ad 209: color / mo + we 1:00–3:40 / room 2400d fall2012 20 oliver oroeger@uic.edu Novel Synopsis Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde is a novella written by the Scottish author Robert LouisStevenson and first published in 1886. It is about a London lawyer who investigates strange occurrences between his old friend, Dr Henry Jekyll, and the misanthropic Edward Hyde. The work is known for its vivid portrayal of a split personality, split in the sense that within the same person there is both an apparently good and an evil personality each being quite distinct from each other; in mainstream culture the very phrase “Jekyll and Hyde” has come to mean a person who is vastly different in moral character from one situation to the next. This is different from multiple personality disorder where the different personalities do not necessarily differ in any moral sense. Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde was an immediate success and one of Stevenson’s best-selling works. Stage adaptations began in Boston and London within a year of its publication and it has gone on to inspire scores of major film and stage performances. Plot summary:Richard Enfield tells a gruesome tale of assault to Mr Utterson. The tale describes a sinister figure named Mr. Hyde who tramples a young girl, disappears into a door on the street, and re-emerges to pay off her relatives with a cheque signed by a respectable gentleman for 100 pounds. Because both Utterson and Enfield disapprove of gossip, they agree to speak no further of the matter. It happens, however, that one of Utterson’s clients and close friends, Dr. Henry Jekyll, has written a will transferring all of his property to this same Mr. Hyde. Soon, Utterson begins having dreams in which a faceless figure stalks through a nightmarish version of London.
Puzzled, the lawyer visits Jekyll and their mutual friend Dr. Hastie Lanyon to try to learn more. Lanyon reports that he no longer sees much of Jekyll, since they had a dispute over the course of Jekyll’s research, which Lanyon calls “unscientific balderdash”. Curious, Uttersonstakes out a building that Hyde visits, which, it turns out, is a filthy shack attached to the back of Jekyll’s home. Encountering Hyde, Utterson is amazed by how undefinably ugly the man seems, as if deformed, though Utterson cannot say exactly how this is so. Much to Utterson’s surprise, Hyde willingly offers Utterson his address. Jekyll tells Utterson not to concern himself with the matter of Hyde. ad 209: color / mo + we 1:00–3:40 / room 2400d fall2012 21 oliver oroeger@uic.edu
A year passes uneventfully. One night, a servant girl witnesses Hyde beat to death without cause an old man named Sir Danvers Carew, who is a member of Parliament and a client of Utterson. The police contact Utterson who suspects Hyde as the murderer. He leads the officers to Hyde’s apartment, feeling a sense of foreboding amid the eerie weather (the morning is dark and wreathed in fog). When they arrive at the apartment, the murderer has vanished, but they find half of the murder weapon left behind a door. The weapon is a cane given to Jekyll by Utterson. Shortly thereafter, Utterson again visits Jekyll, who now claims to have ended all relations with Hyde. Jekyll shows Utterson a note, allegedly written to Jekyll by Hyde, apologizing for the trouble he has caused him and saying goodbye. That night, however, Utterson’s clerk points out that Hyde’s handwriting bears a remarkable similarity to Jekyll’s own.
For a few months, Jekyll acts especially friendly and sociable, as if a weight has been lifted from his shoulders. Later, Jekyll suddenly begins to refuse visitors, and Lanyon dies of a shock he received in connection with Jekyll. Before dying, Lanyon gives Utterson a letter, with instructions that he not open it until after Jekyll’s death. Utterson goes out walking with Enfield, and they see Jekyll at a window of his laboratory; the three men begin to converse, but a look of horror comes over Jekyll’s face, and he slams the window and disappears. Soon afterward, Jekyll’s butler, Mr. Poole, visits Utterson in a state of desperation and explains that Jekyll has secluded himself in his laboratory for several weeks, and that now the voice that comes from the room sounds nothing like the doctor’s. Utterson and Poole travel to Jekyll’s house through empty, windswept, sinister streets; once there, they find the servants huddled together in fear. After arguing for a time, the two of them resolve to break into Jekyll’s labora-tory. Inside, they find the body of Hyde, wearing Jekyll’s clothes and apparently dead by sui-cide. They find also a letter from Jekyll to Utterson promising to explain everything.
Utterson takes the document home, where first he reads Lanyon’s letter and then Jekyll’s. The first reveals that Lanyon’s deterioration and eventual death were caused by the shock of seeing Mr. Hyde drink a potion and, as a result of doing so, metamorphose into Dr. Jekyll. The sec-ond letter explains that Jekyll, seeking to separate his good side from his darker impulses, dis-covered a way to transform himself periodically into a creature free of conscience, this being Mr. Hyde. The transformation was incomplete, however, in that it created a second, evil identity, but did not make the first identity purely good. At first, Jekyll reports, he delighted in becoming Hyde and rejoiced in the moral freedom that the creature possessed. Eventually, however, he found that he was turning into Hyde involuntarily in his sleep, even without tak-ing the potion.
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At this point, Jekyll resolved to cease becoming Hyde. One night, however, the urge gripped him too strongly, and after the transformation he immediately rushed out and violently killed Sir Danvers Carew. Horrified, Jekyll tried more adamantly to stop the transformations, and for a time he proved successful by engaging in philanthropic work. At a park, he considers how good person he has become as a result of his deeds (in comparison to others), believing himself redeemed. But before he completes his line of thought, he looks down and realizes that he had suddenly once again become Mr. Hyde. This was the first time that an involun-tary metamorphosis had happened while he was awake.
Far from his laboratory and hunted by the police as a murderer, Hyde needed Lanyon’s help to get his potions and become Jekyll again; when he undertook the transformation in Lanyon’s presence, the shock of the sight instigated Lanyon’s deterioration and death. Meanwhile, Jekyll returned to his home, only to find himself ever more helpless and trapped as the transformations increased in frequency and necessitated even larger doses of potion in order to reverse themselves. It was the onset of one of these spontaneous metamorphoses that caused Jekyll to slam his laboratory window shut in the middle of his conversation with Enfield and Utterson. Eventually, the potion began to run out, and Jekyll was unable to find a necessary ingredient to make more. His ability to change back from Hyde into Jekyll slowly vanished. Jekyll writes that even as he composes his letter he knows that he will soon become Hyde permanently, and he wonders if Hyde will face execution for his crimes or choose to kill himself. Jekyll notes that, in either case, the end of his letter marks the end of the life of Dr. Jekyll. With these words, both the document and the novel come to a close.
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