Right in the middle there lay the body of a man sorely contorted and still twitching. They drew near on tiptoe, turned it on its back and beheld the face of Edward …show more content…
Jekyll and Mr. Hyde firmly within the tradition of Gothic fiction, which flourished in nineteenth-century Europeand particularly in Britain, where such Gothic masterpieces as Dracula, The Turn of the Screw, Frankenstein, and Jane Eyre were penned. The term "Gothic" covers a wide variety of stories, but certain recurring themes and motifs define the genre. Gothic tales may contain explicitly supernatural material, as Dracula does, or imply supernatural phenomena without narrating it directly, as Jekyll and Hyde does. They may not allude to supernatural events at all, but simply convey a sense of the uncanny, of dark and disturbing elements that break into the routine of prosaic, everyday life, as Jane Eyre does. Gothic novels often center around secretssuch as Jekyll's connection to Hydeor around doppelgangers, a German term referring to people who resemble other characters in strange, disconcerting ways. Frankenstein's monster is a doppelganger for Frankenstein, just as Hyde is for Jekyll. Above all, Gothic novels depend upon geography for their power. Nearly every Gothic novel takes place in some strange, eerie locale from which the characters have difficulty escaping, be it Dracula's castle, the estate of Thornfield in Jane Eyre, or the decaying homes and palaces that appear in the stories of the greatest practitioner of American Gothic fiction, Edgar Allan Poe. In Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, of course, that uncanny place is the fog-blanketed world of nighttime