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.
‘L’homme n’est ni ange ni bête, et le malheur veut que qui veut faire l’ange fait la bête’
(Pascal, 1670, Fragment 572, p. 370).1
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© 2015 Françoise Dupeyron-Lafay
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Dupeyron-Lafay, F. (2015). Transcendental Medicine versus the ‘Prisonhouse of the Flesh’: Enhancement in R.L. Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. In: Bateman, S., Gayon, J., Allouche, S., Goffette, J., Marzano, M. (eds) Inquiring into Human Enhancement. Health, Technology and Society. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137530073_11
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137530073_11
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