Good vs. Bad of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde” is a novella written by Robert Louis Stevenson, a Scottish author. Written and published 1886, this novella reflects on the individual, and societal behavior during the Victorian era. During the Victorian era people, were supposed to behave like a normal person. Certain behaviors were highly restricted for example, showing evil. Instead, they were expected to give respect for everyone. People who acted out against the norm during this period were usually sent to asylums because such behaviors were unacceptable. People in this society did just that, they behaved as if they were perfectly normal. This does not mean that their bad side did not exist. Instead, they hid their evil side from the public, letting all their anger out at home in private. Stevenson’s work is a great example for this time. Through one of his main characters, Dr. Jekyll, Stevenson portrays the two distinct behaviors many people reveal out in the public and in their private life. In the society, people with high status were usually well-known and were well respected. Dr. Jekyll was the perfect man in this story before everything turned around. Dr. Jekyll is a well-known doctor and scientist of his time. He has several doubts about people and their personalities, and believes that a person can separate the good and evil halves of their body, “…man is not truly one, but truly two” (106). Even though Dr. Jekyll is achieving all that he can, he is still not satisfied. Out in the public, Jekyll feels stress, he feels like something is missing in his life. Acting normal in the community is not something he truly wants to do – he wants to express himself and be different. With this, Jekyll finds a way ... ... middle of paper ... ...d selling illegal drugs. With the increasing rate of crime and temptations, the evil side of people will arise, causing them to do actions they would never have thought of doing. In order to protection his good reputation, Dr. Jekyll lived out his dark and evil desires through an alternate identity. In his creation of Mr. Hyde, Dr. Jekyll tries to separate the sides of his nature privately in order to satisfy his darker side without affecting his public reputation of his better half. Robert Stevenson portrays the two contradictory sides all human have within themselves, and when each side truly comes outs. He does this by interpreting the actions of his main character, Dr. Jekyll. • Stevenson creates Dr. Jekyll's dual personality to reveal the manifest differences between an individual's public and private personas, thereby revealing the sinister side of society.
The sense of conflict being created through disapproval portrays duality that the Victorians had at the period; it is almost as if they were in a dilemma and confusion in deciding which element of sanity to maintain. Stevenson wrote the story to articulate his idea of the duality of human nature, sharing the mixture good and evil that lies within every human being. In the novel Mr Hyde represents the evil part of a person and of Dr Jekyll.
Good and evil exist in everyone and any attempts to repress your darker nature can cause it to erupt. Dr. Jekyll was more evil than he wanted to admit to himself or any one before he even separated his soul. Born into a world of privilege and wanting to keep the impression of goodness and morality, Dr. Jekyll really just wanted to indulge in his darkest desires, choosing to hide behind his serum like a coward. However this became his fatal flaw and at the end of the day he could longer hide his true self.
Within the text of The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Robert Louis Stevenson portrays a complex power struggle between Dr. Jekyll, a respected individual within Victorian London society, and Mr. Hyde a villainous man tempted with criminal urges, fighting to take total control of their shared body. While Dr. Jekyll is shown to be well-liked by his colleagues, Mr. Hyde is openly disliked by the grand majority of those who encounter him, terrified of his frightful nature and cruel actions. Throughout Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Stevenson portrays the wealthy side of London, including Mr. Utterson and Dr. Jekyll, as respected and well-liked, while showing the impoverish side as either non-existent or cruel.
In this essay on the story of Jekyll and Hyde written by Robert Louis Stevenson I will try to unravel the true meaning of the book and get inside the characters in the story created by Stevenson. A story of a man battling with his double personality.
Stevenson’s most prominent character in the story is the mysterious Mr Hyde. Edward Hyde is introduced from the very first chapter when he tramples a young girl in the street, which brings the reader’s attention straight to his character. The reader will instantly know that this person is a very important part of this book and that he plays a key role in the story. This role is the one of a respectable old man named Dr Jekyll’s evil side or a ‘doppelganger’. This links in with the idea of duality. Dr Jekyll is described as being ‘handsome’, ‘well-made’ and ‘smooth-faced’. On the other hand, Mr Hyde is described as being ‘hardly human’, ‘pale and dwarfish’, giving of an impression of deformity and ‘so ugly that it brought out the sweat on (Mr Enfield) like running’! These words all go together to conjure up an image in the mind of an animal, beast or monster. During the novel...
