preview

Similarities Between Jekyll And Lanyon

Decent Essays

Scared to death. It’s a hyperbole, it’s an expression, but for Robert Louis Stevenson’s character Dr. Lanyon, it’s a reality. In Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, two of his characters, Dr. Henry Jekyll and Dr. Hattie Lanyon are old friends, but after a fight nearly ten years ago, they are now just friendly. What were they fighting about? Their opposing views on science, on life, and on what could possibly be true or even possible. The specific views the two doctors have that conflict are scientific medicine, metaphysics, the basic nature of evil itself, and man’s duality. “They have only differed on some point of science,” Utterson thinks after hearing Lanyon discuss Jekyll, but there is more than just …show more content…

Jekyll believes that medicine can be used transcendentally, while Lanyon believes he is out of his mind. Jekyll in the form of Hyde states rather spiritedly that Lanyon has “denied the virtue of transcendental medicine,” meaning that Lanyon does not believe in the ways of mystical medicine. Jekyll though, believes that he has found a great use for medicine, being he “compound a drug by which (his spirit’s) powers should be dethroned from their supremacy, and a second form and countenance substituted.” One could imply that after discussing his practices with his longtime friend and fellow scientist, it lead to the termination of their friendship. It is known that the two discussed Jekyll’s views as Jekyll states “you who have so long been bound to the most narrow and material views, you who have denied the virtue of transcendental medicine, you who have derided your superiors--behold,” before transforming in front of Lanyon. Utterson isn’t too keen on Lanyon after expressing “but a hide-bound pedant for all that; an ignorant, blatant pedant. I was never more disappointed in any man than Lanyon.” Jekyll thinks the mystical and magical is possible, as shown when he writes “…direction of my scientific studies, which led wholly towards the mystic and the transcendental….” This area of study leads to Jekyll’s ultimate drug, a transforming stimulant to make him someone knew, a truly changed man. Lanyon doesn’t like to think about metaphysics, and when he comes face to …show more content…

Jekyll believes that there can be two of a person, and brings it to life right before Lanyon’s eyes. Lanyon cannot believe what he has seen, implying that he does not believe that there can be two of any person, and is scared to literal death. Jekyll believes “…that man is not truly one, but truly two. …It was on the moral side, and in my own person, that I learned to recognise the thorough and primitive duality of man; I saw that, of the two natures that contended in the field of my consciousness, even if I could rightly be said to be either, it was only because I was radically both; and from an early date, even before the course of my scientific discoveries had begun to suggest the most naked possibility of such a miracle, I had learned to dwell with pleasure, as a beloved daydream, on the thought of the separation of these elements.” These ideas were Jekyll’s complete scientific beliefs, his entire life’s work, and Lanyon referred to them as “unscientific balderdash.” Jekyll had spent much of his life studying how man is not one, but two. He states that “All human beings, as we meet them, are commingled out of good and evil,” He believed that every man had an evil and a good, but is that truly the

Get Access