Corporatism and the Problem of Singleton Reading in Poes
William Wilson (or, Why Cant You See Twins?) LYNN LANGMADE I n June 2003, the Funk Family of Chicago went to China to adopt a baby girl who had been abandoned outside a textile factory in Yangzhou amid the buzz of streaming cars only hours after birth. They named her Mia. In 2004, the Ramirez family of Miami also adopted a baby girl from China found abandoned outside the same factory in Yangzhou one week later. As it happened, the Ramirez family also named their baby Mia. But it wasnt until August 2006 when Diana Ramirez placed an advertisement on an international orphanage Web site about the upcoming birthday party of her three-year-old daughter that these two families collided. Holly Funk, who just happened to be surfing the orphanages Web site on the day Ms. Ramirezs advertisement went up, put two and two together and wrote back: Diana, I have a Mia as well and she is almost 3. 1 After emails and photos had been exchanged and DNA tests completed, Ms. Ramirez and Ms. Funk came to the shocking, yet inevitable, conclusion that their daughtersMia and Miawho lived fourteen hundred miles apart and over twelve thousand miles fromtheir birth country were twin sisters. 2 The families quickly arranged a meeting between Mia and Mia and discovered that, although they had spent the first three years of their lives apart, the twins shared a remarkable number of personality traits beyond their identical names and appearance. Such similarity coupled with the twins reunion is, according to Mia Funks adoptive father, nothing short of a miracle: What are the odds that of all the people in China these two are sisters? What are the chances of the two of them. . . [finding] each other? Its amazing. 3 But more importantly, this case illustrates the way twins, who appear poised to live their entire lives apart, are often reunited by deceptively simple means, such as a Web site advertisementpulled back together by a far more powerful force than the culture, time, and space separating them. Though the happy ending to the Mia Twins story would have been unthinkable without the technological advancement of the Internet, it is ac- tually just a modern installment of a very old tale: twins separated at birth miraculously reunite by chance or fate and discover eerie similarities. But its C 2012 Washington State University P O E S T U D I E S , VOL. 45, 2012 5 L Y N N L A N G M A D E a tale psychologists did not take seriously until T. J. Bouchard published his groundbreaking Minnesota Study of Twins Reared Apart (MISTRA) in 1990, which conclusively documented the similarities of real twins who had been separated at birth. 4 The MISTRA study made the Jim Twins (Jim Lewis and Jim Springer), who were reunited thirty-nine years after being separated at four weeks, world renowned. The study documented that both men were gifted in math, struggled with spelling, enjoyed mechanical drawing and carpentry, had first wives named Linda and second wives named Betty, named their sons James Allan and their dog Toy. Not too coincidentally, Lewis and Springer also developed headaches at the same time of day, drove the same color and model of Chevrolet, chain-smoked Salem cigarettes, bit their fingernails, and vacationed in the same spot each year. 5 Separated twins, as these brothers demonstrate, may not only reunite quite unexpectedly under bizarre circum- stances but also lead, inexplicably, twin lives. This archetypical tale of twins reared apart, which has spawned an entire mythic lore about multiples, is also crucial for delineating a classic problem in the exegesis of one of Edgar Allan Poes most critically acclaimed short stories, William Wilson. Critics, such as Daniel Hoffman, who typically regard the story as a masterpiece in the genre of the double, have almost universally assumed the story is about a second or divided self that haunts the protagonist and leads him to insanity. 6 This more generalized reading of the story begins with D. H. Lawrences assumption that the protagonist engages an internal battle to kill his own soul, which ends in a spiritual death. 7 Thus critics who disagree about other points of interpretation are united in their assumption that WW 2 is the protagonists imaginary double rather than a real person. 8 One result of this assumption is that the storys violence is inevitably read as psychic violence against the self. 9 Even more problematic is the fact that recent criticism has used materialist-based theory to entrench this orthodox reading, persistently referring to WW 2 as a double. 10 While many critics consider the epigraph to be definitive proof that the story is about the divided self, Jonathan Elmer has convincingly demonstrated why this epigraph should be read ironically. 11 Proffered again and again in slight variation to the delight of the critical community, this unavoidable and entirely uncontroversial thesis 12 has served another subtle function in the process of cultural signification, which is to foreclose completely on alternative readings, specifically those antithetical to allegory. Either way, the verdict is in: with only a few recent exceptions, critics of William Wilson maintain that there is only one Wilson. 13 6 P O E S T U D I E S T H E W I L S O N D U P L E X However, unlike previous scholars who have focused on the Double in William Wilson, I maintain that the eerie story of twins reared apart with which I opened this discussion is central not only to the plot of William Wilson but also to its primary thematic concerns. For no reading with the all-too-easy conclusion that WW 2 is an imaginary Double has managed to resolve the essential ambiguity of the tale: whether there exists one William Wilson or two. Furthermore, the casual, indeed haphazard, way in which two identical characters in this text are nearly unanimously denominated imaginary Doubles tells us that literary criticism itself mirrors the essential conflict in William Wilson, a conflict provoked by acute confusion between the real and the imaginary, the material and the ideal. Fundamentally, the metacritical discussion of this text illustrates that the conflation of twins and Doubles in literary praxis has considerable political implications. In the forthcoming discussion, I examine the metacritical history of the literary Double and the twin with two goals: first, to distinguish the two terms as discrete concepts, and second, to recuperate twins as a viable literary motif in its own right, one capable of resolving a long-standing literary aporia in Wilson scholarship. It is my hope that such an approach will answer the following questions: How might essential ambiguities in literary praxisespecially those regarding William Wilsonbe resolved by properly identifying twins in literature? What does the invisibility of twins say about the stories we tell about being human or, alternatively, those we tell about pos- sessing individual identity? And finally, what are the practical consequences of reducing a class of people to the status of symbol? In other words, what impact does denying the material existence of certain bodiescertain identitieshave on a discipline, and what can this denial tell us about the politics of literary practice? In contrast to the orthodox Double thesis, I offer an equally rigor- ous, if counterintuitive, reading of William Wilson that assumes manifest replicationtwinshipis at work in the narrative precisely because Poe is interested in staging the confrontation between two material bodies. In par- ticular, I maintain that Poe deliberately leverages a centuries-old discourse surrounding the topos of twins separated at birth as an optimal literary de- vice for staging the hesitation required in a tale of the fantastic, in which a confrontation with ones co-twin could conceivably be interpreted as a supernatural event. WilliamWilson is not a story about the anxiety provoked by the Double as many have argued, but about the fear that the body, and perhaps even the Self, has always been multiple. H I S T O R Y , T H E O R Y , I N T E R P R E T A T I O N 7 L Y N N L A N G M A D E Double Vision [a pathological condition of vision in which a single object appears double Random House Unabridged Dictionary] A s Juliana de Nooy astutely observes in Twins in Contemporary Litera- ture and Culture, when twins are mentioned in any general treatise on the Double in nineteenth-century literature, they are subsumed under the broader category of doubles, which is considered to be the central theme of the period. 14 This compulsion to subordinate twins is largely due to the fact that neither a comprehensive definition nor a rigid taxonomy of the Double has ever existed. In fact, according to Albert Guerard, a scholar of the Double, no term is more loosely used by casual critics of modern literature. 