The Strange Case Of Dr. Jekyll And Mr. Hyde

Maria Dominguez Caro 1EN011- Reading Texts Assignment 1 Maria Dominguez Caro 110085623

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THE STRANGE CASE OF DR. JEKYLL AND MR. HYDE

The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde was written by Robert Louis Stevenson after an inspired nightmare he had; it took him three days in his room writing page after page to complete the work. Stevenson was not a normal child; he spent mostof his life in bed due to his sickness, which allowed him to have a very imaginative mind. He had plenty of time to think about fantasies and fairy tales that were also fed by his nurse. The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde was published in 1886 when Stevenson was in his thirties, a late Victorian period where a gothic revival became popular with other stories as Oscar Wilde’s The Picture ofDorian Gray (1891), H.G. Wells’ The Island of Dr. Moreau (1896) or Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897). This revival seemed to search a different sense in Victorian society, escape from all the rules imposed with the becoming of realism. As in our story, moral and philosophical intentions are experimented behind those texts. In the Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, Dr. Jekyll is a man fightingagainst the repressions of Victorian moral society not only with his other self, Mr. Hyde, but also with the little multifaceted society that lies in him.

The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde is settled on the late Victorian period, where a revolution was created during Queen Victoria reign by the flourishing of science, history, religion, philosophy and the questioning of human being and theworld carried out by Charles Darwin and also Charles Lyell. Other advances in technologies as

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the photography and women’s role within society were also important for the growing of a better society in this period. People concerned with all those new discoveries started to change their minds at the end of the period into what would mean a new era,modernism was just around the corner. Victorian period could be divided into three phases, the reformism, the optimism and the decline. The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde is situated on the decline phase, between 1870 and 1901, where the fight aginst the classic was won by the gothic revival and some colonial politics that also became popular at this time. Classicism was thought to enhancethe standars design by Victorians with the creation of realism and novels that only were concerned on it, while gothic focused on social and common values within society creating a more individual conciousness. This decadence phase followed the self-conciouness and social uneasiness regarding that fiction is higher than life, and not only realism could be taken into account in society terms.

Inthe Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde there is an attempt to make Victorian people aware of what all those changes in science really mean. Even though the simple act of a doctor creating a potion which once it is drunk makes him transform into another “person” is not the real issue in the double personality main plot, it shows a new advance in science (even if we are not talking about realism,and we know the potion would not work in real life) to have a potion that could achieve that transformation. And the exposition of a respected person as Dr Jekyll experimenting out of the society knowledge displays how an individual works, just one person fighting alone agaisnt a situation that he himself has previously created and that should be hidden when society gets involved in the case. DrJekyll fights against the Victorian society morals when

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experimenting on his own contribution in dividing himself not just in Mr Hyde but also in a plurality of himself.

We should state that most people will talk about a double or a doppelgänger when they make a first and unique reading on the Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. It is the...