Ch 10 Quotes Flashcards
“began to growl for licence”
Stevenson describes Jekyll’s longing as a “growl for licence,” which, ironically, is reminiscent of animals communicating with each other. In a novel intentionally devoid of billowy language and concerned more with providing a record than with developing verbal description, Jekyll can be most vocally expressive of his desires when he longs to transform into Hyde. As Hyde, he loses the conscious abilities to form language completely, falling victim to the instincts within and losing the ability to recall exactly what is happening. The description implies that Jekyll, in becoming Hyde, is regressing into the primitive and coming closer to the violent, amoral world of animals.
“I felt younger, lighter, happier in body; within I was conscious of a heady recklessness”
Jekyll’s initial reaction to transforming is weightlessness from the burdens of an oppressive society. However, as the equilibrium of man must be restored, implied through “heady”, this transformation will become intoxicating and addictive
“My new power tempted me until I fell into slavery”
Temptation of freedom is what killed him
“My devil had long been caged it came out roaring, I was conscious… a more furious propensity to ill”
Both Jekyll and Hyde are reduced to a state of animalistic impulses. Neither are in possession of reason. Jekyll says Hyde, repressed for so long, had built-up frustrations that exploded. Jekyll sees Hyde’s fury as the logical consequences of Jekyll’s repression of his evil sides. Furthermore, the verb “roaring” has connotations of an animalistic, uncontrolled, agitated and deadly expression of his repressed elements in Hyde, and the phrase “Propensity to ill” indicates a deeper, now natural tendency and inclination to immorality. Devils and animals are clearly distinct from humans, so these images stress how inhuman Hyde is. But animals are part of nature, so at the same time the images acknowledge that the passions Hyde acts on are a natural, if lower, part of us
‘He, I say - I cannot say, I. That child of Hell had nothing human’
Stevenson shows Dr Jekyll’s conflict with the darker side of his identity. When he says of Mr Hyde, ‘He, I say - I cannot say, I. That child of Hell had nothing human’, the repetition of the first-person pronoun displays his wish to assert his separation from Hyde. However, the proximity of the third-person pronoun, along with the pauses created by the dash and the commas, also suggest his confusion and the difficulty of separation. Similarly, the metaphor uses Christianity to link to traditional social values and express his difference to Hyde; however, the noun ‘child’ is included to remind the reader that Jekyll created Hyde and he comes from inside him. Alternatively, Hyde is then also the child of a society who has forced Jekyll to repress his freedoms and pleasures.
“the hand that lay on my knee was corded and hairy!”
Jekyll transforms into Hyde unwillingly. Here, the hand, a symbol of respectability and honour, is invaded by free flowing hair, insuitating ideas of uncontrolled freedom.
” from these agonies of death and birth, I had come forth an angel instead of a fiend”
he imagines the human soul as the battleground for an “angel” and a “fiend,” each struggling for mastery. But his potion, which he hoped would separate and purify each element, succeeds only in bringing the dark side into being—Hyde emerges, but he has no angelic counterpart. Once unleashed, Hyde slowly takes over, until Jekyll ceases to exist. If man is half angel and half fiend, one wonders what happens to the “angel” at the end of the novel. Perhaps the angel gives way permanently to Jekyll’s devil. Or perhaps Jekyll is simply mistaken: man is not “truly two” but is first and foremost the primitive creature embodied in Hyde, brought under tentative control by civilization, law, and conscience. According to this theory, the potion simply strips away the civilized veneer, exposing man’s essential nature. Certainly, the novel goes out of its way to paint Hyde as animalistic—he is hairy and ugly; he conducts himself according to instinct rather than reason; Utterson describes him as a “troglodyte,” or primitive creature.
Yet if Hyde were just an animal, we would not expect him to take suchdelightin crime. Indeed, he seems to commit violent acts against innocents for no reason except the joy of it—something that no animal would do. He appears deliberately and happilyimmoral rather thanamoral; he knows the moral law and basks in his breach of it. For an animalistic creature, furthermore, Hyde seems oddly at home in the urban landscape. All of these observations imply that perhaps civilization, too, has its dark side.
“man is not truly one but truly two”
In risking death to test his hypothesis that the human psyche can be split, Jekyll concludes than man is in constant equilibrium between good and evil. Repression causes a shift in equilibrium,however this will eventually be reversed
