4/26/99



        In the interests of accuracy, referring here to Prof. Rice's use of
and commentary on Robert Louis Stevenson's narrative depiction of that
unhappy doppelganger,to state that Dr. Jekyll "was tranformed into the
infamous Mr. Hyde" is to shift the blame to some vague and unnamed power
and therefore to misread the "moral" of that novella.  The passive voice
construction aside,
Dr.Jekyll was himself the initiating culprit as well as the victim of that
deliberate slide into self-destruction.
         He began, he hinself tells us, by pondering too long on "those
provinces of good and ill which divide and compound man's dual nature. . .
. With every day, and from both sides of my intelligence, the moral and the
intellectual," he confesses, "I thus drew steadily necessary to that truth,
by whose partial discovery I have been doomed to such a dreadful shipwreck:
that man is not truly one, but truly twoI say two because the state of my
own knowledge does not pass beyond that point.
Others will follow, others will outstrip me on the same lines; and I hazard
to the guess that man will be ultimately known for a mere polity of
multifarious, incongruous, and independent denizens."
        Being a "scientist" and physician, he naturally has his own
laboratory, in which he begins experimenting on himself and becomes
inexorably addicted to a concoction of his own making--which ultimately
leads to his doom, to thje distress of those around him.

        I, for one, do not sense,first,that this is the way Prof. Rice
reads this novel or his memory of it--for many, it HAS been a long time
since they read it); or second, that (to quote him) "Supporters of the
implementation plan
we are asked to vote on tomorrow have resurrected this imagery--i.e., his
own misreading--in their arguments."

        Again, I for one share many of Prof. Rice's concerns; but I DO hate
to see a worthy piece of fiction distorted for a purpose far other than an
aesthetic and enlightening one.


        tcw









t.c. ware