Robert Louis Balfour Stevenson was

born in Edinburgh in 1850. Was a novelist

, poet and travel writer and a
representative of neo- romanticism in
English literature. He lived in the south of
England, Germany, France and Italy. All
the time was in conflict with his social
environment, the respectable Victorian
world. He grew his hair long, his manners
were eccentric and he became one of the
first examples of the bohemian in Britain.
Stevenson became popular as a novelist
in the 1880s when he published the
strange case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde,
Kidnapped, and Treasured Island .
 Plot
Mr. Enfield is walking
through London late
one night when he
meets a man, Mr. Hyde
who is trampling a girl.
Mr. Enfield and the girl’s
family catch the man
but don’t take him to the
police, because the man
suggests to give money
to the girl’s family.
 The mysterious man disappears into his house
and returns with a check. It is by the respectable
Dr. Jekyll, a wealthy man.

 Richard Enfield tells the story to his cousin, Mr.

Utterson, Dr. Jekyll’s lawyer. Mr Utterson
examines Dr. Jekyll’s will. The will says that if
Jekyll disappears for more than three months, a
mysterious Mr. Hyde will assume his estate and
if Dr. Jekyll dies, all his money will go to him.
Mr. Enfield and Mr. Utterson go
to Mr. Hyde’s house and they
discover that the house is
connected to Dr. Jekyll’s house.

After several months, Dr. Jekyll

appears telling that Mr. Hyde
was a friend of him who now
has gone away. But Dr. Jekyll
behaves in a strange way:
sometimes, when in public, his
face gets contorted and he has
to hurry away.
Meanwhile, a member of the
Parliament, Sir Danvers Carew,
is killed and a famous doctor,
Dr. Layton, dies mysteriously.
Mr. Hyde is accused of the
murder of Sir Carew.

In a letter written by Dr. Layton

and given to Mr. Utterson
(Jekyll’s lawyer), the secret of
the strange relationship
between Jekyll and Hyde is
revealed: they are the same
person!
Dr. Jekyll invented a
potion that transformed
him into a violent man
and a potion that
transformed him back
into Jekyll. But after a
while he noticed that he
could transform into Mr.
Hyde involuntarily,
without his control.

The only way Jekyll had

to stop Mr Hyde and his
violence was to kill him.
But when he killed Mr
Hyde, he killed himself.
 The setting – – is “double”:
The West End is The East End is marked by
respectable poverty and slums.

This ambivalence is reinforced by the

symbolism of Dr. Jekyll’s house, whose two
façades are the faces of the two opposed
sides of the same man:
The front of this house is The back is used by Mr.
used by Dr. Jekyll and it is Hyde and it is part of a
well-kept. sinister block of buildings.
 Physical appearance:
Dr. Jekyll is handsome, Mr. Hyde is pale, dwarfish
with white, well-shaped and his hands are dark and
hands and a large, hairy.
harmonious body.

Furthermore:
The opposition between Dr. Jekyll – who wants to be
good and stop doing bad things when he is Mr. Hyde –
symbolically represents the struggle between good and
evil, which is often inside any man/woman.

2.This opposition also represents the nature of Victorian

society, full of hypocrisy.
Frankenstein: published in 1818.
The story was written after a
dream.
Frankenstein and the Monster
are complementary because
they both suffer a sense of
alienation and isolation; they
both want to be good but they
become obsessed with hate
and revenge. = Double
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde:
published in 1886. Again, the
story was written after a
dream.
The presence of two different
aspects inside one man:
respectability (a typical
Victorian trait) and
wickedness, violence. =
Double

The main colour of the setting is
white: (the , , ice, snow)
The Monster is not accepted by
society (but he could, as he is
good at the at beginning of the
story).
The main colour of the setting
is black: almost every action
takes place at night.
Mr. Hyde cannot be accepted by
society
The novel and Freud
 It pre-empted Freudian psychoanalysis (which
really only began to be common currency on the
publication of Freud's Interpretation of Dreams in
1901) by twenty-five years, and yet is similar to some
of its theories.
 Under the constraints of rigid Victorian society, the
unprepossessing Jekyll learns to give into his inner
desires (the instinctive forces Freud termed the
Id) when he is transformed into Hyde. The
rational, controlled, civilised part of Jekyll (Freud's
super-ego) attempts to repress the Id, and make
Hyde controllable. However, as Freud pointed out
in his studies of neurotic patients, such a repression
of the driving force of nature within us often leads
to horrible, barbaric consequences.
 Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
 Hyde represents the ever-demanding destructive
powers of the Id
 Jekyll represents the conscious ego, whose
original tendency was by no means towards the
vicious, but rather towards the 'loose', a neutral
desire for certain kinds of personal freedom
 Superego → the dictates of social conventions;
the Victorian professionist.
The end