3. He
put the glass to his lips, and drank at one gulp. A cry followed;
he reeled, staggered, clutched at the table and held on, staring
with injected eyes, gasping with open mouth; and as I looked there
came, I thought, a change—he seemed to swell—his face became suddenly
black and the features seemed to melt and alter—and at the next
moment, I had sprung to my feet and leaped back against the wall,
my arm raised to shield me from that prodigy, my mind submerged in
terror.
“O God!” I screamed, and “O God!”
again and again; for there before my eyes—pale and shaken, and half fainting,
and groping before him with his hands, like a man restored from
death—there stood Henry Jekyll!
This quotation appears in Chapter 9,
“Dr. Lanyon’s Narrative,” as Lanyon describes the moment when Hyde,
drinking the potion whose ingredients Lanyon procured from Jekyll’s
laboratory, transforms himself back into Jekyll. Lanyon, who earlier
ridicules Jekyll’s experiments as “unscientific balderdash," now
sees the proof of Jekyll’s success. The sight so horrifies him that
he dies shortly after this scene. The transformation constitutes
the climactic moment in the story, when all the questions about
Jekyll’s relationship to Hyde suddenly come to a resolution.
Stevenson heightens the effect of his climax by describing
the scene in intensely vivid language. When he depicts Hyde as “staring with
injected eyes” and suggests the dreadful contortions of his features
as they “melt and alter," he superbly evokes the ghastliness of the
moment of transformation. As this passage emphasizes, the true horror
of Jekyll and Hyde’s secret is not that they are two sides of the same
person, each persona able to assert itself at will, but that each is
actually trapped within the grip of the other, fighting for dominance.
The transformation process appears fittingly violent and ravaging,
causing the metamorphosing body to “reel," “stagger," and “gasp.”
Indeed, by this point in the novel, Jekyll is losing ground to Hyde,
and, correspondingly, emerges “half fainting," as if “restored from
death."
