Hands

Authors note: This is a response and creative visual to “Henry Jekyll’s Full Statement of the Case” in Jekyll and Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson. Throughout this chapter the motif of hands was apparent. Here are my thoughts reflecting this topic, I hope you enjoy…

Through the darkest of nights and the peaceful of mornings, our hands are beside us aiding in every chore. These same hands that work the miracles of life are capable of profound evil. Every wrinkle, every scratch holds a story of the past, one that will forever be enslaved to them. The wrongs our hands have faced and the rights our hands have done will forever be memories engraved within each fine line. After examining his hands Jekyll remarks “I was still so engaged when, in one of my more wakeful moments, my eyes fell upon my hand. Now the hand of Henry Jekyll (as you have often remarked) was professional in shape and size: it was large, firm, white and comely. But the hand which I now saw, clearly enough in the yellow light of a mid- London morning, lying half shut on the bed clothes, was lean, corded, knuckly, of a dusky pallor and a thickly shaded with a swart growth of hair. It was the hand of Edward Hyde” (112). It is inevitable that the soft, smooth hands that do justice transform into the cracked, dry hands that carry out evil doings.