Beauty and the Beast (+ Audio CD)

Wolfsbane and potions aside (and Stevenson himself dismissed the device of the smoking potion as "so much hugger-mugger"), it is very simple: somewhere upon Mr. Hyde, Enfield sensed what Kipling called the Mark of the Beast. 8 Utterson has information of his own with which Enfield's tale neatly dovetails (God, the construction of Stevenson's novel is beautiful; it ticks smoothly away like a well-made watch). He has custody of Jekyll's will and knows that Jekyll's heir is Edward Hyde. He also knows that the door Enfield has pointed out stands at the back of Jekyll's townhouse. A bit of a swerve off the main road here . Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde was published a good three decades before the ideas of Sigmund Freud would begin to surface, but in the first two sections of Stevenson's novella the author gives us a startlingly apt metaphor for Freud's idea of the conscious and subconscious minds-or, to be more specific, the contrast between superego and id. Here is one large block of buildings. On Jekyll's side, the side presented to the public eye, it seems a lovely, graceful building, inhabited by one of London's most respected physicians ...»