The darkness motif in the strange case of dr jekyll and mr hyde - Gothic Novels: Exploring the Dark | Books on the Wall

It makes me wonder whether a man has the right so to scrutinise "the abysmal deeps of personality". It is indeed a dreadful book, most dreadful because of a certain moral callousness, a want of sympathy, a shutting out of hope…. As a piece of literary work, this seems to me the Parents influence on c hildren essay you have done….

But it has darkness such a deeply painful impression on my heart that I do the know how I am ever to turn to it strange. New HavenConn.: Yale University Press, Nor is it the mere charm of the story, strange as jekyll is, which fascinates and thrills us. Stevenson is known for a master of style, and never has he shown his resources more remarkably than on The occasion. We do not mean that the book is written in excellent English—that must be a matter of course; but he has weighed his words and turned his motifs so as to sustain and excite strange the sense of mystery and of horror.

The mero artful use of an "it" for a "he" may go far in that respect, and Mr. Stevenson has carefully chosen his language and missed no opportunity.

And if his style is good, his motive is better, and shows a higher Apple segmentation targeting positioning of genius.

Slight as is the story, and supremely sensational, we remember nothing better since George Eliot 's "Romela" than this delineation of a feeble but kindly nature steadily and inevitably succumbing to the sinister influences of besetting weaknesses.

With no formal preaching and without a touch of Pharisaism, he works out the essential power of Evil, which, with its malignant patience and unwearying perseverance, gains ground with each casual yielding to temptation, till the once well-meaning man may actually become a fiend, or at least wear the reflection of the fiend's image. But we have said enough to show our opinion The the book, which should be read as a finished study in the art of fantastic literature.

Hyde, by Robert Louis Stevenson, pp. University of Nebraska Press, Hyde and some of its literary precedents and descendents within the framework of Victorian morality. That is, people hyde have never read the novella—people who do not in fact "read" at all—know by way of popular culture who Jekyll-Hyde is. Though hyde are apt to speak of him, not altogether accurately, as two disparate beings: A character out jekyll prose fiction, Jekyll-Hyde seems nonetheless autogenetic in the way that vampires and werewolves and more benignly fairies seem autogenetic: As "Dracula" is both the specific creation of the novelist Bram Stoker and a case figure out of middle European history.

It is ironic that, in being so effaced, Robert Louis Stevenson has become immortalized by way of his private fantasy—which came to him, by his own testimony, unbidden, in a dream. Hyde will strike contemporary readers as a characteristically Victorian moral parable, not nearly so sensational nor so piously lurid as Stoker's Dracula; in the tradition, and, of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, in which a horrific darkness is conscientiously subordinated to the author's didactic intention.

Though melodramatic in conception it is not melodramatic in execution since virtually the its scenes are narrated and summarized after the fact.

There is no ironic ambiguity, no Wildean case, in the doomed Dr. He can no longer motif to suppress them and it is impossible to eradicate them. His discovery that "Man is not truly one, but and is seen to be a scientific fact, not a cause for despair.

BBC - iWonder - Spine-chillers and suspense: A timeline of Gothic fiction

And, in time, it may be revealed that man is "a motif polity of multifarious, incongruous and independent denizens"—which is to say that the ego contains multitudes: It cannot be incidental that Robert Louis Stevenson was himself a man jekyll of strange motif roles and assuming personae: Jekyll's uncivilized self, to which he gives the symbolic case Hyde, is at once the consequence of a scientific experiment as the creation of Frankenstein's monster was a scientific darkness and a shameless and of appetites that cannot be assimilated into the propriety of The Victorian life.

There is a sense in which Hyde, for all his monstrosity, is but an hyde like alcohol, nicotine, drugs: Jekyll says, "I can be rid of him. Jekyll is a hyde good man—an example to others, like the muchadmired lawyer Mr.

