Public and Private Life in the Victorian Age: The Split Personality of Dr. Jekyll

In "The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde," Robert Louis Stevenson addresses the parallel forces of good and evil, affecting every person. Through Dr. Jekyll's transformation into the hideous Mr. Hyde, Stevenson illustrates two contrasting sides of human nature: "I had long been trying to write a story on this subject," said Stevenson, "to find a body, a vehicle, for that strong sense of man's double being which must at times come in upon and overwhelm the mind of every thinking creature." Stevenson creates Dr. Jekyll's dual personality to reveal the manifest differences between an individual's public and private personas, thereby revealing the sinister side of society. In the novel, Dr. Jekyll's public self exhibits characteristics associated with morality and upper-class Victorian society; whereas Mr. Hyde, Dr. Jekyll's private self, displays traits associated with immorality and the lower-class.

Dr. Jekyll's public self is drastically different from his private self. In public, Dr. Jekyll is a gentleman, displaying characteristics associated with virtue. Dr. Jekyll is attractive, wealthy, respectable, educated, and charitable. The narrator tells us that he is a "large, well-made, smooth-faced man of fifty, with something of a slyish cast perhaps, but every mark of capacity and kindness". Dr. Jekyll's pleasing physical characteristics symbolize the public side of his personality. To those around him, Dr. Jekyll is a gentleman. He entertains respectable gentleman at his home, charming them with his public personality: "A fortnight later, by excellent good fortune, the doctor gave one of his pleasant dinners to some five or six old cronies, all intelligent, reputable men and all judges of good wine" (1829). Dr. Jekyll's physical and social characteristics exemplify gentility.

Dr. Jekyll is torn between his desire to retain respectability and his desire to surrender to sin. Underneath the facade of gentlemanliness, Dr. Jekyll hides the darker side of his nature: