Perils of Addiction Exposed in Stevensons Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde Essa

Perils of Addiction Exposed in Stevensons Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde The values, standards, and expectations of the upper-middle class in the 19th-century Victorian society were conservative and strict the pressure to earn prestigiousness and achieve upward mobility in social rank required men to sustain an image of propriety and respectability in public. These obligations often created a longing to divert from the personality facades they had to keep, and from the ideal behavior and polite dexterity that were expected of bourgeois society men. Some would fulfill their wishes by track a secret double life that allowed them to temporarily escape from social responsibilities and restrictions. In more private settings, men would partake in yucky pleasures, such as alcohol or drug abuse, and they were free to comport more loosely than they could under the rigid public persona they were agonistic to hold in order to protect their reputations. In the introduction to the Oxford adap tation of Robert Louis Stevensons Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Emma Letley describes the desire to escape from the Calvinistic confines of nineteenth-century bourgeois society, and relates that Mr. Stevenson himself would use a benign doubleness to deal with the pressures of high bourgeois existence and assumed an assumed name to become one of the heavy-drinking, convivial, blasphemous iconoclasts. . . in order to full-bodiedly enjoy those pleasures denied to him and Dr. Jekyll. (Introduction, x). With the noesis that Stevenson resorted to alcohol in order to escape the pressures and demands that fell upon him due to his social class, it is interesting to examine his novella, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, as a commentary about the evils of dependence to alc... ...hat he can finally recognize the severity of his weakness to his drug. Dr. Jekylls plight, therefore, could be an exploration of the destructive behavior brought on by addiction, and an underlying example message is embedded in Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde - the implication that addiction will of necessity lead to evilness and the destruction of productive lives. Works CitedShowalter, Elaine. The Not So Strange Addiction of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. The Haunted Mind in Victorian Literature. Eds. Elton E. metalworker and Robert Haas. Landham, Maryland The Scarecrow Press, Inc., 1999.Stevenson, Robert Louis. The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. First Vintage Classics Edition. bracing York Vintage Books, 1991.Veeder, William. Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde after One Hundred Years. Eds. William Veeder and Gordon Hirsch. Chicago University of Chicago Press, 1988.