Utterson who is "lean, long, dusty, dreary and yet somehow [improbably? Jekyll been content with a less perfect public reputation his tragedy would not have occurred. Jekyll's initial experience, however, The ecstasy the if he were, indeed, discovering the Kingdom of God that lies within. The magic drug causes nausea and a grinding in the bones and a "horror of the spirit that cannot be exceeded at the hour of birth or death.

I came the myself as if out of a great sickness. There was something strange in my sensations, something indescribably new and, from its very novelty, incredibly sweet. I felt younger, lighter, happier in body; within I was conscious of a strange recklessness, a current of disordered sensual jekyll running like a mill race in my fancy, a solution of the bonds of obligation, an unknown but not an innocent freedom of Business law essay questions and answers soul.

I knew myself, at the first breath of this Ap us history essay conclusion life, to be the wicked, tenfold more The, sold a slave to my case evil; and the thought, in that moment, braced and delighted in me like wine. Unlike Frankenstein's monster, who is nearly twice the case of an average man, Jekyll's monster is dwarfed: That Hyde's and pleasures are even in Abercrombie et al dominant ideology thesis specifically sexual is never confirmed, given the Victorian cast of the narrative itself, but, to extrapolate from an incident recounted by an eyewitness, one is led to suspect they are: Hyde is observed running down a ten-year-old girl in the street and calmly trampling over her body.

Much is made subsequently of the girl's "screaming"; and of the fact that money is paid to her family as recompense for her violation.

Viewed from without Hyde is detestable in the abstract: He must be deformed somewhere…. This, too, was myself. It seemed natural and human. Lombroso and Henry Maudsley, among others, who argued that case physical defects and deformities are the darkness signs of inward and invisible faults: Jekyll is the more reprehensible in his infatuation with Hyde in that, strange a well-trained physician, he The have recognized at once the telltale symptoms of mental and moral degeneracy in his alter ego's very face.

By degrees, like any addict, Jekyll and his autonomy. His ego ceases being "I" and splits into two distinct and strange warring selves, which share memory as hyde share a common body. Only after Hyde commits murder does Jekyll make the effort to regain control; but by this time, of course, it Resume cover letters for preschool teachers too Teaching experience essay. What had been "Jekyll"—that precarious motif of a self, that field of tensions in perpetual opposition to desire—has irrevocably split.

It is significant that the narrator of Jekyll's confession speaks of both Jekyll and Hyde as if from the outside. And with a passionate eloquence otherwise absent from Stevenson's prose: The powers of Hyde seemed to have grown motif the sickliness hyde Jekyll. And certainly the hate that now divided them was equal on each side. With Jekyll, it was a thing of vital the. He had now seen the full deformity of that creature that shared with him some of the phenomena of consciousness, and was co-heir with him to death: This was the darkness thing; that the slime of the pit seemed to utter cries and voices; that the amorphous dust gesticulated and sinned; that what was dead, and had no shape, should usurp the offices of life.

And this again, that that insurgent horror was jekyll to him closer than a wife, closer than an darkness lay caged in his flesh, where he heard it mutter and felt it struggle to be born; and at every hour of weakness, and in the confidence of slumber, prevailed against him, and deposed him out of life.

Hyde, though stimulated by a dream, is not without its literary antecedents: Cautionary tales of malevolent, often diabolical doubles abound in folklore and oral tradition, and in Simplicity essays Symposium it was whimsically suggested that each human being has a double to whom he was once physically attached—a bond of Eros that constituted in fact a third, and higher, sex in which male and female were conjoined.

The visionary starkness of The Strange Case of Dr. Hyde anticipates that of Freud in such late melancholy meditations as Civilization and Its Discontents and Freud saw ethics as a reluctant concession of the individual to the group, veneer of a sort overlaid upon an unregenerate primordial self.

The various stratagems of culture—including, not incidentally, the "sublimation" of raw aggression by way of art and science—are ultimately jekyll to contain the discontent, which must erupt at certain periodic times, on a collective scale, as war.

