A Comparison Of The Strange Case Of Dr. Jekyll And Mr. Hyde

The Victorian era of British history was a period marked by a resurgence of enlightened thought and a renewed interest in using science to improve society, yet this supposed path to human evolution was one paved with abjection, destruction, and sacrifice. As a result of the increased professionalization of university sciences and recent breakthroughs in scientific theories, “progress” as we call it coalesced in the form of some of the greatest scientists, scholars, and philosophers of the modern era. Yet with these advances came an increasing awareness of humanity’s recalcitrant status as a product of irrational, inescapable animality. Many members of the scientific community fervently worked to tease out what made humans exceptional among the vast lineage of animals that Charles Darwin had found that we evolved from. Indeed, many suggested that mankind and the natural world share many distinctions – or perhaps are one in the same – including author Robert Louis Stevenson, for whom “literature tend[ed] naturally to affirm the metaphysical connection between humans and animals” (Danta 57). Yet some sought to extinguish this link between the world of beasts in order to sanctify the realm of men, and Stevenson explores the resulting Darwinian nightmare in his novel The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. The eponymous Dr. Henry Jekyll, one such esteemed scientific mind and by all appearances a paragon of Victorian enlightenment and virtue, was in fact possessed of the same spirit to renounce “the animal” that so pervaded the underbelly of Victorian medical academia. Dr. Jekyll’s failure, then, represents Victorian science’s ultimate recognition that the “animal within” is in fact a primordial, integral, and inextinguishable aspe...

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...he acknowledged that humankind is irrevocably bound to this earth along with all of its fellow inhabitants, Dr. Jekyll sought to split apart these conjoined and codependent worlds and cast out the corrupted animal – Hyde – in his heart. Philosophically, Jekyll commits a grave and unforgivable crime against human nature, yet even Kant, the grand architect of idealistic systems, would scoff bitterly at the futility of Jekyll’s project from its very inception. Without the contamination of the samples, an “unknown impurity” (Stevenson 61), Jekyll could not have made the transformation to purify himself work in the first place. But the ultimate irony of Dr. Henry Jekyll’s tragic tale is that his mission is actually a complete success: in destroying the animal within, he destroys himself utterly – man and animal – both a senseless sacrifice upon the altar of science.