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GCSE English Literature · key term
Language that compares a person or their behaviour to an animal, suggesting qualities such as instinct, aggression or vulnerability.
Used by AQA, Edexcel, OCR and Eduqas
Paper 1
Revise: Mr HydeThe animal imagery continues into Hyde’s final confinement. In Chapter 8, Poole describes the masked figure moving “like a monkey”. In Chapter 10, Jekyll recalls Hyde’s “ape-like tricks”: he defaces religious books, burns letters and destroys Jekyll’s father’s portrait.
Language that represents a person through animal characteristics or behaviour, such as Hyde’s “ape-like fury”.
Either question: explain how particular words, contrasts and narrative choices support your interpretation. Naming animal imagery without exploring its meaning is not developed analysis.
Integrate context into your interpretation. Explain how animal imagery engages with Victorian fears of degeneration rather than adding an unrelated paragraph about evolution.
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Paper 2
Language that describes a person through animal characteristics or behaviour.
Revise: Mr HydeThe animal imagery connects with nineteenth-century anxieties about the primitive. Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, published in 1859, helped bring evolution and common descent into public debate, unsettling beliefs about a fixed separation between humans and animals. Degeneration theories expressed a different fear: that people or civilisation might decline towards a supposedly earlier, more primitive condition.
Language that associates a person or their behaviour with animals, often suggesting instinct, aggression or a loss of civilised restraint.
Paper 1
Language that associates a person with animals, suggesting qualities such as instinct, aggression or vulnerability.
Revise: Mr HydeThe animal imagery also connects with Victorian debates about humanity’s relationship with other animals. Darwin’s On the Origin of Species appeared in 1859, and The Descent of Man in 1871 explored human evolution. The idea that humans and apes shared ancestors challenged assumptions that humanity was entirely separate from the animal world.
Language that describes a person through animal features or behaviour, suggesting instincts, aggression or a weakened boundary between human beings and animals.
Component 2
Description that associates a person with an animal, often suggesting instinct, appetite or a loss of human restraint.
Revise: ViolenceAnimal imagery can therefore represent human cruelty rather than establish a literal biological explanation for it. The most unsettling possibility is that education, wealth and professional status do not guarantee goodness.
