The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde Flashcards
What’s the setting of the story?
the story takes place in London in the 1870s
at that time London had a double nature and reflected the hypocrisy of Victorian society: the respectable West End was in contrast with the appalling poverty of the East End slums
What is the ambivalence between the West End and East End reinforced by?
by the symbolism of Jekyll’s house, whose two facades represent the faces of two opposed sides if the same man:
the front of the house, used by dr Jekyll, is fair, part of a square of ancient handsome houses; the rear side, used by Hyde, is part of a sinister block if buildings which showed no windows
What time do most scenes of the novel take place?
at night: there is no natural daylight, but only the artificial lighting of Jekyll’s house and of the nightmarish street lamps
How are the most important events presented?
the most important events are wrapped up in darkness and fog:
when Hyde tramples over the child, it’s three in the morning; the murder of a respectable Member of Parliament happens at night, as well as Jekyll/Hyde’s suicide
What structure does the story have?
it has a multi narrative structure in which a complex series of pointsof view is presented
How many narrators are there?
there are four narrators through whom almost the whole action is seen and filtered: Utterson, Enfield, Dr Lanyon and Dr Jekyll
Where did this novel originate from?
the novel had its origin in a dream:
Stevenson wrote down in his diary that he had dreamed of a man in a laboratory who had swallowed a drug and turned into a different being
What aspect excited Stevenson the most?
The Gothic aspect of this story excited him and he produced a first draft
What seemed Stevenson to be concerned with?
Stevenson seems to have been concerned since his youth with the duality of man’s nature, the good and the evils sides
What gave him a sense of man’s divided self?
the Calvinism of his family gave him a sense of man’s divided self and its pessimism moved him to rebel against religion
Where did Stevenson draw inspiration from for the description of Hyde?
from Darwin’s studies about man’s kinship to the animal world;
What could Hyde be?
Hyde may be both the primitive, the evolutionary forerunner of civilized man and the symbol of repressed psychological drives
What has Jekyll projected onto Hyde?
Jekyll has projected his hidden pleasures onto Hyde which become part of his own being, so Dr Jekyll is as guilty as Mr Hyde
What can Jekyll be considered as?
Jekyll is a kind of Victorian Faust and his awareness is a sort of pact with an interior evil that controls him in the end
What may the novel be considered as?
it may be considered a reflection of art itself, as a kind of psychological search, and Jekyll’s discovery may symbolize the artist’s journey into the unexplored regions of the human psyche
