Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde: context Flashcards
What is Victorian Hypocrisy according to Walter Houghton ?
- social rules in Victorian era extremely strict
- many suppressed their true tastes and beliefs in favour of propriety
- pretended to be better than they were (more pious/moral etc. despite high usage rate of absinthe, opium and prostitution)
- shut eyes to ugliness/unpleasantness and pretended it didn’t exist
Why was there so much panic about crime in the 1850s/60s ?
- an MP was robbed (many upper class people were the victims of robbery)
- violence and sexual violence sold more newspapers so crimes were sensationalised
- ripper murders in Whitechapel
- domestic violence massively underreported and taken lightly
- due to the perceived increase in crime, Parliament instituted more brutal laws (flogging, hanging etc.)
What is Cesare Lombroso’s theory of L’uomo Delinquente ?
- studied skulls of criminals to try and find a biological root to crime
- observed that there were atavistic (primitive or ape-like) qualities to their skulls
- posited that criminals were biologically less evolved and so more likely to act on their instincts and primitive desires to commit crime
What is absinthe ?
- extremely strong alcohol
- caused hallucinations
- ‘cocaine’ of the 19th century, nicknamed the green fairy
What is opium ?
- highly addictive drug with high usage rates
- easily bought and went hand in hand with criminal activity
- could shorten life and reduce symptoms of malaria, syphilis, gout and headaches
What is the argument of Leviathan by Thomas Hobbes ?
humans are inherently predisposed to disorder and violence, society has repressed some of this and made humans good
What are the features of gothic texts ?
- preoccupation with darkness vs light
- supernatural
- invoking fear/shock/horror/revulsion
- enjoying savagery/violence
- pathetic fallacy
- Byronic (a man proud, moody, cynical, with defiance on his brow, and misery in his heart, a scorner of his kind, implacable in revenge, yet capable of deep and strong affection) heroes
- exaggerated emotions
- ordered world threatened/overturned
- the sublime
- old buildings as the site of human decay
What are the characteristics of the urban gothic ?
using the city as the site of horror etc.
- arguably a response to industrialisation and public fear of Enlightenment (demonstrated by the rise of Romanticism)
What aspects of duality are explored during the text ?
- duality of humans (persona vs desires)
- duality of humans (good vs evil)
- duality of London (poor vs rich)
- duality of London (criminals vs Victorian hypocrites)
What is the theory of the persona ?
- persona = pretence of personality conforming to societal standards to make people like you
- hidden/repressed desires beneath that
- if desires are repressed too long, they begin to control one
What areas of context apply to The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde ?
- Victorian Hypocrisy
- duality of man
- duality of London
- Cesare Lombroso’s theory of L’uomo Delinquente
- Leviathan/Hobbes’ ideas about the true nature of humans
- Christianity
- gothic archetypes
- sensational crime
- persona
- psychoanalytic theory
- feminism
- marxism
