"The Immortal Mortal" vs "Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde"

The two short stories we read were quite interesting. The Immortal Mortal was written by Mary Shelley and it is about a protagonist who lives through the pain of not dying soon enough. The alchemist Cornelius who wishes to perfect the potion that would make man immortal had taken Winzy as his apprentice. Winzy loved Bertha very much but his love was weakened by his poverty and the matriarch who would not approve of their marriage. He believed Cornelius was trying to make a potion to cure love. So he drinks the potion but soon finds out that there was no such thing. This is the Irony of situation as he discovers that instead he gets the curse of being immortal. In this story humanity is believed to be weak which relies on death, the mysterious friend, to help free everyone form the perils of aging. Winzy finds out that he was not immortal but he was aging slower. This is an irony as he soon finds out living a long life has its own disadvantages as he finds out his beloved Bertha becoming older and dying and he had been the same all those years. I found that cure of love is death and immortality makes it even worse. If a person can grow older with the loved one that is the best cure for love. The theme of this story is that humans may appear weak with death but they are miserable without it. Death is portrayed as an essential part of life as it would end all the misery of being old and helpless.

Dr Jekyll and Mr. Hyde is a story written by Robert Stevenson. In this story Dr. Jekyll creates a substance that makes him able to transform into a short stumpy and deformed Mr. Hyde. The scientist creates doppelganger of himself to enable him to escape morality. Transformation makes Dr Jekyll be this character which does not have conscience. Mr. Hyde does not worry about the consequences of his actions as he does not care about how others feeling or even the authority. This gives him more freedom to do things without Dr Jekyll getting the blame even though they are the same people. The story is a satire to the Victorian society which pretends to be flawless from the outside but is very unforgiving in the inside. The dual nature of man kind of hints us to the fact that there is a good side and a bad side of everything. There is a reference of Dr Jekyll going to church and trying to gather his acts to be a better Christian while Hyde was acting beyond his conscience.

In both of the stories human nature is portrayed as being imperfect. So they need to create a magical potion to transform into this being which would ideally be free from the imperfections. In the first one imperfection is death or mortality while in the second story it is the morality of humans. We can draw parallels to these stories as we find that there is the use of alchemy or science to make humans able to cheat death or transform into an anomaly that is not confined within the social norms, as we discover in some way Winzy and Hyde defy social norms in their own ways.