“The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll And Mr Hyde” is a novella written in the Victorian era, more specifically in 1886 by Scottish author Robert Louis Stevenson. When the novella was first published it had caused a lot of public outrage as it clashed with many of the views regarding the duality of the soul and science itself. The audience can relate many of the themes of the story with Stevenson’s personal life. Due to the fact that Stevenson started out as a sick child, moving from hospital to hospital, and continued on that track as an adult, a lot of the medical influence of the story and the fact that Jekyll’s situation was described as an “fateful illness” is most likely due to Stevenson’s unfortunate and diseased-riddled life. Furthermore the author had been known to dabble in various drugs, this again can be linked to Jekyll’s desperate need and desire to give in to his darker side by changing into Mr Hyde.
...(43). The reader is draw to the wishes of Dr. Jekyll, each person wants to better themselves and each person finds themselves straying from the correct path in life. In trying to better mankind, Jekyll destroyed the decent man he was before.
disturbing. I am not a Jekyll didn't want to face his dark side and control it, he took the lead. easy way out but splitting his soul and having two separate lives both the extreme opposite of the other. Stevenson is trying to show the reader that this is the wrong way to do things because Jekyll dies and commits murder as well. Stevenson is telling us that we have to live.
The story takes place during the Victorian age, a time when there were only two categories of people: good people and bad people. There was no way that one man could be considered acceptable without suppressing his evil side almost entirely. The reason that Jekyll restrained his evil side for so long was because of this dichotomous Victorian society. Most people, including Jekyll’s friends, Lanyon and Utterson, are content to stay molded in this ideal. However, Dr. Jekyll soon became tired of this hypocritical mindset and stated that he “it was rather the exacting nature of my aspirations.
To begin with, Stevenson shows duality of human nature through society. During the Victorian era, there were two classes, trashy and wealthy. Dr. Jekyll comes from a wealthy family, so he is expected to be a proper gentleman. He wants to be taken seriously as a scientist, but also indulge in his darker passions.“...I learned to recognize the thorough and primitive duality/ of man; I saw that, of the two natures that contended in/ the field of my consciousness, even if I could rightly be said/ to be either, it was only because I was radically both..."(125).
In The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, the author Robert Louis Stevenson uses Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde to show the human duality. Everyone has a split personality, good and evil. Stevenson presents Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde as two separate characters, instead of just one. Dr. Jekyll symbolizes the human composite of a person while Mr. Hyde symbolizes the absolute evil. Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, who are indeed the same person, present good and evil throughout the novel.
Page, Norman. "The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson." Encyclopedia of the Novel. Eds. Paul Schellinger, Christopher Hudson, and Marijke Rijsberman. Chicago: Fitzroy Dearborn Publishers, 1998.
Robert Louis Stevenson’s Gothic 1886 novella The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde can be read in a number of ways through any number of different lenses, which makes for a versatile novella, and an interesting read for just about anyone. It also makes for a great novel with which to learn literary analysis. Using The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde one can see how Freudian psychoanalysis, though it had not been so developed at the time of the novel, can intersect with homosexual undertones, and how the manifestations of the repressed can come to light when the subject of homosexuality is not properly addressed. The novella was published in 1886, placing it in terms of history toward the end of the Victorian era. The Victorian era was well known for its repressive attitudes and high moral standards, and one was expected to live in such a certain way in the middle and upper classes.
Jekyll creates his alter ego, Mr. Hyde, as a means to introduce much more excitement and pleasure into his life, albeit with vastly different results. However, the critical difference between Dr. Jekyll’s and Algernon’s situations lies in Dr. Jekyll’s internal battle for dominance. Throughout the course of The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Dr. Jekyll experiences great difficulty in balancing the responsibilities that come with his highly respected social image with the dark desires that constantly haunt him, but ultimately Dr. Jekyll succumbs to the pressures set on him by society and to his urges, despite the potential risks they pose. In Dr. Jekyll’s full statement of the case he writes, “I knew well that I risked death;... But the temptation of a discovery so singular and profound, at last overcame the suggestions of alarm” (Strange Case 1710). This passage highlights Stevenson’s idea that one’s social image should come second to his or her personal desires. This is supported by how Dr. Jekyll had full knowledge that indulging his desires presented the possibility of death, yet he continued with the experiment anyway and deemed this risk to be “worth it,” leaving its potential effects absent from his mind. While Dr. Jekyll’s situation is an extreme example, the internal struggle for dominance he experiences shows the potential effects that bottling up one’s desires and having too much focus on social image can have on a
“Man is not truly one, but truly two”. Stevenson’s novella, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, addresses late Victorian anxieties and theories regarding psychology. Gall’s theories of lateralization, as well as the inklings of psychoanalysis, were beginning to emerge, bringing their influence into literature. The intrapsychic processes of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde illustrate an evident duality of persona throughout the novella, which was an evolving thought in the study of psychology at the time. The binate facets of the self are portrayed through recount of action and character description, and exist in the novella to exemplify the marred and non-equipotent nature of humanity as a whole. Dr. Jekyll embodies a caricature of a well respected