State of Henry Jekyll

The State of Henry Jekyll is the original, composite identity of the novel's protagonist, a respected and wealthy London doctor whose public persona of benevolence and high achievement conceals a long-suppressed, pleasure-seeking nature. This state represents the 'normal' self from which Jekyll seeks escape through his transformative experiments, yet it is also the identity he desperately struggles to preserve as his darker half, Edward Hyde, grows increasingly dominant. The state is defined by its inherent duality, its gradual weakening, and its ultimate tragic dissolution.

Identity and Background

Henry Jekyll was born in the year 18— to a large fortune and endowed with excellent parts, inclined by nature to industry and fond of the respect of the wise and good among his fellow men. These advantages seemed to guarantee an honourable and distinguished future. Yet his worst fault was a certain impatient gaiety of disposition, which he found hard to reconcile with his imperious desire to carry his head high and wear a more than commonly grave countenance before the public. This conflict led him to conceal his pleasures, and by the time he reached years of reflection, he stood already committed to a profound duplicity of life. He regarded his irregularities with an almost morbid sense of shame, and it was the exacting nature of his aspirations, rather than any particular degradation in his faults, that severed in him the provinces of good and ill more deeply than in the majority of men. Both sides of him were in dead earnest; he was no more himself when he laid aside restraint and plunged in shame than when he laboured in the eye of day at the furtherance of knowledge or the relief of suffering.

The Composite Self and the Desire for Separation

Jekyll's scientific studies, which led wholly towards the mystic and the transcendental, shed a strong light on his consciousness of a perennial war within his members. He drew steadily nearer to the truth that man is not truly one, but truly two. From an early date, even before his scientific discoveries suggested the possibility of a miracle, he had learned to dwell with pleasure on the thought of the separation of these elements. He imagined that if each nature could be housed in separate identities, life would be relieved of all that was unbearable: the unjust could go his way, delivered from the aspirations and remorse of his more upright twin, and the just could walk steadfastly on his upward path, no longer exposed to disgrace and penitence. This daydream of dissociation was the foundation upon which his later experiments were built.

The Experiment and the Emergence of Hyde

Late one accursed night, Jekyll compounded the elements of his transformative drug and drank off the potion. The most racking pangs succeeded, but then he came to himself as if out of a great sickness, feeling younger, lighter, and happier in body, conscious of a heady recklessness and an unknown but not innocent freedom of the soul. He knew himself at the first breath of this new life to be more wicked, tenfold more wicked, sold a slave to his original evil, and the thought braced and delighted him like wine. In that moment, he had come to the fatal cross-roads. Had he approached his discovery in a more noble spirit, under the empire of generous or pious aspirations, all must have been otherwise; but his virtue slumbered, and his evil, kept awake by ambition, was alert and swift to seize the occasion. The thing that was projected was Edward Hyde, a being wholly evil, while the other was still the old Henry Jekyll, that incongruous compound of whose reformation he had already learned to despair. The movement was thus wholly toward the worse.

The Weakening of Jekyll and the Rise of Hyde

For a time, Jekyll could transform at will, enjoying the pleasures of Hyde's undignified and eventually monstrous life while returning to his own respectable form. But a reversal occurred when he awoke one morning to find that he had transformed into Hyde in his sleep, without the drug. This incident, like the Babylonian finger on the wall, spelled out the letters of his judgment. He began to reflect that the body of Edward Hyde had grown in stature, and that the balance of his nature might be permanently overthrown. He observed that whereas in the beginning the difficulty had been to throw off the body of Jekyll, it had of late gradually but decidedly transferred itself to the other side. He was slowly losing hold of his original and better self and becoming slowly incorporated with his second and worse. After a period of attempted abstinence, he fell again, and the Hyde within him came out roaring. Following the murder of Sir Danvers Carew, Jekyll resolved to be done with Hyde, and for a time he led a life of severity and beneficence. But the lower side of him began to growl for licence, and he fell once more, this time as an ordinary secret sinner. This final condescension to his evil destroyed the balance of his soul. He transformed involuntarily into Hyde while sitting in Regent's Park, and from that day forth, it seemed only by a great effort and under the immediate stimulation of the drug that he was able to wear the countenance of Jekyll. At all hours, he would be taken with the premonitory shudder, and if he slept or even dozed for a moment, it was always as Hyde that he awakened.

The Final State and Dissolution

Under the strain of this continually impending doom and the sleeplessness to which he condemned himself, Jekyll became, in his own person, a creature eaten up and emptied by fever, languidly weak both in body and mind, and solely occupied by one thought: the horror of his other self. The powers of Hyde seemed to have grown with the sickliness of Jekyll. The hate that divided them was equal on each side; for Jekyll, it was a thing of vital instinct, as he thought of Hyde as something not only hellish but inorganic. The hatred of Hyde for Jekyll was of a different order, driving him to commit temporary suicide by returning to his subordinate station, but he loathed the necessity and resented the dislike with which he was regarded. Jekyll's provision of the original salt, which had never been renewed, began to run low, and fresh supplies proved impure and without efficacy. About a week before writing his final confession, Jekyll finished his statement under the influence of the last of the old powders. He knew that this was the last time, short of a miracle, that Henry Jekyll could think his own thoughts or see his own face in the glass. As he laid down the pen and proceeded to seal up his confession, he brought the life of that unhappy Henry Jekyll to an end, leaving only the question of whether Hyde would die upon the scaffold or find the courage to release himself at the last moment.