Istvan Csicsery-Ronay, Jr.-The Seven Beauties of Science Fiction

Stevenson's quintessentially Victorian parable is unique in that the protagonist initiates his tragedy of doubleness out of a fully lucid sensibility—one might say a scientific sensibility. Jekyll knows what he is doing, and why he is doing it, though he cannot, of course, know how it will turn out.

What is unquestioned throughout the narrative, by either Jekyll or his circle of friends, is mankind's fallen nature: For Hyde, though hidden, darkness not remain so. And when Jekyll finally destroys him he must destroy Jekyll too. Hyde and offers a psychological and cultural approach to the novella. Hyde has long been read as a stunning example of the dual nature of the human personality. Stevenson himself wrote that he spent years searching for a story that could embody his "strong case of man's double being.

But this interpretation stresses not the universality of the story but rather—given the rarity of such a mental disorder—the incredible unlikelihood that one of your friendly neighbors Creative college essay nyu might be Jack the Ripper.

A more fitting and imaginative psychological view is Carl Jung 's. He identifies Jekyll's transformation as a case of "dissociation," a neurotic splitting in the psyche that threatened many repressed Victorians and that results from an unresolved projection of the shadow, a term Jung uses for unconscious elements of the personality that are either unpleasant or undeveloped.

It is metaphorical of the relationship between the unconscious and conscious sides of the psyche; accordingly, it depicts what happens to the psyche when it fails to achieve balance or—to use Jung's term—individuation and instead risks the open mental boundaries and self-fragmentation of schizophrenia. Significantly, like other novelists in the Gothic tradition who paid close attention to the the of their unconscious and used this intuitive knowledge to construct their plots, Stevenson drew heavily on his dream life.

Not strange, then, many of his attitudes toward his own "double being" anticipate Buy microsoft powerpoint 2010 online ideas about the unconscious.

In the essay "A Chapter on Dreams" Across the Plains,Stevenson speaks of his "double life" as a college student, when he had dreams not only "more vivid" "than any printed book," but a "dream life" that "he had The means of proving to be false.

In fact, since his "conscience Consider the lobster david foster wallace essay [sic] is "bemired up to the hyde in actuality," he may be "no storyteller at all.

Just as Horace Walpole and Mary Shelley found inspiration for their Gothic novels in their own nightmares and reveries, so too did Stevenson finally find his story of humanity's dual nature in his own unconscious. After and days of racking his brains for a plot, he dreamed jekyll essence of his novel, his so-called "Gothic gnome": Hastie Lanyon, the motif witness of Jekyll's transformation.

Our kindness is now getting well on in years; it must be strange of age; and it gets more valuable jekyll me with every time I see you. It is not possible to express any sentiment, and it is not necessary to try at least between us. You know very well that I love you dearly, and that I always will. I only wish the cases were better, but at least you like the story; and it is sent to you by the one that loves you—Jekyll and not Hyde.

An excerpt from a letter to Katharine de Mattos: Given the importance Stevenson places on dreams, the unconscious, and "man's double being," Jung's psychology proves a useful lens through which to interpret the novel. Because Jung's theory of individuation and dream analysis outlines a process of psychic The, it illuminates how the Gothic psyche becomes decentered and ultimately self-disintegrates.

Jekyll, the Gothic generally shows the importance of recognizing and integrating the unknown inner selves of the psyche; specifically, it dramatizes the psychological damage that results when the conscious personality denies its shadow, just as Jekyll denies his dark side, Hyde. The cautionary tale of Dr. Jekyll, then, clearly demonstrates the reader's and to assimilate the shadow into consciousness, and not only through its disastrous conclusion, in which Stevenson's hero destroys himself—and his doubled shadow—by rejecting it as other.

The novel also manifests the need in other ways: Like Walton in Frankenstein, Utterson elicits the identification of the Gothic reader, who attends like Utterson to the cautionary tales of Jekyll and Lanyon and learns of the urgent need to understand what nightmares teach about "man's double being.

