William Wilson's DoubleAuthor(s): Ruth SullivanSource: Studies in Romanticism, Vol. 15, No. 2, Psychoanalysis and Romanticism (Spring,1976), pp. 253-263Published by: Boston UniversityStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25600010 .Accessed: 16/02/2011 20:43

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William Wilson's Double

RUTH SULLIVAN

EDGAR Allan Poe's "William Wilson" is a puzzling tale. It seems a rather dull, formulaic story without ambiguities. I

stifle a yawn over the too-obvious moral tag:

"You have conquered, and I yield. Yet, henceforward art thou also dead?

dead to the World, to Heaven and to Hope! In me didst thou exist?and, in

my death, see by this image, which is thine own, how utterly thou has mur

dered thyself."!

And a second yawn over the epigraph, also heavy-handedly direc tive:

What say of it? what say [of] CONSCIENCE grim, That spectre in my path?

Chamberlayne's Pharronida

Another one of those doubles tales, I say, like The Picture of Dorian Gray, in which the suppressed portion of the self is pro jected into a second character or object and in which the reader is

warned that the instinctual self must be curbed by conscience; that one kills the complementary self only by spending the health, even the life, of the whole person. Besides, for me the tale is remarkably abstract. True, there is the grizzly climax in which a maddened

William Wilson confronts his dying, blood-dabbled double; the scene of William Wilson's practical joking trip to his double's

bedchamber; and the description of Dr. Bransby's school; but otherwise the story lacks the consistent hair-raising concreteness of

the narrator's stalking of the old man's eye in "The Tell-Tale

Heart," for example. "William Wilson" is a talky tale, a bit ratio

cinative, though not at all for me of a tone with Poe's detective fiction.

But indeed the tale is fascinating, ambiguous, for the narrator is not who he seems. Is he the representative of instinct unleashed?

1. James A. Harrison, ed., The Complete Works of Edgar Allan Poe (New York: AMS Press, Inc., 1965), III, 325. In italics in the original. All future references to "William Wilson" will be to this edition and will appear in

parentheses in the text.

SiR, 15 (Spring 1976) 253

254 RUTH SULLIVAN

And the double he kills?is he the representative of conscience? The epigraph seems to say this by telling the reader in advance that this is a tale about "CONSCIENCE grim" and the concluding

moral tag says much the same, for when William Wilson kills his

conscience, he dooms himself to a life of "turpitude" (299). All

through the tale, the narrator damns himself: he has engaged in

"unpardonable crime" (299) and "miserable profligacy" (313), has

"passed . . . into more than the enormities of an Elah-Gabalus"

(299), and so on; whereas William Wilson the double consistently whispers good advice into his school fellow's ear and arrives in time to thwart several immoralities. For one psychoanalytic critic, Robert

Rogers, the second William Wilson is "one of the most representa tive superego doubles" in Poe;2 and for Marie Bonaparte, too, the second William Wilson is the superego, who represents "the intro

jection of [Poe's] repressive father system."3 But can William Wilson have killed his superego? Where, then,

does the self-condemnation come from? A moral sense and convic tion of wrongdoing can come only from some form of the superego. Clearly, William Wilson cannot have killed his conscience-double;

equally clearly some trompe-Voeil occurs at the climax when William Wilson claims the superego murder. One notices that the

dying double no longer speaks in a whisper as the conscience double had; that it seems William Wilson the reprobate's voice blends with his double's. In other words, the climax is ambiguous about who dies. Most likely, the reprobate dies and Poe has the

superego masquerade as the instinct-driven William Wilson, in this

guise telling his horrifying autobiography. Loosely, William Wilson's superego tells the story of William Wilson's id. More pre cisely, part of his ego dominated by the superego tells the story of the part of the ego dominated by the id.

