Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde Creative Writing Short MasterClass: Analysis GCSE English Literature Bolton English Tutor/Tuition.’I stole.’

I stole through the corridors, a stranger in my own house; and coming to my room, I saw for the first time the appearance of Edward Hyde.

Look how well-chosen the verb, ‘stole’ is in this extract. It is suggestive of criminality, furtive behaviour and even a frisson of pleasure that the regularity of home has become defamiliarised. Notice the repetition of the proprietorial pronoun ‘my’ which makes it clear that this sentence is concerned with territory and possession: Yet who is really possessing whom? There is a slipperiness syntactically between the speaker and his secret object, ‘Edward Hyde, ‘ mirroring the way the narrator can slip between his competing and supposedly opposing, public and private selves. Perhaps the sentence is a metaphor for desire and for the shifting, secret sexuality of Jekyll?

I wonder too about the reference to ‘corridors’ which appeals to a Gothic sensibility and maybe can be read as an existential crisis too? Think in terms of the mental torment of the ‘respectable’ Jekyll secretly desiring all sorts of behaviours that he knows will ruin him if discovered and made public. Hence this sentence can operate as both a vivid description of the revelation of Jekyll encountering his outlet, Hyde, as well as being a metaphorical description of sexual repression yielding to the expression of desire. The sentence could be a code for the acknowledgement of homosexuality. ‘Coming to my room,’ has connotations of arrival and relief, even of release from the inhibiting public persona of the Victorian Gentleman. What we wonder is really ‘my room’? Space has connotations of privacy as well as liberty; possibly of a sexual kind surely?

In any case, the deployment of the first person, ostensibly confessional narrator, Dr Jekyll who is recollecting his first, thrillingly dangerous ‘meeting’ with his doppelganger, Edward Hyde, reads as a revelation. When we read his depiction of himself as a ‘stranger in my own house’ we might expect pathos emanating from the horror of being alienated in one’s own home, yet this is palpably not the case. The pace of the sentence makes the revelation of the meeting seem fated, preordained and certainly something momentous. The reader recognises the competing duality of the energies invested in this recollection. The speaker knows his meeting proved catastrophic morally, yet we can detect the pride Jekyll takes in discovering his Hyde self. It feels as if he is unveiling his own creation, his own monster, which is himself. We sense the theatricality of Jekyll introducing us to Hyde, who has in reality been ‘hiding’ there all along. A few seconds later we arrive at his revelatory, ‘leap of welcome’ and our suspicions are confirmed. We return to the sentence and notice the staginess of the announcement at the end. The punctuation engineers the momentum of the dramatic unveiling and there he is: the monster unveiled, Jekyll unmasked as Hyde who has been lurking there, behind Jekyll’s eyes all along.