I think that Stevenson’s use of suspense works very well as it makes you want to read more to find out what is going to happen to Jekyll, or Hyde, or whomever the story is focusing on at any particular point.
Gothic novels use different witnesses and narrators to give the reader a different perspective of what is happening in the story. Such as Utterson’s angle of well wishing towards Jekyll, the omniscient narrators point of indifference and Lanyon’s conflicting angles of both a well wisher and an enemy of Jekyll
Most of the documents are found when Utterson is narrating, but the truth about Hyde is revealed during Lanyon’s narrative and confirmed in Jekyll’s narrative. I think that Utterson is the main witness because he is a respectable lawyer and is to be trusted with secrets and documents thus furthering the effects of suspense throughout the story.
The letters and documents that Stevenson used effectively were the wills, the supposedly forged letter from Hyde, and the two letters that make up the last two paragraphs. The way in which Stevenson use documents to build suspense and to raise questions, to which no answer will be provided is quite effective; also the way in which Stevenson answers almost all of the in the last two paragraphs, which are made up of
Dr. Lanyon’s narrative and Dr. Jekyll’s Full Statement of the Case, almost forces the reader to read on to find out what is going happen in the end.
The house that Jekyll experiments in and the weather are typical of gothic setting because the house is both mysterious and unapproachable as it has a solid oak door on the ground floor but no windows which means that there is no way to see into Jekyll’s laboratory which is situated on the ground floor. The weather is dull and dreary with a sinister hint of violence that is created because the wind and fog appear to be battling each other. “The wind was continually charging and routing these embattled vapours” this quotation seems to give the wind the human like characteristic of consciously attacking the wind.
The atmosphere that is created is one of fear and violence, the fear is hinted at by the fog which many people were scared of because it can cause near blindness and is confirmed by the atmosphere in London at the peak of Hyde’s crimes and Jekyll’s sheer fear of transforming into Hyde again. The violence is hinted at by the raging battle between the wind and fog and reinforced by the savage brutality in which Hyde murdered Carew.
Another common feature in gothic novels is the presence of illness, death, and/or insanity. All of which are used by Stevenson in this novel; death was introduced into the story when Hyde brutally murdered Carew; illness seems to be an ongoing theme in the novel on Jekyll’s part as Jekyll is only truly healthy in the months leading up to Carew’s murder, and insanity comes into the story after Carew’s death as it becomes impossible to tell whether or not Jekyll is insane or horribly malformed and ill due to a failed experiment.
The description of Hyde as pure evil,-“all human beings as we meet them are commingled out of good and evil: and Edward Hyde, alone, in the ranks of mankind is pure evil.”- is typically gothic as in many gothic stories the characters are either completely good or completely evil; it is this stereotyping of characters which makes Jekyll out as he is a mix of good and evil-“I stood already committed to a profound duplicity of life”-which is not a normal feature of a gothic novel.
The Strange case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde is not just a gothic novel as it also has the defining features of a detective novel, such as the mystery of Carew’s murder. In conclusion I think that Jekyll and Hyde is not a gothic novel but a hybrid of a detective novel and a gothic novel; I say this because, although Jekyll and Hyde has very distinct gothic features it also includes a large number of detective features such as the hunt for Hyde through legal documents for Carew’s murder.
I think that this story would have scared people in the 1880’s as it describes experimenting on humans and scientific revelations which would have scared most god fearing people at the time; This story did not scare me but it did interest me but it also bored me by avoiding the matter at hand. Overall I think that Jekyll and Hyde is an interesting novel but it lacks excitement towards the end.