What have you learnt about the darker side of human nature from 'Doctor Jekyll and Mr Hyde,' and how does Stevenson create a feeling of evil?

Authors Avatar

Florence Swann                       Page  

What have you learnt about the darker side of human nature from ‘Doctor Jekyll and Mr Hyde,’ and how does Stevenson create a feeling of evil?

‘Doctor Jekyll and Mr Hyde’ is famous novel written in 1886. Stevenson became fascinated with the lowlife of Edinburgh when he attended university there, and the novel deals with the idea that ‘evil is potentially more powerful than good.’

As a young boy, Stevenson suffered from ill health and spent most of his early years in his bedroom where Alison Cunningham would labour to teach him the difference between the pursuit of life of good or evil, the latter course leading inevitably to the everlasting torments of hell. She made sure that Stevenson was not spared details of these torments, causing him to suffer terrifying nightmares which he often recalled in his memories and which afflicted him throughout his life. She would try and convince him, ‘there are but two camps in the world- one of the mundane and vicious..The other on the high road to the gallows and the bottomless pit.’

It was from one of his adult nightmares that ‘Doctor Jekyll and Mr Hyde’ grew a story that would argue there is a light and dark side in all mankind, in the words of Jekyll, ‘man is not truly one, but truly two.’

Jekyll had a strong fascination with a dual personality of a man. Jekyll is a well respected Physician and Chemist who is ‘well made, smooth faced man of fifty with something of a stylish cast, perhaps but every mark of capacity and kindness.’ This illustrated that even the most well respected man is captured by the temptation of evil, and tampers with this.

Mr Utterson is an important figure in the novel to highlight how evil will affect people. Although Utterson appears ‘singularly dull and ‘dreary,’ he is portrayed as an honourable man, ‘tolerant to others,’ with which ‘something eminately human beaconed from his eye.’ This is supported in the book by his firm and moral belief, flailing away from the temptations to open the letter from Jekyll, ‘but no sooner was Mr Utterson alone that night than he locked the note into his safe, where it reposed from that time forward,’ believing that he has done good for Jekyll. Most of the novel is revealed through his eyes, shown on the fist few pages of the novel where a long description of him is provided for the reader to understand his character. Mr Utterson is portrayed as a normal human, who has not tampered with good and evil, and yet still remains to become a good person. Stevenson has deliberately written the book so that the reader explores the events with Utterson and therefore is able to make the same predictions and erroneous conclusions as him on the topics of evil. From this normal point of view, Stevenson has enabled the audience to accurately judge the evil parts of Hyde throughout the novel.

Jekyll is very aware that when people meet Hyde and therefore encounter pure evil, they immediately shrink away from it. Even characters such as Mr Utterson who is a well respected man of society and honourable to his friends, seems to form an immediate ‘dislike’ to Hyde, ‘I saw that Sawbones then turn sick and white with a desire to kill him,’ because Hyde obviously emanates an overpowering sense of evil. The reader is aware that Utterson’s past is not entirely blameless, when thinking back, he is ‘humbled to the dust by the many ill things I have done,’ and therefore the reader is aware that he would not be a judgemental man because he also has made mistakes, and would not easily condemn others. The readers can see how Hyde brings out the worst in people and, even the Doctor, an ordinary man and ‘about as emotional as a bagpipe,’ is roused to the murderous intent of Hyde. Robert Louis Stevenson here, by emphasising to the readers such strong reactions which even the most high regarded character feels for Hyde, highlighting the true revulsion felt for  evil, enhancing a strong foreboding feel throughout the novel, reiterating the abrupt and intense feelings towards evil at its purist form, in this ‘deformed’ and amoral man.

Join now!

By introducing such a trustworthy and reputable man as Utterson as part of the novel, Stevenson is trying to show that it is porrible to be content with life, having a good nature and side to you. However Jekyll, who is also an honourable man cannot be content, he wants to separate good and evil. This idea adds an insight into the hypocrisy of Victorian society.

Jekyll was a character who broke away from these Victorian Hypocrisies and believed that it was the curse of humanity that good and evil were bound together and could not be ...

This is a preview of the whole essay