Poe gives many clues about the identity of the narrator: by the tone of the tale, for example. It is moralistic; further, the con

demnations William Wilson levels far exceed the evidence of

wrong-doing. William Wilson has committed no "unpardonable crime." At least none is detailed in what purports to be a scru

pulous effort to assign cause to his later infamy. As Rogers puts it:

"Except for cheating at cards and excessive drinking, the various

2. Robert Rogers, A Psychoanalytic Study of the Double in Literature

(Detroit: The Wayne State U. Press, 1970), p. 25.

3. Marie Bonaparte, The Life and Works of Edgar Allan Poe (London: Imago Publ. Co., 1949), p. 553.

WILLIAM WILSON'S DOUBLE 255

debaucheries are with one exception unspecified. In this disparity between the relatively innocuous nature of the protagonist's crimes

and the extreme baseness with which they are characterized in the

story itself, the tyrannical severity of the superego finds expres sion."4

Rogers is right. The two severe offenses concretely described are

immoralities but not crimes suitably punished by death or suicide. One offense is would-be adultery. But the object of William Wilson's desires is "the young, the gay, the beautiful wife of the aged and

doting Di Broglio. With a too unscrupulous confidence she had

previously communicated to me the secret of the costume in which she would be habited . . ." (323). Wilson contemplates adultery (it seems he did not perpetrate it), but with a willing, or at least a

morally casual, woman. His other offense is cheating at cards to the

financial ruin of the "young parvenu nobleman, Glendinning? rich, said report, as Herodes Atticus?his riches, too, as easily acquired" (316). Once more, the deed is immoral but not one ap propriately punished, ultimately, by self-murder. What are William

Wilson's crimes, then? He is a spendthrift, a gambler, a drinker, an adulterer (perhaps), and possibly an opium-taker ("there were not wanting other and perhaps more dangerous seductions" than

liquor [313]), but nowhere does the narrator describe deeds merit

ing such severe condemnations as "unpardonable crime." Not even

the climactic murder-suicide is such a deed, for it is not clear who kills whom. Besides, William Wilson, dogged to distraction, defends himself against

a too-harsh superego.

Every other crime attributed to William Wilson is a generalized allegation. For example, his "crimes" at Eton: "I do not wish, how

ever, to trace the course of my miserable profligacy here?a prof

ligacy which set at defiance the laws, while it eluded the vigilance of the institution. Three years of folly, passed without profit, had but given me rooted habits of vice . . ." (313). At Oxford:

Excited by such appliances to vice, my constitutional temperament broke forth with redoubled ardor, and I spurned even the common restraints of decency in the mad infatuation of my revels. But it were absurd to pause in the detail of my extravagance. Let it suffice, that among spendthrifts I out-Heroded Herod, and that, giving name to a multitude of novel follies, I added no brief

appendix to the long catalogue of vices then usual in the most dissolute uni

versity of Europe. (315-16)

4. Rogers, p. 25. Rogers does not draw from his own statement the conclu sion, obvious to me, that it is William Wilson's superego narrating.

256 RUTH SULLIVAN

Other alleged crimes are just as vaguely described. His "crime" in Rome is "ambition"; in Paris, "revenge"; in Naples, "passionate love"; and in Egypt, "avarice" (322).

One must wonder about the reliability of these unspecific ac

cusations and about the validity of William Wilson's assertion that he "might, to-day, have been a better, and thus a happier man, had I less frequently rejected the counsels embodied in these

meaning whispers which I then but too cordially hated and too

bitterly despised" (310). William Wilson is a villain, perhaps, but so is his superego. The moral tag of the tale is therefore misleading, for no psychic wholeness can come out of William Wilson's ac

ceptance of the tyranny of this particular demon. This conscience has a stake in appearing benign and righteous,

an affectionate giver of wholesome advice, the potential savior of the dissolute William Wilson. What stake does William Wilson have in painting himself so bloodily? Remorse, guilt, self-aggran dizement, perhaps; perhaps even gaining the sympathy of his fellow

mortals, as he says he wishes at the beginning of his tale. But the

heavily moralistic tone of the tale sounds more like a superego voice, effective in its sadism because masked in repentant con fession.

