![]() It isn’t about split personalities or “dissociative identity disorder.” It is about a man’s struggle with the conflicting powers of good and evil within his one personality, and the tragedy that takes place when he experiments with a drug to separate the two. The popular idea of what this story is about is also quite out of order. What I never realized until now, on finally reading the story as Stevenson wrote it, is how different his novella is from any and all of the dramatizations, abridgements, contextualizations, and “for dummies” versions on the market. (or Ms.) Hyde gets into, always complicates things for Dr. I have seen and read several of these re-tellings, which share little in common except the essential concept of a man who, by taking a potion, transforms himself into another person-in most versions, an identity compounded of all the dark, evil parts of himself. Next to A Christmas Carol, it has probably seen more adaptations for stage and film than any other work of English literature, including parodies and re-imaginings that (ha, ha) transform the original story almost out of recognition. There are even more versions of Stevenson’s story than variants of its title. It’s not as though the printer needs to save ink it’s a very short book, a novella really. Sometimes it is even given simply as Jekyll & Hyde. Sometimes it is published with a “The” at the beginning. The title of this book varies from one edition to another. ![]()
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