evil" paradigm. However, unlike in earlier gothic works, there is no allusion to priests or monks as players on the side of "evil." In fact, the absence of religion and religious restraints appears to be an element of Stevenson's theme: Jekyll, acting on the doctrine of Rousseau, which is to follow one's "nature," unmoors himself from the restraints traditionally made available by religious conviction. Jekyll, being a man of science, rather than of theology, puts to test the doctrine that divorced the old world from the new, and what he finds is that the doctrine is not good. While the earlier works of gothic horror (like The Monk) pointed out corruption within the clergy, Stevenson's gothic work appears to do the opposite: it points out the corruption in Naturalism: "I not only recognised my natural body from the mere aura and effulgence of certain of the powers that made up my spirit, but managed to compound a drug by which these powers should be dethroned from their supremacy, and a second form and countenance substituted, none the less natural to me because they were the expression, and bore the stamp of lower elements in my soul" (63).
Stevenson's Jekyll ultimately learns that what had been deceptively identified as "natural" was nothing more than the attempt to legitimize fallen human nature. It is this fallen human nature that Jekyll believes he can legitimately embrace (without the "grasp of conscience" (67) as he says) through his transformation into Hyde. Just as Rousseau sought to transform fallen human nature into something untainted by what the medieval world had called Original Sin, Jekyll attempts to transform from a human with a conscience into a human without a conscience.
What Jekyll learns, of course, is that -- as Dostoevsky would write the same...
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