In the following essay excerpt, Geduld traces the intellectual and psychological environment in which Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde was first published.
We can now see that for the Victorians, Stevenson's story expressed the anguish of humanity's compliance with the Law of Polarity, which states that all matter is a manifestation of positive and negative forces. Attempts to apply this law to the human soul stretch back at least as far as the ancient Greeks. By the mid-nineteenth century, the theory of the divided soul was complicated by Charles Darwin's popularization of evolutionary theory in The Origin of Species (1859) and The Descent of Man (1871) [Darwinism challenged the Judaeo-Christian notion that man's immoral or passionate impulses were God's device for testing human will. If human beings had direct kinship with beasts, the passions would have.....
This is a free excerpt of 135 words. This section contains 1,917 words. This
study guide contains 26,387 words (approx. 88 pages at 300
words per page).
Read the rest of this Literature Guide with our Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde Access Pass.