15 Robert Rogers further complicates this taxonomic confusion by widening the jurisdiction of the Double from character to textual structure itself, stating that a distinction must be made between doubling by multiplication and doubling by division, in which multiple characters in a story represent a single concept or in which a unified psychological entity is divided and represented by other characters in the tale. 16 Because the Double has been interpreted to mean almost any dualand in some cases even multiplestructure in a text, most critics agree it has become an outworn literary device completely detached from history 17 that ceases to carry any literary information. 18 Despite the fact that criticism of the Double is riddled with confusion, the devices ever-increasing detachment from history is a result of the premium scholars of the Double place on hidden, psycho-transcendental concerns with the Self. This exorbitant value can be traced back to Freud, who theorized in The Creative Writer and Daydreaming (1908) that the literary Double is essentially a divided self: On the whole the psychological novel no doubt owes its special character chiefly to the tendency of the modern writer to split up his ego, by self-observation, into partial egos and consequently to personify the conflicting currents of his mental life in several heroes. 19 Freud initiates a whole school of psychoanalytic criticism via The Creative Writer by establishing the trope of the Double as an ego that has been divided and dispersed among several characters in a text. And if the Double arises out of the manifest tension in the divided self, then according to such scholars of self-division, it necessarily falls to the purview of psychoanalytic criticism to decipher its secrets. 20 The unfortunate result of the psychoanalytic monopoly of the Double motif is that it privileges the division theory of the 8 P O E S T U D I E S T H E W I L S O N D U P L E X Double at the expense of the multiplication theory, giving primacy, as Rogers maintains, to latent rather than manifest conceptions in literature. 21 Even so, the critical (and metacritical) discussion of the Double that I have outlined here, in which singleton critics subordinate manifest twins to latent Doubles, becomes more curious in light of psychological studies that conclude singletons secretly desire twinship. Prominent Freudian psychoan- alyst Dorothy Burlingham argues in The Fantasy of Having a Twin that the same emotional situation that produces the family romance in which a child fantasizes about being reunited with lost parents also produces a frequent fantasy in singletons for a reunion with a lost co-twin: A common daydream which in spite of its frequency has received very little attention to-date is the fantasy of possessing a twin. It is a conscious fantasy, built up in the latency period as the result of disappointment by the parents in the oedipus situation, in the childs search for a partner who will give him all the attention, love and companionship he desires and who will provide an escape from loneliness and solitude. 22 Though classical psychoanalytic theory generally defines fantasy as an unconscious, unfulfillable desire that is imperfectly repressed and returns in the camouflage of neurosis, 23 Freud is quite emphatic, as Susan Isaacs notes in her foundational study The Nature and Function of Phantasy, that fantasies express destructive instincts and hallucinatory wish-fulfillment via the psychic processes of introjection and projection. 24 In contrast to Freud, preeminent psychoanalyst Maria Torok deduces that fantasy is both an unconscious source and a conscious symptom of a problem. 25 If Toroks logic is valid, then what problem is the hallucinatory wish-fulfillment of the twin-fantasy masking? Freud again helps answer this question. According to Freud, during this same latency period the family romance produces psychic division when a fantasist/writer splits up his ego into partial egos, 26 and energy previously devoted to dealing with the Oedipus problem is now devoted to developing the Self, as sexual and aggressive drives are channeled into such socially accepted forms as repression and sublimation. If the family romance is the means by which one replaces/substitutes/exchanges the totalitarian regime of ones mother and father based on the rejection of oedipal object-cathexes, then the twin-fantasyresulting from the same complex that produces the family romanceis the means by which one promotes the fellowship of ones Self to the status of the multiplicity via rejection of the autoerotic cathexis. Moreover, Burlingham suggests, the only significant difference between the fantasy of recovering a lost co-twin and the fantasy of recovering lost parents is the fact that the love-object is replaced by a being who is like the daydreamer himself. 27 Consequently, the twin-fantasy is not so much a family romance as H I S T O R Y , T H E O R Y , I N T E R P R E T A T I O N 9 L Y N N L A N G M A D E it is a self-romance that provides evidence of a latent psychic crisis, which results in a genuine psychological complexa core pattern of emotions, memories, perceptions, and wishes organized around a common theme that influences behavior. 28 However, literary doubling is only a specific manifestation of the more general phenomenon Freud refers to as Unheimliche (or uncanny), which is symptomatic of the psychological complex generated by the twin-fantasy. Though Freud enumerates many experiences that fall under the rubric of the uncanny, according to Nicholas Royle in his comprehensive study of the subject, the concept can be distilled to the single phenomenon of the Double, 29 which threatens the corporation of the singleton with its untimely division: the repetition of the same facial features, the same characters, the same destinies, the same misdeeds, even the same names, 30 or what sociologist Avery Gordon summarizes as frightening familiarities, animated doubles . . . involuntary repetitions. 31 While many scholars have endeavored to illustrate the special relationship between the uncanny and the Double, it is Freud himself who inadvertently highlights the strange interdependency of the two terms in a curious story he narrates in The Uncanny about his own confrontation with his double on a train: I jumped up to put him right, but soon realized to my astonishment that the intruder was my own image, reflected in the mirror on the connecting door. I can still recall that I found his appearance thoroughly unpleasant. Hence, instead of being frightened by our doubles, both Mach and I simply failed to recognize them. Or was the displea- sure we felt at seeing these unexpected images of ourselves perhaps a vestige of the archaic reaction to the double as something uncanny? 32 But it isnt surprising that Freud should perceive a second version of himself in a mirror, because the illusion of the Double is primarily contrived through technologies of sight. Whether a mirror, a portrait, or a doll, it is material objectsnot personswithin the literary environment that sustain the illusion of a Double. Yet Freuds own pseudo-biographical story in The Uncanny informs us that real people, not just fictional characters, are haunted by objects in the environment. Just as Freud encountered the involuntary repetition of his Self as Other precisely because he failed to see himself in the mirror, so too the uncanny Double is equated with self-deception. Because Freud categorized all uncanny experiences as arising from either (1) the return of repressed infantile complexes, from the castration complex, womb fantasies, or (2) the revival of primitive beliefs, 33 the Double represents the return of the repressed romance of the Self in which the longing for what has been lost (Self) returns in the form of an apparitiona ghost. Indeed, Derrida has not only recognized the spectral relation of the individual to the Self, but has also maintained in 10 P O E S T U D I E S T H E W I L S O N D U P L E X Specters of Marx that such spectrality provides the structural foundation for most of what comprises Western philosophy after Descartesthe Cartesian cogito is actually a colossal, phantasmagoric self-haunting: Ego=ghost. There- fore, I am would mean I am haunted: I am haunted by myself who am. 34 In fact, by adding the controversial epigram to William Wilson, Poe signals his own engagement with the egos spectrality: What say of it? what say of CONSCIENCE grim, / That spectre in my path? (PT, 337). But when we examine the epigram in relation to the storys larger thematic ambitions, we must not lose sight of the fact that specters are fundamentally material phenomena, as is evident from Marxs first usage of the term ideology in The German Ideology (1845), in which he likens human brains to houses haunted by phantoms that are repressions of material life processes: The phantoms formed in the human brain are also, necessarily, sublimates of their material life-process, which is empirically verifiable and bound to material premises. 