The Voice is the Voice of Jekyll, and the Hands are the Hands of Hyde: The Role of Religion in Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde

Abstract

This article challenges the predominantly secular and scientific reading of Jekyll and Hyde, making a case for a new reading of Stevenson’s novel—a theological reading—through an analysis of the text of the novel, through reading the novel in connection with other works of literature wherein horror is also linked to the “Heilige” [“the holy”] (in works such as Mann’s The Magic Mountain, Philip Roth’s “Eli, The Fanatic,” and José Saramago’s Memorial do Convento), and through a consideration of the biblical story of Jacob and Esau and James Hogg’s The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner as key intertexts to Jekyll and Hyde. It elucidates the nexus between the gothic and the religious and explicates the connections between the biblical text and Stevenson’s text. Some scholars have read Jekyll and Hyde through a theological lens; some have argued that it is a Pauline tale rooted in the Romans. These scholars have noted only “passing allusions” to the Old Testament in Jekyll and Hyde, and chose to focus on the novel’s parallels to Paul’s teachings in Romans, or to Stevenson’s allusions to other sections of the New Testament. This article, while in agreement with the notion that Jekyll and Hyde should be read theologically, departs from this position and argues that Jekyll and Hyde is as much grounded in the Old Testament as it is in the New. While this article does not deny that Romans and Pauline theology was a critical source for Stevenson in his construction of the character of Henry Jekyll, it argues that Stevenson’s references to the Old Testament are no mere passing allusions, but are in fact essential to the novel’s theopoetical project; accordingly, this article further argues that Genesis is just as much a key intertext for Jekyll and Hyde as is Romans. This article engages seriously with the novel’s Old Testament allusions and argues that the literary-theological task Stevenson set for himself was a Victorian-era retelling of the Jacob and Esau tale from Genesis—and that in Stevenson’s version of this tale, the biblical drama of the Jacob and Esau conflict becomes situated within the psyche of a singular Janus-faced soul.