Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde Essay | Critical Essay #3

Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde Critical Essay #3

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 to be as much part of human nature as of animal nature. They...
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