Frankenstein and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and Man's Dual Nature - Literature review Example

Introduction In comparing and contrasting the dual nature of man in Frankenstein and The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, I would first like to elaborate a thought I have about the nature of adolescence. Recently it has struck me that a young person growing up reaches that certain tender age and suddenly begins a serious rebellion against seemingly everything. This rebellion is indeed controlled to some extent by such things as family, school, religion, and the such. But I began to wonder the reason why. There is a point when the fairytale world of which we were all initially raised in, becomes clouded and suddenly uprooted. Things we had once been taught, things we felt that were true are strangely without foundation, and the young adolescent mind must begin to find other ways or other things to depend on to explain presence of evil in the world. Perhaps two of these things are Frankenstein and The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Thesis Victor Frankenstein and his monster are prime representatives of man’s nature, as our Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Victor is his monster’s “father”, but is neglectful and unloving. The monster becomes violent because of the neglect his “father” visits upon him. Victor represents man’s drive to achieve, and also man’s inability to always determine what responsibilities and consequences their achievements may bring. The monster represents the human primal side. The part of man that is unfiltered, without emotion and without reason. Similarly, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde represent the dual nature of man. Dr. Jekyll is the logical, thinking, loving side of man. He has emotions and feelings, and is able to comprehend the emotions and feelings of others. Hyde, on the other hand, could care less about feelings and emotion, because he is unable to conceive of them. Hyde is the raw, uninterrupted side of man. Jekyll and Frankenstein are the side of man that is educated, taught, and essentially trained. Hyde and the monster are the side of man exhibited when all of the education and training that humans receive is abandoned. Hyde and the monster are raw and uncut. However, Hyde and the Monster are the alter-egos of Jekyll and the doctor. These are the sides that Jekyll and the Victor wish they could show more of, but cannot and will not because it is not an acceptable norm for everyday society. Discussion This, to me is what Mary Shelley and Robert Louis Stevenson encountered in their famous stories of Frankenstein and The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. It is significant for one could say the child growing up to be an adolescent was the country England, the United Kingdom during their time. It was the period of Queen Victoria, when England had managed to climb to the top of the world with all its worldly land acquisitions including India, Australia, Africa and interests in China. Its powerful navy had no seconds. England stood, as the United States today, as the major moral force of the world. But then England had found out things about itself in its growth. It had found out about evil that not only had it witnessed in its climb to the top, but which it too had to pursue and use. Imagine intentionally forcing a whole colony of possible international traders to become opium eaters, as it did in China. There was much more but hence the need of a Victorian strong jacket coat of moral fortitude had to be built, furnished, and locked. There were just things not spoken of. Stevensons Henry Jekyll knew all about this hiding of evil from his early life as a youth, probably from adolescence. It wasnt a stark sense of evil that it would later become in his creation of Hyde but it was such that at some point in his life he "stood already committed to a profound duplicity of life" (p. 115). As he matured Jekyll began to accept the "through and primitive duality of man" as set. But important to him, for his social bearing and the way he was to function in the world, he was just like England, practicing its social bearing and the way it must function in the world as a moral compass. Jekyll had to produce an outward stiff upper lip that he could portray to the world and not let the world know that he also desired the other side of his dual nature. Mary Shelley was a remarkable person. She was a remarkable woman. She wrote Frankenstein when she was but 19 years old. This is totally fantastic from the inner complexity of the books plots and story development. A large part of her genius probably had to do with her father. William Godwin was once a minister and later became a rather atheistic respected philosopher. Her mother Mary Wollstonecraft, who had died when Mary was a child, had been an early feminist writer. In other words, she came from a family of functioning intellectuals in England and her life remained that of a productive intellectual and writer. Mary married the poet Percy Shelley, they all ran in the company of poet Lord Byron and she outlived them all, continuing to write notable fiction and just well, respected non-fiction biographical essays. But what could a nineteen year old have of the concept of mans dual nature? It