The Gothic Portrayal of Morality and Evil: Split Identities in Dorian Gray and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde

Resumen

The concept of the dual nature of human beings has been highly present in literature, from the Original Sin to Doctor Faustus, always motivated by the longing for some unattained desire. The subject of Victorian ethics has been enriched by the contribution of Leslie Stephen among other writers, and the concept of evil will be analysed in this paper from the perspective of Philip Cole’s theory. The following paper collects the main ideas from both areas and focuses on the parallel journeys of Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890) and Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886). The respective journeys may appear to be quite resemblant, nevertheless, it is primarily the distinctions between them what is to be considered in the present project. The concepts to be applied to the works of Wilde and Stevenson, namely, morality and evil, will be analysed from the Victorian Gothic perspective, which portrayed darkness as a completely different idea from the traditionally assumed. Evil lurked among the most respectable members of society rather than in faraway castles; and decadence, a widespread topic during the fin de siècle, characterized the development of the characters.