Moralistic tone is not the only clue Poe gives that the over zealous conscience is the narrator. The style of the story pro vides another. It is, by Donald Baylor Stauffer's excellent analysis, "highly abstract, rather stilted?even mannered." It is "the lan

guage of speculation and conjecture. . . .

Formality and order . . .

are the chief characteristics of the dominant style of 'William Wilson.'. .." Words "often have not only an analytic but a strongly moralistic tone as well."5 This is not the language of instinctual

license, even repentant, but of a personified superego pretending mildness and reason.

Then there is the sentimental nostalgia evinced in the narrator's memories of Dr. Bransby's school. The "old and irregular" (301) house is surrounded by "a high and solid brick wall, topped with a bed of mortar and broken glass. . . . This prison-like rampart formed the limit of our domain; beyond it we saw but thrice a

week . . ." (301). "At an angle of the ponderous wall frowned a more ponderous gate. It was riveted and studded with iron bolts,

5. Donald Baylor Stauffer, "Style and Meaning in 'Ligeia' and 'William

Wilson/ ?

SSF, 2 (1965), 326, 328.

WILLIAM WILSON'S DOUBLE 257

and surmounted with jagged iron spikes" (302). Presiding over this

prison-like place is Dr. Bransby from "a remote and terror-inspiring angle" (303) of the schoolroom, who, "with sour visage, and in

snuffy habiliments, administered, ferule in hand, the Draconian laws of the academy" (302). Here William Wilson says he was

happy: "It gives me, perhaps, as much pleasure as I can now in any manner experience, to dwell upon minute recollections of the school and its concerns" (301). "Encompassed by the massy walls of this venerable academy, I passed, yet not in tedium or disgust, the

years of the third lustrum of my life. . . . The apparently dismal

monotony of a school was replete with more intense excitement than my riper youth has derived from luxury, or my full man

hood from crime" (304). Such pleasure from confinement in a

prison-like school ruled by a harsh father-figure seems inconsistent for the character of someone who is described as from earliest

infancy "self-willed, addicted to the wildest caprices, and a prey to the most ungovernable passions" (300), one who grows increas

ingly restive under what he calls his double's "impertinent and

dogged interference with my purposes ..." (306). The pleasure is, however, consonant with the superego double, the narrator, who, by affirming that the wild William Wilson was happy in this school,

says in effect that he not only needed but thrived under control.

By the device of misleading the reader into believing that the sinful William Wilson is the narrator, Poe not only permits a

tyrannical superego to run rampant but also directs the reader to what I believe is another concern of the tale, which is both a moral about how William Wilson destroys himself because he cannot assimilate his conscience and, as well, a moral about the latent

criminality in the reader, who can readily perceive "evil" in in stinctual license but cannot so easily perceive it in the destructive ness of an excessive curb to instinct, a vicious superego. Conscience

can be a criminal, too. The later crimes, committed after the self

murder, can as well have been perpetrated by a ruthlessly domi

nating superego. Poe holds up the whole story as the mirror wherein, like William Wilson seeing his own bloody visage, the reader, too, can perceive, if dimly, his own duplicity in the double murder of William Wilson. "CONSCIENCE grim" has driven William Wilson to his self-destructive act; hence, both of them are murderers. The narrator's story is the revenge of the superego against his double, of excessive morality against instinctual license.

Certain ambiguities remain, however. For instance, the scene in

258 RUTH SULLIVAN

which William Wilson looks upon his double asleep in his bed chamber: what do his anguished words mean? "Were these?these the lineaments of William Wilson? . . . What was there about them to confound me in this manner? . . . Was it, in truth, within the bounds of human possibility, that what I now saw was the result,

merely, of the habitual practice of this sarcastic imitation?" (312). I assume that William Wilson perceives not only that his double carries his name, effectively imitates him, and so on, but that the two look, indeed, are exactly alike. The climax makes this obvious, for there it seems William Wilson sees "mine own image" in "a

larger mirror"; and "I could have fancied that I myself was speak ing while he [William Wilson, the double] said ..." (325), and so on.

