Robert Louis Stevenson's The Strange Case Of Dr. Jekyll And Mr. Hyde

Robert Louis Stevenson’s 1886 “shilling shocker”, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, has been subjected to various interpretations over the years. While some have assessed the trope of duality in the light of racism, colonization and cultural ‘other’, others have drawn on psychological references of split personality or ‘dissociative identity disorder’(i.e. existence of more than one personality in one body). The popularity of the novella and the idea of binaries existing in one being, has given birth to the phrase ‘Jekyll and Hyde’ which associates itself to a person whose attitude is vastly different from situation to situation. The respectable Dr. Jekyll, in his attempt to prove the worth of his scientific ambitions and studies, creates a monster much like Frankenstein’s monster but at the same time completely different from it. In both the cases, it is a scientific experiment gone wrong but in Stevenson’s text, the horror lies in the transformation of the protagonist. Set in fog-bound London, this Gothic masterpiece explores the baser instincts in a human being that necessarily hastens the doom of the same.

Henry Jekyll in his ‘Full Statement of the Case’ where he states that “…man is not truly one, but truly two.”(58) In my paper, I have attempted to explore the transformation that takes place in The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and connect it to the transformations in Thomas Harris’ novels The Silence of the Lambs and Red Dragon and their respective movie