35 Gordon concurs, postulating that any ghostly matter is itself a historical materialism, whereby haunting is automatically tied to historical and social effects. 36 Taking such times and history of the specter into consideration, Derrida classifies The German Ideology as the inexhaustible gloss on . . . ghosts and the entire corpus of Marxs work as a veritable spectrology. 37 Accordingly, the fundamental haunting embodied in Marxs work, par- ticularly the mysticism of commodity fetishism in Capital, registers as an effect of a trauma that becomes a failed attempt in the work that Derrida sees as mourning: a mourning in fact and by right interminable . . . between intro- jection and incorporation. 38 Though Freud originally defined introjection in The Ego and the Id as a defense mechanism brought on by the loss of an object- cathexis that facilitates mourning by allowing the ego to give up a lost object, 39 editor and psychoanalytic scholar Nicholas Rand suggests that Maria Torok and Nicolas Abraham redefine introjection to be the unhindered activity of perpetual self-creation and the enrichment of psychic self-fashioning and self-awareness. 40 According to this revised definition, in the event of failed introjection, the lost object (Double/phantom) that continually haunts by its very repetition results in the ego literally incorporating the objectal loss. For our purposes here, the demetaphorization (taking literally what is meant metaphorically) and objectivation (pretending suffering is not an injury to the subject), which results in incorporation, ensures that the figurative loss of Self is translated literally and quite materially into the bodily corporation of the twin, and that the singleton subject will remain oblivious to the shock of the psychic trauma of this loss. For as Torok and Abraham astutely observe, incorporation is the refusal to acknowledge the full import of the loss, a loss H I S T O R Y , T H E O R Y , I N T E R P R E T A T I O N 11 L Y N N L A N G M A D E that, if recognized as such, would effectively transform us. 41 While Torok and Abraham explain that fantasy can lose its verbalizing function, becoming a form of desperate magic that tricks the sufferer into acting as if some actual and devastating trauma had not really occurred, 42 I would argue that the twin- fantasy violates oedipal law, becoming a terrorizing witchcraft that threatens the fiction of singleton individuation. Similar to, but distinct from, Abrahams theory of the fant ome, the twin-fantasy as a fantasy of non-introjection haunts the subject via an anthropophagic, Freudian incorporation of the lost twin- self and begins to speak as OtherDoublefrom within the subjects own mouth. 43 Critical then to the uncanny is not merely the fact of the deception that a Self is repeating but the fact, according to Derrida, that such sights have everything to do with how one refuses to see: The specter, as its name indicates, is the frequency of a certain visibility. But the visibility of the invisible. And visibility, by its essence, is not seen . . . . The specter is also, among other things, what one imagines, what one thinks one sees and which one projectson an imaginary screen where there is nothing to see. 44 The uncanny experience, by which unsubstantiated Doubles are pathologically projected onto inanimate material objects in the environment, is the absolute demetaphorization. The uncanny experience is a haunting of the most exact kind by ghosts who in some strange way challenge us to see. Because fantasy, according to Torok and Abraham, results from the denial of a gap, 45 twins, as subjects of the twin-fantasy, become liminal beings that provide events for particular ways of unknowing in singleton societythat is, they are constantly articulating themselves by forcing singletons to recalibrate their vision for absences rather than presences when searching the visible world. The once- familiar Self now alienated by repression morphs into a specter (a Double), which inevitably returns to haunt us. And if, as these theorists maintain, the ghost is a legitimate social figure who signifies what is absent and/or lost, then the Double is also a manifestation of an unconscious wish for a second self: a co-twin. In this sense, as objects for singletons autoerotic cathexis, twins necessarily produce material effects, becoming fant omesdelegitimized social figuresin a world of singletons haunted by repressed fantasies of their second self. The uncanny experience is then not so much a garden variety haunting by a ghost as it is a confrontation with our own fant omeour own deathand our own suicide. But the twin-fantasy that results in this psychological framework has a complex relationship to the scene of reading and writing, which is duly noted by Freud in The Creative Writer and Daydreaming when he theorizes that fantasy is consciously written by a little fantasist, 46 and by Rand, who 12 P O E S T U D I E S T H E W I L S O N D U P L E X confirms that fantasies, no less than dreams, are readable entities. 47 Yet if we think about the origin of the uncanny experience as the distortion of a viable fantasy for a lost co-twin in the autoerotic complex of self-romance, we will do well to remember that the fantasist/writer always writes his or her own twin- fantasy for the thrill of reading it. As such, the twin-fantasy generates some very uncomfortable questions about the ideological conditions that enable singleton reading and writing. These questions become evident in the protracted literary debate over the Double in which twin characters who have been manifestly added to a text are unseen by blind singleton readers/critics, interpreted as one entity, not two. In literary praxis, a singleton reader encounters a choice between manifest twinship or latent self-division when making an interpretative decision about the onto-phenomenology of a character in a narrative, but looks through or past the twinship, never registering that a choice has been presented. Such preterition, such overlooking, connotes not only an omission by passing over but also the gap or absence left by voiding, a process of cancellation. The systemic critical blindness that cannot see the choice between various forms of corporative organization is evidence of an ideologya spectropoliticsin which critics as readers and readers as writers unwittingly fall prey to certain assumptions about what constitutes legitimate personhood and who qualifies as an authorized subject for literary interpretation. Such critical blindness assumes, in other words, that the singleton is the basic political unit by naturalizing subjectivity as the socio-political domain of the singleton. Indeed, such a praxis, what I deem literary corporatism, is likely the reason most scholars have erroneously categorized twins in narrative as a subspecies of the Double. But I wish to suggest that if the family romance, which places individuals into different kinship structures than those they were born into, goes to the heart of Western fiction, 48 then we will need to rethink why so many literary critics simply cannot see twins. Certainly, the fact that critics have trouble seeing twins is inextricably bound up in the politics of difference, given that the Double bears little resem- blance to the twin when examined in any depth. Yet it is this very difference that has been exploited by critics to bind twins illegitimately to Doubles in the interest of singleton consolidation. For a long Western philosophical tradition rooted in a pathological anxiety over identity undergirds the refusal to see twins in literary-critical praxis. In fact, in his demolition derby on the metaphysics of presence, Dissemination, Derrida designates the Double as the necessary supplement of human identity, whereby involuntary repetition is added to identity to supply it with a fundamental unity that it lacks. The additive or supplement that posits non-truth actually serves to reinforce truth H I S T O R Y , T H E O R Y , I N T E R P R E T A T I O N 13 L Y N N L A N G M A D E by opening up difference through the possibility of the double, the copy, the imitation, the simulacrum. Repetitions are non-truths because what is essentially gets lost when it multiplies itself through. . . phantasms, simu- lacra. 49 In passages such as these, Derrida illustrates that ghosts and copies through their multiplicative onto-phenomenology exist as reified phenomena only to provide identity to that which is stable, singular, identifiable, so that all forms of involuntary repetition are stripped of their uniqueness and collapsed under the homogenizing signifier Double. In due course, Derrida finds West- ern philosophy indebted to the Double for its indentured servitude as necessary supplement, which it must perpetually exclude to reinforce difference as the foundation of its metaphysics. More important for our purposes here is Derridas later deconstructive metacritique of Lacans tri-logical reading of Poes The Purloined Letter. In The Purveyor of Truth, Derrida surrenders to his own curious form of logichis own peculiar blindnessby substituting for Lacans triangle a bi-logical labyrinth of doubles without originals. 