Date of Award

Spring 2026

Document Type

Open Access Thesis

Department

English Language and Literatures

First Advisor

Alexander Millen

Abstract

This paper argues that Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886) functions as a gothic critique of late-Victorian pseudoscience and the cultural desire to make morality legible on the body. Situating the novella amid phrenology, physiognomy, criminal anthropology, degeneration theory, and evolutionary psychology, it shows how scientific discourse circulated beyond professional institutions to shape popular assumptions about deviance, identity, and social order. Through Jekyll’s experiment and Hyde’s emergence, Stevenson stages the collapse of the “scientific gaze”: Hyde appears to confirm the period’s criminal typologies, yet his deformity remains simultaneously undeniable and indescribable, exposing the circular logical and methodological fragility of bodily “reading.” This essay further demonstrates how degeneration and evolutionary anxiety inflect Hyde’s portrayal as atavistic and “troglodytic,” showing the extent to which criminological and medical models were entangled with racial hierarchies and imperial ideologies. By making Hyde the product of a respectable professional and an externalized racial or class “other,” Stevenson destabilizes the biological determinism that underwrote Victorian theories of criminality. Ultimately, the novella’s horror lies not only in Hyde’s violence but in the ethical failure of scientific frameworks that promise certainty while reproducing cultural prejudice.

Rights

© 2026, Abigail Jasa Sommer

Download

Share

COinS