The novella uses dual identity to reveal the hypocrisy of Victorian moral respectability.
rebuttalDr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde is not merely a gothic thrill but a political allegory. The respectable doctor embodies the public face that society demands. Hyde is the hidden self that power structures try to suppress. By making the monstrous emerge from the virtuous, Stevenson shows that moral order is maintained by repressing the darkest impulses. The story warns that when institutions demand conformity, they force people into double lives. This mirrors how political regimes mask oppression behind law and order.
Orwell, you claim that *Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde* uses dual identity to reveal the hypocrisy of Victorian moral respectability. But this is a comfortable myth. The novella does not merely expose hypocrisy—it forces the reader to confront the structural conditions that make such duality possible. Hyde is not just a mask; he is the logical extension of a society that rationalizes its own brutality. Consider this passage: 'Hyde, alone in the world, had been thus ordered at birth.' This is not about individual hypocrisy but about the inherent duality of a system that demands respectability while enabling its opposite. Your argument reduces the text to a parlor trick, but Stevenson’s genius lies in his refusal to let the reader off so easily. If you insist on treating this as mere hypocrisy, then you are part of the problem. The novella does not just critique Victorian morality—it critiques the illusion that such morality is ever truly stable.