50 It is telling that Derridas critique of the metaphysics of presence is inextricably tied to Poes work and that Derrida needs Poes doubles, no less than Lacan, to justify his assumptions. Accordingly Derrida unconsciously performs a semiotic slippage in a brief but illuminating moment of rhetorical signification at the end of Purveyor, in which he likens Dupins duplicity, not simply to doubling, but to actual twinning: a blow signed by a brother or confrere, a twin. 51 In the hallucinogenic play of signification, Derrida moves syntagmatically, and quite presumptively, from the Double to the twin and in so doing identifies the twin as the necessary supplement of the Double, which through its difference is always providing a lack or absence that confirms the presence of essence for the singletons missing unity of Self (identity). The Double cannot be defined-named-identified without twin (juxt)opposition; consequently, with- out the twin, the Double remains an incognizable construct. Whats more, Derrida, who has conjured the Double to support his arguments in a multitude of texts and has even based his own critical praxis on the innovation of the Double Session, has given the Double an open invitation to revisit him, becoming haunted by his own voluntary repetition, a textual regurgitation of his own anthropophagic crisis of incorporation. While I concur with Derridas seminal essay Freud and the Scene of Writing that the deconstruction of logocentrism is not a psychoanalysis of philosophy, 52 I argue in contrast that it is through the confession we call deconstruction that philosophy came to psychoanalyze Derrida, exhuming unsuccessful repression and its concomi- tant suppression in criticism as a viable psychological framework. For Der- ridas phenotext that writes a scathing critique of the politics of metaphysics 14 P O E S T U D I E S T H E W I L S O N D U P L E X produces a genotext that tells of an extended search for his lost co-twin in the haystack of texts that comprise Western philosophy. Such a genotext disseminates an acutely invisible metaphysics of presence, which is first and foremost sustained not on speech (logos), or patriarchy (law of the father), or ethnocentrism (white mythology), but on corporatism (spectrology). More importantly, Derridas unsanctioned genotext demonstrates that even the revolutionary poetics of poststructuralist praxis are constantly narrating its own flight from meaning by remaining blind to, and complicit in, the dissemination(s) of literary corporatism. To summarize, I have described a progressive quadripartite psycho- logical framework that (1) begins as an unconscious loss of the autoerotic object-cathexis (Self); (2) becomes symptomized as a conscious fantasy for a co-twin during latency (incorporation); (3) later transforms into the return of the repressed via the more generalized experience of uncanny haunting and its specific projection of the Double (lost co-twin); and (4) becomes institutionalized in the discursive dissemination of the ideology of literary corporatism, which blinds otherwise astute critics to twin visibility. However, it might be more practical simply to think of this framework as The Double Complex or a duplex, from the Latin defined as consisting of two together, forming a pair, composed or compounded of two parts or elementsall of which connote societys desire to name and control its anxiety over limitless dissemination. 53 Ultimately, this duplex begins as the childhood twin-fantasy and then eventually exhibits itself in the systemic blindness of literary critics who persist in seeing Double or Nothing, or a self-consolidating literary vio- lence that effaces the identity of twins and continually places their ontological viability as a discrete corporative organization in jeopardy. Double Take [a rapid or surprised second look, either literal or figurative, at a person or situation whose significance had not been completely grasped at first Random House Unabridged Dictionary] I t should come as no surprise, then, that criticism of William Wilson falls right into this Double or Nothing trap. As I noted at the beginning of this discussion, critical consensus regarding William Wilson assumes that the narrator of the story (WW 1 ) is imagining the second William Wilson (WW 2 ) and that the manifestation of this second body is merely allegory for H I S T O R Y , T H E O R Y , I N T E R P R E T A T I O N 15 L Y N N L A N G M A D E psychic fission. The discursive domination of this allegorical reading provokes an inevitable question: why is it privileged over literal readings when more- than-sufficient evidence exists within the story, other twin tales by Poe, bi- ography, history, and even biology to throw serious doubt on it? In fact, all one needs to do to unsettle the notion that WW 2 has no objective basis in the storyworld (a mental projection) is to look at two critical paragraphs that bookend the text: (1) the narrators initial proleptic comment that he survives the narratives event; and (2) the narrators revelation that two material, yet identical, cloaks exist (PT, 337, 353). But a real barrier to seeing twins in the tale, even for critics of William Wilson who do not preclude the literal reading and its material bodies, is what the narrator calls the constant twofold repetition in the story (PT, 344). Though we now know that Poes foster father, John Allan, actually did business with two discrete individuals named William Wilson, 54 commonness of the name and/or sheer coincidence does not account for the persistence with which these two indistinguishable bodies come into contact throughout the tale. For even Tsvetan Todorov, who is sympathetic to a literal reading, acknowledges in The Fantastic that, while many of the events can be comprehended without resorting to allegory, one should not assume that this kind of coincidental contact would constitute the kind of haunting that it does in Wilson: this double appear[s], as though by magic, at every important juncture of William Wilsons life. But even if we could explain the events of the story, Todorov suggests, there is simply no way to explain the utterly improbable resemblance of the two men, 55 which would allow us to move William Wilson from the rubric of the fantastic to the uncanny. 56 But there is an explanation for the involuntary repetition in the tale, both the recurring collisions and the resemblance between the two figures, and Poe actually gives us that explanation in a carefully coded, but nonetheless discrete, sentence early in the tale when the narrator begins analyzing the uncanny likeness between himself and WW 2 . After elucidating that WW 2 engages in the same conduct and possesses the same name and even date of birth, the narrator theorizes: I have before said, or should have said, that Wilson was not, in the most remote degree, connected with my family. But assuredly if we had been brothers we must have been twins (PT, 342; emphasis original). Most likely critics have not taken the phrase must have been twins seriously because a disqualifying conditional phrase, if we had been brothers, precedes it. The narrator is justifiably making kinship a requirement for twinship, and if kin- ship cannot be confirmed, then the duplicate Self cannot be a twin, but merely a Double. What better way is there to illustrate an eerie likeness between two seemingly unrelated individuals than to suggest that if it werent for certain 16 P O E S T U D I E S T H E W I L S O N D U P L E X conditions, two individuals could be twins? But what if the narrator, who has already demonstrated astonishing feats of unreliability, either from volition or ignorance, is himself also an unreliable source for disproving kinship in the tale? In other words, reading we must have been twins as an objection against a twin reading fails to take into account that not all twins are aware they are twins. For the field of Twin Studies begins, not only as a study of twins reared apart via Sir Francis Galtons seminal work, The History of Twins, As a Criterion of the Relative Powers of Nature and Nurture (1875), but also with the assumption that many of these twins remained unaware of their kinship status. 57 More importantly, Bouchards well-known MISTRA study showed conclusively in 1978 that twins who are reared apart often reunite by meeting each other by chance. 58 Further studies have also verified that sets [of twins] most separated also are among the most similar [in looks] and personality. 