Stevenson, Robert Louis - Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (2)

Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde

The Scottish writer Robert Louis Stevenson, who was born in 1850 and died in 1894, lived all his life during the Reign of Queen Victoria and witnessed the mood of chaning of the last decade of the 19th century. As a consequence he depicted the new shape of the society into his works where he expressed, above of all, the moral dichotomy between good and devil. This is a fundamental theme in his masterpiece ‘’the strange case of dr.Jekyll and Mr.Hyde’’ where the hypocrisy is embodied by the double. The protagonist is in fact a man divided into two different characters, Jekyll, a respectable and rational doctor, and Hyde, an evil genius devoted to crime and irrationality. Jekyll, who has previously managed to create a potion that brings Hyde to life, is overcome by his evil part and, as a final conclusion, he has to kill himself in order to assassinate Hyde. The final suicide has a symbolic meaning: for Stevenson a man must kill one part of his nature to live in a civilized society. The two main characters are also a symbol of the duplicity in Victorian society: Jekyll represents the public face of the individual but at night in the bad areas of London he is Hyde who represents the dark side that is present in everyone. It is also important to underline that even the narrator and the set communicate something important: the set ,the Victorian London full of fog and dark corners, and the multiple prospective of narration mislead the narrator who is lost in horror.