"A Profound Duplicity of Life"

"With every day, and from both sides of my intelligence, the moral and the intellectual, I thus drew steadily nearer to that truth, by whose partial discovery I have been doomed to such a dreadful shipwreck: that man is not truly one, but truly two" (Stevenson 108).

Through the use of this one sentence Stevenson pithily puts into words the sensation that Freud describes in his work The Ego and the Id.  So Dr. Jekyll is left to face the multiple aspects of his personality.  The book gives the two halves of the Dr. the basic attributes of "good an evil," which simplifies the greater idea that applies in a more general self.  We hide or "Hyde" our Id within ourselves in order to contend with the super ego found in the world around us.

The point that Stevenson successfully makes is that the Id isn't necessarily evil so to speak, but is looked at as evil by society and therefore the ego of ourselves.  So assuming that Jekyll is the Ego and Hyde is the Id, people like Utterson, who exist in the greater world, can be considered the Super Ego.  And if we are to relate the theme of "black mailing" in this novella to illegality of sodomy, then we can say that the Id is likely meant to represent homosexual tendencies in Jekyll- and the other men in his circle.

So it is no wonder that Jekyll wishes to separate the two parts of himself that he has been forced to live with his entire life.  Jekyll includes in his confession, "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 me. 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" (Stevenson 107).  His "irregularities" cause him to invent the potion that lead to his ruin.  This intense suppression of his Id results in the greater explosion that we see in Hyde.

What I find interesting is that even after Jekyll has allowed Hyde into the world, he still feels incredibly guilty about the actions of his other and "he would even make haste, where it was possible, to undo the evil done by Hyde" (Stevenson 119).  After realizing the damage that Hyde is doing, Jekyll continues to release him because of the high he gets from decompressing his Id.  The problem is that he does not learn from this separation of self.  He cannot get out from under the thumb of the Ego and Super Ego that control his life.  There is only extreme, a happy medium cannot be found.

Despite recognizing the duplicity within himself, Jekyll cannot find a way to cleanse away the Id that he so despises.  The reason that he moves so towards Hyde is that Hyde is his true self.  When Jekyll is Jekyll, Hyde is still within him, when Jekyll is Hyde, Hyde is only Hyde.  It is in his self hatred that Jekyll turns to what he supposedly hates within himself, rather than being a person that he can control.

Stevenson clearly realizes that there is a lot of power in not having to hide the "evil" within yourself, because you have no sense of the shame that society forces upon you.