Essay Database

Dr. Henry Jekyll was a respected doctor and friend of both Lanyon a fellow physician, and Utterson, a lawyer. Jekyll is a prosperous-seeming man, well established in the community, and known for his decency and charitable works. Since his youth, however, he has secretly engaged in unspecified dissolute and corrupt behavior. Jekyll finds this dark side a burden and undertakes experiments intended to separate his good and evil selves from one another. Through these experiments, …

…his bad and vice versa, he ends up separating the bad alone, while leaving his former self, his Jekyll-self, as mixed as before. Jekyll succeeds in liberating his darker side, freeing it from the bonds of conscience, yet as Jekyll, he never liberates himself from this darkness. The dominance of Hyde, first as a latent force within Jekyll, then as a tyrannical external force subverting Jekyll, holds various implications for our understanding of human nature.