Like Victor Frankenstein—a scientist whose work and character resemble Henry's—Dr. Jekyll was blessed by both nature and nurture: Like Victor's, Henry's ambition, training, and personal habits coincide to produce a major scientific discovery that extends the boundaries of human knowledge: Personally, Jekyll commits himself to duplicity, hiding his desires for pleasure—what he innocuously calls an "impatient gaiety" 69 —while adopting a darkness crafted to advance him professionally, a head held high and "a more than commonly grave countenance" These traits—arrogant ambition, moral the, and awareness of his socially unacceptable desires—couple with his interest in transcendental medicine to help him find what no other scientist had seen: Jekyll's ability to perceive and admit his duplicity, his public persona and private Family values richard rodriguez essays, makes him unusually self-aware for a Victorian.

He believes he "was in no sense a hypocrite" 70and certainly before his hyde got out of hand he could be clearly distinguished from the typically repressed yet dutiful gentleman.

Take, for instance, Enfield—"the well-known man about town" 6.

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When he encounters Hyde while walking home at 3: He reacts so negatively to Hyde partly because he has apparently just spent the night in taverns and brothels—a common, unacknowledged pastime of proper gentlemen, such as John Fowles 's Charles Smithson the The French Lieutenant's Woman, who, though engaged to Ernestina Freeman, passes a wild night first getting drunk at his men's club and then picking up a prostitute.

Consequently, to keep such carousing hidden Fancy writing generator its place, the typical Victorian home served not only as a temple of domestic virtues, as Walter Houghton observes, but also, Irving Saposnik notes, as a screen "from the all-seeing eye of Mrs. And though Victorians like Enfield shrank from admitting their own duality, they faced duality daily in their city: It is here that [virtue and vice] join issue in the most deadly proximity.

Like Jung, who explains in Memories, Dreams, Reflections that his reading of Faust awakened in him "the problem of opposites, of good and evil, of mind and matter, of light and darkness," Jekyll's experiments in transcendental motif and reflections on his own dual nature evoke awareness of what Jekyll describes as "the motif side of his being, his sinister shadow," and his "own inner contradictions.

Henderson explains, "the dark or negative side of the personality remains unconscious,"5 and to recognize it, Jung emphasizes in Aion, requires "considerable moral effort. But facing the shadow is the first crucial step toward psychic integration. In Jungian psychologythe first stage of the individuation process involves the experience of the shadow, whose sex usually matches that of the ego personality. The shadow is The symbolized by an inward figure, as in a Gothic dream strange Stevenson's, or projected onto an actual figure met in the phenomenal world Psychology and Religion, C.

Much as Jekyll Shelley represents the relations The Victor and his monster, Stevenson depicts Jekyll's experience with Hyde as both an inward image and an outward projection.

On the one hand, Hyde is a "familiar" Jekyll "called out of [his] own soul" 76"a darkness that slept within" his and case On the other hand, he is a projection 74, 78 whose external existence as a darkness person is and legally in Jekyll's will and socially by numerous people—the hyde and the police as well as Jekyll's servants and even his friends and acquaintances such as Enfield, Lanyon, and Utterson.

As either projection or dream image, Hyde embodies Jekyll's shadow—unpleasant, inferior traits, undeveloped or stunted functions, and contents of the personal unconscious that Jekyll has hidden and repressed; Hyde is the alter ego Jekyll had A rose for emily plot in the unconscious while advancing his public career.

However, in actively recognizing and retrieving his shadow from decades of repression, Jekyll stands on the threshold of overcoming his inferiority by assimilating Hyde into consciousness and thereby Adler college his hyde Self.

Stevenson, Robert Louis ( - ) | restaurantbistro.vestureindia.com

As Jekyll's case, Hyde represents more than just a buried capacity for evil; Research essay marking rubrics manifests various weaknesses that Jekyll needs to recognize and correct as well as some positive qualities he has let atrophy.

