The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde

14/06/2024

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Here is a complicated word but one very commonly used in Scottish literature: Antisyzygy. It is a word useful in understanding an aspect of Scottish history, Scottish culture and Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. The term refers to the duelling polarities in a single entity and “In Scottish Literature: Character and Influence, G. Gregory Smith "labelled the energy of contradiction in the writing of his compatriots from the fifteenth to the eighteenth century ‘the Caledonian Antisyzygy’, thereby furnishing Hugh MacDiarmid with a creative principle and a war cry for his Scottish Renaissance movement of the 1920s.”  (The Poetry Ireland Review)

Some of these polarities include the divisions between Highlanders and Lowlanders, Protestants and Catholics, the British and the Scottish. But of the three, the most clear potential crisis resides in the split between Scottish and British. One can be a Highlander but not a Lowlander without difficulty, and a Protestant without at all being a Catholic, but to be Scottish is to be British, at least until another referendum over self-determination. One term is subsumed into the other as Catholicism is not absorbed into Protestantism. If Englishness has often been synonymous with Britishness, and the two often used interchangeably, nobody means Scottish when they say British. When asked if you are Scottish or British, what do you say? Both?

We can see here the beginnings of a split personality, and who better than Robert Louis Stevenson to bring out this division in hyperbolic form? Stevenson was born in Edinburgh in 1850, the child of devout Presbyterians and whose grandfather was a minister in the Church of Scotland. Presbyterianism was a reformed version of Protestanism, but not a separation from it — as Catholics are very distinct from Protestants and thus his upbringing offers a variation of the Scottish/British schism. Not all Protestants are Presbyterians but all Presbyterians are Protestants. For a brief period as a teenager, Stevenson was a Covenanter (a sub-branch of Presbyterianism) but soon adopted more liberal views and while he studied law he never practised it. Much of his time was spent travelling, partly to find places that could alleviate his poor health. As a boy, he was ill until eleven, and throughout his life had a sickly constitution that showed in his thin, stringy frame. Places like the south of France, Davos and Samoa were used as an attempt to counter his ill-health, but they allowed too Stevenson to expand on the narrow binaries of Scottish consciousness. He also married an American, a divorcee with a child, whom he wed in the US. 

Stevenson is well-loved for books like Treasure Island and Kidnapped,  and some wonder whether Stevenson was too keen on being loved. “Too much of Stevenson’s work is marred for the modern reader by its desolate and ingratiating charm”, Jonathan Raban says, introducing The Amateur Immigrant. But for Stevenson all that mattered were “truth to the fact and good spirit in the treatment.” (The Art of Writing) And yet our judgements are based on two things: “first upon the original preferences of our soul; but second, upon the mass of testimony to the nature of God, man, and the universe which reaches us in divers manners, from without.” (The Art of Writing) This notion of manners which are sociable and states spiritual can be found in perhaps Stevenson’s finally best-known and most respected work, Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, where we can also see the problem of the split personality at its most pronounced. There have been many books dealing with splits and divisions within the psyche, and Smith wouldn’t have utilised the term antisyzygy if it weren’t pertinent to a number in Scotland - none more so than James Hogg’s Confessions of a Justified Sinner. One of its many descendants has been Emma Tennant’s The Bad Sister and she saw her book as well as many other Scottish novels were about, “seeing doubles everywhere, that it was a Caledonian malady.” (Guardian) 

Heck, even the famous sixties Scottish anti-psychiatrist’s most well-known book is called The Divided Self, which opens with the claim, “the term schizoid refers to an individual the totality of whose experience is split in two main ways: in the first place, there is a rent in his relationship with his world and, in the second, there is a disruption of his relation with himself.” But there are plenty examples from elsewhere, from Dostoevsky’s The Double, Nabokov’s Despair and Palahniuk’s Fight Club. Yet maybe no book is more synonymous with the self-divided than Stevenson’s novel. Here is a doctor who seems to be under the strange influence of a terrible man named Mr Hyde, and the narrative position focuses on Gabriel Utterson who wants to find out what has been going on. The story is presented as a detective thriller but is a victim of its own success: few reading the book won’t be well aware that Hyde and Jekyll are the same man, and that the doctor was experimenting with a new serum. 

