Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde is a short novel written by Robert Stevenson, shocking the audience with its sudden twist. Told mostly from the view of Mr. Utterson, Jekyll’s lawyer, he goes through the mysterious connection between Jekyll and a horrible man named Mr. Hyde. In the end of the novel, it is discovered that Jekyll is Hyde, taking a potion to transform into the hideous man. After several transformations into Hyde, Jekyll finally glances into a mirror, seeing a short, hideous and hairy man, much different from the tall and clean Jekyll. In the novel, Stevenson uses mirrors to represent Hyde’s physical manifestation, an object that reflects within the person, and he uses the mirrors to show the unstable duality of the individual's psyche. At first mention of the mirror, it is associated with evil and fear. Utterson and Poole go into Jekyll’s home and the pair notice the mirror, “…into whose depth they looked with an involuntary horror” (Stevenson, 57). Both of these characters have never mentioned the mirror before, yet when they look into it they mutual sense of dread, fearing the mirror, but not knowing exactly what they fear. Poole goes on to whisper “‘This glass has seen some strange things, sir’” (Stevenson, …show more content…
De Caprariis,” a high school in southern Italy, had a group of its students compose several articles exploring the deeper meaning of Jekyll and Hyde, including mirrors. In the first scene, they describe the mirror as an object used “to convey the sense of obsessive and horrible setting… reflecting the monstrous shape of Hyde at his first appearance on the Earth” (V. De Caprariis). This quote pertains to the reactions of Poole and Utterson, who both regard the mirror as something to be feared, a portal to the dark and twisted mind of Mr. Hyde. By use of the word “setting,” V. De Caprariis is agreeing that Hyde’s world in trapped in the mirror, and by looking into the mirror, Poole and Utterson can see into