined the human condition that its effects still ripple through our thoughts today.
The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde came to Stevenson in a dream. Stevenson was confined to bed and suffering from an affliction of the lungs. The story goes that one night his wife, Fanny, heard her husband’s cries and decided to wake him, much to his dismay. When Fanny awoke him, he said the now infamous line, “Why did you wake me? I was dreaming a fine bogey tale.”
In the next six days Steveson would pen the dark story that combined a childhood villain by the name of Deacon Brodie, the author attempted to write a play earlier in his career about the aristocracy who lived a double life, and Stevenson’s obsession with the duality of man.
However, as was his custom, the first reader of his manuscript was his wife. The praise he was expecting did not come and Stevenson hurled the first draft into the fire. He rewrote the novella in just three days.
Stevenson believed he had missed the allegory in his original draft, and that by rewriting it in its entirety he would find the essence. I’d say the bastard was right.
“I thus drew steadily nearer to that truth, by whose partial discovery I have been doomed to such a dreadful shipwreck: that man is not truly one, but truly two.” — Robert Louis Stevenson
Stevenson himself often wondered what it would be like to live a double life and even experimented with being a lush libertine, however, given his illnesses the life did not suit him and found letters to be much more to his liking, and thank god for that. The man would not only give us this strange novella but also other adventurous works such as Treasure Island and Kidnapped.
Yet, the thing that makes Stevenson’s novella stand out amongst the rest of his works is the truth of the matter. Before Sigmund Freud’s id, ego, and superego, before Carl Jung’s concept of the shadow, Stevenson captured the duality of man in metaphor. While waring duality was nothing new in mythology, after all every god and goddess had its counterpart just as the Christian God had his Satan, the premise of capturing light and dark in man set his work apart.
Good and evil, order and chaos are themes universal to man. Written more than a hundred years ago, the story of the mild mannered Dr. Jekyll and the vile medicine that unleashes his darkest persona Mr. Hyde is as relevant today as it was then. The classic possess an understanding of human nature that is unrivaled as it probes the inner conflicts of man and invokes our worst nightmares.
We’ve seen this theme repeated again and again throughout literature, cinema, and comic books.
Stan Lee’s Dr. Bruce Banner and his mean green friend the Incredible Hulkare a prime example of a reimagining of Stevenson’s idea. As are district attorney Harvey Dent and his better known alias Two-Face in Bill Fingerand Bob Kane’s Batman Universe, as well as Dent’s colleague Bane, a villain whose strengths are amplified by his secret “Venom.”
So what is it about Stevenson’s idea that illuminates the dark? Why are we so infatuated with duality?
“A man cannot destroy the savage in him by denying its impulses. The only way to get rid of temptation is to yield to it.” — Robert Louis Stevenson
We only show one side of ourselves to the world. In our idealistic culture we present our idealistic self and it grows nicer and nicer. We may present an ethical, moral self that is wonderful to the world, but that does not mean that we are not without sin.
Furthermore, as Jekyll discovers, we cannot separate the bad from the good. While we may fantasize about what it would be like to absolve ourselves from sin, we must carry the weight of our evil and it cannot be ignored.
If we ignore darker impulses, if we attempt to shudder them away, they do not grow weaker but stranger. After all, darkness only grows in darkness. By trying to lock our darker impulses away we do not eradicate them, but rather we strengthen their resolve. In the case of Mr. Hyde, Jekyll’s lifelong pursuit of ignoring his shadow created a barbaric brute that destroyed them both.
Swiss psychiatrist and psychoanalyst Carl Jung contributed more in his lifetime to the understanding of the human psyche than some nations. Using the myths of Cain and Edom as well as Judas and Hagen, and yes even referencing Stevenson’s seminal work, Jung addresses the evil that man is capable of.
“Until you make the unconscious conscious it will direct your life and you will call it fate” — Carl Jung
Jung suggested that we all present a persona of who we think others want us to be, our Jekyll, and that everything we shun, everything the “ego cannot see” is darkened and made more evil in our shadow. We create acceptable masks we wear in public, and if we do not work on integrating our darker selves then those impulses we shun will only grow in strength.
