Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde Essay | Critical Essay #4

Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde Critical Essay #4

In the following essay. Fraustino explores how two of the characters in Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde overcome both social and language convention to discover the secret of Dr. Jekyll-Mr Hyde.

Since Robert Louis Stevenson first published Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde almost a century ago, critics have generally regarded the work as moral allegory, a dramatization of the conflicts between Jekyll and Hyde, good and evil, split parts of a dual personality. Recent scholarship, however, disputes this reading approach, focusing on the contradictions within Jekyll's own personality, which eliminate him as a symbol of pure respectability, and on the importance of secondary characters. While Edwin Eigner [in Robert Louis Stevenson and the Romantic Tradition] notes that Utterson and En-field are the first doppelgängers encountered in the novel, Masao Miyashi states that Jekyll is not really committed to goodness but to mere respectability. Miyashi further suggests that the secondary...
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