Persona And Shadow

Robert Louis Stevenson's The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray are two famous novellas filled with mysterious color in the Victorian Period. Carl Gustav Jung is a Swiss psychiatrist whose study is called analytical psychology. His celebrated contributions are the collective unconscious and archetypes. Among numerous archetypes persona and shadow play extraordinary roles. Based on Jung's analytical psychology, this thesis mainly analyzes the two protagonists'survival conditions in these two novellas by using Jung's Persona and Shadow theories. This thesis profoundly probes into the personal factors and the social factors of the protagonists'tragedy and exposes the fact that all the human beings not only want the chance to break the bonds of civilization, moral and social norms, but also want the liberation of natural instincts and desires. In the end, this thesis draws the conclusion that the inner world of our human has become the root of all evils that's all due to the discord between the repressed shadow and the persona. Consequently, human beings begin to harmonize the persona with the shadow to promote greater social harmony.