59 It is with this in mind that I take a counterintuitive step in the history of Wilson scholarship and dare to do an honest double take on a literary situation whose significance has not first been grasped; that is, to rethink decades of sedimented readings of this text, which have been grounded on a singleton vision of the world, and reposition it from the perspective of the multipleto imagine how persons who come into this world as multiple might interpret this tale. Based on the careful analysis of studies of twins reared apart, the only rational explanation that accounts for the excessive involuntary repetition in the tale is that WW 1 and WW 2 are twins who were separated at birth. The advantage of reading the text literally and taking for granted that two similar but material bodies are inhabiting the same local universe in William Wilson is that portions of the story that once appeared almost extraneous reveal themselves to be lucid and significant to the narratives larger thematic aims. Take, for example, this passage: I discovered . . . something which first startled, and then deeply interested me, by bringing to mind dim visions of my earliest infancywild, confused and thronging memories of a time when memory herself was yet unborn. . . . 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 agosome point of the past even infinitely remote (PT, 346). Here, the reader witnesses the narrator explaining that despite the fact that he has never met WW 2 prior to school, he still has the nagging sensation of having seen WW 2 before that first encounter, some time in his infancy when memory was yet unborn. The only valid explanation for the narrators belief that he was acquainted with WW 2 prior to school is that he was acquainted with him in the cradle, a time in life predating language and, hence, memory. But this could only be explained, given their striking resemblance, if the narrator and WW 2 were twins who were separated at birth. H I S T O R Y , T H E O R Y , I N T E R P R E T A T I O N 17 L Y N N L A N G M A D E In fact, the feeling the narrator describes is so commonly expressed by identical twins when reunited after a lifetime of separation that it borders on clich e. And Poe chose this scenario precisely because twins-reared-apart, as the many treatments of this topos attest, is an optimal literary device for staging the hesitation required in a tale of the fantastic. But it would be foolish to argue that the story is about twins, just as much as it would be foolish to argue that the story is about the divided Self. For the terror produced in the story, as Todorov and Ware suggest, arises from the fact that Poe provides no conclusive evidence that it is one or the other within the text itself. I wish to propose, however, that this terror is produced not simply because the reader doesnt know whether the antagonist is a real antagonist or imaginary. Critics have consistently erred in their efforts to account for the curious events in the story because they have assumed that these two ideas are mutually exclusive. That is, they assume criticism must make a choice between a symbolic (latent) and literal (material) reading of the tale. I argue that to make such a choice is to do a serious disservice to the deliberate structures that bring off the tales dramatic effect. Poe himself endorses choosing not to choose in an 1842 review of Hawthornes Twice-Told Tales when he compares one of Hawthornes stories to Wilson and suggests that WW 2 is the phantom or reduplication, and later in the same essay calls the figure a wraith or duplication of the beholder (ER, 57677). It is important to note here the persistent linkage of the word phantom with the word duplicate. Poe himself either wasnt sure whether the figure of his creation was an imaginary ghost or real duplicate, or did not want his reader to know whether it was imaginary or real. Either way, Poes own analysis of the tale gives credence to the idea that the terror produced for the protagonist and, thereby, the reader exists precisely because the figure is defined by being both. The reunion of separated identical twins is the only possible situation in which an uncanny event can produce an effect associated with the marvelous: when a twins altercation with his/her co-twin can appear to be a supernatural event. Thus the story William Wilson, or more accurately the metacritical dialogue regarding the story, becomes an optimal text in the United States literary tradition with which to examine the literary hegemony of the Double. For the metacritical spectropolitics of seeing Double or Nothing, what I call The Wilson Duplex, articulates a theory of duplication by reenacting the classic gesture of literary corporatism. When analyzed from within the hege- mony of literary corporatism, any form of involuntary repetition is instantly translated into a Double, which is really a divided singleton, whose presence within the narrative signifies psychopathology. Literary multiples are never what they appear to be at face value but are always pure pretext, marginalized 18 P O E S T U D I E S T H E W I L S O N D U P L E X as disembodied, spectral presences. In this sense, the multiple is not exactly, as Poe describes it, a phantom, but rather a mental aberrationa fant ome. As such, the category of the Double is a self-consolidating literary violence engendered by singletons to individuate the singleton more clearly. Twins dont call themselves Doubles and dont think of themselves as Double; singletons call twins Doubles. Double is just another word singletons use to demarcate a zone of terror brought on by the limitless dissemination they euphemistically refer to as uncanny. It is yet one more word to identify that which is not unique, special, or one-of-a-kind. If so, the study of twins cannot be a study of the Double. And if it is not a study of the Double, then what is it? Double or Nothing [a bet in gambling where a player who owes money has the debt doubled or canceled depending on the outcome of the next play] I n part one of this essay, I challenged the validity of the orthodox reading of WilliamWilson as the story of a Double (divided singleton). In part two, I offered an alternative to this orthodox reading, speculating that material duplication, not symbolic doubling, is the storys real thematic concern. For the remainder of this argument, I hope to answer the following question: What could Poe possibly gain from staging a confrontation between two identical, but seemingly unrelated, persons in William Wilson? The most critically rich place to begin to answer this question is the quotation with which Poe concludes The Purloined Letter, a story many critics consider to be another classic double tale: Un dessein si funeste, Sil nest digne dAtr ee, est digne de Thyeste [If such a sinister design isnt worthy of Atreus, it is worthy of Thyestes]. This frequently discussed quotation comes from Cr ebillons Atr ee et Thyeste (1707), 60 a play that begins as a battle for primogeniture between the mythological Greek twins Atreus and Thyestes and ends with one twin murderingindeed, devouringhis co-twins sons. 61 Poes explicit reference to this play signals his interest in what I call the literature of gemicide, derived from the Latin root gem, as in geminus (twin-born, twin) and gemino (to double). 62 Poe gestures to both the popular Romulean tradition of gemicidal literature, in which twins battle each other, often to the death, for dominion over state (territory and people), and the more recent diluted version in which twins battle over estate (an extensive manor and its property). It is a literature, in other words, preoccupied with the conflict that arises when the H I S T O R Y , T H E O R Y , I N T E R P R E T A T I O N 19 L Y N N L A N G M A D E birth of twins makes it impossible to determine primogeniturethat is, who will inherit the right to title. Certainly many critics have been quick to point to the issue of title in the story, specifically the name in William Wilson, to underpin a Double reading of the tale. For example, the reader learns at the outset of the story that the narrator is not using his real name: In this narrative I have therefore designated myself as William Wilson,a fictitious title not very dissimilar to the real (PT, 341; emphasis added). With this simple utterance, which is a partial confession of imposture, the narrator explicitly identifies naming as a function of personal identity to be a major thematic concern of the tale by positing identity as a negative proposition: William Wilson. This partial confession is the first of two apparatuses Poe inserts to foster narrative unreliability and critical ambiguity. However, unlike other critics who have suggested that the name William Wilson foregrounds the primeval argument between father and son for symbolic titleWill-I-am versus Will-sonI argue that the story is primarily concerned with a literal title to property and that this has everything to do with the precarious position of primogeniture statutes in the nineteenth-century United States. In The Origins of English Individualism, Alan Macfarlane notably demon- strates the link between individualism and primogeniture, arguing that the institution of primogeniture was the decisive factor in forming a purely English individualism. 