Reviewing the William Wilson Complex: Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, by Robert Louis Stevenson

• Grant number: 13/16530-9
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Scientific Initiation
• Start date: November 01, 2013
• End date: October 31, 2015
• Field of knowledge: Linguistics, Literature and Arts - Literature - Modern Foreign Literatures
• Principal Investigator: Aparecido Donizete Rossi
• Grantee: Vinicius Lucas de Souza
• Host Institution: Faculdade de Ciências e Letras (FCL). Universidade Estadual Paulista (UNESP). Campus de Araraquara. Araraquara , SP, Brazil

Abstract

The main purpose of this paper is to demonstrate how the novel Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886), by Robert Louis Stevenson, reviews, innovates and broadens the tradition of the double, which was initiated by E. T. A. Hoffmann and articulated in his short story "The Sandman" ("Der Sandmann", 1816), developed later by Edgar Allan Poe in the short story "William Wilson" (1839) e revisited in the novel The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890-1891), by Oscar Wilde. Departing from these novels and short stories, besides theoretical and critical texts, we intend to focus on the extension of the William Wilson Complex in this Stevenson's novel, resulting in the Jekyll and Hyde Paradox, which this research intends to delineate better. In order to achieve this, we shall firstly reflect on the double and the resulting William Wilson Complex. Next, departing from an in-depth analysis on Stevenson's novel, we shall demonstrate how the tradition of the William Wilson Complex is broadened and/or modified in Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, to the point of constituting what here is named Jekyll and Hyde Paradox.