Here is the synopsis of our sample research paper on Robert Louis Stevenson's 'Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde' /Theme of The Double. Have the paper e-mailed to you 24/7/365.
Essay / Research Paper Abstract
A 7 page paper looking at both the motif of the double personality in this novel, and the double genres -- allegory and Gothic -- in which it was written. Bibliography lists 2 additional sources.
Page Count:
7 pages (~225 words per page)
File: D0_Jekylh.rtf
Buy This Term Paper »
Unformatted sample text from the term paper:
told her reproachfully that she had ruined "a fine bogey tale" (Hennessey, 207). What the nightmare had depicted, he later asserted, was the transformation of Jekyll into Hyde. He
immediately stopped working on the play and began fleshing out his dream. For three days Stevenson stayed in bed, working furiously, getting up only for meals and the most pressing
needs of his toilette. After three days he read his finished product to his wife, who flatly told him hed missed the point of his own dream; it should not
have been a Gothic horror tale, it should have been an allegory. Stevenson was outraged; how could his wife possibly know how to render his own dream? Later that day,
however, he concluded she was absolutely right. He threw his forty-thousand-word manuscript into the fireplace and started over. The second draft also took three days, and this time Fanny loved
it. (Hennessey, 107). Fanny was right in part; much of this story is an allegory, a depiction of mans divided nature. But however sensationalistic Stevensons first draft may have been,
this one is certainly not completely divorced from all things Gothic. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, the Gothic story arose as a new literary genre; its "horror"
tales conjure up the dark side that many of us at least half-believe is hidden just beneath the surface of the most conventional lives. This motif of the double, of
two persons in one, is quintessentially Gothic, and is only one of many ingredients Stevenson has inserted into this story that cause that characteristic shiver all the way up our
spines. This paper will examine both the role of the double in Stevensons story, and the double genres -- Gothic and allegory -- in which the book is written. The
...