‘Jekyll and Hyde’ as a Gothic Novel (Scottish Highers English): Revision Notes
'Jekyll and Hyde' as a Gothic Novel
What is Gothic fiction?
Gothic fiction is a literary genre that combines elements of horror and mystery. These novels explore dark themes through atmospheric settings, disturbing events and supernatural occurrences.
Famous examples include Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, Bram Stoker's Dracula and Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights.
Stevenson's novella incorporates many conventions of Gothic fiction, using them to explore the darker aspects of human nature and Victorian society.
Key Gothic features in 'Jekyll and Hyde'
The novella demonstrates five central characteristics of Gothic fiction. Each contributes to the text's unsettling atmosphere and thematic depth.
Mysterious settings
Stevenson creates an atmosphere of uncertainty through his depiction of London. The descriptions of dark, deserted streets and the "fogged city moon" establish an eerie environment where anything might happen.
Jekyll's laboratory contains mysterious objects that heighten the sense of the unknown. These settings reflect the hidden nature of Jekyll's experiments and suggest that beneath the civilized surface of Victorian London, darkness exists.
The fog and darkness work symbolically as well as literally. They represent the moral confusion and hidden evil that the novella explores, making it impossible to see things clearly.
Disturbing secrets
At the heart of the novella lies Jekyll's hidden second identity. This secret is deeply disturbing because Hyde carries out terrible acts of violence that horrify witnesses.
Everyone who encounters Hyde experiences an instinctive terror. This reaction suggests something fundamentally wrong about Hyde's existence. The secret of Jekyll's dual life reveals uncomfortable truths about the hidden evil that might exist within seemingly respectable people.
The fact that Jekyll actively chooses to create and conceal Hyde makes the secret even more unsettling. This is not accidental or imposed from outside, but a deliberate act by a respected gentleman.
Dreams and visions
Utterson experiences a terrifying vision in which he is "haunted" by a faceless figure. This nightmare combines elements from Enfield's account of Hyde's attack with Utterson's own anxieties about what might be happening.
The vision is frightening because it blends reality with imagination, creating psychological horror. Utterson cannot escape the image even when awake. The faceless figure suggests both the unknown nature of evil and the way it haunts the conscience.
Dreams and visions in Gothic fiction often reveal deeper truths that characters try to ignore. Utterson's nightmare foreshadows the terrible reality he will eventually discover about Jekyll and Hyde.
The supernatural
Jekyll's scientific work is described as "mystic and the transcendental", suggesting it goes beyond normal science into something otherworldly. The language used emphasizes how his experiments push into forbidden territory.
When Lanyon witnesses Hyde's transformation, he describes how Hyde's features "seemed to melt and alter" in a way that appears impossible. This description suggests that Hyde exists outside the natural order. The transformation seems magical or demonic rather than scientific.
The supernatural element raises questions about whether Jekyll has violated natural laws. Hyde may represent not just Jekyll's evil side, but something that should not exist in the world at all. This creates horror by suggesting that some boundaries should never be crossed.
The double
The entire novella is built upon the concept of human duality. Jekyll represents mankind's double nature: the respectable public self and the hidden private self.
What is 'the double' in Gothic fiction?
In Gothic novels, the double refers to a pair of characters. Sometimes these are two separate individuals, such as Victor Frankenstein and his creature in Frankenstein. In other cases, they represent two aspects of the same person, as with Jekyll and Hyde.
The double allows Gothic writers to explore internal conflicts by making them external and visible. Jekyll's physical separation into two distinct beings makes his moral struggle concrete and visible.
Beyond Jekyll's obvious split, other characters and settings in the novella also have two sides. London itself has respectable streets and dangerous back alleys. Utterson presents a stern exterior but has his own private desires. This pattern of duality reinforces the novella's central theme about hidden darkness.
The Gothic novel in the Victorian period
Gothic fiction evolved significantly by the time Stevenson wrote Jekyll and Hyde. These changes made the genre more relevant and frightening to Victorian readers.
Traditional Gothic settings
Earlier Gothic novels were set in haunted buildings or abandoned castles, typically in distant locations like medieval Europe. These exotic, faraway settings created horror through unfamiliarity and distance from readers' lives.
Victorian Gothic settings
By the late Victorian period, Gothic fiction shifted towards contemporary and recognizable locations. Jekyll and Hyde takes place entirely in Victorian London, a familiar environment for Stevenson's readers.
This change made the horror more immediate. When terrible events occur in places readers know, in times they live in, the threat feels real rather than safely distant.
Traditional Gothic villains
Earlier Gothic novels featured obviously evil characters. The villain was clearly wicked from the start, often living apart from normal society in isolated locations.
Victorian Gothic villains
In Jekyll and Hyde, the wicked character exists as part of a respectable man. Hyde emerges from Jekyll, a distinguished doctor and gentleman. This change reflects Victorian anxieties about hidden evil within apparently civilized people.
The novella suggests that wickedness might lurk behind any respectable facade. This makes the horror more personal and immediate for Victorian readers.
Why these changes were effective
These developments ensured Gothic fiction remained disturbing for Victorian audiences. Stories about openly evil people in faraway locations were easier to dismiss as fantasy that could not affect readers' lives.
How Victorian Gothic Made Horror More Immediate:
The plot of Jekyll and Hyde remains strange and extraordinary, but its setting in familiar London makes it harder to dismiss. Horrible deeds committed by apparently civilized people in normal places were far more terrifying because they suggested such events could actually happen.
As Stevenson knew, a Victorian gentleman reading by the fire could ignore stories about castles in distant mountains. But when the setting is London and the villain is a gentleman like the reader himself, the horror becomes impossible to ignore. The key quotation "The figure...haunted the lawyer all night" captures this inescapable psychological terror that Victorian Gothic created.
Remember!
- Gothic fiction combines horror, mystery and atmospheric settings to explore dark themes
- Jekyll and Hyde includes five key Gothic features: mysterious settings, disturbing secrets, dreams and visions, supernatural elements, and the double
- The double refers to paired characters or dual aspects of one person, allowing Gothic writers to externalize internal conflicts
- Victorian Gothic shifted from distant castles to familiar cities and from obviously evil villains to respectable people hiding wickedness
- These changes made Gothic horror more immediate and frightening by suggesting that evil could exist anywhere, even within civilized society