In Jekyll and Hyde, Jekyll is the good side to a person's or thing's character; an apparently good and respectable person or thing. Hyde represents an unsuspected or hidden evil side to a person's character. As in the quotation HAY "We encountered surprisingly few Hydes. Nearly all were Jekylls..of the most competent and courteous type." Jekyll and Hyde are the primary characters in the 1886 story by Robert Louis Stevenson (Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde). The story Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, is about a London lawyer who investigates strange occurrences between his old friend, Dr. Henry Jekyll and the misanthropic Mr. Edward Hyde.
Jekyll was the stereotypical member of the middle class - repressed and moralistic. Through the ingestion of a drug Dr. Jekyll becomes his mirror opposite - vital, egocentric, a sexual predator and ferocious.
While expressing a Christian dichotomy between good and evil the two characters are also seen as expressing the conflict within the self between ‘ego’ and ‘id’ as well as the conflict between ‘culture’ and ‘nature’.
Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde was a big success and one of Robert Louis Stevenson's best-selling works.
Robert Louis Stevenson's Jekyll and Hyde and the
Double Brain - Stiles, Anne.
SEL Studies in English Literature 1500-1900 - Volume 46, Number 4, Autumn 2006, pp.
879-900
The Johns Hopkins University Press
This article traces the inspiration for Stevenson's novella back to two famous French case
studies of dual personality, Felida X. and Sergeant F., whose "double lives"
were widely discussed in French and British periodicals. In the late-nineteenth century,
such cases of dual personality were often attributed to bilateral brain hemisphere
asymmetry, a condition Stevenson faithfully depicts in his fictional Strange Case. The
author's awareness of contemporary neurological theories and his acute satire of the
conventions of the case study contribute to his innovative take on the late-Victorian
Gothic romance.
Jekyll and Hyde: Men's Constructions of Feminism
and Feminists
Nigel Edley, Nottingham Trent University, Margaret Wetherell, Open University, M.S.
Feminism & Psychology, Vol. 11, No. 4, 439-457 (2001),
Research and commentary on men's responses to feminism have demonstrated the range of ways
in which men have mobilized both for and against feminist principles. This article argues
that further analyses of men's responses require a sophisticated theory of discourse
acknowledging the fragmented and contradictory nature of representation. A corpus of men's
talk on feminism and feminists was studied to identify the pervasive patterns in men's
accounting and regularities in rhetorical organization. Material from two samples of men
was included: a sample of white, middle-class 17-18-year-old school students and a sample
of 60 interviews with a more diverse sample of older men aged 20 to 64. Two interpretative
repertoires of feminism and feminists were identified. These set up a `Jekyll and Hyde'
binary and positioned feminism along with feminists very differently as reasonable versus
extreme and monstrous.
Jekyll and Hyde - Marie-Edith Bissey, John D Hey and Stefania Ottone
Jekyll and Hyde were in fact two people inside the same person – an obviously
dynamically inconsistent person. In the book and in the movie, the dynamic inconsistency
was resolved in arather dramatic way.
Irreversible Transformations: Robert Louis Stevenson's Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and
Scottish Energy Science
ALLEN MACDUFFIE?
ABSTRACT This essay discusses Robert Louis Stevenson's use of the discourse of
thermodynamics to structure the transformation in The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr.
Hyde as an irreversible process. Refashioning metamorphosis along scientific lines imbues
the moral life of the novel with the pressure and reality of physical law and links the
individual flaws in transformation to a vision blending scientific and
theological accounts of apocalypse.