Nineteenth-century novel, Year 10: duality, science and reputation (The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde option)

That each person has two natures, one good and one bad, sharing one body

提示He thinks everyone is divided inside.

为什么He then says he suspects there are even more than two. The idea is meant to apply to everyone, so Hyde is not a freak but a picture of what is in all people.

Younger, lighter and happier, with a sense of reckless freedom

提示The first change is pleasant in some ways.

为什么He writes “I felt younger, lighter, happier in body”. That feeling is why he repeats the experiment. Stevenson shows that evil is attractive to Jekyll, which is what makes the story a warning.

That Hyde is part of him and not a separate person

提示He feels welcome rather than horror.

为什么He describes the sight as natural and human. The line shows that Jekyll cannot truly escape responsibility for what Hyde does.

Jekyll is a mixture of good and evil, as all other people are

提示Think of how he describes everyone else.

为什么Jekyll says all human beings are commingled out of good and evil. Hyde has had the good taken out of him, which is why he is so extreme.

Hyde grows stronger and Jekyll weaker, until Hyde takes over

提示The one who is allowed out more often gains power.

为什么Jekyll writes “The powers of Hyde seemed to have grown with the sickliness of Jekyll”. In the end Hyde takes over and Jekyll cannot come back.

On himself, knowing he might die

提示He asks nobody else to take the risk, for good or bad.

为什么He says he knew he risked death. The secret, selfish experiment sets him apart from the cautious Lanyon, and nobody else knows what he is doing.

In a laboratory in the old dissecting-room block at the back of his house

提示The building was once used for surgery.

为什么In Chapter 5 we learn that Jekyll bought the house from a surgeon's heirs and turned the block into a chemical laboratory. In Chapter 2 Hyde is seen using a key to its old dissecting-room door, and in Chapter 7 Enfield sees that the door of his story is a back way to Jekyll's. So his secret science and Hyde's door are one place.

That he has always rejected Jekyll's mystical, boundary-breaking science

提示He is the sceptic who is about to be proved wrong.

为什么Hyde says it just before he drinks the potion and transforms before Lanyon's eyes. Lanyon, the man of ordinary science, is destroyed by seeing what the other kind can do.

That some knowledge is so terrible that it can destroy the person who learns it

提示He is a healthy man before and a dying man after.

为什么This is one reading: Lanyon does not die from a weapon but from a fact. Stevenson hints that science has uncovered something humans were not meant to see.

Never to refer to the story of the door again

提示A handshake closes the subject.

为什么Both men are ashamed of having talked. The bargain is a small example of the silence of the novel's gentlemen, who protect each other's reputations by not asking.

He suspects someone is paying Hyde to keep quiet about an old scandal

提示The cheque suggests an honest man buying silence over his youth.

为什么He guesses at blackmail because a respectable name was on the cheque. The word shows how easily these gentlemen assume that a good name hides a secret.

A profound duplicity of life

提示A word meaning pretending to be two things at once.

为什么He wanted to hold his head high and wear a more than commonly grave countenance before the public. The pressure to look respectable is what makes him need a second self.

Jekyll

提示The man whose cane was the weapon.

为什么Utterson is afraid that the scandal might sweep up Jekyll. He keeps what he knows from the police for a time, which shows how loyalty can become a kind of concealment.

He takes the letter to his clerk, privately, to compare handwriting

提示He prefers a quiet inquiry to a public one.

为什么A lawyer's habit of discretion leads him to keep things in his own office. It is part of why the secret stays hidden for so long.