Transformation

The Transformation is the core physical and metaphysical event of Robert Louis Stevenson's Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, the process by which Henry Jekyll uses a chemical drug to separate his good and evil natures into two distinct bodies. It is the mechanism that drives the entire plot, enabling Jekyll to indulge his darker impulses as Edward Hyde while preserving his public reputation, and ultimately leading to his loss of control, the murder of Sir Danvers Carew, and his suicide.

Discovery and First Experiment

Jekyll's scientific studies, which led wholly toward the mystic and the transcendental, had long convinced him that man is not truly one but truly two. He began to perceive the trembling immateriality of the seemingly solid body and found certain agents that could shake and pluck back that fleshly vestment. After purchasing a large quantity of a particular salt from a firm of wholesale chemists, he compounded the elements late one accursed night, watched them boil and smoke together in the glass, and when the ebullition had subsided, drank off the potion. The most racking pangs succeeded: a grinding in the bones, deadly nausea, and a horror of the spirit that cannot be exceeded at the hour of birth or death. Then these agonies began swiftly to subside, and he came to himself as if out of a great sickness. He felt younger, lighter, happier in body; within he was conscious of a heady recklessness, a current of disordered sensual images, a solution of the bonds of obligation, an unknown but not an 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 the act of stretching out his hands, he was suddenly aware that he had lost in stature. He stole through the corridors, a stranger in his own house, and coming to his room, saw for the first time the appearance of Edward Hyde.

The Nature of the Two Forms

Jekyll concluded by theory that the evil side of his nature, to which he had transferred the stamping efficacy, was less robust and less developed than the good he had deposed. Because his life had been nine tenths a life of effort, virtue and control, the evil side had been much less exercised and much less exhausted. Hence Edward Hyde was so much smaller, slighter and younger than Henry Jekyll. Evil, which Jekyll still believed to be the lethal side of man, had left on that body an imprint of deformity and decay. Yet when Jekyll looked upon that ugly idol in the glass, he was conscious of no repugnance, rather of a leap of welcome. This, too, was himself. It seemed natural and human. In his eyes it bore a livelier image of the spirit, more express and single, than the imperfect and divided countenance he had been accustomed to call his. He observed that when he wore the semblance of Edward Hyde, none could come near him at first without a visible misgiving of the flesh, because all human beings are commingled out of good and evil, and Edward Hyde, alone in the ranks of mankind, was pure evil. The second and conclusive experiment succeeded: he once more prepared and drank the cup, suffered the pangs of dissolution, and came to himself with the character, stature and face of Henry Jekyll.

The Drug's Limitations and the Loss of Control

The drug had no discriminating action; it was neither diabolical nor divine; it but shook the doors of the prisonhouse of Jekyll's disposition. Because his virtue slumbered at the time of the first experiment while his evil was alert and swift to seize the occasion, the thing that was projected was Edward Hyde. The movement was thus wholly toward the worse. Jekyll soon discovered that the power of the drug was not always equally displayed. Once, very early in his career, it had totally failed him; since then he had been obliged on more than one occasion to double, and once, with infinite risk of death, to treble the amount. After an involuntary transformation in which he awoke as Hyde in his own bed, he began to spy a danger that the balance of his nature might be permanently overthrown, the power of voluntary change forfeited, and the character of Edward Hyde become irrevocably his. 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.

The Final Crisis

After the murder of Sir Danvers Carew, Jekyll resolved to renounce Hyde and for two months led a life of severity. But in an hour of moral weakness he once again compounded and swallowed the transforming draught. His devil had been long caged and came out roaring; he was conscious of a more unbridled, a more furious propensity to ill. The involuntary transformations accelerated: from that day forth it seemed only by a great effort as of gymnastics, and only under the immediate stimulation of the drug, that he was able to wear the countenance of Jekyll. At all hours of the day and night he would be taken with the premonitory shudder; if he slept or even dozed for a moment in his chair, it was always as Hyde that he awakened. The powers of Hyde seemed to have grown with the sickliness of Jekyll. The hatred between them became equal on each side: Jekyll thought of Hyde as something not only hellish but inorganic, the slime of the pit uttering cries and voices, knit to him closer than a wife, closer than an eye; Hyde loathed the despondency into which Jekyll was fallen and resented the dislike with which he was himself regarded. Jekyll's provision of the salt, never renewed since the first experiment, began to run low. He sent out for a fresh supply and mixed the draught; the ebullition followed and the first change of colour, but not the second; he drank it and it was without efficiency. He had London ransacked in vain and became persuaded that his first supply was impure, and that it was that unknown impurity which lent efficacy to the draught. Under the influence of the last of the old powders, he finished his statement, knowing 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. He laid down the pen and proceeded to seal up his confession, bringing the life of that unhappy Henry Jekyll to an end.