Role Of Writing The Body In Dr Jekyll And Mr Hyde

‘Writing the body’ is a trope in literatures across cultures. Literature employs diverse images of the well-formed, the deformed, the anomalous, the abled and the disabled, human body to represent a plethora of ideas and thoughts. The novel The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde employs the body as a metaphor to exhibit the dual natures in a human being. R.L. Stevenson’s novel has become a seminal work in the discourse on dual selves subsequently. The phrase ‘Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde’ has made its way in English dictionary to denote a person who has two distinct personalities, good and bad.
In the novel, the normative and the nonnormative bodies are represented by the characters Dr Henry Jekyll and Mr Edward Hyde respectively. The portrait

The indulgent self of the sober and reputed doctor is hidden in the body Mr Hyde. The doctor seeks an outlet for all his repressed “undignified” desires by transforming himself to Hyde. He is forced to look grave and respectable in the public when he secretly wishes to indulge. The social and the religious restrictions in the Victorian Period force the Victorians to reckon sober behaviour as respectable and sanguine behaviour as disrespectable. Consequently, Dr Jekyll counts his inclination for merry making and pleasures as a grave mistake- “And indeed the worst of my faults was a certain impatient gaiety of

Dr Jekyll’s identity is apprehended in relation to the performance of the social role of a reputed doctor. Being Dr Jekyll is being a person with normative body with good self that conforms to social and moral codes. Hence, being Dr Jekyll is being a respectable doctor who renders valuable services to the society. On the contrary, being Dr Jekyll is being a hypocrite hiding in the mask of a reputed doctor secretly indulging in sensual pleasures. Dr Jekyll is not purely good even before the emergence of Mr Hyde. The presence of evil in him gets intensified and concentrated after the consumption of the drug. As mentioned earlier, Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde are one and the same person with two different physical manifestations. But, society can perceive only the tangible bodies and the external actions. Consequently, his friends Mr Utterson and Dr Lanyon look at them from two different perspectives. Mr Hyde is seen in relation to his ugly and deformed body and villainy whereas Dr Jekyll is seen in relation to his attractive physique and acceptable social behaviour. In fact the friendship of Mr Utterson and Dr Lanyon with Dr Jekyll and enmity with Mr Hyde are directed to the same person, Dr Henry