Similarities Between Dr Jekyll And Mr Hyde

Some individual characters do not typically exhibit a clear perception of their intentions and sometimes their selections and behavior do not naturally reflect their prearranged moral compass. In that event, these characters are assumed morally ambiguous. Their morals are not clearly depicted as they stray the reader from labeling them as solely good or solely evil. In The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, there are two opposing identities striving for superiority in existence. Dr. Jekyll justifies that “man is not truly one, but truly two,” as he envisions people’s conscience as the realm for an “angle” and a “fiend,” each competing for dexterity. By looking at the two split identities of Jekyll and Hyde, and seeing how they reflect

good and evil, shows that Henry Jekyll can be seen as a morally ambiguous character whose social obscurity is significant to the novel as a whole.
Jekyll’s character, at first, is represented as a elementary man whose worst blames lie in an eager optimism about the world and its mechanics. The doctor was a man of simple values; prominent, popular and well known for his dinner parties; born into a good family; large, handsome man of perhaps fifty. He has little ramifications that allow him to materialize as a conscientious citizen in the Victorian Society. From this viewpoint, Jekyll cannot be seen as a morally ambiguous character. Very early on, he saw the need to hide the shameful side of himself from the world, and the necessity to try and separate the two selves. Jekyll’s experiment, which Dr. Lanyon found so misguided that it killed him, was an endeavor to disassociate the two components of himself, the good and the bad; when he came upon the correct formula and drank it, he was approaching fifty years of age; yet after his changeover into Edward Hyde, he felt younger, lighter and more sensual. Before the ambiguity can be determined, an analysis of Jekyll’s foil, the obscure Mr. Hyde, is required to extract the darker aspects of Jekyll’s moral ambiguity.
Edward Hyde, as the name foreshadows, serves as the nefarious part of man which Jekyll felt the need to “hide” -- as Utterson once quipped on his name: “Well, if he is Mr.

Hyde, I will be Mr. Seek” (chapter 2). While Jekyll is known as “large, well-made, smooth-face man of fifty with something of a slyish cast,” Hyde is commonly portrayed as a younger, more active man who is shorter than Jekyll, and depressed with an abnormality. However, Jekyll’s enjoyment of Hyde’s actions grants Hyde to grow in stature, and of the two men, Hyde is gradually securing the dominance over Jekyll. When Mr. Hyde is first encountered, he is seen running over a young girl, simply trampling her. Throughout the year, it is unknown to what Hyde has been doing, what atrocities he has committed and what degradations he has stooped to. In Jekyll’s Full Statement, he reveals that Hyde had been caged for so long that when he was let out, he came out roaring and one of his first actions was to savagely murder Sir Danvers Carew. Obviously, there has been numerous devilish actions from Hyde, because he has moved from being a creature who tramples on a child to where he commits an unprovoked murder. However, Hyde is only one half of the man that portrays as an ambiguous

character.
After testing his theory that in every man dwells a good and evil face, Dr.

Jekyll developed a formula that separated the two, turning him into a violent hoodlum, Mr. Hyde. He was aware from day one that he himself was “tenfold more wicked [and] evil.” It is unknown what horror Hyde has committed and what depravities he stoop to, but after a year of his turpitude, Jekyll had had enough of it. He vowed to give up the “liberty, the comparative youth, the light step, leaping impulses, and secret pleasures I had enjoyed in the disguise of Hyde,” the utmost satisfaction he received as Hyde is basically why Jekyll cannot put Hyde to rest. Although Jekyll did attempt for several months to lead a “life of such severity,” the bad in Jekyll was continually fighting for dispensation. Inhibited for so long, when Hyde finally surfaced, he “came out roaring.” Jekyll now has to vie with his “lust of evil,” with the “ugly face of iniquity” which peered into his ego. Hyde’s violent tendencies demonstrated throughout the novel offers a dichotomy with Dr. Jekyll’s reserved actions. While Jekyll is reasonable, Hyde is impetuous; while Jekyll is humble, Hyde is arrogant; throughout the time Jekyll was once an open socialite, Hyde was a standoffish hermit. Ultimately, Hyde is an intense portrayal of Jekyll’s restrained side and darker penchant. This is what, in the end, makes Henry Jekyll a morally ambiguous

character.
Throughout the novel, Henry Jekyll goes back and forth on being good versus being evil. This is what distracts readers from labeling him as solely good or solely evil. Classifying Jekyll as a morally ambiguous character is very self evident, since the complexities associated with his moral ambiguity is discussed throughout the novel. “It was on the moral side, and in my own person, that I learned to recognise the thorough and primitive duality of man; I saw that, of the two natures that contended in the field of my consciousness, even if I could rightly be said to be either, it was only because I was radically both; and from an early date… I had learned to dwell with pleasure, as a beloved daydream, on the thought of the separation of these elements” (chapter 10). In The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Henry Jekyll is an ambiguous character because he had two split identities that reflect as good and evil.