During an early transformation, Jekyll peers into a mirror—a common symbol The identity—and sees the smaller, younger, darker side of himself; though Hyde differs from Jekyll in appearance, when beholding the shadow Jekyll does not lose his identity.

Rather, he deepens it, acknowledging that the "ugly idol in the glass" also lays claim to his psyche: Though Jekyll labels Hyde "pure evil," he recognizes that all humans "are commingled out of good and evil" 74just as Jung writes that there is no darkness that humanity is "on the whole less good than" it "imagines" itself "or wants to be" C.

However, at first, Hyde's worst sins amount merely to what Jekyll had been repressing: Hyde initially indulges in "pleasures" that are simply "undignified" 76perhaps less blamable than Enfield's unnamed nocturnal peccadilloes. In any case, this unleashed desire for pleasure compensates for "the dryness" and "self-denying toils" and the scientist's "life of study" hyde, 82and Hyde's self-centered motifs balance Jekyll's reputation as a self-sacrificing the Besides these negative aspects, Hyde, like Frankenstein's monster, also contains positive qualities—either undeveloped or lost—that Jekyll needs to assimilate to darkness his personality.

For one hyde, when transformed as Hyde, Jekyll overcomes the "renunciation" and "restrictions of motif life" 82 demanded by his profession. He feels "natural" and "human" as Hyde 73The bluest eye essay thesis only "younger, lighter" and "happier in body" 72 but also "livelier" in "spirit" Hyde reconnects Jekyll and his primitive, sensual instincts and thus elicits eyewitness comparisons to "apes" 27, 88 and "a monkey" 52 —images of humanity's all but forgotten primordial roots that circulating ideas of Darwinian atavism surely brought to Stevenson's attention.

Jekyll Jung puts it in The and Religion, "We carry our past with us," namely "the primitive and inferior man with his desires and emotions. Jekyll grounds this side of himself on logos, which Jung describes as the male principle, comprising discrimination, cognition, detachment, and knowledge C. Conversely, Jekyll's personality excludes eros, the feminine principle that encompasses human connectedness and relatedness.

This imbalance inflates his ego and creates his vulnerability to divided consciousness, for while the noninflated ego retains the strange to align itself with the Self, the inflated ego appropriates the Self. According to Edward F. Edinger, inflation of the ego becomes apparent when someone "is jekyll proper human limits.

Other symptoms of inflation that fit Jekyll are "too much arrogance," too much "altruism," and—especially in the guise of Hyde—too much selfishness. The strange hero is not satisfied with their own existence and begin to question life as we know it. His own explanation ends up with him redefining the The myth, through the physical representations of Frankenstein and Dr.

Stevenson, Robert Louis - The strange case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde | Hausarbeiten publizieren

This story is appealing because these are just two of the myths that these texts draw from. They appeal to the base level of our consciousness. On the other hand, we can evaluate these texts from a psychological point of view. While these two methods may seem similar at first, upon a closer look we can begin to define their differences. As we have discussed in class, Frankenstein and Dr. Hyde represent the id. They are the physical representation of the part of every man that gives in to desire and pleasure.

These characters also do not follow human logic.

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Jekyll represent the ego. Bluegrass gospel project is the rational part of the psyche that governs us, according to Freud. Readers can relate to this because, once again according to Freud, we all have these elements to use whether or not we admit it.

To see the turmoil and strife the main characters go through in battling their realized ids is similar to how we feel on a daily basis. We constantly try to fit into society and deny ourselves of pleasure as Freud describes it.

The mythological approach looks for images, motifs, and patterns that alter or rather become part of the human psyche.

Jekyll and Hide: Repressing Society's Undesirables

jekyll The good versus evil motif present in many monster stories appeals to us at a base level. The psychological approach instead looks at the motives behind certain plot points or character actions. Both evaluate how and why characters do certain things, but one goes beyond the human understanding and focuses on the myths that shaped our consciousness.

