The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson further
attests to the monster’s significance as a representation of the changing attitudes
of the conservative Victorian society, in which deviation from the norms of sexual
repression drew the highest public furore. The novella stands as a timeless allegory,
dramatizing the conflict between the co-existence of good and evil within in the
human psyche, and encapsulating the questioning spirit of society during the religious
and economic divisions of Victorian England. The simultaneous allure and revulsion
evoked by Frankenstein and The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde are not
merely expressions of our fears and weaknesses, but also symbolic of the existential
angst caused by all
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In the twentieth century, the human
capacity for bestial behaviour was deemed a far greater threat than the non-human.
As such, film and literature began to deviate from depictions of monsters as repulsive
outliers of society, and instead, introduced modern existentialist anti-heroes to reflect
the increasingly blurred distinction between ‘good’ and ‘evil’. Bret Easton Ellis’
American Psycho is one such literary text that stands as a critique of the emotionally
vacuous, disconnected, and superficial bastion of consumerism that came to define the
late twentieth century. The novel’s anti-hero, Patrick Bateman, is the quintessential
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eighties American male whose insatiable appetite for violence and murder serves
as a grotesque embodiment of the brutality of capitalism, the soulless nature of
materialism, and the ‘crisis of masculinity’ that ensued in the post-modernist era.
Alternatively, Patty Jenkin’s 2003 biographical film Monster adopts the rhetoric of
a post-feminist gaze, as its’ protagonist, Aileen Wuornos, emerges as the