06/10/2026
Most people haven’t read the hundred or so pages of the original tale from Robert Louis Stevenson, because if they did they’d know what it truly means to be Jekyll and Hyde, and that the strange case of, isn’t actually so strange at all.
Popular adaptions depict Jekyll and Hyde as two separate entities. One good. The other evil. But that’s such a convenient limitation on what Stevenson is saying about human nature. Hyde isn’t really a separate person. In fact, Hyde is Jekyll.
Hyde isn’t some figure of duality that accidentally appears as a result of Jekyll’s potion. He deliberately creates Hyde because he wants to separate the respectable Dr. Jekyll from the parts of himself he doesn’t want anyone else to see. The parts he considers shameful and beneath him. Stevenson even ties Hyde to this idea of social respectability. Hyde uses Jekyll’s back entrance. Jekyll gives him a home in Soho, London. He keeps Hyde physically and socially separate from the respectable world Jekyll occupies. But the fact remains, Jekyll likes being Hyde. He can do whatever he wants as Hyde, act on such pleasures and impulses deemed immoral, and then afterwards go back to being the respected Dr. Jekyll without any of the responsibility for the actions.
Except this isn’t actually possible. Hyde still has Jekyll’s memories. His intelligence. His desires. His consciousness. Jekyll doesn’t black out while a separate monster takes over. Jekyll is there.
But of course this arrangement starts falling apart when Jekyll begins transforming without choosing to. He no longer has control of the separation. And Jekyll has to confront the fact that the monster he created was never really separate from him in the first place.
