Behold The Beast: Victorian Anxieties and Monstrous Forms

This paper seeks to analyze two examples of Victorian Gothic, the 1885 novella The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and the 1897 novel Dracula as texts dealing with anxieties of degeneration, medicine, and addiction on the personal scale and a wider societal scale respectively. Both Dracula and Hyde represent monsters constructed as representatives of these anxieties in a direct and actionable form so that the audience could address their concerns.