Jekyll And Hyde Comparison Essay

Robert Louis Stevenson shows a marvelous ability to portray. He depicts the surroundings, architectural details of the dwellings, the inside of the houses, the instruments and each part of the environment in detail. He even specifies that the laboratory door is “covered with red baize” (p.24). Not only does he offer a precise picture of the setting, but also he draws accurately the characters. About 200 words are used in order to describe Mr. Utterson the lawyer (p.5). Dr.Lanyon, the gentleman who befriends Mr. Utterson and Dr. Jekyll, is described as “a healthy, dapper, red-faced gentleman, with a shock of hair prematurely white.” (p.12). Each of the characters are described according to their importance in the novella. Each of them except

Hyde. The maid does not grant us anything new, but for a comparison between Mr. Hyde and “an aged beautiful gentleman with white hair” (p.20) Having two descriptions so close we cannot deny the difference between them.

The previous chapter before the two confessions is reasonably remarkable. Poole, Dr. Jekyll’s butler, provides another portrayal. He offers many comparisons between Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. (“My master (…) is a tall, fine build of a man, and this was more of a dwarf.” (p.38)). The affirmations of the poor butler are all correct except perhaps the most important: This “thing” that is in the cabinet is in fact Dr. Jekyll.

The penultimate description is presented by Dr. Lanyon. Lanyon focuses in the way he feels towards Mr. Hyde and the possible reason of that (p.48).

The first transformation occurs in the seventh chapter of the novella. Mr. Utterson and Mr. Enfield can see barely something because Dr. Jekyll closes the window in the precise instant when transformation starts (p.33).Nevertheless, it is sufficient to provoke a deadly silence between the two gentlemen. The last transformation is pretty inexact too, but it appears in Dr. Jekyll confession. The narrator is dealing with several things, it is not strange this evasion of a suitable

Lanyon uses more words in his description of Mr. Hyde than in a moment with that importance. In addition, Lanyon describes more accurately the change of color of the potion than the transformation itself (p.49).

As specified, descriptions cannot be called descriptions. Moreover, in a extremely important moment, the transformation, when Mr. Hyde should appear in all his glory, words simply avoid his figure. Trying to find a reason for this strange way to proceed Sami Schalk wrote an interesting article: “What Makes Mr. Hyde So Scary?: Disability as a Result of Evil and Cause of Fear”. One of the main ideas of the text is that Stevenson takes advantage of Victorians’ mentality and uses this untraceable disability of Mr. Hyde in order to produce fear:

Just as Victorians did not particularly distinguish between mind and body, the moral model does not regulate which comes first (…). As a result it is not clear if Hyde is disabled because he is evil or if he is evil because he is disabled. The two are not necessarily perceived to be the same, but are so intensely linked in the back of our minds that it becomes hard to not make the assumption of their coexistence