Literary Essay

In L/L Writing we learnt how to write a literary essay, and after doing some activities we wrote one based on the story "The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde", by R. Louis Stevenson.

An essay on “The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde”

In the story “The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde” written by Robert Louis Stevenson, the main character, Dr. Henry Jekyll is a scientist who is interested in creating a potion to separate the two sides of a human. As the story develops, his evil side, Mr. Edward Hyde takes control over him and finally takes him to death. The themes of this story, which are The Duality of Human Nature, Rational versus Irrational and Violence, will be explained in this essay as the centre of analysis.
In the story the main theme is “The Duality of Human Nature”, this theme explains that every person has two sides in their personality, a good side and a bad side. In this case, Dr. Jekyll drinks a potion to separate the two sides of his personality and his bad part, Mr. Hyde, becomes uncontrollable till the point to kill both, Dr. Jekyll and himself. This can be seen when it says “…retuned the doctor with a smile. But the words were hardly uttered, before the smile was struck out of his face and succeed by an expression of such abject terror and despair.” This explains how Mr. Hyde started gaining control over Dr. Hyde.
Other theme is “Rational versus Irrational” which explains that Dr. Jekyll is the rational part and Mr. Hyde is the irrational, because Dr. Jekyll is not the one who commits the crimes, whereas Mr. Hyde commits all the crimes knowing it is wrong, and he is amoral when Dr. Jekyll is moral. For instance when it says “And then came the horrible part of the thing, for the man trampled calmly over the child’s body and left her screaming on the ground.” Mr. Hyde was the guilty of all the crimes, he even hit a girl and left her lying on the floor.
The last theme is “Violence”  and it explains that Mr. Hyde commits crimes and murders people using violence and knowing it is wrong, while Dr. Jekyll is a gentleman and a well-known doctor in London. All the violent scenes take place at night, because it is when Mr. Hyde transforms. For example, in the chapter about the Carrew Murder Case it says “Although the fog rolled over the city in the small hours, the part of the night was cloudless” and after that, Mr. Hyde kills Mr. Carrew.
As a conclusion, we can say that this story I about a respected doctor who separates his good side from his evil side by drinking a potion, and finally his bad side takes control over the situation, commits many crimes and murders and in the end, he drags Dr. Jekyll and himself to death.