Robert Louis Stevenson: The Struggle of Good and Evil in 'Jekyll and Hyde', Appunti di Inglese

Scarica Robert Louis Stevenson: The Struggle of Good and Evil in 'Jekyll and Hyde' e più Appunti in PDF di Inglese solo su Docsity! STEVENSON Robert Louis Stevenson was born in Edinburgh in 1850. Because of his poor health he spent most of his childhood in bed, terrified of the dark room he was kept in and tutored at home, under the influence of his family’s Calvinism. He took up Engineering at university, following in his father’s footsteps, but he was not an enthusiastic student. He travelled a lot in search of a friendlier climate; he lived in the South of England, Germany, France and Italy. He 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, openly rejecting his family’s religious principles and their love for respectability. After giving up Engineering, he graduated in law in 1875 and decided to devote himself to writing. He married an American woman and since his health was deteriorating, they moved to Australia and Tahiti, settling down at Vailima in Samoa. He died of a brain haemorrhage in 1894. THE STRANGE CASE OF DR. JEKYLL AND MR HYDE KEY IDEA→The novel is the portrayal of good and evil, and its characters, Jekyll and Hyde, are the stereotypes of people who are ‘good’ and ‘evil’. As Jekyll has lived a virtuous life, his face is handsome, his hands are white and well shaped, his body is larger and more harmoniously proportioned than Hyde’s. Since Hyde is pure hate and evil, he is pale and dwarfish, his hands are dark and hairy, he gives an impression of deformity, and the good Mr Utterson reads ‘Satan’s signature’ in his traits. On several occasions Hyde is made to appear dressed in Jekyll’s fine clothes, which are too large for him; this fact points out how much smaller and uglier Hyde is than his alter ego. Though the evil side of Jekyll’s nature is initially less developed, Hyde gradually spoils his good twin. The smaller, slighter Hyde begins to grow in stature and the original balance of good and evil in Jekyll’s nature is threatened with being permanently overthrown. PLOT→Mr Utterson is a respectable London lawyer and friend to the brilliant scientist Dr Henry Jekyll. After relating a disturbing tale of a sinister man assaulting a small girl, Utterson begins to question the odd behaviour of his friend. As he investigates further into the life of Dr Jekyll, he discovers a story so horrific, so terrifying, that he can hardly believe it. In fact, his friend has created a potion able to release his evil side, Mr Hyde. These two beings are in a perpetual struggle; once Hyde is released from hiding, he achieves domination over the Jekyll aspect, so that the individual has only two choices. On the one hand, the man may choose a life of crime and depravity or, on the other hand, Jekyll must eliminate Hyde in the only way left, by killing him. Hence Jekyll’s suicide is the final and only choice. DOUBLE NATURE OF THE SETTING→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. This ambivalence is reinforced by the symbolism of Jekyll’s house, whose two fronts represent the faces of the two opposed sides of the same man: the front of this house, used by the doctor, is fair, part of a square of ‘ancient, handsome houses’; while the rear side, used by Hyde, is part of a sinister block of buildings, which ‘showed no windows’. 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. The most important events are wrapped up in darkness and fog: when Hyde tramples over the child, it is three in the morning; the murder of a respectable Member of Parliament, Sir Danvers Carew, happens at night, as well as Jekyll/Hyde’s suicide. SOURCES→This novel had its origin in a dream: afflicted with tuberculosis and haunted by sleeplessness and melancholy, 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. It was the Gothic aspect of this story that excited him, and he produced a first draft. In the last decades of the 19th century several works depicted the double nature of Victorian society, with its antithetical values and sexual repression. Stevenson himself seems to have been concerned since his youth with the duality of man’s nature, the good and the evil sides; the Calvinism of his family gave him a sense of man’s divided self and its pessimism moved him to rebel against religion. INSPIRATIONS→ Stevenson drew inspiration for the description of Hyde from Darwin’s studies about man’s connection to the animal world. Hyde’s small stature indicates that his body is not exercised; he is lame, ‘deformed’; he is called ‘abnormal’ but what this deformity consists of, nobody is able to say. Hyde may be both the primitive, the evolutionary ancestor of civilised man – since he is described in terms of grotesque animal imagery – and the symbol of repressed psychological drives. Jekyll has, in fact, projected his hidden pleasures onto Hyde, which become part of his own being, so Dr Jekyll is as guilty as Mr Hyde. Thus, 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. This novel may also be considered a reflection on art itself, as a kind of psychological search, and Jekyll’s discovery may symbolise the artist’s journey into the unexplored regions of the human psyche.