Perils of Addiction Exposed in Stevenson's Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde

Perils of Addiction Exposed in Stevenson's Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde

The values, standards, and expectations of the upper-middle class in the 19th-century Victorian society were conservative and strict; the pressure to earn prestige and achieve upward mobility in social rank required men to sustain an image of propriety and respectability in public. These obligations often created a longing to divert from the personality facades they had to keep, and from the ideal behavior and polite manners that were expected of bourgeois society men. Some would fulfill their wishes by leading a secret double life that allowed them to temporarily escape from societal responsibilities and restrictions. In more private settings, men would partake in sinful pleasures, such as alcohol or drug abuse, and they were free to behave more loosely than they could under the rigid public persona they were forced to hold in order to protect their reputations.

In the introduction to the Oxford edition of Robert Louis Stevenson's Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Emma Letley describes the desire to escape from the "Calvinistic confines of nineteenth-century bourgeois" society, and relates that Mr. Stevenson himself "would use a benign doubleness to deal with the pressures of high bourgeois existence" and assumed an alias to become one of the "heavy-drinking, convivial, blasphemous iconoclasts. . ." in order to "full-bodiedly enjoy those pleasures denied to [him] and Dr. Jekyll." (Introduction, x). With the knowledge that Stevenson resorted to alcohol in order to escape the pressures and demands that fell upon him due to his social class, it is interesting to examine his novella, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, as a commentary about the evils of addiction to alc...

... middle of paper ...

...hat he can finally recognize the severity of his weakness to his drug. Dr. Jekyll's plight, therefore, could be an exploration of the destructive behavior brought on by addiction, and an underlying moral message is embedded in Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde - the implication that addiction will inevitably lead to evilness and the destruction of productive lives.

Works Cited

Showalter, Elaine. "The Not So Strange Addiction of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde." The Haunted Mind in Victorian Literature. Eds. Elton E. Smith and Robert Haas. Landham, Maryland: The Scarecrow Press, Inc., 1999.

Stevenson, Robert Louis. The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. First Vintage Classics Edition. New York: Vintage Books, 1991.

Veeder, William. Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde after One Hundred Years. Eds. William Veeder and Gordon Hirsch. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988.