Assuming you clicked on this article because you haven’t read “The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde”, it’s a gothic psychological thriller about the most common allegory, ´good and evil.´

I’m going to take Edward Hyde´s side in this article, and without spoiling too much, I want to convince you to read it. Jekyll is considered the protagonist, but we read the story through the eyes of Mr. Utterson, a stoic lawyer. He’s plagued by a house in the neighborhood, which has no windows, and only one door, which is never unlocked. On a stroll down the streets of London, in the 1800s, Dr. Utterson and his very good friend, Mr. Enfield, are discussing the strange occurrences that had happened around the house. About a week or so ago, a murder had taken place on the street and Mr. Utterson needed to find out who lived there. As if by chance, he strolls upon Mr. Hyde, a good friend of Henry Jekyll. He enters the house when Utterson attempts to befriend the man.

Like Erik Destler (from Phantom of The Opera), Hyde is a broken man who is demonized, not only because he kills people, but also because of his disability. Hyde is physically disabled, being described as having some sort of deformation without looking all too different in the face, but hunched over and sickly looking. Utterson believes he might have cancer, but there’s a very high possibility that it’s not only that, but he’s also in an altered state from the bad state of his mental health, and how it goes ignored until the bitter end.

Hyde isn’t only a friend of Jekyll, but a separate personality from an experiment that had gone wrong, a manifestation of the deepest parts of Jekyll’s mind. Utterson, of course, doesn’t know this, but once he is alone to sit with his thoughts, he realizes how strange it was that Dr. Jekyll had already written his will; he’s only in his early fifties. Even stranger, he writes it while a serial killer is loose in London, a serial killer that is scarily similar to Mr. Hyde.

Hyde is everything that Jekyll wants to be and everything he hides. Hyde is everything Jekyll resents. Since we end up discovering that this is indeed fact, then is Jekyll the true killer ? And if Hyde displays non-heteronormative behaviors, does that mean that Jekyll is not straight either ? Also, if Hyde is physically and mentally disabled, wouldn’t that inherently mean Jekyll was masking ? Looking at any question in regards to Hyde just creates more questions for Jekyll, which makes you wonder why Hyde is the one who’s always blamed for the murders. Of course he killed them, but as the host of the body, wouldn’t it be Jekyll’s responsibility to get help ? To tell others that his alter was having homicidal behaviors. It’s all extremely intriguing to play with the idea of it.