A Jungian Reading of Jekyll and Hyde
We finally come to the end of The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. I saw a comment that @gerrysherry left on another post asking for a Jungian reading, so I thought I would take the excuse to go off about my favorite psychological concept. Strap in, because I have thoughts.
Jekyll describes himself as âcomposite,â both good and evil, while Hyde is pure evil. In a Jungian reading, Hyde is Jekyllâs Shadow. This means that he is an expression of the repressed side of Jekyllâs personality. He is everything about Jekyll that Jekyll is ashamed of, not just his secret desires and pleasures but also his violent impulses and wanton cruelty. I argue that the reason why this ends so tragically for Jekyll is because he fails to integrate Hyde; and, in fact, actively attempts to segregate the halves of himself.
The first thing that Jekyll tells us in his statement is that heâs really, really repressed:
Hence it came about that I concealed my pleasures; and that when I reached years of reflection, and began to look round me and take stock of my progress and position in the world, I stood already committed to a profound duplicity of life. Many a man would have even blazoned such irregularities as I was guilty of; but from the high views that I had set before me, I regarded and hid them with an almost morbid sense of shame.Â
The Victorians were already repressed, but Jekyll is even more repressed. He feels deeply ashamed about these nameless âpleasuresâ (which, letâs be honest, is probably just being gay) and distances him from his conscious personality. He doesnât want these secret parts of himself to influence his public reputation, or otherwise interfere with the image of himself that he presents to the world. So, he buries them deep down, hiding them not just from the world, but from himself. He already feels like he has a dual nature even before the mad science gets involved.
Jekyllâs intention with the mad science is essentially to give himself Dissociative Identity Disorder, I think. He wants to separate the âgoodâ self from the âevilâ self, and have them live independently from each other. Honestly, knowing what I know of DID, I fail to understand how that would be much better. I donât think he ever really thought this through. But he finds that he cannot do this. He doesnât end up with a purely good self and a purely evil self, he ends up with his normal self and a purely evil self. The purely evil self, Hyde, is literally just Jekyll with his inhibitions removed and his repressed aspects brought to the surface. Apart from that and his changed appearance, Jekyll isnât any different. He initially acknowledges this, that Hyde is just himself but in Shadow form:
I felt younger, lighter, happier in body; within I was conscious of a heady recklessness, a current of disordered sensual images running like a millrace in my fancy, a solution of the bonds of obligation, an unknown but not an innocent freedom of the soul. I knew myself, at the first breath of this new life, to be more wicked, tenfold more wicked, sold a slave to my original evil; and the thought, in that moment, braced and delighted me like wine. I stretched out my hands, exulting in the freshness of these sensations; and in the act, I was suddenly aware that I had lost in stature.
Here, heâs talking about Hyde in the first person. He feels younger, more reckless, and more wicked, but he otherwise hasnât changed. Heâs still aware of and in control of his actions. Hyde, being a Shadow, is both everything Jekyll does not to be associated with and everything he secretly wants to be. So, he goes for it. He lets out all of his repressed crap, indulges in his âundignifiedâ pleasures, and then returns to his conscience. Hyde is still Jekyll, but with a unique opportunity to resolve his midlife crisis and live it up with no consequences.Â
A lot of adaptations portray Jekyll as an innocent victim of an evil alter rising up from within and taking over his body. I just watched Moon Knight, so Iâve been thinking about Dissociative Identity Disorder for these last few days. (If you havenât seen it, Moon Knight is AFAIK one of the best portrayals of DID in media.) In Moon Knight, Marc and Steven are literally separate people that share the same body, to oversimplify a bit. Steven has no awareness of Marc at first, experiences amnesia and blackouts, and has no control over Marcâs actions at all. Despite how adaptations might make it look, Jekyll and Hyde emphatically do not work like that. Jekyll and Hyde are the same person. They donât just share the same body, they are literally the exact same person.Â
That means that there is no meaningful difference between Jekyll and Hyde. Everything Hyde indulges in is something that Jekyll already enjoys. Everything Hyde does is something Jekyll already wants to do. Everything Hyde is responsible for, Jekyll is equally responsible for, because theyâre the same person.Â
Jekyll never fully comes to terms with this, and thatâs where he goes wrong. âIt was Hyde, after all, and Hyde alone, that was guilty. Jekyll was no worse; he woke again to his good qualities seemingly unimpaired.â He never makes any real attempt to confront or deal with these dark desires of his, he just shoves them off into a secret double life. So, when the halves of his life start to overlap against his will, what does he do? He freaks out, and starts repressing Hyde again, even worse this time: âI led a life of such severity as I had never before attained to.â His answer is not to try to understand Hyde, take responsibility for his actions, or reconcile his shame. Instead, he locks his Shadow up again, with even tighter mental padlocks. But once the Shadow has been let out to play, it doesnât go back in the dark easily. Jekyll âbegan to be tortured with throes and longings, as of Hyde struggling after freedom.â Repressing Hyde has made him feel like he has an internal monster straining to break free and wreak havoc, instead of Hyde being a relatively superficial shift in appearance and mindset.Â
