Discuss How Robert Louis Stevenson Explores the Topic of...

English Coursework The Gothic fiction novel â€Å"Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde†, written by Robert Louis Stevenson in 1886, is a novel about a man torn by the desire to separate the good and evil inside people. The plot beholds a scientist who finds a way to literally separate his good from his evil by drinking a potion. The plot picks up on the Victorian hypocrisy that crippled people into being society’s idea of ‘good’ and the shallow nature of the Victorians and how they judged character by appearance. At this particular era classes still reigned, so this meant that reputation was still more important than anything, and if being ‘respectable’ meant suppressing inner desires or altering the person you were and having to live with that, then†¦show more content†¦Eventually due to the inaccuracy of his ‘unscientific balderdash’ (as spoken by Lanyon) something goes wrong and his changes from Jekyll to Hyde become more irrepressible, ‘My blood was changed into something exquisitely thin and icy. Yes I had gone to bed Henry Jekyll, I had awakened Edward Hyde.’ He lacks the power or strength to stop these changes. Hyde seems to perform the metamorphosis without warning or consent. I believe this to be significant to the fact that Hyde is becoming stronger and less willing to do as dictated, and because he, the inner demon, has been exercised at such a severe extent he had become a bigger part of Jekyll and so containing the inner beast becomes harder. Stevenson writes ‘the powers of Hyde seemed to grow with the sickliness of Jekyll.’ I do not think he wrote this meaning a literal sickness but was instead talking about the mental deterioration of Jekyll. The distinction of the unplanned and unwelcome changes between Jekyll and Hyde is symbolic to the fact that as the lines forming the distinction of the personality of Hyde and Jekyll began to merge thus so did the transition. The huge importance of the different physicality of Jekyll and Hyde is illustrative to the completely different characters and the way they are as humans. In Victorian society you could be judged as a rapist, murderer, crook or just plainly evil simply by the way you looked. Stevenson played on