The Doctrine of Shock and the Doppelganger: An Analysis of William Wilson by Maddie Patterson

For my edition of William Wilson, I want to probe further into the idea of the doppelganger, what it represents within the tradition of the gothic, and what that could mean/represent for Poe concerning his personal life. Much of my analysis is been guided by Naomi Klein’s memoir Doppelganger, which chronicles Klein’s relationship with Naomi Wolf, a far-right commentator and anti-vaccine conspiracy theorist. Throughout the memoir, Klein charts Wolf’s descent into the far-right sphere after a series of petty minor public humiliations and one critical event where a translation error in her dissertation proved to destroy her academic credibility.

In many ways, I feel like this sort of career path lines up with Poe’s biography, from the petty disappointments of struggling to fit in with his peers, his deteriorating relationship with John Allan and his denial of his inheritance, and his inability to achieve his goal of ever becoming a literary editor of his own magazine. While a variety of differences separate Poe and Wolf, I think that by applying the same approach Klein utilizes I can gain a further understanding of Poe’s mental state.

From this, I then turn to analyze the actual use of the doppelganger in the story as well. While the uncanny is “the class of the terrifying which lead back something long known to us, the very familiar” (Freud, The Uncanny), the doppelganger represents the most potent and horrifying image of all: it is a direct reflection of our self. Throughout William Wilson, we follow a narrator who exemplifies the negative traits one might have. However, a closer reading does inform us that many of the characteristics the narrator has directly parallel Poe’s own vices, while also echoing and reflecting some of Poe’s biography. Fundamentally, what I attempt to do is to position how Poe might have used William Wilson as a way to process the humiliation and trauma he faced as a result of his many disappointments, and how the story could act as a way for him to vocalize these concerns in a narrative format.

Source text citation: Poe, Edgar Allan. “William Wilson: A Tale”. The Gift for 1840, issued October 1839: pgs