Nov 16, 2009

The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde | "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde: Anatomy of Misperception"

In the following essay. Fraustino explores how two of the characters in Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde overcome both social and language convention to discover the secret of Dr. Jekyll-Mr Hyde.

Since Robert Louis Stevenson first published Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde almost a century ago, critics have generally regarded the work as moral allegory, a dramatization of the conflicts between Jekyll and Hyde, good and evil, split parts of a dual personality. Recent scholarship, however, disputes this reading approach, focusing on the contradictions within Jekyll's own personality, which eliminate him as a symbol of pure respectability, and on the importance of secondary characters. While Edwin Eigner (in Robert Louis Stevenson and the Romantic Tradition) notes that Utterson...