Psychological Criticism Used towards The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde - Term Paper Example

The most significant events that take place in Robert Louis Stevenson’s short novel The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde are mental or psychological. In this dark tale of a man’s struggle with his dual personality, the author utilizes psychological occurrences to point out the duality of human nature as well as the dark side of civilized society. The term psychological criticism refers to an approach to dissecting a work of literature that draws upon psychoanalytic theories, especially those of Sigmund Freud, whose revolutionary psychoanalytic theories changed our perceptions of human behavior by exploring new and controversial areas like wish-fulfillment, sexuality, the unconscious, and repression, as well as how language and symbols operate by demonstrating their ability to reflect unconscious fears or desires, or those of Carl Jung and Jacques Lacan, to comprehend more fully the text, the writer and the reader. In her book Routledge Critical Thinkers: Sigmund Freud, Pamela Thurschwell dwells more deeply on the conception of the human psyche, that is, Freud’s iceberg metaphor. She explains the struggle between the Id, Ego and Superego in the following manner: a. Id: Basic needs - it is all about me. Not reality based. b. Ego: Reality based or alters reality to justify his actions. c. Superego: Social programming - what is acceptable for the character - morality and conscience. (81-83) This particular piece of fiction by Stevenson is most commonly associated with the rare mental condition often referred to as “split personality” disorder, where there exist two distinct personalities within the same person. This notion is also connected to the so called “doppelganger” motif, which represents a tangible double of a living person that typically represents evil, a notion which predates Freud’s concept of the repressed, unconscious alter ego. The doppelganger represents the narrator’s attempt to project an inner evil into the outside world, which is exactly the case with Jekyll. This idea has been widely used in literature, ranging from authors and works like Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, Edgar Allan Poe’s “William Wilson,” Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s “The Double” and many others, whose protagonists find their identical nemesis in a psychological self-splitting process. This notion centers on the conception of humanity as dual in nature, even though the readers become fully aware of this in the last chapter, when the true story of Jekyll and Hyde emerges before them. Until the very end of the novella, these two characters seem nothing alike, and one can by no means make the connection between the well liked, respectable doctor Jekyll and the indescribably hideous and disfigured appearance of Hyde: “He is not easy to describe. There is something wrong with his appearance; something displeasing, something downright detestable. I never saw a man I so disliked, and yet I scarce know why. He must be deformed somewhere; he gives a strong feeling of deformity, although I couldn’t specify the point. He’s an extraordinary-looking man, and yet I really can name nothing out of the way. No, sir; I can make no hand of it; I can’t describe him. And it’s not want of memory; for I declare I can see him this moment.” (Stevenson 12) When Enfield relates to Utterson how he watched Hyde trample a little girl underfoot. Utterson asks his friend to describe Hyde’s appearance, but Enfield, as the quote indicates, proves unable to formulate a clear portrait. This lack of eloquence does not mean that he did not see him clearly. Quite the contrary, the image of Hyde is branded into his mind as he speaks, yet he fails to articulate Hyde’s ugliness and deformity. This creates the impression of Hyde as being almost intangible, mysterious, beyond words, just as he is beyond morality and conscience. Viewed as an almost supernatural creation, he is not of this world, and correspondingly, he manages to evade the comprehensive faculties of human beings. He represents the evil side of humanity, while his appearance emphasizes his perverted morals. He is also exceptionally hairy, a beastly characteristic which suggests that perhaps man is not essentially half good and half evil, but purely barbaric and immoral, thus implying that our natural savagery is only repressed by civilization and society’s standards. For the audience of Stevenson’s time, his ugliness and wickedness might have been something more than just symbolic. Apart from the fact that many people believed in the science of physiognomy, which upheld the belief that one could recognize a criminal merely by his physical characteristics, and even children’s fairy tales offer a straightforward recognition of the “bad guy.” The protagonists, usually a beautiful young maiden or a handsome prince, through sheer power of their righteousness, manage to defeat the ugly witch, the horrifying dragon or any other atrocious monster the ancient story tellers managed to think of. Thus, humanity has always been taught to follow a rather shallow perception of the world by connecting beauty with goodness, and ugliness with evil. Stevenson uses an ingenious approach to portray the human soul as a battlefield for an “angel” and a “fiend” who both fight for the possession of the human soul. Every human being contains opposite forces within him, an alter ego that hides behind a social and polite everyday façade. Jekyll asserts that “man is not truly one, but truly two” (Stevenson 95), that is one is never black nor white, but always in the grey area in between, and the situation at hand brings out more of one side or the other. Jekyll’s potion that would purify and separate each element, the angel from the fiend, only manages to bring out the dark side into being. Hyde surfaces, but he brings forth no angelic counterpart. It is left to be argued whether or not this part of the angelic counterpart is left for Jekyll himself, but one can clearly notice that his demeanor is utterly moral and decent, and he does enjoy the reputation of a charitable, courteous and genial man, yet he never embodies the virtue of good equally as Hyde embodies the very opposite from it. He simply portrays civilized behaviors and morals, leaning towards good. He bravely takes it upon himself to purify his good side, but he ends up liberating the darkness and freeing it from the