Zusammenfassung der Ressource
Dr Jekyll and Hyde
- THE OTHER
- Psychology
- the body and the mind as a source of horror
- Explanation for socially
unacceptable or abnormal
behaviour
- Late 19th Century
- Demonic posession
- Duality
- Second self
- Alter ego or alternative
personality
- Doppelganger
- Paradox of encountering an
identical version of yourself -
e.g. body snatcher
- Splitting of the self - one
character becomes two, for
example, The Incredible Hulk
- Jekyll describes his life as a 'profound
duplicity', himself as a 'double dealer'
'man is not truly one but truly two'
- Hyde represents Jekyll's
secret and repressed desires
- Hyde's actions: instinctual, sexual, irrational,
immoral, violent, urgent and uncivilised
- Jekyll's actions: professional, polite,
rational, moral, measured, civilised
- Freud - the interaction between the
conscious self and the unconscious self
- Freud - Hyde represents the otherness
of the unconscious 'id', which invades
the stability of the conscious 'ego'
- Lacks power but is
nevertheless threatening
- Disrupts the order of things;
unfamiliar and unknown
- Occupies the margins of
society - the outsider
- Degeneration and Atavism
- Fears about social and biological degeneration
- Darwinian theories of evolution
- Examples of degeneration: insanity,
criminality, immorality, physical abnormality
- Hyde possesses atavistic
and degenerate qualities
- Jekyll is progressive and Hyde is regressive
- Mr Hyde was pale and drawfish, he gave an
impression of deformity without any nameable
malformation, he had a displeasing smile, he
had borne himself to the lawyer with a sort of
murderous mixture of timidity and boldness,
and he spoke with a husky, whispering and
somewhat broken voice (15)
- Utterson then continues: 'god bless me
the man seems hardly human!
Something troglodytic'
- 'Ape like fury'
- 'masked thing like a monkey'