Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde

Don’t you hate those people with split personalities? One of the key themes in The Island of Dr. Moreau and The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde is the duality of man. What the authors suggests through them is that every man has two different personalities, one good and one evil. If the evil side is dormant for too long it comes out with a vengeance. In Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Jekyll tries separating his good self from his evil, thus creating Mr. Hyde. When Jekyll tries to fix what he has done and control his transformations, he can't find the ingredients and permanently lives within the body of Mr. Hyde. In The Island of Dr. Moreau, Dr. Moreau creates humans out of animals but doesn't want their animal side shown anymore. Thus he forces laws upon them as to do things like standing up straight. In the novels The Island of Dr. Moreau and The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde the authors use science to explore the duality of man.
Hyde is a man with no consequence, who indulges in his desires unlike everyone else. “With ape like fury, he was trampling his victim underfoot and hailing down a storm of blows”(Stevenson 15). Jekyll creates Hyde because he was looking into the nature of man. More specifically, he was trying to understand why man does what he does. Jekyll as the doctor could see the darker side of human nature, and tried to recognize positive aspects, increased strength, stamina, passion, but didn’t understand that these are inseparable from man's evil nature. He discovered that man's evil nature is an inseparable part of man.
Dr. Moreau takes the flaws of man and tries using science to perfect them. Pendrick isn’t a man of science therefore he can’t fully understand Dr. Moreau’s experiments. “The creatures I had seen were not men, had never been men. They were animals - humanised animals - triumphs of vivisection”(H.G. Wells 95). Dr. Moreau takes animals and humans and replaces certain parts of the animal with human parts, this causes the animals to turn into beast men. “Not to go on all- fours; that is law. Are we not Men?” This is one of the laws set by Dr. Moreau to make sure the beast men are more human than animal.
In reality there is no Mr. Hyde, Dr. Jekyll creates a poison to change his appearence and he fools himself into thinking there is a seprate person, Mr. Hyde. Hyde is not a separate personality living in the same body as Jekyll. Hyde is just Jekyll, having transformed his body into something unrecognizable, acting on unspecified urges that would be unseemly for someone of his age and social standing in London. Jekyll did not create a potion to remove the evil parts of his nature. He made a potion that allowed him to express his urges without feeling guilty and without any consequences tarnishing his name. That’s also why he names his alter ego “Hyde,” because Hyde is a disguise, to be worn and discarded like a cloak. It’s important that it’s Doctor Jekyll and Mister Hyde. Jekyll is a respected professor. Hyde is a lower class person. Hyde is also much younger than Jekyll. Both of these facts allow Jekyll as Hyde to get away with a lot worse behavior. Crucially, we never get Hyde’s point of view. Because it does not exist. Even when he looks like Hyde, Jekyll always thinks of himself as Jekyll. In his testament that ends Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Jekyll always talks about his time in Hyde’s body using “I” statements; I looked in the mirror and saw Hyde, the pleasures I sought in my disguise, I awoke to see I had the hand of Hyde. Even when describing the murder of Sir Danvers, the worst thing he ever does as Hyde, Jekyll says “I mauled the unresisting body”(49) and then, “I saw my life to be forfeit”(49). That is, he both takes responsibility for the murder and the pleasure it brought him and has a very Jekyll like fear of losing the good life he has. He is always Jekyll, no matter what he looks like, or how he’s behaving.