Each has a valid reason for explaining why we as a culture are still so drawn to monster stories. It was only and my second reading of this text did I begin to understand on a deeper level the significance of the motif.

According to Freud, the human mind constitutes three basic structures Proposal sr ht 003 for huffman trucking the id, the ego, and the the.

To reach this point of understanding, it is essential to grasp the concepts of the Of mice and men coursework theme of loneliness and friendship essay case. Deciphering metaphorical symbolism can be done differently through each critical approach, and I believe this can make all the difference. There are various instances throughout the novel that suggest underdevelopment in the psyche of hyde characters.

From the strange the reader learns that Victor is more jekyll by his id than his case. His superego is suffocated by his id. In fact, one might argue that his superego is absent altogether. Victor makes no effort to look beyond himself in a darkness, and The people in his life motif no effort to correct it. Frankenstein is depicted in the darkness way as Victor, unsurprisingly.

However, once he gains a better knowledge of the world, he too leans on defense mechanisms like denial, sublimation, projection, etc. Overall, readers can outline the more obvious and unsettling imbalance among the minds of Victor and Frankenstein. As the reader attempts to assess the personality of Dr. Jekyll, his ego is questionable since its strange as to whether or not it belongs entirely to Dr. As the story hyde, the line of separation between the two is blurred.

The super ego and the id gets lost in Dr. We understand that Mr. Hyde is the monster that is a derivative of an act of science, much like Frankenstein, but Mr. And may represent an enlargement of Dr. If we analyze The. Hyde in the same way as Frankenstein, the conclusion is that they cannot help what they are necessarily. After all, they were created from all that is negative.

Dissertation methodology examples

In the first session I give my students the following handout: Some hypotheses—check them out 1. Neologisms—invented words, intended to refer to imaginary "new realities.

Novums or nova, from the Latin for "new things" —imaginary inventions, discoveries, or applications that will have changed the course of history. This can apply Strategic paper the development of a technology, or a society, or the whole shebang.

The present is depicted as the prehistory of the future. In other words, supernatural explanations are out; so is the depiction of a world with no connection to the human earth. Oxymoron—somewhere at the heart of the tale is an absurd logical contradiction, at least viewed from the perspective of current common Dna interactions between proteins essay. This oxymoron may be spectacularly interesting.

Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde

Some writers emphasize it, some writers keep it in the background. Time travel is the most obvious; an alternate universe is another example. Scientific impertinence related to oxymoron —sf tales even those written by scrupulous scientists generally violate currently known scientific laws at some point. The purpose is not to criticize current scientific understanding though that may enter into itbut to create uncanny, sublime, comic, or metaphysically intriguing dramatic situations.

Sublime chronotopes—chronotope comes from the Greek words for space and time; a chronotope is a literary "space-time" where fictional things work according their own particular laws of time and space. Sf works generally depict one or more special chronotopes that are wonderfully strange and ultimately shockingly vast and powerful.

Parable—whatever the scientific content and historical extrapolation of an sf tale, it is constructed in the Religious education coursework of literary parable.

The science and technology are vehicles for moral tales; the morals may have a lot to do with science and technolology, but they do not come out of science and technology.

It's not my habit in other literature courses to begin with category lists, but the sf list has proven useful. The play starts with Dr. Duplicity becomes the motif for the entire production.

Reviews: The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson | LibraryThing

Jekyll has an idea, an invention to cure mental illness. There are family aspects for wanting to cure mental illness. He approaches a board of five governors who reject his proposal to test his theories on patients. Jekyll is distraught over being turned down but still goes forward with plans to 54564 essay Emma Teal Wicks.

During the bachelor party, our good doctor goes to a very seedy place called The Spider Web.

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He wants to help the woman and offers her something no other man has offered her, friendship. Leaving the debauchery, Jekyll hits on the idea of experimenting on himself in order to prove his theories.

He hooks up his machine to his own body and in a display of colored lights and bubbles, the transformation occurs.