The Similarities Of The Strange Case Of Dr. Jekyll And Mr. Hyde

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What if the person you seen in the mirror began to transform into ways you do not understand? What if you were split with another person in the same body but with two separate personalities and memories? Imagine the feeling of not knowing the person who looks back at you in the mirror. Imagine the feeling of being a strange to yourself. Published in London, in 1886, the Gothic fiction story, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson, unfolds events about a man named Dr. Jekyll experiencing transformations into Mr. Hyde, a smaller man with strange deformed features. Dr. Jekyll is a well-liked doctor with many respected positions as a member of society with morals and decency who engages himself in charity work. In …show more content…

Myers noticed certain similarities between Jekyll and Hyde. Jekyll gave Mr. Utterson, the lawyer, a letter than he was uncertain on what to do with. The letter was written in an odd, upright hand and was signed by Hyde. The clerk retrieved the letter and examined it. “Well, sir,” returned the clerk, “there’s a rather singular resemblance; the two hands are in many points identical: only different sloped.” (Stevenson 93). Myers wrote Stevenson concerning the similarity of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde’s handwriting and proposing the idea of a loss of consciousness at the point of transformation. “The subwaking self is devoid of all personal characteristics, it is both personal and impersonal... it assumes indifferently all kinds of character and of person, for it has no individuality. In Contrast to those who viewed such unconscious processes as pathological and at best subservient to consciousness, Myers found that ‘the unconscious mentation flowed on intercurrently with the conscious.” (Robertson 114). This could result in the difference of the slope in the two handwritings. Each person has an individual handwriting; therefore, the similarity of the comparison between the two suggest that it was written by the same …show more content…

Myers’s proposing ideas and cases support the idea of these two characters sharing the same human body. Hyde and Jekyll is one person; however, with split personalities. The scientific study wasn’t as common then for split personalities then; however, cases of multiplex personalities were rising to be noticed. Stevenson may have based his characters off of his interest in research, which results in his characters being an account. Jekyll and Hyde could be a possible, imagined account of subjects that experience multiplex personality

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