The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde | The Context of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
In the following essay excerpt, Geduld traces the intellectual and psychological environment in which Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde was first published.
We can now see that for the Victorians, Stevenson's story expressed the anguish of humanity's compliance with the Law of Polarity, which states that all matter is a manifestation of positive and negative forces. Attempts to apply this law to the human soul stretch back at least as far as the ancient Greeks. By the mid-nineteenth century, the theory of the divided soul was complicated by Charles Darwin's popularization of evolutionary theory in The Origin of Species (1859) and The Descent of Man (1871). (Darwinism challenged the Judaeo-Christian notion that man's immoral or...
[The entire page is 1940 words long]
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