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Dr. Jekyll And Mr. Hyde Character Analysis

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For my Victorian novel, I chose to read The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson. Like most Victorian novels, this book contains an original situation, a conflict, a climax, and a conclusion. Dr. Jekyll is an old doctor with two very close friends, Mr. Utterson and Mr. Lanyon. Mr. Hyde is a younger man with an aptitude for evil. Throughout the book, Mr. Utterson is disturbed by this link between his friend, Jekyll, and this mysterious evil man, Hyde. Hyde has a key to Jekyll’s house and gives orders to Jekyll’s servants. Mr. Utterson, who is Jekyll’s lawyer, begins to feel extremely skeptical when Jekyll leaves his estate and his fortune for Hyde in his will. Utterson fears that Hyde has some authority over the …show more content…

The first woman character we see in the novel is knocked over by Mr. Hyde. Stevenson writes, “the man trampled calmly over the child’s body and left her screaming on the ground” (Stevenson 3). After being trampled, the girl cries for help, signifying that she relies on other people for her protection, making her relatively docile and one-dimensional. The second woman we see is the maid, who is described as, “romantically given, for she sat down upon her box, which stood immediately under the window, and fell into a dream of musing” (Stevenson 17). Once again, this is an example of a female who is a romantic, and only a romantic, making her a superficial character. She witnesses Hyde murder the man on the street. When she sees Hyde beating this man with a cane, she faints and wakes up after Hyde is gone, showing her as a very inactive character that does not have much influence on the novel. The absence of female characters in this novel is due to the fact that in Victorian novels, women characters are supposed to be examples of good moral influence, and Stevenson thought that women would have pointlessly complicated the book. Women in this book had weak, secondary roles so that Stevenson could focus on other more pressing issues present in the Victorian era, like man’s inner good vs.

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