Beginning of Essay
The Gothic theory of the double is both reductive and powerful. It assumes that we are all playing a role in life; that a raving beast waits within for the chains to loosen or snap. Doubles stories seem to proliferate when people sense an unnegotiable divide betwe ....

Middle of Essay
.... released in the shape of Mr. Hyde”. According to Calder (ii) “AJ Symonds, a friend of Robert Stevenson, and many others found this chilling to contemplate.” The society of men is Stevenson’s main focus and is evident in the number of ways in which he presents Hyde in terms of society. If Jekyll and Hyde is characterized in Gothic fiction’s exaggerated tones of late-Victorian anxieties concerning deterioration of social status, and the idea of ‘criminal man,’, it invariably situates those concerns in relation to the practices and discourses of lawyers like Gabriel Utterson, doctors like Henry Jekyll and H ....