Personality and the Beast Within in The Strange Case of...

Personality and the Beast Within in The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde Everyone has a dual personality, two sides, good and evil. Robert Louis Stephenson uses the book to explain this, he wanted people to realise that not only Dr Jekyll carries a double personality, but the other characters in the book too. Also the people reading it must see that they too, are a part of this frightening uncontrollable fact, that there is â€Å"the beast within† us all. Stephenson suggests that all gentlemen keep secrets, suppress emotions, desires, and hide their true inner self. In the story Mr. Utterson is a great example of a gentleman (lawyer) needing to suppress his less socially acceptable side for the sake of preserving his†¦show more content†¦It was hard to accept that we are just one species among many fighting for survival. In the nineteenth century Christians believed that on the day of judgement animals and monsters would go down to hell with the damned. Newspapers printed pictures of apes standing next to human beings showing the duration of the evolution and comparing the few differences. Life had never been looked like this before, nor shared with the public. It was all very strange and frightening. In the book ‘The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde’, Robert Louis Stephenson writes that Hyde ‘moves like a monkey’. Hyde is compared to an animal, he is ‘ape-like’, in the introduction-under the tittle Apes and Angels-it shows that ‘Jekyll conceives of Hyde as his lower element’. Throughout this book Jekyll is evolving backwards, the mad scientist has gone too far with his experiments and releases the beast within himself. At the end of the story Hyde defeats Jekyll-his physical state and his mind. This aspect of the story is rather frightening together with the reality of the area, London. As Robert Mighall writes in the introduction†¦Ã¢â‚¬ËœStephenson betrayed a distinct physiological interest, demonstrating that the body and mind of individuals could provide horrors of their own, the site of unwelcome legacies’†¦ Robert Louis Stephenson builds up the tension in the book by usingShow MoreRelatedEssay on Dual Personalities in Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Stevenson1313 Words   |  6 PagesDual Personalities in Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Stevenson INTRO The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde is a classic mystery story, enticing to all audiences merely upon it’s suspense alone. When Stevenson first wrote the story (after recalling a dream he had) he had only the intentions of writing such an entertaining tale. Yet at the suggestion of his wife, he decided to revamp the mystery to comment on the dual nature of man and of society in general. 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