shackles of conscience. The bad is released into the world, untainted with the virtue of goodness, while his former self stays as mixed as before. Yet, before acquitting Jekyll of any blame for the subsequent events, it is important to take into account that he himself ascribes his lopsided results to his dark state of mind on first taking the potion. Having been motivated by sinister of ambition and pride, it was easy for him to produce Hyde. It is implied then, that if he had entered into this devilish endeavor with pure motives, an angelic being would have emerged. Once released, Hyde exerts an enormous amount of power and gradually reaches the point of utterly dominating both personas, until we witness the existence of Hyde becoming more frequent than the existence of Jekyll. The dominance of Hyde holds various implications for understanding the psychology of human nature. As Jekyll appears to lose his grip over Hyde and his life, one begins to wonder whether perhaps Hyde is the original, the authentic nature of man, which has been repressed but not extinguished by the accumulated weight of civilization, conscience, morality and societal norms. Even Victorian England, which considered itself the pinnacle of Western civilization in its manners and demeanor, does not have the power to restrain the liberated dark, instinctual side of man foolish enough to release it. Now, if one tends to perceive Hyde as a “troglodyte,” a primitive creature brought under tentative control by civilization, conscience and law, what the potion merely does is scratch the surface just a little, stripping off the civilized veneer, exposing the essential, animalistic nature of man. However, if Hyde is truly just an animal, it comes as quite a surprise the utter delight he takes in committing crime. The novella repeatedly gives account of Hyde as a creature of pure evil and countless vices. The fact that he tramples a girl and murders an old man, both of whom had done nothing to provoke his anger and deserve death, rounds up the immorality of the unleashed dark side. He seems to commit violence for the mere pleasure of it, something not even an animal does. He appears wickedly and happily immoral, rather than amoral, a trait of an animal that acts on its instincts, not having the moral debate of right and wrong. His kind of evil constitutes not just a lapse from good, but an outright, deliberate, devious attack on it. As far as surroundings are concerned, they also have a large impact on the protagonist(s). Dr. Jekyll resides in a home possessing, as Stevenson says, “a great air of wealth and comfort” (24). While on the other hand, his laboratory is “a certain sinister block of building … [which] bore in every feature the marks of profound and sordid negligence” (Stevenson 6). With its outer appearance of decay and negligence, the laboratory is the perfect nesting place of wickedness, the ideal birth place of the corrupt and perverse Hyde. Correspondingly, the respectable, prosperous looking main house is a symbol of the upright Jekyll himself. The connection between these two buildings and the outer appearance they project similarly corresponds to the connection between the personas they represent. The remarkable fact is that these two buildings are adjoined, but they look out on two different streets, an ingenious technique with which the author manages to convey the split personality of the protagonists’ abode itself, as well as the one existing in the persona of Jekyll. Due to the fact that the layout of the streets in that area is moderately convoluted, it is impossible for the casual observer to detect that these two utterly different structures are simply two parts of one whole, exactly as the readers are unable to detect the relationship between Jekyll and Hyde at first. This correlates to the idea of false appearances. The house appears perfect from the front view, but behind this façade lurks something malicious. This notion could symbolize a metaphorical criticism of how citizens of Victorian England were always expected to keep a polite façade despite their ulterior motives. And, lastly, Stevenson goes to great lengths to present the urban terror and the darkness seething on the streets of London. During the course of the novella, a strong link is established between the streets of Victorian London and the ominous events surrounding Hyde. These streets are the perfect place of nightmarish imagery, with a sinister landscape wrapped in fog, where not even the street lights dare to illuminate the darkness for fear of what crimes they might witness. Surprisingly, Hyde seems oddly at home in this urban landscape, a trait not befitting an animal. It is obvious that is he an urban creature, he is a product of his own time and society, a new and more dangerous breed of a sewer rat, hiding in the darkness and waiting to attack. The streets of Victorian England offer a refuge and are the devil’s playground for Hyde, just like they were for Jack the Ripper, who just like Hyde, relished in the thought of inflicting pain and murdering people who did not deserve the tragic fate they were dealt. All of these observations imply that perhaps civilization, too, has its dark side, because London is not only a well kept, bustling center of commerce, but also a foggy, dreary, nightmarish place where bogeymen reside. Having got the inspiration for the novella in a dream sequence, Stevenson reworked the dream into this novella by working feverishly and in self-enforced solitude to complete it, rather like Dr Jekyll's self-imposed exile. In the end, he left the question concerning human innate state and its duality open. Psychologically speaking, the text is remarkably profound in its exploration of the ethical ego and the immoral other in the guise of Hyde. Also, it is possible to view the text as a failure to acknowledge the dark side within each individual. Is it the story of a duality of being, or that of a monster which lurks in the depths of the soul? Stevenson managed to create a gripping story by avoiding to answer this question, but still managing to engage the reader enough into reaching his own conclusion. Bibliography: Dryden, Linda. The Modern Gothic and Literary Doubles: Stevenson, Wilde and Wells. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003. Stevenson, Robert Louis. The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. London: Bibliolis Books Ltd, 2010. Thurschwell, Pamela. Routledge Critical Thinkers: Sigmund Freud. New York: Routledge, 2000. Read More