How does Robert Louis Stevenson create a notion of good and evil in the Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde?

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Fraser McAvoy 10 Lowry                07/02/04

How does Robert Louis Stevenson create a notion of good and evil in the strange case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde

The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde was published in 1886 and was written after a dream Robert Louis Stevenson had. The story is mainly a horror but has an element of mystery throughout it. It is a powerful story with a hidden philosophical outlook on life and society.

The story has one main theme running through it and other smaller ones that can only be found by reading between the lines.

The main theme is that of a duality in humans, that we all have hidden extremes in us, extreme evil and extreme good. Robert Louis Stevenson focuses on the Extreme evil in this story. The story is set in Victorian England where society was much disciplined and people were expected to be either working class or upper class. The working class were to work and their views not considered, whereas the upper class were always very rich people who were accustomed to not working and instead occupied themselves with experiments in the field of science. This is exactly how the theme of duality is brought into the story, ‘I learned to recognise the thorough and primitive duality of life.’

Dr. Jekyll found all this order and expectations to keep a tight upper lip all too hard to handle, ‘But such as I found it hard to reconcile with my imperious desire to carry my head high, and wear a more than commonly grave countenance before the public.’ Despite this Jekyll stayed quiet and ‘I concealed my pleasures.’

After these years Dr. Jekyll looks back on his life with reflection and realises that he is wasting his life pleasing society and others. He says that ‘many a man would have even blazoned such irregularities that I was guilty of,’ but instead he feels ashamed of it.  This is where one of the other theme comes in, Stevenson is also creating a desire for freedom, which is what Jekyll craved, the ability to do what he wants without being judged, something that still hits home today, we all want to be free from the judgement of society, something that was all to common in Victorian society.

The story is also about contrast between good and evil, and Stevenson brings this into the story by his narrative. His narrative creates this notion of good and evil by telling the story from both perspectives, good and evil. The good being Mr. Utterson and Dr. Jekyll and the evil Mr. Hyde.  By doing this the story also sounds more plausible, in that the story isn’t one sided, for if it had being one sided it would more an opinion than a story. With the story told from good and evil people’s views we find it easier to believe and it sounds less biased.

The narrative in the opening chapter, Story of the Door, is told by a Mr Utterson, we are given a description of Mr. Utterson, ‘Mr. Utterson was a man of rugged countenance, that was never lighted by a smile’, he is also ‘lean, long dusty, dreary and yet somehow loveable.’ We are also given a piece of information that is quite significant to the story, we are told that Mr. Utterson does not judge other people, instead, ‘I would let my bother go to the devil in his own ways,’ this is not to say he does not care, but that he will not judge others instead let them go about things in their own way and how they want to.

Also in the opening chapter we are told the story of Mr. Hyde and how he trampled straight over a child one night like a ‘juggernaut’. Despite this piece of information we are never actually told what Mr. Hyde looks like, this is most likely because our imaginations are able to produce a more terrible picture of Mr. Hyde, one more scary and horrible than that which could ever be described in a book with words. The book is a horror ad Stevenson has realised that our minds have amazing imaginations, and if he did put into the story what Mr. Hyde looked like it may not even compare to what we the readers thought he looked like. Also Stevenson was weary of people working out the ending of the story too early just by describing what Hyde looked like. It is also important that we know the child is trampled so that we have a better understanding of how evil Hyde is, that he would come close to killing an innocent child and show no remorse or human emotions. This is also a stepping stone, one that will spur our imaginations to even greater atrocities.

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Enfield and Utterson often take walks together and in this chapter during their walk they walk down a small street where it is remarked that it seems all the inhabitants of the houses are doing well. 2 doors from the corner on the left hand going east, and at that point, ‘a sinister block of building thrust forward’. It was 2 storeys high and had no windows, nothing but a door on the lower storey. The door had neither a doorbell of door knocker. It was ‘blistered and distained,’ with tramps sitting on the doorstep lighting matches on the ...

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