Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde Essay | Critical Essay #2

Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde Critical Essay #2

In the following review, Oates discusses how Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde illustrate the Victorian dichotomy of good versus evil.

Like such mythopoetic figures as Frankenstein, Dracula, and, even,Alice ("in Wonderland"), Dr.-Jekyll-and-Mr.Hyde has become, in the century following the publication of Robert Louis Stevenson's famous novella, what might be called an autonomous creation. That is, people who have never read the novella—people who do not in fact "read" at all—know by way of popular culture who Jekyll-Hyde is. (Though they are apt to speak of him, not altogether accurately, as two disparate beings: Dr. Jekyll, Mr. Hyde.) A character out of prose fiction, Jekyll-Hyde seems nonetheless auto-genetic in the way that vampires and werewolves and (more benignly) fairies seem autogenetic: surely he has always existed in the collective imagination, or, like Jack the Ripper, in actual history? (As "Dracula" is both the specific creation of the novelist Bram Stoker...
(read more)