Dr. Jekyll Vs. Hyde Essay

In her article “Hyding Nietzsche in Robert Louis Stevenson’s Gothic of Philosophy,” Harriet Hustis argues that Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde displays an amalgamation of “the fictive and the philosophical” (Hustis 993). Hustis claims that Stevenson’s account of the origins of Jekyll and Hyde in his “A Chapter on Dreams” challenges the distinctions between “fiction and philosophy, the intention and the unintentional,” as well as “the conscious and the unconscious” (Hustis 994). The distinction between self and other is rendered equivocal as well. In addition to Stevenson’s account of its origins, the story of Jekyll and Hyde itself poses philosophical ideas about the breakdown of binaries and supposed opposites. Hustis compares Stevenson’s writings in and about Jekyll and Hyde to Friedrich Nietzsche’s philosophical statements in Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future—published in 1886, months after the publishing of

Hustis includes an excerpt from a letter that Stevenson wrote to his friend Edward Purcell in 1886 to support this claim. In this letter, Stevenson admits to an “ethical confusion” (Hustis 996) that results from “the old Scotch Presbyterian preoccupation” about morality that is compounded by “the incapacity to choose” and “an age of transition” (Stevenson, Jekyll and Hyde, 83-84). Stevenson considers the hippocracy displayed by Jekyll as Jekyll’s greatest misdeed. Jekyll’s account in “Henry Jekyll’s Full Statement of the Case” displays self-deception and hipocritical denial premised on the insistence that his intentions were “good.” Jekyll’s valuation of his intentions as “good” is dependent upon a dissasociation between his motivations and the “evil” consequences that resulted from his actions (Hustis