A Short Story Character Analysis Essay

Character traits

Mr. Hyde is essentially a werewolf, the well of irrational rage that lies hidden within us all. Jekyll's attempt to expel his dark side is doomed to failure from the outset, a fact obvious to the reader, because it is an inescapable aspect of being human. In that sense the story is a tale of horror, even without an overtly supernatural element. Stevenson's Dr. Jekyll falls into the same error as Mary Shelley's Dr. Frankenstein: He pursues knowledge blindly, without giving a thought to the consequences, and is ultimately destroyed by his own creation. The text can also be read as a warning that the savage lies close beneath the surface in all of us, that civilization is just a mask to hide our true faces. As an enhancement of character duality, Stevenson places his protagonist in an aggressively sinister gothic setting at a home laboratory and former dissecting theater protected from prying eyes by a foggy cupola, closed windows, heavy doors, and a courtyard. Staying apart from the handsome, respectable home of Dr. Jekyll, the troglodytic Hyde resides to the rear of the block in a windowless residence behind a discolored wall lacking bell and knocker, a suitable dwelling for a man with the evocative name of Hyde. Because Hyde is given to puerile tricks of scrawling blasphemies in books, burning letters, and marring a portrait of Jekyll's father, the scientist acquires a flat for Hyde in Soho. The area is known for lowlife pubs, cabarets, cheap eateries, and brothels "with its muddy ways, and slatternly passengers like a district of some city in a nightmare." In the chiaroscuro common to his late hours, Hyde can prowl Soho's disreputable streets, then disappear for months when Jekyll consumes him by shape-shifting back into his normal self (Saposnik, pp. 108-117).

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Character behaviour

Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde debate the conflict between good and evil and the correlation among bourgeois values, urban violence, and class structure. Dr. Jekyll is a seemingly placid character whose often-debated scientific research has nonetheless gained him respect amid his peers. The potion that Jekyll develops causes an unexplainable transformation into the violent Mr. Hyde. The Mr. Hyde alter-ego may represent an uncontrollable subconscious desire driven by anger and frustration toward an oppressive English class structure. Hyde's numerous rampages include trampling a young girl and murdering the prominent English politician Sir Danvers. Although Jekyll prefers living the life of "the elderly and discontent doctor" (84), he cannot control his urge for "the liberty, the comparative youth, the light steps, leaping impulses, and secret pleasures" that the Hyde persona offers him. Dr. Jekyll's desired liberty is perhaps caused by the restricted lifestyle that bourgeois cultural codes imposed on English society. Several Victorian social critics maintained that inner-city London dwellers were a debased life form living in jungle like conditions analogous to those in Africa. In 1890, William Booth, the founder of the Salvation Army, claimed that England needed rescuing from its continually degenerating condition since ...