The Duality of Human Nature

             Hyde- is a classic mystery story that centers upon a conception of humanity as dual in nature. This central theme does not fully emerge until the last chapter when the relationship between Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde is revealed.
             Dr. Henry Jekyll is a well - respected doctor in his community. He is a good friend of Dr. Hastie Lanyon, a fellow physician, and Mr. Gabriel John Utterson, a lawyer. Dr. Jekyll is an apparently prosperous man, well established in the community, and known for his decency and charitable works. Since his youth, however, he has secretly engaged in unspecified corrupt behaviour. Jekyll finds this dark side a burden and undertakes experiments intended to separate his good and evil selves from one another. He asserts that "With every day, and from both sides of my intelligence, the moral and the intellectual, I thus drew steadily nearer to that truth, by whose partial discovery I have been doomed to such a dreadful shipwreck: that man is not truly one, but truly two."" He imagines the human soul as the battleground for an "angel- and a "fiend,"" each struggling for mastery. .
             Through these experiments, Dr. Jekyll creates a potion, which he hoped would separate and purify each element, but only succeeds in bringing his dark side, Mr. Hyde, into being. Mr. Edward Hyde is a strange, repugnant man who looks faintly pre-human. Mr. Hyde is violent and cruel, and everyone who sees him describes him as ugly and deformed "yet no one can say exactly why. While explaining Mr. Hyde to Utterson, Mr. Enfeild asserts, "He is not easy to describe. There is something wrong with his appearance; something displeasing, something downright detestable. I never saw a man I so disliked, and yet I scarce know why. He must be deformed somewhere; he gives a strong feeling of deformity, although I couldn't specify the point. He's an extraordinary-looking man, and yet I really can name nothing out of the way.