63 Similarly, historian Lawrence Frederick Kohl has shown that a divisive political conflict erupted over the exact nature of the U.S. society being erected upon individualism during the Jacksonian era: This political conflict may well be called the politics of individualism. 64 Though Alexis de Tocqueville introduced the neologism individualism in Democracy in America to describe a shift in emphasis from corporate to individual structures of society, 65 Kohl maintains that in an individualistic society, individuals dont actually thrive in isolation but instead depend on complex social networks based on wealth that allow them to stand above or apart from one another, regulating how individuals relate to each other. 66 Yet if wealth regulates social relations, how did Jacksonian individual- ism, which marks the near-apotheosis of the individual in U.S. political and civil discourse, erupt precisely at the moment when U.S. jurisprudence defini- tively abolished the institution of primogeniture? Legal historian Lawrence Friedman explains that, in all but Rhode Island, primogeniture, or the En- glish system of partible descent, was nonexistent in New England. Only the Southern states, notably Virginia, Maryland, and the Carolinas, still had pri- mogeniture statutes on the books prior to the American Revolution, and those were quickly wiped away: Gradually, the rules of inheritance of land were 20 P O E S T U D I E S T H E W I L S O N D U P L E X assimilated to the rule of inheritance of money and goods. The statute makers swept feudal tenuresmost of them were not living law in this countryclean off the books. 67 Both Jefferson and Paine railed against the institution because it destroyed liberty and equality for posterity. In fact, one of Jeffersons first acts after signing the Declaration of Independence was to draft a bill in the Virginia legislature to prevent the development of a permanent aristocracy, or Patrician order as he called it: To annul this privilege, and instead of an aristocracy of wealth, of more harm and danger, than benefit, to society, to make an opening for the aristocracy of virtue and talent . . . was deemed essential to a well-ordered republic. 68 Not only was the system of primogeniture abolished primarily to pre- vent the formation of a landed aristocracy, but U.S. jurisprudence, in its zeal to create a Jeffersonian aristocracy of virtue and talent, underwent a tectonic shift in its treatment of property rights. In Inheritance in Amer- ican Legal Thought, Ronald Chester clarifies that, while Supreme Court Justice John Marshall believed the English brought certain natural rights, including property rights, to America, these property rights were to be specifically protected if they made use of ones acquisitive skills, but if they merely represented the fruits of inheritance, they were afforded less protec- tion; thus, institutions such as primogeniture could be abolished summarily by the new nation, whereas the right to make use of the fruits of ones labor could not be so easily curtailed. 69 Though early U.S. jurisprudence remained closely tied to its English predecessor, during the nineteenth cen- tury U.S. jurists gradually broke with the English tradition by making a qualitative distinction between property earned by an individuals own skills and property that was simply inherited. A simple concept in theory, but in Tocquevilles view, eliminating primogeniture had substantial social effects on the U.S. public: Its work of destruction is almost over in the United States . . . . The law of entail was modified . . . to leave virtually unaffected the free circulation of possessions. The first generation passed away; the estates began to be parceled up. This process increased in speed as time went by. Nowadays, after a lapse of little more than sixty years, society has already quite an altered appearance: the families of the great land owners have been swallowed up by the masses . . . . The last traces of hereditary rank and distinction have gone; the law of inheritance has reduced all men to one level. Though this abrogation divided great landed estates and in so doing increased the distribution of land holdings, it also had an unintended side effect, H I S T O R Y , T H E O R Y , I N T E R P R E T A T I O N 21 L Y N N L A N G M A D E according to Tocqueville, of making it increasingly more difficult for landed elites to secure hereditary fortunes, forcing more and more individuals to struggle to earn a living: But wealth circulates with an astonishing speed and experience shows that rarely do two succeeding generations benefit from its favors. 70 Historian Karen Halttunen confirms Tocquevilles assessment: within the system of partible inheritance, average farm holdings underwent a steady rate of decline, resulting in many farmers sons becoming landless agricultural laborers, craftsmen, or small home manufacturers. 71 From the premise that inheritance laws reduced landed states, Tocqueville concludes that, if literal property no longer represents riches, then wealth will of necessity derive from [different] sources. 72 But what other elements could constitute a persons wealth if not literal property? I submit that in the Age of Individualism, the Self must constitute wealth. While the discourse of Jacksonian individualism was based on notions of equality, evinced by the abolition of primogeniture, it logically became fixated on the loss of ones freedom resulting from inequality. As John Locke had famously declared in chapter 5 of his Second Treatise of Civil Government, people are first individuals, and as such have inalienable property in their person, making them not only proprietors of their person but also masters of themselves. 73 Lockes theory laid the groundwork for what political theorist C. B. Macpherson later identified as possessive individualism, which was pervasive by the advent of the nineteenth century and which codified what many now take for granted: that an individuals identity depends on the fact that he possesses inalienable property in his person or Self, which only he, himself, can own. According to this theory, only some may actualize individuality by accumulating property, and many will do so at the expense of others. 74 As such, systems of slavery that forced individuals to submit their will to an external authority called into question the assumption of the indi- viduals freedom. In The Gold Standard and the Logic of Naturalism, Walter Benn Michaels, who engages directly with Macpherson and thereby Locke, explains that in order for property to be property it must be alienable. And if it is alienable, then a possible barrier exists between what is valued (the owning Self) and what is feared (the owned Self), creating a terror of dispossession/possession that may be reflected in gothic conventions but is nonetheless erected on the horrors of capitalism: If the masochists desire to be owned is perverse, it is nevertheless a perversion made possible only by the bourgeois identification of the Self as property. Without that, no truly modern slavery is possible, since only if you identify freedom with self-ownership can being owned by someone else seem an intrinsic abridgment of that freedom. 75 22 P O E S T U D I E S T H E W I L S O N D U P L E X Thus, as Kohl illustrates, the more individualism is emphasized, the more insecurity about the status of that individuals autonomy will increase because any Self that can be owned is ultimately a Self that can be sold or stolen: In an age that celebrated individualism, the Jacksonian feared enslavement to the will of others. References to chains, bonds, and manacles were abundant in the editorials of Democratic newspapers. 76 If, as Terence Whalen maintains, Poe understood how material condi- tions could determine the form of literature, 77 and if his works, as Jonathan Elmer argues, are profoundly responsive to social reality, 78 then William Wilson appears most interested in fleshing out the socioeconomic impact of primogeniture on life in the United States. Though William Wilson may not explicitly thematize a familial crisis brought on by primogeniture, it does foreground a crisis precipitated by the abolition of this institution in the U.S. I offer two instances from Poes own biography in defense of my thesis. First, Poes relationship with both the Southern Literary Messenger and Burtons Gentlemans Magazine placed him amid a heated transatlantic debate on the subject. 