preview

Jekyll And Mr Hyde Gender

Good Essays

Robert Louis Stevenson was a popular 19th-century author who wrote books such as Treasure Island. One of Stevenson’s classic works is called Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr.Hyde. In this book, Dr. Jekyll conducts a science experiment that morphs him into Mr. Hyde. Mr. Hyde is the opposite of Dr. Jekyll. Where Dr. Jekyll represents temperance, virtue and science, Mr. Hyde represents passion, immoral behavior and a complete lack of reason. Whereas Dr.Jekyll is a law abiding citizens, Hyde runs rampant committing act of violence and murder. Within the story of Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde one can obtain a moral lesson on appropriate behavior during the Victorian times. While it is still taboo to commit murder, other aspects of Hyde's personality deviate from the social norms at the …show more content…

Jekyll and Mr. Hide suggests that Stevenson provides such a profound contrast between the two to point to the absurdity of the male gender roles in the Victorian Period. In his article, Hyding the Subject: The Antinomies of Masculinity in the Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and My. Hyde, Ed Cohen argues, The logical effect of this opposition gives rise to the conundrum that while all men "naturally" and consistently ought to be men by virtue of possessing male bodies, only some men are "real" (a.k.a, bourgeois English) men, insofar as they embody the appropriate class-defined, nationally inflected gender attributes. By invoking and elaborating this unacknowledged tension, Stevenson prizes apart the impacted logic that subtends Victorian ideas about bourgeois male subjectivity and allows the imaginary work that obscures its (ir)rationality to become palpable in the double being Jekyll/Hyde (182). In other words, Stevenson gives readers the contrast between characters so that they may draw their own conclusions about masculinity. Of course, the suggested conclusion would be the irrationality of the prescribed gender

Get Access