Yet the novel is set up as a mystery and Utterson the man investigating, even if the book is now more famous for its exploration of hubristic science over the thriller aspects. It is closer to Frankenstein than to the work of Stevenson’s fellow Edinburgh contemporary Arthur Conan Doyle. Sherlock Holmes novels are all about working out the plot, while the priority in Stevenson’s novel is the problem of this need to play God. However, this notion of playing God has a particular bent here, taking into account the significance of religion in Stevenson’s life and its presence in Scottish culture. The novel may be set in London but it has more than a whiff of the Scottish capital about it. As Alastair Braidwood says: it is “surely spiritually based in Edinburgh.” (Bottle Imp) We see it when Jekyll wonders whether he should get rid of Hyde altogether: “strange as my circumstances were, the terms of this debate are as old and commonplace as man; much the same inducements and alarms cast the die for any tempted and trembling sinner…”. We are once again in the mind of a justified sinner; a Presbyterian thought. 

Thus the book also and more importantly emphasises the split-personality that comes out of the experimental, as if what makes Stevenson’s work singular isn’t that it is a cautionary tale about science but also about regulating principles within one’s life. When Jekyll thinks: “all things seemed to point to this: that I was slowly losing hold of my original and better self, and becoming slowly incorporated with my second and worse” we see the Scottish divide once again. Mary Shelley’s purpose wasn’t to show the hidden side of a personality but to play up the progress technology can make and the difficulties people have in the face of a monster. Shelley’s book, like Stevenson’s, has a framing device, and it too has a murder that is misinterpreted, but while in Frankenstein Victor is guilty because of what someone else does (namely his creation) which leads to a woman’s execution for a crime the monster committed, in Stevenson’s novel, the murderer and the doctor are one and the same: a split personality rather than separate entities. It thus fits neatly into the question of the antisyzygy in Scottish culture and will be central to our exploration today.

© Tony McKibbin

Tony McKibbin Tony McKibbin

The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde

Here is a complicated word but one very commonly used in Scottish literature: Antisyzygy. It is a word useful in understanding an aspect of Scottish history, Scottish culture and Robert Louis Stevenson's The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. The term refers to the duelling polarities in a single entity and "In Scottish Literature: Character and Influence, G. Gregory Smith labelled the energy of contradiction in the writing of his compatriots from the fifteenth to the eighteenth century 'the Caledonian Antisyzygy', thereby furnishing Hugh MacDiarmid with a creative principle and a war cry for his Scottish Renaissance movement of the 1920s." (The Poetry Ireland Review)

Some of these polarities include the divisions between Highlanders and Lowlanders, Protestants and Catholics, the British and the Scottish. But of the three, the most clear potential crisis resides in the split between Scottish and British. One can be a Highlander but not a Lowlander without difficulty, and a Protestant without at all being a Catholic, but to be Scottish is to be British, at least until another referendum over self-determination. One term is subsumed into the other as Catholicism is not absorbed into Protestantism. If Englishness has often been synonymous with Britishness, and the two often used interchangeably, nobody means Scottish when they say British. When asked if you are Scottish or British, what do you say? Both?

We can see here the beginnings of a split personality, and who better than Robert Louis Stevenson to bring out this division in hyperbolic form? Stevenson was born in Edinburgh in 1850, the child of devout Presbyterians and whose grandfather was a minister in the Church of Scotland. Presbyterianism was a reformed version of Protestanism, but not a separation from it as Catholics are very distinct from Protestants and thus his upbringing offers a variation of the Scottish/British schism. Not all Protestants are Presbyterians but all Presbyterians are Protestants. For a brief period as a teenager, Stevenson was a Covenanter (a sub-branch of Presbyterianism) but soon adopted more liberal views and while he studied law he never practised it. Much of his time was spent travelling, partly to find places that could alleviate his poor health. As a boy, he was ill until eleven, and throughout his life had a sickly constitution that showed in his thin, stringy frame. Places like the south of France, Davos and Samoa were used as an attempt to counter his ill-health, but they allowed too Stevenson to expand on the narrow binaries of Scottish consciousness. He also married an American, a divorcee with a child, whom he wed in the US.

