Dr Jekyll And Mr Hyde Analysis

Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde was immediately popular among readers, due to its terrifying introduction of “double-identities,” upon its release in 1886. While there has been much debate over Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde as being representative of two separate bodies or, alternatively, two beings within one body, the resolution of two separate identities is clear. Mr. Hyde’s identity is the socially marginalized, racially charged, and devolved physical embodiment of Dr. Jekyll’s fear of growing class separation and “biological degeneration and racial decline, sparked by Darwin’s evolutionary theory” (Sborgi 149).

The year 1859 saw the publication of Charles Darwin’s surprise success, On the Origin of Species,

Dr. Jekyll is, immediately, a character the audience recognizes as well-educated, socially respected, and nearly beyond reproach – the culmination of Victorian idealism. However revered, Dr. Jekyll is at unease with himself and states that, “a certain impatient gaiety of disposition” has long haunted him, dividing his social perception from personal feeling (55). “In order to absolve himself of guilt and resolve his existential crisis, Jekyll turns to the outer limits of science” (De Ciccio 11). In his laboratory, Jekyll devises an elixir that separates his dual-nature and creates the nefarious Mr. Hyde to act upon his primal, animalistic desires “for his own pleasures” (Stevenson

With the publication of Darwin’s Origin shortly before Stevenson’s novella, the world-stage had been set to pseudo-scientifically reason fearful social issues. This predominant social fear was not of an integration of “lesser” and “greater” races, but of a regression of a “greater” race into a “lesser” one. It is hard to argue if Stevenson’s novella would have been as popular among “white” literary masses if Hyde would not have been compared to a dark, violent, and degenerate race. The overnight success of Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde as Gothic Terror is attributed, in part, to a marrying of Science Fiction and the Age of Enlightenment by preying on the newly formed evolutionary fears that appeared to carry scientific