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Human Restraint In Dr. Jekyll And Mr. Hyde By Robert Stevenson

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Kenned for the promotion of rigorous morality, the period between 1837 and 1901 in England is synonymous with human restraint. The Victorian era, named after Queen Victoria’s ascension to the throne, began with the elite in control of society and its politics. Concerned with maintaining power over their society, these hundreds of families fixated on the convivial disseverment between the upper and lower classes; associating enlightenment with the upper class became a leading thought abaft this disseverment, which regarded the lower class as brutal in nature. This thrust the Victorian era into a period of human hypocrisy and emotional elimination: a cultural conception that drain into the fields of science and religion. Robert Stevenson mimic …show more content…

Therefore, the audience of book can presume that Dr. Jekyll is familiar with the times, therefore subdue his natural, human needs in according with Victorian society. As a result, Jekyll, the ego, experience a tragedy of imbalance in which the morals, imposed by a Victorian superego, overwhelm the psyche. Fighting with the standards placed on humanity, he engages the help of science to physically extract the repressed human needs, or id, and from his haunted mind whose physical form is Hyde. Epitomizing Hyde as the consequence of society control, Robert Louis Stevenson strives to expose the devastation Victorian society creates on …show more content…

Jekyll, the reader must extent an understanding principals and theories in science and religion during the time period. Lombroso, Myers, and Nicholson stress that duality in humankind composed of adjoining good and bad halves of personality. Lombroso’s theory of the criminal man epitomizes the first argument. Lombroso claims that there are relating bodily structure differences between criminals and men. “Criminals are evolutionary throwbacks in our midst,” describes Stephen Gould on Lombardo’s theory, “These people are innately driven to act as a normal ape or as a savage would.” In a different of saying this, for people with these anatomical traits, the track of the criminal is destiny (Gould). However, jeers of Hyde from Jekyll counters arguments such as Lombroso’s, which testify that criminal traits are not only phenotypic but also hereditary. Jekyll’s countenance does not resemble that of a criminal, and due to his ancestry, he could not have inherited the “criminal

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