Stevenson is well-loved for books like Treasure Island and Kidnapped, and some wonder whether Stevenson was too keen on being loved. "Too much of Stevenson's work is marred for the modern reader by its desolate and ingratiating charm", Jonathan Raban says, introducing The Amateur Immigrant. But for Stevenson all that mattered were "truth to the fact and good spirit in the treatment." (The Art of Writing) And yet our judgements are based on two things: "first upon the original preferences of our soul; but second, upon the mass of testimony to the nature of God, man, and the universe which reaches us in divers manners, from without." (The Art of Writing) This notion of manners which are sociable and states spiritual can be found in perhaps Stevenson's finally best-known and most respected work, Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, where we can also see the problem of the split personality at its most pronounced. There have been many books dealing with splits and divisions within the psyche, and Smith wouldn't have utilised the term antisyzygy if it weren't pertinent to a number in Scotland - none more so than James Hogg's Confessions of a Justified Sinner. One of its many descendants has been Emma Tennant's The Bad Sister and she saw her book as well as many other Scottish novels were about, "seeing doubles everywhere, that it was a Caledonian malady." (Guardian)

Heck, even the famous sixties Scottish anti-psychiatrist's most well-known book is called The Divided Self, which opens with the claim, "the term schizoid refers to an individual the totality of whose experience is split in two main ways: in the first place, there is a rent in his relationship with his world and, in the second, there is a disruption of his relation with himself." But there are plenty examples from elsewhere, from Dostoevsky's The Double, Nabokov's Despair and Palahniuk's Fight Club. Yet maybe no book is more synonymous with the self-divided than Stevenson's novel. Here is a doctor who seems to be under the strange influence of a terrible man named Mr Hyde, and the narrative position focuses on Gabriel Utterson who wants to find out what has been going on. The story is presented as a detective thriller but is a victim of its own success: few reading the book won't be well aware that Hyde and Jekyll are the same man, and that the doctor was experimenting with a new serum.

Yet the novel is set up as a mystery and Utterson the man investigating, even if the book is now more famous for its exploration of hubristic science over the thriller aspects. It is closer to Frankenstein than to the work of Stevenson's fellow Edinburgh contemporary Arthur Conan Doyle. Sherlock Holmes novels are all about working out the plot, while the priority in Stevenson's novel is the problem of this need to play God. However, this notion of playing God has a particular bent here, taking into account the significance of religion in Stevenson's life and its presence in Scottish culture. The novel may be set in London but it has more than a whiff of the Scottish capital about it. As Alastair Braidwood says: it is "surely spiritually based in Edinburgh." (Bottle Imp) We see it when Jekyll wonders whether he should get rid of Hyde altogether: "strange as my circumstances were, the terms of this debate are as old and commonplace as man; much the same inducements and alarms cast the die for any tempted and trembling sinner...". We are once again in the mind of a justified sinner; a Presbyterian thought.

Thus the book also and more importantly emphasises the split-personality that comes out of the experimental, as if what makes Stevenson's work singular isn't that it is a cautionary tale about science but also about regulating principles within one's life. When Jekyll thinks: "all things seemed to point to this: that I was slowly losing hold of my original and better self, and becoming slowly incorporated with my second and worse" we see the Scottish divide once again. Mary Shelley's purpose wasn't to show the hidden side of a personality but to play up the progress technology can make and the difficulties people have in the face of a monster. Shelley's book, like Stevenson's, has a framing device, and it too has a murder that is misinterpreted, but while in Frankenstein Victor is guilty because of what someone else does (namely his creation) which leads to a woman's execution for a crime the monster committed, in Stevenson's novel, the murderer and the doctor are one and the same: a split personality rather than separate entities. It thus fits neatly into the question of the antisyzygy in Scottish culture and will be central to our exploration today.


© Tony McKibbin