How is evil presented in Jekyll and Hyde?

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How is evil presented in Jekyll and Hyde?

The book Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde was written by Robert Louis Stevenson in 1886, it was based on a dream that Stevenson had about the hypocritical Victorian society that he was a part of. However this dream was just the basis for the book. The main inspiration for the book came from all around him. The Victorian society had very strong morals; it was very clear to them what was right and what was wrong. The Victorians also had a very wide culture because of the Empire ruled by Queen Victoria. This wide culture and power gave the Victorians a sense of power which made them feel that all other types of people were inferior. They felt that they had to maintain this sense of power by acting, according to their society, like good men and women all should act.

  The majority of people regularly visited church and obeyed by the rules set in the bible. Religion was a very large and influential part of Victorian society. During this time fifty percent of children died before the age of six. Religion was one way for people to deal with this high mortality rate. People told themselves that the people they had lost had gone to a place that was better than earth, a place without pain or suffering. All Christians believed that to get into this ‘better place’ they had to earn the right to be there during their life on earth. This is where the protestant work ethic came from. The protestant hard working ethic was present in most people.

  However this image of the perfect society ruled by goodness and well being was only what most people made themselves believe in order to convince themselves that they were leading the perfect life. There was, underneath this show, a side of Victorian society that would have been viewed by an outsider as very absurd and appalling.

  There was a huge underclass of beggars and starving people. Child exploitation, thievery and drunkenness were extremely common and prostitution was a booming trade. In the novel Stevenson created the characters Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde to represent the two sides of Victorian life. Dr Jekyll represents the side that is presented on the outside; he is a gentleman that is well respected and looked up to. Mr Hyde represents the darker more evil side of Victorian life, the gambling, prostitution and child exploitation among other things. Just as Dr Jekyll is ashamed of Mr Hyde and tries to conceal him, Victorian life is ashamed of its bad side. The social behaviour of people was very strictly bound by the conventions of morality, this drove people to live dual lives as they could not express or discharge their inner basic needs that had been built up by living by these strict conventions. This is what happens to Dr Jekyll in the novel. He creates his alter ego to release this build up as he cannot express his feelings and emotions as himself. This made people hypocrites; they taught their children and told other people to live in a good honest way and to always obey the bibles teachings; then they went out and totally contradicted their teaching with their actions by fighting, gambling, drinking alcohol, visiting prostitutes and getting involved with the underworld. Stevenson picked up on this hypocritical side of society and was appalled by it. To him it seemed that it was almost as if people would live a good life based on ethics and morals during the day and during the night they would transform their lifestyles to a life of pure evil, gluttony and smut driven by greed and the human need for evil. From the book I believe it was Stevenson’s personal opinion that all mankind should live a balanced life of good and evil, without this balance there would always be a yearning or desire for the other side. This urge to fulfil the other side of life would eventually become unbearable and cause corruption and hypocrisy in all people. You can see this in the novel when Dr Jekyll creates Mr Hyde to fulfil this yearning for evil

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  The evil mood of the novel was also achieved by the use of setting and scenery, Stevenson portrays many different parts of the scenery in a way that presents them as evil. During the novel Stevenson uses pathetic fallacy to create different moods and to give a specific sections of the novel different feelings. Pathetic fallacy is attributing human feelings to an object. “A fog rolled over the city in the small hours,” this gives a mysterious and evil feeling because the reader subconsciously associates fog and the darkness with not being able to see what is coming; ...

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