The Suicide of Hyde

Although Achille Mbembe discusses power and death on a global scale, when reading “Necropolitics” I was most drawn to his discussions of slavery and suicide. Paraphrasing Gilroy, Mbembe states that in the suicide of slaves, death “can be represented as agency. For death is precisely that from and over which I have power“ (39). Applying this idea of “agency through suicide” in Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Hyde’s suicide becomes his way of resisting a society that wishes to contain and control him and of achieving a humanity that everyone believes him (and perhaps all slaves) incapable of.

In my first blogpost, I brought up the idea that we can think of Hyde, at least in the beginning, as a creature in slavery. He was brought into existence to solely serve the purposes and pleasures of another being, his “master” Jekyll.  Although he eventually overcomes that master, or subsumes him actually, he is still subject/slave to the Victorian social and moral codes of the era he lives in.  As Mbembe says, to exist as a slave is to suffer “expulsion from humanity altogether” (Mbembe 21). And we see this de-humanization of Hyde throughout the novella: He’s described as “ape-like,” (Stevenson 46) a creature of “deformity” (41) whose face is imprinted with “Satan’s signature” (42), a “fiend” (82). Lastly, most damning of all, he is “a child of Hell” that contains “nothing human, [because] nothing live[s] in [Hyde] but fear and hatred” (90). In essence, he’s relegated to animalistic slavery because he doesn’t have a dual nature that Jekyll insists is a fundamental part of humanity (78-79).

But these representations, while easy to buy into, do not paint Hyde in his fullness. In fact, he is not only capable of hatred, but love as well, even if it is only a love of excess and experience. He has a passionate attachment to being in the world, and he fears only one thing—the end of experience, death itself.  Jekyll’s locus of control rests solely on the fact that “[Hyde]fears [his] power to cut him off by suicide” (92). Is it supremely poignant or ironic then, that it is Hyde, not Jekyll, who commits the suicide? I would argue for poignancy because, for Hyde, it’s the greater sacrifice; it is he whose “love of life is wonderful” (92). Jekyll thinks nothing more of his end but that “I am careless” (93). Whether poignant or ironic, it’s utterly important that it is Hyde who kills himself because it demonstrates his capacity for courage which helps him gain something most people would never ascribe to him—his humanity.

Jekyll wonders, near the end of narrative, “Will Hyde die upon the scaffold? or will he find the courage to release himself at that last moment?” (93). The answer is “Yes, he does find the courage” and refuses to let himself be taken by Utterson and Poole because to do so would be to remain in a state of slavery, now serving a new master, the Victorian sense of morality and social justice system. In his suicide, Hyde faces the one thing he feared to do (dying) and he does it, not through necessity but by choice. He becomes a being of both hatred and love, a being of fear and courage. He gains at least a measure of duality (a state of being that Jekyll argues is necessary to be labeled as human), thus transcending his previous existence as an animalistic creature of servitude.  And he proves his humanity and removes himself from his state of slavery only because he dies and by his own hands[1].  Whether it is freedom from slavery, or from the prevailing view of his in-humanness, "death and freedom are irrevocably interwoven” in the suicide of Hyde (Mbembe 38).[2]

Word Count: 629

(Please read footnote 2 if you would like to see a paragraph that I was going to insert after this ending, but didn’t due to word count constraints. I think the post works as it is, but I noticed an interesting pattern in Mbembe and wanted to somehow include it but couldn’t. Consider it a choose your own ending if you will)

Mbembe, Achille. "Necropolitics." Trans. Libby Meintjes. Public Culture 15.1 (2003): 11-40.

Stevenson, Robert Louis, and Martin A. Danahay. The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Peterborough, Ont.: Broadview, 2005. Print.

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[1] There are critics who have argued that Jekyll ultimately kills Hyde (an argument I do not agree with as I find no textual evidence for such a claim). A lot of movie adaptations of the novella have Utterson shoot Hyde (rather than Hyde committing suicide).. I ask here, what violence is done to Hyde’s burgeoning humanity when both critics and adapters of this text alike take Hyde’s suicide away from him? 

[2] And here I end my argument, firmly centered upon the death of the individual subject, refusing to expand my argument to the global proportions of Mbembe’s necropolitics. Why, you ask? I'll tell you. The last section of the essay (before the conclusion that is), is the first time where Mbembe discusses the deaths of individuals.  And in this section, he does something quite startling that he doesn’t do anywhere else. He inserts first-person pronouns into his writing and ends up referencing , more than once, his own death. At the very least, he uses the language of his own death to make points about death and agency. What this means is that rather than being merely the author, Mbembe becomes the person who is being killed (which makes his actions a form of literary suicide since he is writing, or producing, his own death)  (36, 37, 39). Mbembe can’t help but make death personal and individualized. Thus, I would say that as much as Mbembe talks about contemporary global warfare and the destruction of thousands of people, what he most interestingly also ends up proving (intentional or not) is, that of all the deaths that happen in this world, the most important death, because it is the only one we can understand or experience, is our own.