One commonly accepted reading of this is as an addiction metaphor, especially because itâs followed up by a relapse in which Jekyll takes his drug again and commits an act of senseless violence. From a Jungian perspective, though, Hydeâs actions are worse when he finally breaks free because Jekyllâs repression of him had been so severe. Jekyll got scared and shoved down his Shadow, so when his Shadow bursts forth, all of the repressed desires and impulses that compose Hyde manifest themselves in the most horrifying way. The more Jekyll represses his darkness, the bigger it grows; the brighter the light, the darker the Shadow. It festers like a wound unattended. So, the pendulum swings all the way back in the other direction, and the violence feels good: âWith a transport of glee, I mauled the unresisting body, tasting delight from every blow...âÂ
Itâs after the horror of having murdered someone that Jekyll starts intentionally dissociating himself from Hyde more and more. He speaks of Hyde in the third person, because he canât bring himself to admit that Hydeâs actions are his own. He starts to speak of Hyde the way many adaptations portray him: as if he were an uncontrollable evil force, rising from within in an attempt to take over and destroy him. He even dehumanizes Hyde, describing him as a kind of beast: âHe, I sayâI cannot say, I. That child of Hell had nothing human; nothing lived in him but fear and hatred.â Then he speaks of Hyde and Jekyll as if theyâre different people entirely, with different motivations and desires. Then he speaks of Hyde as something âinorganicâ -- not only inhuman, but unalive -- the âslime of the pitâ and âamorphous dust.â Heâs so desperate to disassociate himself from his Shadow that he insists his Shadow is inhuman dead matter.
Hyde is not actually becoming a separate being as the story goes along. Jekyll is slipping further and further into denial. As I said before, thereâs no meaningful difference between Jekyll and Hyde. Jekyllâs failure to realize this is his undoing. The more Jekyll denies that Hyde is himself, the more his Shadow manifests involuntarily. When he self-righteously pats himself on the back for the charity work that he did to assuage his own guilt, Hyde nearly takes over completely.Â
So what should Jekyll have done? This is where the Shadow concept doesnât fully line up with Stevensonâs worldbuilding. Hyde is literally pure evil -- everyone can see it in his face. The Shadow is not actually evil, itâs just the parts of you that you refuse to acknowledge. This is usually because you personally believe them to be evil, or because your culture has taught you that they are evil, but that doesnât mean they actually are. Jekyllâs premise was flawed from the beginning. Itâs not possible to separate a human being into good and evil halves. This is because there isnât really such thing as inherent âgoodâ or âevil.â Who decides whatâs âgoodâ and whatâs âevilâ? Victorians? Humans are nuanced. All parts of oneself are there for a reason and have value, because they can be helpful or harmful in different situations. Jekyll should have taken responsibility for his actions as Hyde, but he also should have found healthy outlets for his darker desires instead of beating himself up over them. Maybe fantasize about killing someone you hate and then move on with your life, instead of snapping and actually doing it! Jekyll should have integrated the two halves of himself instead of doing everything in his power to separate them.Â
Your Shadow is half of yourself, and if you repress it, then you lose all the potentially positive aspects of it. If you repress pride, you lose your self-confidence. If you believe that power and ambition are the root of all evil, you may lose your leadership skills or ability to be assertive. If you believe sexuality is evil... well, thatâs kinda self-explanatory. Â The answer here is, ultimately, self-love. Â Your Shadow is you, and it still wants whatâs best for you, it just has a very different idea of what that means. The least you can do is hear it out and give a hug, instead of locking it back in your subconscious dungeon.Â
Itâs extremely difficult to admit to and then to come to terms with your Shadow. Itâs a dark night of the soul. Itâs a long and laborious process, in which youâll have to reassess your identity. There are other works of media that I think demonstrate how to do it healthily, like The Wizard of Earthsea by Ursula LeGuin (although, just watch, I can make any story about Shadow work). Youâre not alone, youâre not evil or sick, and youâre not a hypocrite for having a Shadow. Most people have them, and making friends with your Shadow is a genuinely wonderful thing. Thank you for coming to my TED talk. I canât wait to analyze The Picture of Dorian Gray next!
I leave you with this masterpiece of an animatic, by S.K. Michels. Speaking from experience, this is how Shadow work sometimes feels. (Also, this artistâs portrayal of Jekyll/Hyde looks scarily like an OC I use to represent my own Shadow, so this video hits particularly hard for me).Â
