O gótico vitoriano do fin de siècle em O Médico e o Monstro.

Abstract

This work aims to analyze the novella Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886), by the Scottish writer Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-1894), from the perspective of the Gothic. From its first literary manifestations, the Gothic is characterized by questioning taboos and cultural traumas rooted in the society, embodying prevailing fears through a poetics of terror that frights at the same time that it attracts and makes reflect. In this sense, it is observed that Stevenson's masterpiece uses Gothic elements to bring up controversial and problematic issues in relation to the last years of Queen Victoria's reign, when the novella was published. The British fin de siècle was a period of turbulent revolutions and profound changes that shook the country's social, political and economic structures, putting at stake the thitherto crystallized notions of humanity, progress, and science. In this context, in addition to highlighting aspects of the Gothic, this work shows how the Gothic aesthetics is used in the narrative to critically portray anxieties that surrounded the mind of the English people at that time, much due to the reeling state in which the British empire and the nineteenth-century society were and to the rise of revolutionary theories, which reinforced the contrast between socially acceptable and socially repelled, requiring narrow moral standards of behavior if one wished to have prestige in society. It is, therefore, a bibliographical research, anchored in theorists that deal with themes related to Gothic in its most varied manifestations over time, such as Hogle (2002), Clery (2002), Warwick (2007), Hurley 2002), Vasconcelos (2002), among others.