79 In 1838, shortly before Poe became coeditor, Burtons published A Chapter on Aristocracy, in which the following passage on primogeniture appeared: Those who look for distinctions from the long-drawn inheritance of their fathers, begin now to feel that their places in society are occupied by others, whose own qualifications have been received as a safer guarantee than the long spun and time frittered mantle of a once honored name; and while they find, in the abolition of primogeniture, the destruction of the family equipage and estate, they behold, in the enterprise and industry of some new made man beside them, the eclipse that drives them into an obscurity that not even their own vanity, feeding on itself, can give a show of radiance. This new made man, who eclipses the fallen aristocrat and forces him to feed off his own vanity, will become the basis of a new social elite by virtue of possessing a singular mark of distinction: an aristocracy of MIND equivalent to the new kind of Tocquevillian riches detached from material property. 80 My second piece of biographical evidence is the frequently overlooked fact that the abolition of primogeniture actually played a role in Poes ability to inheritor failure to inheritwealth from his foster father. According to biographer James Hutchisson, despite the fact that Poe was not John Allans legitimate son, Poe believed he had a right or claim to Allans legacy, a thought H I S T O R Y , T H E O R Y , I N T E R P R E T A T I O N 23 L Y N N L A N G M A D E that would have been inconceivable prior to the abolition of primogeniture in Virginia after the Revolution. Allan came into an inheritance valued at $750,000 dollars from William Galt, whom many dubbed the wealthiest man in Virginia; Galts bequest included plantations in several counties, grist and sawmills, stock in the Bank of Virginia, and several hundred slaves. Although Allan did not receive his inheritance until Poe was sixteen, the fortune nevertheless allowed the family to live the life of the landed gentry or as aristocrats with overflowing coffers. We know that the issue of inheritance was of primary concern to Poe because he lied on his application to West Point, declaring not only that Allan had adopted him but that he was also Allans heir. 81 Biographer Kenneth Silverman offers even more compelling evidence that Poe lied about being disinherited by Allan: Poe also told his cousin William Poe not that Allan had cut him out but that No will was found among his papers. 82 According to Americas revision of the laws of partible descent, each time Allan produced another heir, he reduced the partition of the estate and more widely distributed its wealth. This unfortunate situation for Poe was complicated even further by the birth of Allans illegitimate twin sons, who eventually inherited portions of the estate, whereas Poe was left with nothing. 83 If names were once synonymous with great estates, it stands to reason that the addition of more children to ones estate would further divide and diminish inheritable portions of that estate. Though Poe was never adopted, he thought of himself as a first son and rightful heir to Allans fortune. As such, Poe went from being an heir to one of the richest estates in Virginia and a member of the leisure class to a professional writer eking out a living. With the revised partible estate, the family nameAllanlost its power to stand for wealth and was diluted into mass property. Furthermore, because Poe never received even a penny from the Allan estate, he felt the impact of primogeniture divesture more than any of Allans children, and this grievance was a direct response to the birth of Poes twin foster brothers. Generally speaking, the more his once honored name fell into the common property of the masses, 84 the poorer was the fallen aristocrat who was unlucky enough to be born in the U.S. rather than England. The fact that Poe used the surname Allan in England but later used Poe in the U.S. demonstrates his preoccupation with the national politics of naming. In communications to Allan, Poe threatened to use his own ac- quisitive skill to make a name for himself: If you determine to abandon me . . . NeglectedI will be doubly [ambi]tious, & the world shall hear of the son you thought unworthy of your notice. (In fact, as Poe pleaded with his father, he explicitly equated disinheritance with his name: My father do not throw me aside as degraded . . . . I will be an honor to your name.) 85 The fact 24 P O E S T U D I E S T H E W I L S O N D U P L E X that Poe later re-appended the surname Poe to his formal signature, Edgar Allan, after his disinheritance in many ways solidified his desire to recreate wealth in the form of his own personal acquisitive skills, a kind of wealth to which U.S. jurisprudence gave ipso facto more protection than to inheritance. Rather than reading the name William Wilson exclusively as a dialectic between father and son, as other critics have done, I suggest that we read it as a declaration of exclusive right to a titleWill, I am Only Son of Will and, given that the narrator disparages the twofold repetition of his name (PT, 344) and refers to WW 2 as his namesake at least five times, that we recognize the storys primary concern with the abolition of primogeniture. It is a story, in other words, that thematizes what happens when the right to inherit the estate only by virtue of being first, singular, or eldestor, in the case of Wilson, of being one, not twois no longer a right. The narrator explains on more than one occasion that, despite his common name, he possesses a noble descent (PT, 341) and explicitly argues that he owes his own security to the masterly air of the copyist who imbues WW 1 with the full spirit of his original (PT, 345; emphasis added), equating economic livelihood with individuality or being an original, not a gradated copy. What if possessing the name means possessing not the common property of the mob (PT, 345, 341), that is, landed wealth, which has been diluted due to the abolition of primogeniture, but as Tocqueville suggests, a new kind of property that cannot be owned without first possessing ones Self? What if the failure to possess self- identity, to individuate oneself, in this story has not only acute psychological consequences but also severe material effects? This theory accrues even greater credence with the recognition that WW 1 s economic livelihood depends on not only his individuality but also his capacity to deploy his acquisitive skills. Quite simply, WW 1 survives by virtue of becoming a professional gambler: It could hardly be credited, however, that I had, even here, so utterly fallen from the gentlemanly estate, as to seek acquaintance with the vilest arts of the gambler by profession, and, having become an adept in his despicable science, to practise it habitually as a means of increasing my already enormous income at the expense of the weak- minded among my fellow collegians (PT, 34951). Certainly these narrative events are disturbingly analogous to Poes own biography, for gambling was an occupation he chose for economic survival while at college, one that negatively affected his right to inherit a portion of Allans estate. Similarly, WW 2 s interference at various gambling events makes it impossible for WW 1 to sustain his economic subsistence, as I will show. The narrators fall from gentlemanly estate (PT, 349) causes him to seek refuge in activities that Victorian economist Thomas Corbet had by 1841 H I S T O R Y , T H E O R Y , I N T E R P R E T A T I O N 25 L Y N N L A N G M A D E already identified as speculation. According to Corbets treatise on political economy, An Inquiry into the Causes and Modes of the Wealth of Individuals, gambling is distinguished from trade because trade consists of exchanging different products that will provide use-value to each trader, whereas gambling consists in a mere exchange of money for money. 86 But Marx, who takes up Corbets discussion of gambling in Capital, is careful to point out that the exchange of money for money is actually the characteristic form of circu- lation in capitalistic exchange, 87 and he further argues, drawing on banker James Gilbarts words, that it is impossible to say at what precise point trade ends and speculation begins. 88 In this sense, for Marx, gambling, no less than trade, strikes at the heart of capitalisms mystical exchange. In volume 3 of Capital, regarding the division of profit into interest, Marx attempts to explain more accurately the mysterious effect of money traded for money. If gentlemanly estate is capital, then any title of ownership is what Marx calls fictitious capital or capitalization, a claim or title to property rights on a commodity that is as yet unsold. This ownership title essentially posits a title to value or to the surplus-value which this capital is to realize, and it is mystical precisely because profit is made by trading in fi- nancial claims based on signs, such as paper, that are completely detached from tangible assets, that is, referents. Marx is very clear that such ownership titles are real capital beyond even the capital or claim to which they may give title, and become legitimate commodities in their own right, which reflect a typically ghostly differential between market and nominal value without there being any change in the actual capital. In fact, according to Marx, any profit (surplus-value) or loss that is accrued from fluctuations in the price of the ownership title at the time of sale is eventually the result of gambling, which now appears in place of labour as the original source of capital ownership, as well as taking the place of brute force. 