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The Strange Case Of Dr. Jekyll And Mr. Hyde

Decent Essays

People are too quick to judge something by its first appearance:

The theme that something or someone should not be judged on first appearances should be an obvious fact known to everyone. Appearances do not always reflect reality and our society is often too quick to judge human beings and objects by their visual appearance without discovering more about the person or object. This appears to be a prominent recurring theme throughout the novel “The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr Hyde” by Robert Louis Stevenson, the novel “Frankenstein” by Mary Shelley, the short story “The Monkey’s Paw” by W.W Jacobs and the short story “Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman. These four texts convey this theme through the use of gothic …show more content…

Jekyll. Characters from Jekyll’s society such as Utterson and Enfield form an incorrect judgement of Jekyll because they judge him, because of the fact he is a doctor. This has dire consequences for their society because of Jekyll’s lying and inability to contain Hyde resulting in the subsequent murder of Sir Danvers Carew “and at that Mr. Hyde broke out of all bounds and clubbed him to the earth”, Hyde breaking out of the bounds of Jekyll and clubbing Carew to death. Later in the novel, Dr. Jekyll says to Mr Utterson “I have really a very great interest in poor Hyde”, obviously Dr. Jekyll is willingly lying to Utterson, not confessing that he is in fact Hyde, and is not the honest man he is perceived to be, manipulating the people of his society by making them believe he is the ‘honest doctor’ they judge him as by first appearance. This occurs similarly, but in the opposite way, in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein where Frankenstein’s monster is not accepted by others purely because of his appearance. The monster says “I remembered that I was forever deprived of the delights that such beautiful creatures could bestow and that she whose resemblance I contemplated would, in regarding me, have changed that air of divine benignity to one expressive of disgust and affright”, showing that he wants to be accepted, but has already been unfairly judged by his society just by first appearance and not because of his kind soul. This judging by first

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