Genre, Scientific Censuring, And Gender Roles

Genre, Scientific Censuring, and Gender roles
The theme of science begins to be discussed through literature in the late Victorian era to the early Edwardian period. Two novels are both rich in not only scientific influence, but how the Britain’s dealt with and viewed science as a society. The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson and The War of the Worlds by H.G. Wells are two famous and historic pieces of literature tat can be looked at to view the influence of science and the impact it had on the society at that time. One novel is being classified as science fiction, while the other had been referred to as gothic literature. One can say that science was seen as the work of mad men and these two novels censure science to a certain degree.
We shall first look at and examine the earlier of the two novels, which is The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Stevenson. Stevenson tells a very cautionary tale of science in this work. Dr. Jekyll is an educated man of science who is respected and helps people of the community. Mr. Hyde is the opposite and characterized as a monster-like man:   “It wasn’t like a man; it was like some damned Juggernaut.”(Stevenson 9)   and again “And the next moment, with ape-like fury, he was trampling his victim under his foot, and hailing down a storm of blows,…”(Stevenson 22). Stevenson writes about the “citadel of medicine, where his friend, the great Dr. Lanyon, had his house and received his crowding patients” (Stevenson 13). The author portrays the Dr. Lanyon as being great, as physicians were seen as great persons of the community and well respected. Mr. Hyde is representative of   the dark side of the scientific field. New technology and new medicines can be great healers, but the author is saying that if we alter with God’s work and the nature of human life, it can turn on society.
There is a general moral strategy to this novel penned by Stevenson, and that is “to describe an evil that wears...