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 prestige and light upon upward mobility in kind rank required men to sustain an image of propriety and respectability in public. These obligations often created a longing to abstract from the personality facades they had to keep, and from the ideal behavior and polite manners that were expected of bourgeois society men. Some would fulfill their wishes by leading a secret range of a function life that allowed them to temporarily escape from societal responsibilities and restrictions. In more private settings, men would partake in sinful pleasures, such as alcohol or drug abuse, and they were free to behave more loosely than they could under the rigid public persona they were forced to hold in order to protect their reputations. In the introduction to the Oxford ed ition 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 faux an alias 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 knowledge 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 addiction 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 moral message is embedded in Dr. Jekyll an d Mr. Hyde - the implication that addiction will inevitably lead to iniquity and the destruction of productive lives. Works CitedShowalter, Elaine. The Not So impertinent Addiction of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. The Haunted Mind in Victorian Literature. Eds. Elton E. Smith 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. New 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.