Strange case of dr jekyll and mr hyde (fiction)

Okay, so maybe you’re not going to get better marks in your next chemistry test just because you’ve read the Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. Nevertheless, the story can give us an insight into what some of the attitudes to science were in the 19th century because scientific development is one of the novella’s themes.

Science as a theme in the Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde

In Victorian England, many people believed in God as the creator and followed the word of the Bible. This meant that people were sceptical and afraid of scientific developments, such as Darwin’s theory of evolution. People were so cautious of science that Darwin’s book, the Origins of the Species, was condemned and banned. In the story, Jekyll creates a chemical formula and ingests it in order to become Hyde. However, his self-experimentation leads to his self-isolation and death. Jekyll’s attitudes to science also cause him to lose the respect of his old friend, Dr Lanyon. Given what people thought of scientific developments at the time, Stevenson’s choice to portray Jekyll as a kind of rogue scientist elevates the horror of the story. This means that a reader’s suspicion of science may also be heightened after reading Stevenson’s misrepresentation of chemical experimentation.

Jekylls and Hydes in chemistry today

Moving beyond the story itself, the characters of Jekyll and Hyde have also been brought up in chemistry in order to describe things with a dual nature. Marjorie Mikasen and Mark Griep have pointed out that the concepts of symmetry and dominance, illuminated by the characters Jekyll and Hyde, are also central to chiral molecules in chemistry. 

Chiral molecules are like your left and right hands. They are mirror images of each other, but they cannot perfectly align if placed on top of one another. In chemistry, chiral molecules look identical in a mirror but have different spatial arrangements and this pair of molecules is called an enantiomer. Because of their differences, their properties or behaviours in biological systems can differ. 

Chiral molecules only seem equivalent when viewed as a mirror image and the same goes for Jekyll and Hyde. As well as this, neither Jekyll and Hyde nor chiral molecules can exist in the same place at the same time because in both pairs there is a struggle for dominance. In this way, reading fiction can provide new representations of chemical ideas.