This symbolic reading, that the two Wilsons are identical because each represents half of one personality, is logical. There is also this

peculiar passage which is, I am certain, related to the two occasions in which William Wilson perceives an essential identity between himself and his double:

It was about the same period . . . that, in an altercation of violence with

him, in which he was more than usually thrown off his guard, and spoke and

acted with an openness of demeanor rather foreign to his nature, I discovered, or fancied I discovered, in his accent, his air, and general appearance, a some

thing which first startled, and then deeply interested me, by bringing to mind dim visions of my earliest infancy?wild, confused and thronging memories of a time when memory herself was yet unborn. I cannot better describe the sensation which oppressed me than by saying that I could with difficulty shake off the belief of my having been acquainted with the being who stood before me, at some epoch very long ago?some point of the past even infinitely re mote. (310-11; emphasis added)

Though William Wilson passes this off as a delusion, I resonate to the early identity he claims between himself, "self-willed, ad dicted to the wildest caprices" (300) and William Wilson the

superego, voice of a ruthless morality: both are psychically fed from the same early infantile source, an inborn sadism (a "com

ponent instinct," says Freud) and narcissism that can inform both one's instinctual life (as it does William Wilson's in his wild

pleasure seeking and aggressiveness) and conscience (in the too harsh self-condemnations and possible later crimes of the narrator).6

6. In his discussion of where the experience of a double comes from, Sigmund Freud says:

WILLIAM WILSON'S DOUBLE 259

The two William Wilsons are identical in being symbolically parts of the same person and in having their early nourishment at the same psychic sources. Ironic, of course, is that both William Wil sons are criminals, one from a sense of wrong-doing and the other

from uninhibited release of anti-social drives. There are still other puzzles in this tale. The narrator is William

Wilson's double, and that double is representative of the superego dominated ego; but the puzzle remains that nowhere in the story does William Wilson express guilt. If the superego-dominated ego is telling the tale, one would expect guilt. Indeed, almost everyone I have read or heard speaks of this story as narrated by someone

guilt-ridden. But when William Wilson describes his motivation for telling his story, nowhere does he say he feels guilt for his years of "unpardonable crime." He says he tells the story because on his deathbed he wants to understand how he became so wicked so

suddenly; he wants the sympathy, even the pity, of his fellow men; and he wants to justify his life by belief in somehow "dying a victim to the horror and the mystery of the wildest of all sublunary visions" (300). He continually complains about being "steeped in

misery" (301). To his classmates' reproachful glances when William Wilson ruins Glendinning, the former reacts not with guilt but with a more primitive emotion, shame: "I could not help feeling my cheeks tingle with the many burning glances of scorn or reproach

Such ideas, however, have sprung from the soil of unbounded self-love, from the primary narcissism which dominates the mind of the child and of primitive

man. But when this state has been surmounted, the "double" reverses its aspect. From having been an assurance of immortality, it becomes the uncanny har

binger of death.

The idea of the "double" does not necessarily disappear with the passing of primary narcissism, for it can receive fresh meaning from the later stages of the ego's development. A special agency is slowly formed there, which is able to stand over against the rest of the ego, which has the function of observing and criticizing the self and of exercising a censorship within the mind, and which we become aware of as our "conscience." In the pathological case of delusions of being watched, this mental agency becomes isolated, dissociated from the ego, and discernible to the physician's eye. The fact that an agency of this kind exists, which is able to treat the rest of the ego like an object? the fact, that is, that man is capable of self-observation?renders it possible to invest the old idea of a "double" with a new meaning and to ascribe a number of things to it?above all, those things which seem to self-criticism to

belong to the old surmounted narcissism of earliest times. (James Strachey, ed., The Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud [London: The Hogarth Press, 1955], xvn, 235.)

