Ideas of Human Existence

Paper Summary:

The paper examines how both Robert Louis Stevenson in "The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde" and Aldous Huxley in "Brave New World" develop and explore the themes of desire, pleasure, self-restraint, gratification and "humanness." The paper discusses their respective stories about human misuses, either individually or within a dystopian totalitarian society of scientific technology. The paper demonstrates how both authors imply within their novels how human existence, by its very nature, involves frustrated desire, pleasure and displeasure and the necessity, however uncomfortable and frustrating, for self-restraint in order not to hurt oneself and others.

From the Paper:

"Robert Louis Stevenson's The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886) features, at the beginning of the story, a well-respected doctor, Dr. Jekyll, who scientifically concocts a potion that allows him to change himself, since he would like to experience feeling less human restraint than he does as the responsible and respectable Dr. Jekyll, into a hideous monster of a man, the destructive, unpredictable, and murderous Mr. Hyde. Stevenson's novel, set in Victorian England, during a time of then-unprecedented technological and scientific progress (a fact that may well have helped Stevenson to create the idea for this novel), underscores human anxieties of the sort that still exist today about the possibilities of new scientific progress (e.g., cloning; genetic engineering), in his creation of the fictional Mr. Hyde."

Sample of Sources Used:

• Booker, Keith. The Dystopian Impulse in Modern Literature: Fiction as Social Criticism. Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1994. 47-66.
• Huxley, Aldous. Brave New World. New York: Harper Perennial; Reissue edition June 1989.
• Stevenson, Robert Louis. The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. New York: Dover Reprint ed., 1991.
• Toumey, Christopher P. "The Moral Character of Mad Scientists: A Cultural Critique of Science." Science, Technology, & Human Values, Vol. 17, No. 4 (Autumn, 1992). 411-437

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