Jekyll and Hyde: Good vs Evil

• we all live in a society that is judged by one another
• "it fell out with me, as it falls with so vast a majority of my fellows"

  • the Victorian society live with the sin of Adam and Eve - from birth
  • Stevenson doesn't believe this but many things we enjoy - society disagree with
  • he wants to change the way society believe in
• our desires are seen as animalistic and uncontrollable, we are seen as having no control over our desires - the theory of evolution of us being adapted from apes
• "God bless me, the man seems hardly human! Something troglodytic, shall we say?"

  • apes are part of our most evil intentions
  • an early description of Hyde - early Neanderthals are assumed to be better than humans
  • Stevenson correctly points out Darwin's theory that evolution could've reproduced better - if modern life changes we could go to an earlier form of humanity if we survived better
• "the ape-like tricks that he would play me, scrawling in my own hand blasphemies on the pages of my books" 1

  • Stevenson suggests that at the end of his books that Christianity is a story and ridiculous and that's why Hyde writes the "blasphemies" in the religious books Jekyll is reading
  • this allows the Christian reader to avoid this statement because of "ape-like tricks" given to Hyde - the evilness of his character against God is what attracts the reader
• 1:

  • the reader is going to be satisfied that Hyde is punished however the wider purpose is that Stevenson kills both Jekyll and Hyde and he leaves Utterson behind - similarly the character with a mixture of good and evil as we all are, finishing the book on protecting secrets and confessions
  • when he describes the tricks as "ape-like" suggest that it may be primitive and evil however if we evolve back to an “ape-like“ state there isn't any evil intentions
  • the idea of Christianity is something that we have invented as we've become more sophisticated