Father and Son

Abstract

In Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde Robert Louis Stevenson created, out of one of his own dreams, the most famous pre-Freudian case study of the divided self. The present essay explores the roots of that work in Stevenson's lifelong difficulty in separating from his moody, conflicted, and passionately possessive father. Out of a matrix of religious guilt and social conformity, Stevenson struggled to create and define his own identity as a writer, a struggle that ran counter to many of his beloved father's deepest needs and led to sharp clashes, accompanied by periods of severe depressive and physical illness in both. Stevenson's creative block during his father's final depression and dementia was broken only by the nightmare that became Jekyll and Hyde, which enabled him to give enduring literary expression to the disavowed rage, guilt, and sense of deformity and fractured identity endemic to their internalized relationship. It may also have functioned as an act of exorcism and expiation that helped him recover rapidly from his father's death and exploit more productively the few years that were left to him.