This essay explores hypocrisy and morality in the two texts "Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde" and "Mary Reilly" in their Victorian literary and social context.
Victorian Hypocrisy and the Boundaries of Morality in Robert
Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and
Valerie Martin’s Mary Reilly
English Studies 214
Seminar Group 9: The Servant’s Story – Final Essay Task
Louisa Naudé 25095900
Lecturer: Dr Jeanne Ellis
, Naudé 2
Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and Valerie Martin’s Mary
Reilly, a neo-Victorian adaptation of Stevenson’s text, both criticise the hypocritical nature of
nineteenth-century Victorian society by exploring the presence of good and evil in the novellas’
characters. Martin, however, explores themes present in the source text from the marginalised
working-class perspective of a maidservant. While Jekyll’s deception, moral division and
alienation from the respectable middle class is portrayed as reprehensible in both texts, Martin
presents the earnest and honest servant Mary Reilly as a foil to these traits. Furthermore, Mary’s
inclination towards light and goodness despite the darkness in her life contrasts Jekyll’s need to
satisfy his “evil” desires through the creation of his alter ego Hyde and thus maintaining a façade
of good within society.
Both Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and Mary Reilly are set in the social and literary context of
the Victorian era. Stevenson and Martin explore this society divided by class through Jekyll as a
middle-class gentleman and his unrefined counterpart, Hyde, both of whom are contrasted with
the working-class Mary. Jeanne Ellis shows that Stevenson’s exploration of hypocrisy as a
symptom of Victorian convention was driven by the strict social mores and stigma that often
stemmed from the Evangelical mainstream (Ellis E214 S4 PP2 VN1). Walter Houghton indicates
that a failure to adhere to the principles of good and evil within class boundaries was heavily
condemned, claiming that “the proper thing to do is not only what the individual wants to do in
order to belong to a good society; it is also what he must do if he is to avoid social stigma” (147).
We can observe these strict social values in Mary Reilly when Jekyll first asks Mary to deliver a
letter for him to a brothel in Soho. He cannot deliver it himself because a respectable gentleman
cannot be seen with prostitutes in a working-class area, and Mary is deeply unsettled by the
implication that her master has been visiting a brothel. At this point in the text, Mary has been
writing letters about her life to Jekyll upon his request and they regularly converse as Mary
carries out her servant duties of caring for her master and his house. After the two characters
have a conversation in the garden in which they discover that Mary was educated at a school that
Jekyll helped to set up and finance, Mary reflects that “this is truly something I see in Master and
why I am so drawn to serve him and what he mun see in me,” referring to trauma that she
believes they have both suffered (Martin 32). This demonstrates that, having established a
rapport with Jekyll, Mary believes she understands some of his character. However, her
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