i read this in a gorgeous old leather-bound illustrated edition from my local library that was so pristine i'm pretty sure only a handful of people had checked it out before me. check your local libraries!!!

anyways i always forget that this is a sci-fi story and not straight-up a case of split personality. i didn't have a great time reading this, it's much drier than i remember. i do have trouble reading robert louis stevenson in particular - treasure island is the only book to completely and utterly filter me, i didn't even try reading it past the first chapter when it was assigned reading in 8th grade - so i might just have brainrot when it comes to fully appreciating victorian-era novels.

i read this for the psychological allegory. this is a story that you can likely get something completely different from depending on what your life circumstances are when you read it and it gave me much to think about. i was probably unconsciously drawn to it if i'm being honest.

i copied a shitton of quotes from this into my commonplace book and this is the defining part of the story to me.

Had I approached my discovery in a more noble spirit, had I risked the experiment while under the empire of generous or pious aspirations, all must have been otherwise, and from these agonies of death and birth, I had come forth an angel instead of a fiend. The drug had no discriminating action; it was neither diabolical nor divine; it but shook the doors of the prisonhouse of my disposition; and like the captives of Philippi, that which stood within ran forth. At that time my virtue slumbered; my evil, kept awake by ambition, was alert and swift to seize the occasion; and the thing that was projected was Edward Hyde. Hence, although I had now two characters as well as two appearances, one was wholly evil, and the other was still the old Henry Jekyll, that incongruous compound of whose reformation and improvement I had already learned to despair. The movement was thus wholly toward the worse.

in his effort to split his personality, he ends up hating his flawed "true self", ironically over-identifying with his shadow in his attempts to repress it.

dr jekyll tries to play god with himself and this is what leads to him wholly becoming hyde. he thinks he alone can control and judge his behavior and the split just leads to total indulgence and worse pain than if he had integrated his shadow. note that his spontaneous transformation into hyde begins when he looks down on people he considers beneath him.

After all, I reflected, I was like my neighbours; and then I smiled, comparing myself with other men, comparing my active good-will with the lazy cruelty of their neglect. And at the very moment of that vainglorious thought, a qualm came over me, a horrid nausea and the most deadly shuddering. These passed away, and left me faint; and then as in its turn faintness subsided, I began to be aware of a change in the temper of my thoughts, a greater boldness, a contempt of danger, a solution of the bonds of obligation. I looked down; my clothes hung formlessly on my shrunken limbs; the hand that lay on my knee was corded and hairy. I was once more Edward Hyde.