Dr. Jekyll

Dr. Jekyll was a well known novel written by Robert Louis Stevenson that managed to play on the inner feelings of men in the 1800’s that had no yet been tapped into by any other novel. This is why the book is still talked about and analyzed by people this day and age. The greatnesses of this novel were due to the inspirations the Victorian age had on Stevenson and the effects the novel had on the reader, not only that, but the book was also similar the another well known novel of that time called Dracula.

The Victorian age was like no other, so it’s no wonder why it had such a strong impact on Stevenson’s Writings. The time period lasted from 1837 to 1901; Stevenson’s life was from 1850 to 1894, the core of the Victorian age. “Religion was peaking, people were socializing, and men were pretending. “Reality was lived in the darkness” (williams1). The Victorian age corresponds with the reign of Queen Victoria. The period was beloved for its attention to high morals, modesty and proper decorum, as inspired by the Queen and her husband, Prince Albert. The period was known for the men who were pressured by their inner being to live another life outside of a modest, highly moral society. The sense of inner division has come to be regarded as normal for that time period (1).

Stevenson lived as many of the men in his time did, split. Church-going, social, and known as people wanted to know him was one side of Stevenson. The other side of this man was sexual, self-fulfilling, and lived without people knowing what was going on. The time, the way he lived, and society around this man were the influences that made his writings what they were, something that the people of his time could relate to. His books and novel contained both a psychological and spiritual aspect (Stiens2). Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde was one of the greats that showed Stevenson’s true potential and brought out the truth about Stevenson and Society as a whole during its time (2).

Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde was a novel that had the power to make the reader look at his own life from the third person. The novel had many firm aspects to it that were similar to those of men in the Victorian age and even today (1). Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde book falls into a genre all of its own, but can also be put into a gothic like genre which makes it exceptionally appealing to the readers who tend to get sucked into the treasures the book has to offer.

Split between the enticement of a life led by sin and the path God intended them to live, men of the Victorian age looked to literature for answers. From their point of view, society was full of consideration, and people who lived proper lives. Although, for the most part, this was in fact lie. They did not see what went on behind the closed doors of the other men (Jefferson3). In the novel Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Dr. Jekyll is himself enticed by the temptations of sin. He manages to conjure up a brew that allows his inner demon to show through and take over for a period of time. Once the potion was consumed, a new man was formed, one not known by the public. As Dr. Jekyll continued to drink the potion and allow the new man, Mr. Hyde, out into the world to satisfy the urge to do evil, the evil part of the now split man became stronger and stronger. This struggle between the good and evil in this man represented the constant thrashing about many men went through when finding their true nature (Wilcox6).

Authors adjusted their styles in the second half of the 1800’s to give meaning to their novels that the reader could relate to (Tomlinson4). The authors of the second half of the nineteenth century began to focus on dreams because of the change in views of the human psyche. The function of the dream is to show that Gothic occurrences are externalized, “quasi-allegorical”, representations of internal conflicts. This is in fact why in the novel Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Stevenson uses the intense daydreaming that Dr. Jekyll encounters throughout his life as a metaphor for the concentrated dreams he himself had about pursuing he desire to go against the grain. He uses this as a metaphor for dreams of evil . There were other authors that used comparable techniques to acquire similar feelings in the reader.

Dr. Jekyll