Jekyll And Hyde Flashcards
What is the significance of Gothic Fiction?
Provide authors with |imaginative ways to address contemporary fears|and to highlight modern concerns
What are examples of typical Urban Gothic settings?
Urban slums
Labyrinthine streets
Unpleasant areas of vice and squalor
How did Gothic change in the Victorian fin de siècle?
No longer the |physical landscape|that provides the location for gothic tales but rather, |more disturbingly, the human body itself|
Explore the |theme of the human mind and body changing|and developing , mutating, corrupting and decaying, and all do so |in response to the evolutionary, social and medical theories that were emerging at the time|
What were the effects of Darwin’s theory of evolution of Victorian society?
Late-Victorian society was haunted by the implication of Darwinism
A nightmarish lineage in which human evolution was portrayed as a disturbing variation on the theme of Frankenstein’s monster
How was degeneration explored in The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde?
Humanity being assembled from assorted disparate earlier versions
Implication that the brutal and uncivilised Hyde is somehow a reversion to a more primitive stage of human development
A ghastly evolutionary precursor who stands in a direct genetic line behind the eminently respectable Dr Jekyll
What is physiognomy?
Notion that mind and body were interconnected; if a sound mind went together with a sound body, the implication was that twisted mind resided in a deformed body
Who discovered atavism?
Cesare Lombroso
What is atavism?
Study that attributed criminal behaviour to more primitive facial and physical features
Evolutionary throwback
How does Stevenson respond to Lombroso’s theory?
Jekyll- highly respected
Hyde- social outcast
Happen to be one and the same person
Simultaneously accepts and refutes the theory
How does Stevenson simultaneously accept and refute Lombroso’s theory?
Implication that the criminal could lurk behind an acceptable public persona
Rendered J&H a particularly disturbing work
How does Stevenson’s life reflect his novella?
Celebrated writer
Beneath veneer of respectability and charm
Liked nothing better than to satisfy his own carnal curiosities
What does Enfield say about Hyde’s appearance?
‘Something displeasing, something down-right detestable”
“Something displeasing, something down-right detestable”
Appalling and disgusting features
Exaggeration of deformity
Context: enormously concerned with morality sexual promiscuity and crime was chastised/reprimanded
Expected to repress carnal curiosities
Abnormality symbolises incongruity
Jekyll admits he wore ‘a more than commonly grave countenance before the public’
Double meaning of ‘grave’: somber, Jekyll’s behaviour in public; connotations of death
Grave countenance due to suppression and burial of emotional side
‘I felt younger, lighter, happier in body’
Rule of 3
Emphasis on the amount of pleasure he feels
Moreover, positive comparative adjectives has a crescendo effect
Mirroring the pleasure building up inside Jekyll
