Dr Jekyll And Mr Hyde Duality Essay
The Strange case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and Mary Reilly
Lenka Říhová
MUP, 4AS_K
January 2014 Word Count: 1856
Valerie Martin, an American novelist and short story writer, wrote a gothic, suspense story Mary Reilly, based on Robert Louis Stevenson ´s classic novel The strange case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. This essay is going to deal with the problem of duality seen from different angles as well as comparing of both novels and the way Valerie Martin was able to see this original horror story from another point of view. Robert Louis Stevenson was a typical author of Victorian times. He had an ability to describe scary events in a very exciting way. His novel The strange …show more content…
One of them is the city of London. The novel starts on a London street and also a great part of the story takes place outside in the night time. It is portrayed on two different, contrasting levels. Firstly, it is described as a beautiful, idyllic, well kept, bustling center, which changes into a dangerous, dark, foggy, and mysterious place. Both main characters need a different surroundings and environment for living. Dr. Jekyll needs freedom of the modern, bustling city for his experiments, because he is able to realize them only in case of absolute anonymity. And then Mr. Hyde can live unnoticed in the London ´s underworld, poor districts, surrounded by beggars, prostitutes and strangers. Throughout the novel, Stevenson makes a link between the urban landscape of Victorian London and the dark events surrounding Hyde. He achieves his desired effect through the use of nightmarish imagery, in which dark streets twist and coil, or lie in fog, forming an ominous landscape exactly suited for the crimes that take place there. Bleak visions of the city also appear in Utterson ’s nightmares: “He would be aware of the great field of lamps of a nocturnal city. . . . The figure (of Hyde) . . . haunted the lawyer all night; and if at any time he dozed over, it was but to see it glide more stealthily through sleeping houses, or move the more swiftly . . . through wider labyrinths of lamp-lighted city, …show more content…
This is quite usual for all the other film adaptations. The original story is re-imagined from a psycho-sexual angle. Mary is in fact the reason of Jekyll ´s madness, why he goes crazy. The film tells us that it is a lust that is hidden beneath Jekyll ´s kindness and civility, he remains respectful but feels repressed as he lusts after Mary. Hyde, on the other hand, is uninhabited, he leers at Mary without any difficulty, grabs her breast…7 To summarize the problem of duality in The strange case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, it is necessary to mention that duality is not found here only in the two characters of Jekyll and Hyde - duality of human nature, but it is apparent from different points of view as well: Victorian society and its social hypocrisy, the city of London with its two different faces, Stevenson ´s only male characters versus lack of females, rational and the irrational – reality and the nightmare
Lenka Říhová
MUP, 4AS_K
January 2014 Word Count: 1856
Valerie Martin, an American novelist and short story writer, wrote a gothic, suspense story Mary Reilly, based on Robert Louis Stevenson ´s classic novel The strange case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. This essay is going to deal with the problem of duality seen from different angles as well as comparing of both novels and the way Valerie Martin was able to see this original horror story from another point of view. Robert Louis Stevenson was a typical author of Victorian times. He had an ability to describe scary events in a very exciting way. His novel The strange …show more content…
One of them is the city of London. The novel starts on a London street and also a great part of the story takes place outside in the night time. It is portrayed on two different, contrasting levels. Firstly, it is described as a beautiful, idyllic, well kept, bustling center, which changes into a dangerous, dark, foggy, and mysterious place. Both main characters need a different surroundings and environment for living. Dr. Jekyll needs freedom of the modern, bustling city for his experiments, because he is able to realize them only in case of absolute anonymity. And then Mr. Hyde can live unnoticed in the London ´s underworld, poor districts, surrounded by beggars, prostitutes and strangers. Throughout the novel, Stevenson makes a link between the urban landscape of Victorian London and the dark events surrounding Hyde. He achieves his desired effect through the use of nightmarish imagery, in which dark streets twist and coil, or lie in fog, forming an ominous landscape exactly suited for the crimes that take place there. Bleak visions of the city also appear in Utterson ’s nightmares: “He would be aware of the great field of lamps of a nocturnal city. . . . The figure (of Hyde) . . . haunted the lawyer all night; and if at any time he dozed over, it was but to see it glide more stealthily through sleeping houses, or move the more swiftly . . . through wider labyrinths of lamp-lighted city, …show more content…
This is quite usual for all the other film adaptations. The original story is re-imagined from a psycho-sexual angle. Mary is in fact the reason of Jekyll ´s madness, why he goes crazy. The film tells us that it is a lust that is hidden beneath Jekyll ´s kindness and civility, he remains respectful but feels repressed as he lusts after Mary. Hyde, on the other hand, is uninhabited, he leers at Mary without any difficulty, grabs her breast…7 To summarize the problem of duality in The strange case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, it is necessary to mention that duality is not found here only in the two characters of Jekyll and Hyde - duality of human nature, but it is apparent from different points of view as well: Victorian society and its social hypocrisy, the city of London with its two different faces, Stevenson ´s only male characters versus lack of females, rational and the irrational – reality and the nightmare