Dualism And Sadism In The Strange Case Of Dr. Jeyll And Mr. Hyde

Friedrich Nietzsche once said, “Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster.” The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde is a novella that tells the story of a troubled man, Dr.Jekyll. In the novella, The Strange Case of Dr.Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Robert Louis Stevenson presents symbols such as the door and character names along with conveying a theme of duality regarding good and evil. Stevenson uses the door as a major symbol to hide the evil acts and secrets of Dr. Jekyll. In the critical essay, Woman and Sadism in Strange Case of Dr.Jekyll and Mr.Hyde “City in a Nightmare,” Charles Campbell analyzes the door by noting, “It is not the theatre door of his own repression, which would involve an

Hyde to support the universal theory that all humans have a natural duality, and there is good and evil in everything. In the critical essay, Robert Louis Stevenson’s Jekyll and Hyde and the Double Brain Anne Stiles further criticizes characteristics of the novella when she presents, “Like these scientists, Stevenson explores the potentially heretical possibility that human beings are inherently double, even in a healthy state.According to Jekyll’s narration, both he and Hyde existed before the discovery of the salt that enables them to lead separate lives” (Stiles 4). Jekyll is aware of his desire for the wicked and has been searching for a way to separate the good from the evil. Like drugs ease the pain of addicts, the salt that Jekyll adds to the potion eases the stress of the duality in his own mind. He abuses his body in order to escape the chains of his own mind and not feel the guilt of wanting to be malicious. Whether healthy or mentally ill, Jekyll is a pronoun example of the inherent duality in human minds. Additionally, Stevenson incorporates an extension of duality that is good v evil. In Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Thomason discloses, “Stevenson argues that the novel is ‘a symbolic portrayal of the dual nature of man, with the moral inverted: not to impress us by the victory of good or evil, but to warn us of the strength and ultimate triumph of evil over good once sin is suffered to enter human habitation’” (Thomason 9). It is evident that Dr. Jekyll is a prestige example that humans do not know their own strength mentally, nor do they know their own strength physically. In Jekyll’s upright attempt to separate the good from the evil, evil prevailed over good. Evil, Edward Hyde, had the highest victory over good, Henry Jekyll, in being fatal to both