Today I published my Kindle Unlimited Guide to Jekyll and Hyde. You can read the whole guide, for free, for 30 days. Just follow this link.
This is an essay from a student who hasn’t read my guide or taken ideas from my videos.
I often get emails like this, from very hard working students who don’t realise that getting top marks is easy.
So, obviously, I am insulted. But I also like to help. Read the essay.
At the end, I’ll talk you through what’s right and wrong with it.
The Essay
Hyde is clearly presented as inhuman and disturbing through his sinful actions, his appearance, and his influence. However, perhaps what Stevenson is suggesting is that the most disturbing fact about Hyde is that he is in fact human as he is a representation of the embedded evil that exists in everyone.
Stevenson presents Hyde as a harmful member of society: “torture and deform the sufferer”. This is Utterson’s explanation of the illness that he believes Jekyll is afflicted by. The use of the personifying verb ‘torture’ highlights the painful effect that the secret ‘illness’ is having upon Jekyll. However, it also implies the impact that Hyde is having on Jekyll. The use of the noun ‘sufferer’ illustrates that Jekyll is the victim of this ‘illness’ but also therefore portraying Hyde as the offender which creates the impression of him as harmful to society. The use of the verb ‘deform’ emphasises how powerful Utterson believes that the illness is but also carries connotations that Hyde is unevolved. Stevenson can be seen to be linking to Darwin’s Theory of Evolution from the previous decades and suggesting how all humans evolve from the same common ancestors and perhaps have uncivilised, primitive and instinctual parts of their being. In this way, Stevenson is also exploring the theme of duality and how Hyde is actually not inhuman because he is a part of Jekyll and therefore represents the evil in all humans.
Stevenson portrays Hyde to be an animalistic character: ‘cry and whip up stairs.’ This is the butler’s explanation of how Hyde was acting. The use of the animalistic verb ‘cry’ and ‘whip’ conveys Hyde to be a savage animal. ‘Cry’ implies that Hyde’s impact on Jekyll is so strong that Jekyll has no control over himself as it mirrors how Hyde is suffering too.
This perhaps suggests how Jekyll is gradually losing control, hinting that Jekyll as a character will be lost due to Hyde’s dominance. The verb ‘whipped’ emphasises the animalistic violence of Hyde. Stevenson reinforces this idea by illustrating Hyde to ‘cry out like a rat’. The simile captures Hyde as a ‘rat’ which is a harmful creature carrying diseases. This also reinforces the idea that Hyde is an unevolved and uncivilised creature representing Victorian’s fear of de-evolution, the idea that we might revert back to a more primitive form of human. Stevenson also explores the theme of duality as Hyde being a small and vulnerable ‘rat’ is a contrast to Jekyll being a ‘fine build of a man’.
Hyde is presented as particularly disturbing in the scene of the murder of Sir Danvers Carew in Chapter 4. The murder itself is deeply disturbing but is made even more unsettling to the other characters in the novel due to the high status of the victim who is a highly respected MP. The murder itself is made extremely shocking and disturbing because there appears to be no motive and the maid who describes it cannot explain how it started. It is also made clear how shocking the violence of Hyde is as he “clubbed him to the earth”. This description combines with others to illustrate the aggressive, abandoned violence of Hyde. Therefore, Stevenson again portrays Hyde as being extremely powerful and also consumed by violence and anger which it seems that he is unable to contain. He suggests how this violence has developed from earlier in the novel when he tramples the girl: this is a clear escalation of his violent tendencies. Stevenson might be portraying the growing evil of Hyde as he becomes more powerful; this could be seen as Jekyll himself enjoying more and more malevolent acts or it might be suggesting that, as he becomes more addicted to becoming Hyde, he has to feed his “pleasures” more and more. In this way, Stevenson creates the impression that Hyde becomes more harmful to society as he becomes less and less human. He also might be suggesting that Victorian society, which demands respectability and behaviour befitting a gentleman, makes Jekyll’s problems worse as his inner desires become more degraded the more that they have to be hidden.
Hyde is and portrayed as ‘hardly human.’ He is presented to be more inhuman and disturbing because no one can describe his face. One’s face was the moral signature in Victorian society.
In addition, Utterson waits until the sun is set to confront Hyde. The fact that he is wandering around at midnight hints that he is going through sinful actions, conveying him as a disturbance to society. It is also made clear of how shocking his violence is by the description of his face, having a ‘displeasing smile’ and ‘Satan’s signature’. Therefore, Stevenson illustrates Hyde to contain pure malevolence which is embedded inside Jekyll.
Stevenson presents Jekyll to be fully responsible for his own death, as Jekyll approached forbidden scientific knowledge which went against christianity, causing him to divide into good and evil identities. Jekyll enjoyed living as Mr Hyde, being a disturbance to society. Stevenson suggests society is partly responsible, because it indulges all of Hyde’s pleasures and sins before he commits murder.
Utterson questions Jekyll about Hyde, which perhaps augments Jekyll’s pleasure of living a double life. Stevenson also presents Jekyll as trying to hide his embedded evil to protect his reputation and suggests this has in fact led to the development of Hyde as a separate and inhuman character. Stevenson mentions how the most disturbing fact is that everyone has an enclosed version of Hyde, implying that his inhumanity makes him impossible to describe. Stevenson constructs Hyde to be the potential trigger of Victorians’ fear of de-evolution, referring to Darwin’s Theory of Evolution.
Fundamentally, Hyde is an inhuman character but is also seen as a human motif present in everyone’s souls. Stevenson warns Victorian readers that discovery of forbidden knowledge and excessive curiosity could lead to the development of an animalistic and disturbing character to society.
My Comments
This is well over 900 words. If you can keep writing about the exam question for that many words, you will, on average, gain a grade 8 or 9.
There are a number of reasons I don’t want to give it a grade 8 or 9:
The thesis statement is pretty good. However, it completely ignores the Christian context of the novel. So does the conclusion and the main body of the essay. It is a bit like writing about Harry Potter, but deliberately not writing about the magic. It misses out on the main point.
There are some excellent, detailed analyses of quotes. Students are taught to do this all the time. I get it. But you need to write about high value quotes. If I listed the 100 most important quotes in the novel, these wouldn’t make the list. I can get over that, but my next problem is that they don’t appear in the order in which they appear in the novel.
You don’t have to write about quotes in chronological order. But it is so much better if you do. Writing about how Hyde is revealed chronologically in the novel makes it much easier to write a coherent argument, which is convincing. Here, there are lots of thoughtful ideas, which arrive as the student thinks of them, rather than in the best place to build an argument. ‘Thoughtful’ is grade 7, ‘convincing’ is grade 8 and 9.
Many of the paragraphs can consequently be put in a totally different order, and the essay would still make just as much sense. This is a clear proof that there is no argument - there is simply ‘another thing, and another thing, and before I forget, another thing.’
However, if you follow the character chronologically, NONE of your paragraphs will be in the wrong order, or in a random order.
In reality, the examiner won’t be as annoyed about this as I am. So it will get a grade 8.
But here’s the thing: it would have been so much easier to write as a grade 9 essay!
Is anyone else having trouble getting the Kindle Unlimited version of this? It still shows on Amazon as £2.99 even though I have Kindle Unlimited and am logged in. Other titles have a link to "Read for £0.00" but this one doesn't have that option