260 RUTH SULLIVAN

cast upon me by the less abandoned of the party" (318). He is "affected" by the "silent contempt, or the sarcastic composure" (320) of his fellows. "Abased, humbled to the dust" (320), he "left the

apartment with a resolute scowl of defiance . . . [in] a perfect agony of horror and shame" (321).

Can there be a sense of wrongdoing without an accompanying sense of guilt? There can be. First, however, the reader must remember that the double is telling the tale. If he is representative of a superego-dominated ego, he might be punishing in his char acteristic way, by making the ego experience guilt. However, in

masquerading as William Wilson the reprobate, he records accu

rately the feelings that Wilson would have. Not guilt, because one

purpose of the tale is to record the fruits of William Wilson's in

ability to assimilate a conscience (a person without conscience does

not, of course, feel guilt). The narrator-double practices his sadism on William Wilson in other ways; by making him appear a blacker villain than he is, for instance; but he generally tries to record

accurately how William Wilson feels. And after all, inability to feel guilt for such alleged wrong-doing is an implied condemnation in harmony with the punitive purposes of the narrator.

Another emotion consonant with a strong sense of wrong-doing yet not necessarily involving a sense of guilt is anxiety concerning abandonment. "If I behave badly and am caught, I feel not only shame but fear that I will no longer be loved." At the beginning of the story, William Wilson shows marked concern about this. For one thing, he seems to hate himself (self-hatred can be a reflex from being unloved for misbehavior). He wishes not to use his real name because "the fair page lying before me need not be sullied with my real appellation. This has been already too much an object for the scorn?for the horror?for the detestation of my race" (299). Later, in young manhood, he is most deeply irritated by his double for whispering his name, thus confounding some ill deed. In Dr.

Bransby's school, "there was one form of his practical wit that disturbed me beyond measure. ... He habitually practiced the

annoyance. I had always felt aversion to my uncourtly patronymic, and its very common, if not plebeian praenomen. The words were venom in my ears ..." (308). With the coming of his double,

William Wilson is "doubly disgusted with the name because a

stranger bore it, who would be the cause of its twofold repeti tion . . ." (308). William Wilson also fears abandonment. He believes himself to

WILLIAM WILSON'S DOUBLE 261

be "outcast of all outcasts most abandoned!?to the earth art thou not forever dead? to its honors, to its flowers, to its golden aspira tions??and a cloud, dense, dismal, and limitless, does it not hang eternally between thy hopes and heaven?" (299). He tells of his "later years of unspeakable misery" (299). This combination of

feelings and deeds (misbehavior, fear of being abandoned, self

loathing, self-recrimination, sense of misery and shame) sounds like the intrapsychic relationship between the ego and the superego, for the superego can treat the ego like a child, withdrawing love as

punishment for misdeeds and burdening the ego with painful self

disgust and sense of abandonment. Thus far, Poe's story rings true, therefore, as an accurate portrayal of how the second William

Wilson as superego-dominated ego would treat the first. But this does not yet fully account for the absence of a sense of guilt in the

story.

There are some clues whereby one can further refine a definition of the narrator. One of these is the fact that William Wilson the

reprobate (by report of the narrator) seems never to learn from his double's advice, admonitions, or thwartings of planned misbe havior. At school, the two engage in mutual mild hostilities: prac tical joking, arguing, teasing, and so on. William Wilson recognizes

with chagrin "his true superiority" (305). "It is difficult, indeed, to

define, or even to describe, my real feelings towards him. They formed a motley and heterogeneous admixture;?some petulant animosity, which was not yet hatred, some esteem, more respect,

much fear, with a world of uneasy curiosity" (307). William Wilson

recognizes about his double "that his moral sense, at least, if not his general talents and worldly wisdom, was far keener than my own . . ." (310). Nevertheless, William Wilson responds "with a

