Under Construction Journal Issue 6.1 UNDER CONSTRUCTION JOURNAL 6.1 | Page 38

“There must be something else said the perplexed gentleman. ‘There is something more, if I could
find a name for it. God bless me, the man seems hardly human! Something troglodytic, shall we
say? Or can it be the story of Dr Fell? Or is this the mere radiance of a foul soul that thus transpires
through, and transfigures, its clay continent.” (Stevenson 2015, 43)
This repeated, almost frantic questioning is stereotypical of a detective narrative full stop. new sentence.
Utterson is trying to figure out the essence of Hyde but his conventional manner of acting marks him out
as an ordinary or traditional detective. However, we must remember that Utterson is not the only
character in the novel who is detecting Hyde. Jekyll himself is interested in Hyde, or more accurately the
side of himself that Hyde represents:
“The evil side of my nature, to which I had now transferred the stamping efficacy, was less robust
and less developed than the good of which I had just disposed… And hence, as I think, it came
about that Edward Hyde was so much smaller, slighter and younger than Henry Jekyll.”
(Stevenson, 2015, 78)
Therefore, Jekyll forms theories about Hyde, and in that act, being that he is really forming theories about
himself, undertakes self-detection.
While we can code Jekyll’s experiment of the “duality of man” (Stevenson, 2015, 76) in a scientific
manner, we can also code it as a self-reflexive (that is, interior) act of detection. Jekyll reminds us that he
is the subject of his own test which explores his theory “that man is not truly one, but truly two”
(Stevenson, 2015, 76), which undermines objectivity. Therefore, what Jekyll is doing is examining and
detecting his own morality. He is discovering the state of his soul:
“If each, I told myself, could be housed in separate identities, life would be relieved of all that was
unbearable; the unjust might go his way, delivered from the aspirations and remorse of his more
uptight twin; and the just could walk steadfastly and securely on his upward path, doing the good
things in which he found his pleasure, and no longer exposed to disgrace and penitence by the
hands of this extraneous evil.” (Stevenson 2015, 76)
Jekyll has therefore discovered through his self-reflexive detection that his soul contains ‘extraneous evil’
which needs to be contained. He has found a way to look inwards and physically split his soul in an attempt
to accept the two parts of himself. We know from the conclusion of the novella that Hyde takes his villainy
too far which is evidenced in Hyde growing. Even Jekyll “stood at times aghast before the acts of Edward
Hyde” (Stevenson, 2015, 81): the novel therefore brings forth questions as to why this self-reflexive
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