Our Screaming Secrets

Author’s note: I wanted to do something a little different than a paragraph for the last response on Jekyll and Hyde, as we have now finished the novella, so I’m going to do a poem/combination of words to create something unique in describing the evil inside the human race.

Our defiant nature marks us
Bull’s-eye
Our fury fumes within us
Steaming
Our pride rages beyond us
Heartless

We walk on our earth like it’s coal
Black
We forget the importance of life like it’s oxygen
Dead
We wear our hearts on our sleeves like it’s cyclical
Forbidden

Our anger overtakes our minds
Hatred
Our insanity clouds our judgment
Terror
Our cold spirits proclaim our malevolence
Shattering

The Space Between Connection

Author’s note: While reading through the chapters “The Last Night” and “Dr. Lanyon’s narrative” my eyes were opened to the biblical motifs and illusions so I decided that I’d spend this writing response emphasizing the way these correlations add to the duality and evil of this novella.

Deserted. Seclusion. Isolation. What better words to describe the life of Jesus? While His feet walked the Earth, he was alone and rebuked. The motif of seclusion was repeated many times throughout this novella, I believe, because Hyde/Jekyll felt the same way. “They” tried to achieve the highest honor in man’s eyes yet they were left as the outcast just as Jesus was. Just as an outcast is separated from the world, so is Heaven and Hell. Stevenson talked about “communication separately” and a “spacious cellar.”  This separation and space showed the lapse between good and evil; Heaven and Hell. Evil is just a distortion of good and biblically this is sin. That sin could be lying, blasphemy, lust, greed, pride, the list could go on forever but Stevenson stopped that list at distortion – lies and blasphemies. Jesus was accused of both and it was this that got Him killed; like the heart, soul, and mind of Hyde. Ultimately, the author used these biblical separations, although connections too, to emphasize the separation between good and evil and to for the illusion of how far Hyde was from good.

A Peek Through the Clouds

Author's note: I had a hard time figuring out what to write for this writing response so I began looking through my codes and noticed all the times I coded something about the fog/weather/sky. Hence, this became my writing topic for the day.

Particularly in chapter 4, I noticed the mention of “fog” which got me thinking on what the purpose of this could be. Fog has the ability to cloud judgment; to disguise knowledge and cause mystery. Not only did I see this as a description of the mind but also as a foreshadowing of the plot to come. Specifically, “the fog would be quite broken up” allowed me to understand that soon, a new opportunity or doorway would open but “with its muddy ways” and “swirling wreaths” I could come to the idea that the effect and idea of the unknown would soon fill the thoughts of the characters. Not only did the repetition of fog bring me to these conclusions, but the motif of doorways and windows, did as well. As the “touch of that terror” began to set in this chapter, “the fog lifted a little” and the doorways were cracked open and it was through these beautifully crafted motifs that I found the plot weaved in and throughout the top coat that the average would just glace at and admire.

Jekyll and Hyde

Author’s Note: Our Honors English class is reading Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and while reading and analyzing the first few chapters I began to realize how much it seemed the author wanted to get across the face of evil. How evil acts, looks, lies and deceives us and allows us to take a second look to the wickedness we’re born into.

Something that I've noticed Stevenson doing throughout these first three chapters, is incorporate the motif of coldness, seclusion and darkness. It was through these themes that I realized the face of evil and how it is hidden, cold-blooded, and mysterious. At the bottom of page 39, it speaks of a “black winter morning” which I took as a secluded cold time of year, when the grass and plants go dormant and the blackness being the dark shadows that fill the course of the day never seeming to catch a glimpse of sunlight.  There’s no warmth spoken here because evil itself has no affection, tenderness to its core and a black winter describing the morning is a harsh reality to our dreams. Again on page 41, the cold-hearted spirit of malevolence and sin a “black, sneering coolness…like Satan” caught my eye. It just so clearly depicts the way that Satan’s lies sneer at us like hungry lions in the shadows and their cold souls won’t rest until they’ve bitten into ours capturing our spirits and turning our hearts.  These are only but a few of the occurrences that these motif(s) were mentioned but it is such a heavy background to lay behind this story that they way they are peppered throughout, heeds great effect on the reader, and to me.