repugnance which gained strength as I grew in years" (310). Further, he is apparently stupid later when he seems unable fully to

recognize who his double is and why he pursues the reprobate. He knows it is the William Wilson from Dr. Bransby's school. "But who and what was this Wilson??and whence came he??and what were his purposes?" (315). He even recognizes that his double comes

only on certain occasions, when William Wilson I is about to embark on another piece of misbehavior. What is striking, though, is that William Wilson not only does not learn from the advice and interference of his seemingly benevolent double but apparently grows more and more dissolute and violent.

One psychological fact can add up these details: William Wilson

262 RUTH SULLIVAN

as-superego hates his double, who fears abandonment as retaliation

for misbehavior, experiences misery and shame but not guilt because his double represents not an internalized conscience but a fore runner of the superego in the voice of parental authority before and during the oedipal period. True, the double grows weaker when Wilson drowns himself in wine and he whispers as the voice of conscience does, but he also uses as words of admonition, "William Wilson!" just as parents often do to erring children. Before the child fully introjects parents' voices and cultural values to form the superego during and after the oedipal period, that child

responds to external curbs to his behavior and will do whatever he can get away with.7 There is, as Otto Fenichel puts it, "no unified

organized character in the prohibitions"; for instance, bogeymen and policemen "represent these 'externalized pre-superegos/ The child fluctuates between giving in to his impulses and suppressing them."8 William Wilson, like a child before his introjection firmly occurs, needs external curbs to his pleasure drive, needs the ex

ternal voice of admonition, feels abased and ashamed and horri fied but only temporarily, and has not yet learned to discipline himself. The double, then, can be called a conscience-representative only in a loose way; more accurately, he is representative of the

precursor of conscience.

Poe gives another fact, indeed, a clinically useful one, to support the probability of what I am suggesting. In earliest infancy, Wilson

says, "my parents could do but little to check the evil propensities which distinguished me. Some feeble and ill-directed efforts re sulted in complete failure on their part, and, of course, in total

triumph on mine. Thenceforward my voice was a household law; and at the age when few children had abandoned their leading strings, I was left to the guidance of my own will, and became, in all but name, the master of my actions" (300). These facts say that William Wilson's parents did not provide the moral founda tion or supervision necessary for eventual development of a super ego. Later, at school, when William Wilson is between ten and fifteen (in his "third lustrum"), he acquires a father-surrogate in the stern-and-benevolent Dr. Bransby; he also experiences the

7. See Charles Brenner, An Elementary Textbook of Psychoanalysis (Garden

City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1957), pp. 124-140, for a comprehensive discussion of

the superego. 8. Otto Fenichel, The Psychoanalytic Theory of Neurosis (New York: W. W.

Norton, 1945), p. 104.

WILLIAM WILSONS DOUBLE 263

emergence, at an almost clinically correct age (according to Charles

Brenner, the superego is not fully formed until about age nine or

ten)9 of his double, the precursor of the superego and representa tive of parental authority he never had. The second William

Wilson becomes tyrant when a kind of psychic wholeness occurs,

ironically during the effort of the reprobate to kill him. A kind of

introjection there takes place with extreme unwillingness on the latter's part. At the climax, the two merge, for both voices blend and speak

as one person; the part that survives is the superego dominated part of the ego.

Thus Poe lures us, his readers, deeply into his story by disguis ing the narrator, thereby inviting at least a three-fold pleasure: the

socially acceptable delight in witnessing the punishment of for bidden behavior (apparently, the reprobate suffers a life of "un

speakable misery"); the covert indulgence, under the noisy moral tone, in sadistic identification with a ruthless superego; and, in a more limited way, a pleasure in identifying with vice. "William

Wilson" is more ambiguous, more complex than it appears.

Northeastern University

9. Brenner, p. 126.