Characterization Of Dr. Jekyll And Mr Hyde

Robert Louis Stevenson’s novella the “Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde” is an interesting story set to originally be published around Christmas time as horror stories instead of Father Christmas was popular during the Victorian age. Stevenson’s story however was quite popular for exploring a topic that no other novelist had covered yet in a horror story. Stevenson wrote about the split personality of Dr. Jekyll, who encompassed both himself as the original and the worse qualities that he possessed in Mr. Hyde. To a Victorian English audience this twist that Jekyll and Hyde were the same person was a huge shock. While this twist made his novella spread more quickly for its engaging story and new type of horror Stevenson is critiquing his audience and their repressive society that leads men and women down dangerous self destructive paths. He criticizes high English society and its repression of desires, and how only certain things should be …show more content…
The lesson formed behind the character of Jekyll/Hyde is that the more you repress the more likely those repressed feelings build up until you eventually boil over and blow up in a sense on top of the idea that the demands of society were so great Jekyll needed to become an entirely new person just to be himself. Hyde was a representation of Jekyll’s repressed desires and when Jekyll tried to bottle Hyde up he only became more violent and volatile. Stevenson believed that the society would consume itself with ridiculous rules until it was destroyed, while his novella was widely read for the horror that could be lurking in everyone it was more a statement on what society was as a whole and that it created it’s own