was not so much that the ideas of her father that influenced her as it was the open Romantic spirit of the writers and poets at that time. Her father and mother did give her a fertile and inquiring mind and most of all she was struck by the Romantic spirit and its love and respect of nature. She, like Stevenson did a lot of travelling from England to the continent, France and Switzerland. Her writing is infused with wonderful flashes of mountains and landscapes. Perhaps the dual nature was in the monster she imaginatively created in her novel. The sensitive Victor Frankenstein didnt create a mere monster of shock and fear. The monster educated himself. He had taught himself to read and write. Significantly he had learned to respond to the senses he had received from his outside world, in the way that philosopher John Locke said the mind was a tabula rosa, empty at birth. The mind received knowledge through what came in and was accumulated by the senses. Victor Frankensteins monster learned in a way to be human by copying what he thought he saw humans did. When he viewed the peasant family, the blind De Lacey from the small hole in the barn, his son and daughter, he learned about human relationships. More so when he saw how Felix related to the Turkish woman Safie with love. All this came to the monster. But the monster was a creation of Victor. The monster came from the need of Victor to find out about new and strange things. Just as Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll had a strong and inquiring mind, so did Shelley’s Victor. But Jekyll sought to experiment on himself. Victor experimented on the monster and found out he had created "a thing such as even Dante could not have conceived" (p. 19). The monster’s ugliness became equated with an inability to control evil. This is the thought that overpowered Victor Frankenstein, that he had created one that was responsible for evil things. However, Shelleys portrayal of the duality of man was not as profound as Stevenson. What drove her story was more so plot, I believe, than character. But certainly Victor had depth of character. However so many things happened in Shelleys story, attesting more to the brilliance of her young mind. Although these happenings could be seen as the good man facing the evil creation, her main theme could be the inability of man to control his stages of inquiry, not knowing how to approach his ceaseless scientific questions with moral bearing. Victors monster did try to have a moral sense, and he went through several plot struggles to engage and develop it. But he failed every time because, ultimately, he was not human. He was an ugly creation of man. Leonard Wolff in his edition of Jekyll and Hyde, relates how Stevenson, after writing the story in three days from his sick bed - Stevenson was an active though sickly figure all his life - read it before the fire to his like-in-mind creative wife, the American woman Fanny van de Grift Stevenson. The stepson liked the draft. Fanny did not and said so distinctly. It was missing allegory. Stevenson surprising tossed the manuscript in the fire and three days later produced the allegorical work. It is this version that delineates mans dual nature and his dual feelings toward it. Dr. Jekyll wanted his evil nature out and he wanted it functioning so that he could enjoy it. But it was ‘evil’ then as it was more an expression of unbound, innocent freedom. Freedom of obligation. It was only toward the end when he found out that the drug was losing its ability to bring him back from the evil Hyde personification that he realized the danger of experimenting in his evil self. Conclusion I started with adolescents and their finding out that there was a dual nature in the lives of people that could be uncontrollable and probably accountable for a lot of the inconsistencies that they begin to see unfolding before them. Today these inconsistencies appear so obviously in their environments and especially across the TV screen. But how profound is the thought that the teenager gets when making the connection of common people losing their houses to foreclosures, and bank executives who have taken these houses away yet making millions and millions in salaries? How profound is it that many of their families are experiencing the moral and physical chaos of drug addiction or even how they begin to realize the difficulty and challenges of working out careers for their lives. Imagining the teen then coping with the books (the actual books) Frankenstein and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. I think it is Stevensons work that would give them an appreciation of dual natures clearly and profoundly. But, then, it would be Mary Shellys book that will tell them about the challenges and the different loves of life. Both writers became sharp and professional, at the top of their art and craft. And both writers still manage to raise these important questions, what are we to do about, then evil. For Mary, the question becomes so interestingly compounded. How do you express love if you are, but, a man created monster? Shelley, Mary. Frankenstein or The Modern Prometheus (1818). New York: Penguin, 1992. Stevenson, Robert L. The Essential Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde (1886). Ed. Leonard Wolf. New York: Penguin,1995. Read More