Social Anxieties In Dr Jekyll And Mr Hyde

Just as a mirror reflects one’s face, the horror genre is a physical representation of how fear is portrayed to discuss the social anxieties of one’s time period. Representations of fear have continued to vary in accordance to reflect a particular time period’s social anxieties. Robin Wood, in the essay American Nightmare: Essays on the Horror Film, articulates how the ‘true subject of the horror genre is the struggle for recognition of all that our civilisation represses or oppresses.’ He contended that the way in which any given horror narrative determines this conflict, uncovers its ideological orientation, and further, that most of these compositions will be conservative; stifling desires inside of the self and disavowing it by projecting

Stevenson truly voices the anxieties and fears of the late Victorian age, and such can be seen throughout his novella, Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde in the late eighteenth century. Stevenson identifies the double standard of society that he explores through the two characters, Henry Jekyll and Edward Hyde. Peri Bradley, in Monstrous Makeovers: Transforming 'Monsters’ into Beauty Queens, affirms that ‘each culture and each era creates its own monsters that embody and express the fears and anxieties specific to the environment of that particular generation.’ Within his novel, Stevenson alludes towards the concealment of vice which in turn creates an environment of hypocrisy, leading towards the cultivation of monstrosity. Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde truly captures the Victorian era in the way that it has configured the monster and reconstructed the setting of the narrative. Traditional Gothic conventions, such as the use of distant and foreign locations, have been dismissed as Stevenson replaces it with the dark geography of contemporary London; which in turn, literally and metaphorically reinforces the duality in the psychology of late Victorian Britain. An equally significant aspect is Stevenson’s narrative style, which dismisses the omniscient narrator prevalent in the Gothic genre; this allows him to employ conventions involving a scientific nature which explores monstrosity of a different kind. Through this, Stevenson explores evil as an internal element that lies at the heart of human nature itself. The evolution of monstrosity has therefore evolved since Polidori’s construction of the monster; Stevenson highlights society’s creation of its own monsters in its own likeness whilst