Top 5 Most Evil Charachters in Literature pt. 4; Mr. Hyde

Robert Louis Stevenson's "the Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde" is to this day the greatest fictional portrayal of split personality disorder ever written. The story is particularly frightening because Dr. Jekyll is a kind and benveolent man noted for his numerous good deeds, and it is because he tries so hard to live up to this good persona that an absolutely malevolently evil and sadistic persona forms within that same personality, essentially with Mr. Hyde taking over Dr. Jekyll completely. The book is left ambiguous, and we are never explicitly told what Jekyll does when he becomes Hyde at night, though it was certainly something of a depraved and immoral nature. In my mind, I always felt Stephenson was trying to hint at a bloodlust for prostitutes. The fact that Jekyll takes the potion to become Hyde also hints that he feels that as Hyde he is allowed to engage in immoral activities that a doctor of his stature would never be able to get away with freely. It is most likely that Dr. Jekyll has this evil in him at all times, but it is the potion that only gives him the courage to do something that he feels constantly a need to do, such as when he killed the benevolent Sir Danvers in the streets of London for no other personal gain than the thrill of the kill.

Freud believed that our unconcious repressed thoughts have massive influence on our concious thoughts. Dr. Jekyll was trying so hard to repress his evi side, or his bad self, that all of us have within us, that an actual seperate and malevolent personality was formed to act out these darker urges. If someone repressed all thier dark urges to the unconcious mind than these urges can manifest unconciously, thus creating a Mr. Hyde like dual personality. The book is terrifying because Dr. Hyde/Mr. Jekyll is a representation of both pure good and pure evil. The failure to accept the tension of duality between good and evil is related to Victorian Theology in that Satan was banished to hell for failing to accept that he was a created being and not in fact God.