Jekyll and Hyde Response #1

Author's Note: Currently, our class is reading the novella Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.  This novella explores  the ideas of duality of man and the difference between good and evil.  The diction is heavily saturated and the symbolism is very prominent.  Here is my response on the first three chapters of the novel. 

     Evil can be seen differently through the eyes of everyone – to some people evil may be an abusive parent and to others it may just be the complete darkness when they are alone in a dark room.  It frightens us, sends shivers down our spines, and can envelop us if we let it.  A prominent form of evil known by everyone is Satan; the very creature that leads humans, if they allow, away from the love of God and into the arms of Hell.  In the novella Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson, Dr. Jekyll’s creepy doppelganger, Mr. Hyde, is the very depiction of Satan.  A creature that dwells in the night, Hyde inflicts fear upon anyone around him, revealing that the evil of his presence is undeniable and inescapable. 

     The “desire to kill him” (40) is inevitable; who wants to let the devil live and thrive near their home?  Yet after he tramples a young girl in the streets at three A.M., the crowd that gathers allows Hyde to walk away without punishment.  A man, walking the streets of London; a threat, with the nerve to walk away from its own destruction; a beast, a “man [who] seems hardly human” (52) who is ugly for some unknown reason.  Every character thus far in the novella notices that Hyde has devil-like qualities; “he [speaks] with a husky, whispering and somewhat broken voice” (52) and has a “displeasing smile” (52).  The air about him contains tension and fright, which holds his power; the same power of Satan to draw people into his beliefs rather than their own.  Hyde could easily utilize fear to nurture the insecure into his own grasp, just as the serpent seduced Eve into eating the forbidden fruit.  He will continue to wreak havoc in London as long as no one stops him; and though Jekyll states that “the moment [he] choose[s], [he] can be rid of Mr. Hyde” (58), it is his choice between letting evil run the streets or bottling it up and never again letting it out.