It shattered the veneer of class-conditioned respectability that covered and controlled the lives of respectable members of the population. Stevenson's depiction of the respectable gentleman Dr Jekyll as capable of the terrible behaviour exhibited by Mr Hyde, is evidence of his manipulation of Victorian anxieties and social fears. The transformation is generated by the fear of regression, as both men are revealed to be the same person. This is revealed to the reader by the horrifying transformation of Dr Henry Jekyll into the atavistic murderer Edward Hyde. The Gothic element of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde is represented via the theme of doubling. In his short story 'Olalla', elements of atavism and heredity curses are woven into the story to create terror the central protagonist becomes the victim of a bestial attack committed by the atavistic mother of the family with whom he is lodging. The Italian Criminologist Cesare Lombroso, via Wikimedia Commons Jekyll and Hyde is not the only text in which Stevenson manipulates Gothic tropes. The unsettling, dwarfish appearance of Edward Hyde and the violent behaviour he exhibits are clear atavistic traits. However, the text was written before the science of psychology was firmly established, and the novella itself appears to be influenced by a variety of scientific theories predominant in the late-Victorian era.Ĭesare Lombroso's theory of atavism (discussed in greater detail in 'The Victorian Gothic' essay on this website) appears to have greatly influenced Stevenson's novella. The work is now associated with the mental condition of a 'split personality', where two personalities of differing character reside in one person. The relationship between scientific discourse and the Victorian Gothic is greatly emphasised when reading Robert Louis Stevenson's 1886 novella The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde.
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