The Split-Personality Fiction That Modern Psychologists Adopted as Fact

In my stylometric study, I tested two of “Stevenson’s” novels and they matched two different groups: C (Kidnapped) and G (Treasure Island). Dr. Jekyll (1886) is closer to the latter, so it was probably ghostwritten by James Muddock, who I mentioned a few times in this set of reviews. Because these 1880s stories are in the public domain, Penguin has rightly included some introductory materials to distinguish this edition. There is a chronology, an introduction, and guidance for further reading.
“Robert Louis Stevenson’s immortal tale of personality and evil, now in a… new clothbound edition.” There are several lines in this novel that echo this idea: “All human beings, as we meet them, are commingled out of good and evil: and Edward Hyde, alone in the ranks of mankind, was pure evil.” I don’t think this a point-of-pride for this novel. These are melodramatic echoes that generalize a character as “pure evil”. Melodrama became Muddock’s regular escape when he was writing in a lighter or quicker style; in the body of this novel, there are many exclamations, such as: “A fear came upon me; I could answer nothing…” But unlike in bad melodramas, this paragraph goes on to discuss a specific confrontation with a rival… returning again to melodramatic theologizing about praying to God (132). Writers who try to learn from this example might err by just borrowing exclamations of “fear”, without the context that explains why these characters are afraid. Returning to the earlier point, Hyde is in the same body as Jekyll, but the two of them are being separated partly to be able to exclaim with panic that a specific person is evil-incarnate. As in this other line: “Evil, I fear, founded—evil was sure to come… I believe poor Harry is killed; and I believe his murderer… is still lurking in his victim’s room. Well, let our name be vengeance…” (43). By classifying a person or entity as “evil”, the others are given permission to violently hunt them down and murder them, without losing their “hero” status, and in fact a “hero” has to kill someone “evil” to reaffirm themselves as the Alpha-Hero. Such evil-casting appears in almost every modern pop novel, and perhaps they would be better served by avoiding this simplification.
“Published as a ‘shilling shocker’, Robert Louis Stevenson’s dark psychological fantasy gave birth to the idea of the split personality.” It is not good if a fiction has birthed a psychological concept that is now widely regarded as the truth. Muddock was probably referring to “the split personality” of a ghostwriter who must take on different tints to write as the masculine “Stevenson” versus the feminine “Virginia Woolf”. He explored this masculine-feminine duality in Orlando. A writer must take on a different personality to write believably from the perspective of contrasting characters, and a ghostwriter even has to change the broader style of the whole novel to fit a different authorial biography. It is, then, absurd, for psychologists to pick up on this sane ability to see the world from murderous and charitable perspectives alike in a writer, and to apply this as a personality-illness in ordinary people. It is not a defect when a person switches between being angry and sad, or murderous and loving. That’s the human condition. If anybody is any one of these extremes, they are the abnormality. In the body of the novel, “Stevenson” writes: “For two days I went about racking my brains for a plot of any sort; and on the second night I dreamed the scene at the window, and a scene afterward split in two, in which Hyde, pursued for some crime, took the powder and underwent the change in the presence of his pursuers” (141). This passage confirms that the author is speaking through this narrator by equating a fictional “plot” with the magical split within the character of Hyde.
“…The story of respectable Dr Jekyll’s strange association with ‘damnable young man’ Edward Hyde; the hunt through fog-bound London for a killer; and the final revelation of Hyde’s true identity is a chilling exploration of humanity’s basest capacity for evil.” The notes clarify things, like explaining that a character investigating this mystery considers two theories: “that Hyde is blackmailing Jekyll; and that Hyde is Jekyll’s illegitimate son”, early in the search (163). Such notes should help readers who might otherwise be lost by vague references in the text. There is much about this novel that could be improved by cutting out repetitive sections. This is why most people today are familiar with imitative portrayals of Hyde and Jekyll, and few are still reading this novel itself, unless it is required-reading.
—Pennsylvania Literary Journal, Fall 2024: https://anaphoraliterary.com/journals/plj/plj-excerpts/book-reviews-fall-2024

A shockingly modern and relevant story about science, man, fate, and our absurd little attempts to control the uncontrollable. A timeless and incredibly engaging story that would pair well with any modern stories dealing with the terrors of modernization.