Jekyll and Hyde: A Gothic

Jekyll and Hyde: a Gothic Novel

Robert Louis Stevenson published his Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde in 1886 -- a good century after the first Gothic novel came into being in England. Stevenson's novel was, in a sense, a throwback to the gothic essence: it had all the elements of horror: a strange visitor, murder, secrets, science, and epistolary confessions. And it was an immediate sensation with both the literary and non-literary world. Like any true classic it rose above the prejudices of its medium (and/or genre) to convey a truth about humanity that both captured the essence of a time and place (Victorian England) and a universal common to all mankind. This universal could be said to be at the heart of the gothic genre, which Jekyll and Hyde modernizes to some extent -- and the universal may be defined as the fact that evil attracts, but that giving into that attraction has demonstrable (and damning) consequences. This is the lesson that Jekyll learns. This paper will analyze Stevenson's Jekyll and Hyde and show how what happens to Jekyll in both his soul and physicality when he transforms into Hyde can be viewed as an example of gothic fiction.

One of the most important elements of gothic fiction is atmosphere: gothic novels are always atmospherically dark. That is to say, they tend to take place in shadowy places; in medieval castles; in dank, subterranean sectors of city life. Stevenson's gothic setting is London -- but a side of London that is set off -- whether it is Jekyll's study where he sequesters himself or London itself, at night, when Hyde is on the loose. Stevenson immediately establishes his novel in the gothic tradition by introducing Mr. Utterson as a "man of rugged countenance that was never lighted by a smile; cold, scanty and embarrassed in discourse; backward in sentiment; lean, long, dusty, dreary and yet somehow lovable" (5). In Mr. Utterson's face is a reflection of the modern world: it is humorless, uneasy, slightly macabre -- and yet not without its humanity. The same description would have aptly fit Mary Shelley's Dr. Frankenstein and/or his monster: it is a description of the gothic horror of Romantic/Enlightenment doctrine -- and it is, to a great extent, that doctrine and its divorce from (and reinterpretation of) the medieval world that gives gothic horror its character. That doctrine is the second element of gothic fiction that Stevenson employs in Jekyll and Hyde.

However, by the time Stevenson gives us Jekyll and Hyde, 18th century Enlightenment and 19th century Romance have essentially run their courses: the aftermath of both eras is what Stevenson reflects in the propriety with which the characters of Victorian England engage one another in their public life. Following on the heels of the Romantic era, which had given reign to a free-spirited, revolutionary dogma (born of the Enlightenment) that produced one of the most gothic tales in modern literature (Frankenstein); Stevenson's Victorian England is a world attempting to recover from the consequences of Byronic Romance and Shelleyian tragedy. Yet, the most apparent consequence of Romantic/Enlightenment doctrine was the dropping of the guard against evil -- which, for a time, was viewed as a holdover of old world spirituality. It is Jekyll's fascination with committing whatever acts he might like with impunity that leads him to become Hyde. Jekyll uses science to pursue a philosophical tenet of the Age of Enlightenment: Rousseau defined the tenet: essentially, what the old world had viewed as a fallen human nature (due to sin), Rousseau viewed as simply "natural" and "good."

Thus, when Jekyll confesses in his suicide note that his potion allowed his outward semblance to become the reflection of a part of his "nature" that ordinarily and traditionally would have been suppressed, Stevenson reveals the archetypal gothic element of his narrative to be none other than the traditional "good vs. evil" paradigm. However, unlike in earlier gothic works, there is no allusion to priests or monks as players on the side of "evil." In fact, the absence of religion and religious restraints appears to be an element of Stevenson's theme: Jekyll, acting on the doctrine of Rousseau, which is to follow one's "nature," unmoors himself from the restraints traditionally made available by religious conviction. Jekyll, being a man of science, rather than of theology, puts to test the doctrine that divorced the old world from the new, and what he finds is that the doctrine is not good. While the earlier works of gothic horror (like The Monk) pointed out corruption within the clergy, Stevenson's gothic work appears to do the opposite: it points out the corruption in Naturalism: "I not only recognised my natural body from the mere aura and effulgence of certain of the powers that made up my spirit, but managed to compound a drug by which these powers should be dethroned from their supremacy, and a second form and countenance substituted, none the less natural to me because they were the expression, and bore the stamp of lower elements in my soul" (63).

Stevenson's Jekyll ultimately learns that what had been deceptively identified as "natural" was nothing more than the attempt to legitimize fallen human nature. It is this fallen human nature that Jekyll believes he can legitimately embrace (without the "grasp of conscience" (67) as he says) through his transformation into Hyde. Just as Rousseau sought to transform fallen human nature into something untainted by what the medieval world had called Original Sin, Jekyll attempts to transform from a human with a conscience into a human without a conscience.