–In the Eyes of the Beholder–

“He had his death-warrant written legibly upon his face. The rosy man had grown pale; his flesh had fallen away; he was visibly balder and older; and yet it was not so much these tokens of a swift physical decay that arrested the lawyers notice, as a look in the eye and quality of manner that seemed to testify to some deep-seated terror of the mind” (23).

Poole is going to see Dr. Lanyon in his office and he notices physical differences that lead him somewhere deeper in recognition. He eyes up Dr. Lanyon and looks past what is obvious to him and begins to find things arbitrary to even Dr. Lanyon’s knowledge on the basis of identity and being. It is this power of ‘soul searching’ that allows Poole to derive such a heartfelt, detailed conclusion from a mere look past physical attributes, into Dr. Lanyon’s eyes and ultimately into his personal sensory systems.

There is an interesting theme of identity in this passage, derived through atypical methodology using personal detective skills, where one looks past the being and into the human. This “deep seated terror of the mind” was not found through a personal endeavor of searching, instead it as found through the use of an outsider: Poole. This idea is fascinating; where personal feeling and identity is sometimes beyond the eyes of the beholder.

Dr. Lanyon’s identity, surfaced and solidified by the searching of Poole demonstrates the overall idea that sometimes one cannot see what his/her surrounding human beings can. At the end of the novel, this epiphany arises, where one discovers that Jekyll and Hyde are the same person, and this quote is important to this epiphany of identity. Jekyll and Hyde are more than less understood as one, yet clearly encompass two separate identities. This is a help or hinder question: could the uniqueness of an identity crisis such as this be a tragedy or a blessing to the quality of life or the scale of shame? AND what is it about the “quality of manner” that requires so much searching?