Published Paper Details:

With an emphasis on The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and The Picture of Dorian Gray, this essay explores the connection between repression and identity crises in late nineteenth-century Gothic fiction. These books, which emerged from the moral and cultural conflicts of the Victorian era, depict a society that encouraged the concealing of socially inappropriate urges while demanding external respectability. The idea of a cohesive self is eventually undermined by such repression, which causes a psychological struggle between private urge and public identity. This study examines how both Stevenson and Wilde depict identity as brittle and divided when moral and emotional urges are repressed rather than integrated through in-depth textual analysis guided by psychoanalytic viewpoints. In Stevenson's story, suppression takes the form of Jekyll and Hyde's bodily separation, signifying the effort to separate impulse from morality. In Wilde's book, Dorian Gray's image serves as a metaphor for the accumulation of covert corruption while the protagonist pretends to be innocent. Both pieces demonstrate how repression exacerbates internal conflict and results in an identity crisis, despite their disparate narrative techniques. The study makes the case that Gothic fiction reveals the psychological effects of a society that prioritizes moral image over emotional authenticity by looking at various depictions.