Jekyll, Hyde and the Stories Behind the Closed Door

Everybody knows what a Jekyll-and-Hyde character is, even if they have never opened Robert Louis Stevenson’s novella. In the original, published in 1886, the connection between the respectable doctor and the man he protects is the last thing the reader is meant to learn.

The Book I Read

This Korean edition brings together Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, “The Body Snatcher,” “Olalla” and Stevenson’s “A Chapter on Dreams.” In the essay he recalls scenes for the novella arriving in dreams. In one, the change takes place against Jekyll’s will. That is the detail that interests me: the experiment starts as a choice and ends as something he can no longer choose.

A Mystery Before It Is a Transformation Story

The lawyer Utterson sees Hyde from the outside. The will, the door and the things people are reluctant to say keep him looking for a connection to Jekyll. Only late in the book do Lanyon’s account and Jekyll’s confession show what the doctor has done to himself.

Jekyll hoped to separate the parts of himself that could not coexist comfortably in public. At first he takes a drug to become Hyde. Later the change happens without his consent, and the drug he needs to turn back cannot be reproduced. The novella builds its horror out of an increasingly narrow set of choices.

Two More Gothic Stories

“The Body Snatcher” follows men who obtain corpses for dissection. Medical standing and professional ambition make it easier for the characters to ignore where the bodies come from.

In “Olalla,” a wounded officer recuperates at the home of a once-prominent Spanish family. He wants to marry its daughter. She refuses, understanding something about the family that he cannot see from his place as a guest.

Each story leaves the reader outside a closed door for a little while. In one there is an experiment, in another a trade, and in the last an inheritance. Stevenson lets respectable surfaces remain visible just long enough for the reader to wonder what they have been protecting.