“Everyone carries a shadow,” Jung wrote, “and the less it is embodied in the individual’s conscious life, the blacker and denser it is.”
At the end of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, what are we left with? In order to spare humiliation and scandal, Jekyll destroys himself so Hyde will not. Yet, this is not the message Jung has left us.
Summarizing Carl Jung on the Joe Rogan Podcast, Dr. Jordan Peterson, a Canadian clinical psychologist, said the thing that separates Jung from the self-help genre is the pathway to completion is through the embodiment of the monster. In order for someone to be a good person they must first learn their capacity to do evil. Men who cannot cause harm are not good, they are tame.
There is a major difference between someone who is a good person because they are naive and a person who is a good person because they have faced the abyss. There is no morality in a naive person any more than there is in a dog to obey his master.
Later in the interview Peterson said, “Morality comes when you are a monster and you can learn to control it.” We must all understand that we possess the capacity for great evil. When playing Anthony Hopkins played Hitler in The Bunker he said the thing that makes Hitler so terrifying is that he is not a monster, he’s a man. Even Hitler loved kittens.
Jung said, “No tree, it is said, can grow to heaven unless its roots reach down to hell.” No man can do any real good until he understands fully his capacity for evil.
In his lectures Peterson refers back to Jung again and again, and both men use metaphor and myth to illustrate their point.
A descendent of Jung and perhaps no better analyzer of myth of Joseph Campbell. A professor of comparative mythology he quite literally wrote the book on the hero’s journey with Hero with a Thousand Faces.
In it he lays out the basic plot of the hero’s journey:
In Campbell’s interpretation of countless myths from around the world, he cited similar patterns that occurred again and again. One of the common themes of the hero is that he had to die, he had to face the worst possible version of himself, and he had to be resurrected.
There is perhaps no better example of this than a student of Campbell’s who used this structure to perfection, George Lucas.
In Star Wars, Lucas used the hero’s journey to tell the story of Luke Skywalker, and later expanded to tell the story of Luke’s father Anakin and the fall of the Jedi.
Just as Jekyll loses himself in the darkness and freedom of Edward Hyde, so too does Anakin give way to the greatest villain of all time, Darth Vader. The story of Vader, while debatably not the epic tale we were all hoping for, is a tragic one, a classic fall of a great man. We see a hopeful hero slide to the dark side and become “more machine now than man;twisted and evil,” just as Stevenson’s description of Hyde is that of a gnarled grotesque figure driven by rage. The thing that drove Anakin to the dark side was fear. While he was quick to rush to a fight, desperate to prove himself in battle, he was afraid of losing his loved ones. For Anakin, fighting was an easy way to express his power, however, he was never able to face the one enemy he needed to conquer. Vader succumbed to the power of the dark side, be it for questionable reasons, and consumed by his Shadow.
In an attempt to spare Luke the same fate as his father, both Obiwan and Yoda desperately try to lead the Skywalker away from the temptations of the darkside.
In fact, in a classic Campbell moment in Episode V during Luke’s training, Luke must descend into a cave where he faces off with his greatest fear Darth Vader. Only, it turns out that the face that Luke sees in Vader is not a foreign one, but his own. Later, Yoda tells Luke, “Anger, fear, aggression; the dark side of the Force are they. Easily they flow, quick to joining you in a fight. If once you start down the dark path, forever will it dominate your destiny, consume you it will.”
We see this theme repeated again and again in myth and fairytale alike, however, rarely do we believe it applies to us. No great hero is born entirely good or entirely evil, and it is the struggle within us that defines us. Until we learn that we possess the power to do great harm as well as great good we do not possess any power at all. It is only by setting out on our own journey of self-discovery that we can truly face those darkest desires that frighten us.
“In each of us, two natures are at war — the good and the evil. All out lives the fight goes on between them, and one of them must conquer. But in our own hands lies the power to choose — what we want most to be, we are.” — From the panel of Paramount’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Clara Beranger