The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson

The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson

Good and bad. Pure and evil. Right and wrong. Joy and despair. These

are all themes Robert Louis Stevenson addresses in his novel, “The

strange case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde”

Robert Louis Stevenson presents the view that no human has the

capacity to be completely good or completely bad. Instead human nature

is shown to exhibit both good and bad with dynamic results.

Human nature encourages us to feel and experience a range of emotions.

Happiness, sadness, love and hate are all natural feeling that helps

to shape our personality. To help the elderly, to feed the poor, to

shelter the homeless, to nurture a baby are all elements of human

nature and incorporated into the way humans interact within society.

The basic human emotions that drive people are love and hate, within

these two come other emotions, sympathy, forgivness, revenge and

jealousy. Hyde’s life revolves around the emotions within hate

Hyde’s actions are very evil. Hyde’s first victim was an innocent

child “He trampled calmly over the body and left her screaming” By

making a child the first victim Stevenson emphasizes the moral

awfulness from the beginning of the story.

Hyde’s life revolves around the emotions within hate. He has no

knowledge of Love. This prevents him from feeling any regret for the

things that he does “he is perfectly cool and made no resistance,” he

takes great pleasure in his actions, suggesting perhaps that he does

know Love, but this love is derived from Hate, he loves his hateful

emotions and wicked actions. He enjoys satisfying his needs. Jekyll

knows both of these raw emotions and this combination brings a new

emotion; guilt which is pow...

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...ual which he may no be, the police officer

may have seemed like an evil person because he showed expressions of

joy on hearing about the death of sir Danves Carew, the others could

believe that he had committed, the crime because of his action. The

maid/servant because the police officers thought she looked evil the

moment they saw her “ She had an evil face smoothed by hyprocisy;”

this shows a persons appearance can be deceiving, although she looked

evil and seemed to be a bad person because she was delighted that Mr

Hyde’s in trouble that doesn’t mean she is.

Stevenson held a strong view on good and conduct and believed that

everyone is capable of evil. He also believed that evil is just as

much part of the respectable Dr Jekyll. At the time when this book was

published in 1885, the story/novel was successful, people found the

fact extremely shocking.