Transcendental medicine versus the "prisonhouse of the flesh"

enhancement in R. L. Stevenson's the Strange case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde

Françoise Dupeyron-Lafay

pp. 205-228

in: Simone Bateman, Sylvie Allouche, Jerome Goffette, Michela Marzano (eds), Inquiring into human enhancement, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2015

Abstract

Robert Louis Stevenson's The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (Stevenson, 1886) is a world famous fantasy text presenting a respectable Victorian doctor's personality splitting in two thanks to a draught that results in the embodiment of his other evil self. Partly because of film adaptations that schematise and stylise the contents to make it more sensational and visual, the spectacular transformation of the doctor in his laboratory and the havoc wreaked by Hyde are what dominates in the public's mind. However, Stevenson's text is more subtly uncanny and provides an in-depth and complex theorisation of the psychological and metaphysical significance and origins of the double.