““The story is told in fragmentary narratives written by a Doctor and a Lawyer, culminating in Jekyll’s own full statement of the case. As well as creating a sense of mystery as each narrator witnesses a series of inexplicable events that is only finally explained by Jekyll’s own posthumous statement of his experiments, this structure is also symbolic of the fragmentary personality that Hyde’s existence reveals. For Jekyll is careful to note that Hyde is not simply his own ‘evil’ alter ego – rather he is just one facet of Jekyll’s personality, increased to the maximum. If Hyde is completely evil, it does not necessarily follow that Jekyll is entirely good – he always had the capacity for evil within him, but has repressed it in order to live a socially respectable life. It is this capacity for evil, lying beneath the socially acceptable face of society, that Hyde represents. This has made the novel open to all kinds of intriguing readings that suggest that the Jekyll/Hyde split is symbolic of the divergent experiences of ‘respectable’ Victorian society and their less respectable ‘others’ – a commentary on the hypocrisy of a society that condones certain kinds of behaviour so long as the mask of respectability is maintained. This subtext means that the novel fits easily into the Gothic genre, which is typically concerned with the chaotic forces lying beneath the pretence of civilisation.””
