Dr. Jeckyll and Mr. Hyde: “The Ape Within”

Robert Louis Stevenson’s novella Dr. Jeckyll and Mr. Hyde is a chilling allegory of the duality of human nature that rang true for many Victorians when it was published. It is the tale of a doctor who experiments in a lab with his dark side; he creates a concoction that turns him into the evil Mr. Hyde, his hideously deformed alter ego, who performs the monstrous crimes that Dr. Jeckyll can only fantasize about. According to Professor Harrington’s lecture, the story was extraordinarily popular when it was published, and it reflected the uneasy sentiment of the late Victorian era. It falls under the category of the late Victorian Gothic revival tradition, according to Professor Harrington, which was characterized by a preoccupation with “monstrous crime” and “evil genius,” horror and terror portrayed through “spooky” settings and situations, the use of embedded narratives, and, crucially, a focus on the dark inner psyche of mankind and a connection with evolutionist/degenerationist themes.

Dr. Jeckyll and Mr. Hyde contains all of these, capitalizing on the preoccupations and fears of Victorian England. Interestingly many of these fears stemmed from newly emerging ideas and understandings of human evolution and man’s place in nature, or what might loosely be termed “Darwinian” concepts. The fact was becoming clearer and clearer that man was not much different, evolutionarily speaking, than a gorilla, and this was intensely frightening for many people (it still is very frightening to some people, even today). The anxiety that the only thing separating man from beast is the “thin veil of civilization” was played upon in Stevenson’s work, in which Hyde represents the simian, beastly creature lurking beneath the surface of every self-respecting Victorian man and woman. To me, Jeckyll’s mad and reckless experimentation with science represents the fears that people had about science taking things too far; the worry that if science had proven that men were no more than mere beasts already, what other evil and monstrous things could it uncover? This fear and distrust of modernization, technology, and scientific innovation is reflected throughout the ambivalent end of the Victorian era.