89 Buying, trading and brokering of ones ownership titlegamblingis the primordial basis of the relations of production that usurps labors heretofore privileged role as the source of all capital ownership. With this in mind, we will want to examine the nature of the relationship between the narrators so-called fictitious title (PT, 341) in William Wilson and Marxs concept of fictitious capital. 90 To begin with, the narrator, who has already declared weak-minded men to be his prey, deliberately targets a man (Glendinning) of great riches as a fitting subject for [his] skill (PT, 351, 350). Thus, the wealth the narrator amasses is a product not of inheritance by virtue of a once honored name but of his distinctive labor- power, which he sells in a market under his fictitious title. In this way, the narrators acquisitive skills serve to separate himindividuate himfrom 26 P O E S T U D I E S T H E W I L S O N D U P L E X others in the relations of production that produce the title to property in gambling. Accordingly, the title to estate, the name William Wilson, is also fictitious capital, as it represents the surplus-value and capitalization gained in the commodity of labor-power that he has not yet sold. Because the narrator targets those of weak character, surplus-value is also a phantasmic function of the Self that has been transformed into a commodity in the relations of production that take place between sole proprietors. For the store of Self is gained by exploiting those who have no Self. Yet what becomes apparent as WW 2 keeps dogging WW 1 across Europe at one gambling event after another is that WW 2 collides with WW 1 only at those specific moments when he is entering into the relations of production with a view to increasing the market capitalization in his title. But these uncanny visitations are a natural by-product, as Derrida maintains, of spec- ulators unhealthy preoccupation with specters. 91 In this light, the narrators disturbing encounters with his second Self during market exchange more adequately reflect this involuntary repetition as an economic haunting. The narrator complains, in one example, that WW 2 keeps interfering with his gambling, and this interference is a spectral effect: yet with how spectral an officiousness, stepped he in between me and my ambition (PT, 354). In sentences such as these, Poe eerily captures the fetish character of commodities in which personsparticularly identical personsare converted into ghosts via the mysterious differential in the commodity exchange of selves. An example may serve to outline this point further. The climax of William Wilson involves the narrators attempt to employ his signature skills via the speculative strategy Corbet calls Double or Nothing, which consists of doubling the preceding stake every time he loses. 92 The narrators goal is to defraud a man of his personal wealth: In a very short period he [Glendinning] had become my debtor to a large amount, when, having taken a long draught of port, he did precisely what I had been coolly anticipatinghe proposed to double our already extravagant stakes (PT, 351). In this passage, we witness the narrators acquisitive skill converting the pure exchange-value of his ownership title (promissory note) into credit with an eye toward re- marketing his opponents capitalized debt, which has been converted via the market transaction of gambling into a commodity that can be sold. As a result, gambling creates a unique mode of production, in which all participants in the exchange own the means of production and may sell either their own debt (promissory note) or credit (debt + capitalization). Yet behind this new democratic exchange lies a sinister reality, which can be demonstrated via a hypothetical scenario. H I S T O R Y , T H E O R Y , I N T E R P R E T A T I O N 27 L Y N N L A N G M A D E Beginning with an initial $5 wager and subsequent loss: This loss can be converted into pure credit whose principal through nine progressive losses of a doubled wager will be transformed into a debt of approximately $2,560. In this hypothetical scenario, the $5 gambling loss possesses a market capitalization of $2,555 dollars for those who would trade in the commodity of debt. Given that Poe began to feud with John Allan over $2,000 dollars worth of gambling debts he had accrued at the University of Virginia, it is reasonable to conclude that Poe likely fell victim to such speculative economics. Poes $2,000 debt, which is equivalent to over $38,000 dollars worth of debt in todays economy, had the initial catastrophic effect of forcing him to resign from the university, and the resulting ignominy caused himthe further injury of loss of his inheritance. 93 As Marx notes, speculative strategies, particularly Double or Nothing, are always simultaneously a source of extreme sudden enrichment for one participant in the exchange and economic impoverishment for the other, demonstrating with utter clarity the economic violence at the heart of capitalistic exchange. 94 Indeed, Marx believed that fictitious capital has a steroid-like effect on the natural fetish character of commodities because it further obscures the forces of production (labor) behind capital. In William Wilson, Glendinning is the unfortunate victim of this sinister effect, whose economic destruction is so totalizing that despite a crowded room, he produces an ejaculation evincing utter despair (PT, 351). Glendinnings despair demonstrates that WW 1 has grown wealthy by quite literally capitalizing on debt that has become pure exchange-valueon phantasmagoria itselfwhose magic has been effectuated by the narrator, who is metonymically equated with a fiend (PT, 351). As this capitalization represents surplus-value in money-to-money mar- ket exchange, William Wilson also eloquently illustrates the ephemeral quality of exchange-value, particularly howit allows the producer selling credit and the consumer buying debt to exchange roles depending on their skills. Not only does WW 2 s constant intervention into WW 1 s gaming make the storys tenuous role-playing even more precarious, but it is likely the reason, both structurally and thematically, that Poe chose to stage a confrontation between two material bodies rather than imaginary Doubles. For instance, just as the narrator is about to collect his winnings, WW 2 enters the gambling den with a goal of tarnishing the narrators reputation by calling him a cheat. By defaming the narrators skills, WW 2 effectively diminishes his reputation (name) and thus steals his fictitious title. With the mere presence of the second Self, who has so disastrously exposed the narrator (PT, 341, 353), Glendinning is instantaneously rescued from the precipice of economic ruin. The exposure of WW 1 s theft is an exposure of the immaterial loss of Self that voids any material gain. If the narrator is not the proprietor of his Self, then he cannot 28 P O E S T U D I E S T H E W I L S O N D U P L E X possibly enter into economic exchange in the era of possessive individualism. Eventually, this exposure produces the terror that will result in WW 2 s death, showing that the simultaneous presence of two material, identical bodies with the same fictitious title can have a disastrous effect on the political economy of the Self. Double Exposure [the repeated exposure of a photographic plate or film to light, often producing ghost images Oxford Dictionary] I wish to close this discussion by circling back to the quotation from Cr ebillons gemicidal play, Atr ee et Thyeste, that Poe appended to The Purloined Letter because, in the long history of gemicidal literature, the occasion of the attempted murder of a twin by his co-twin for property is highly correlated with and predicated on the plot device of twins who have been reared apart. For example, the disturbingly popular Valentine and Orson (1510), an early modern English prose romance in which twins reared apart stumble upon each other in the woods and attempt to kill each other, had received at least thirty-three treatments by the beginning of the nineteenth century and was frequently referenced by Poes contemporaries. 95 As I have already suggested, the struggle for property in this story, to which WW 1 refers as gentlemanly estate (PT, 349), as well as the numerous references to competition and rivalry in William Wilson, give a reader ample cause to place the story within this tradition. I would like to press this argument further and propose that this story does not simply reenact the profane myth of gemicidal rivalry but actually constitutes a dramatic renovation of it by illustrating why agonism over material property is inevitably preceded by agonism over intellectual property. Theoretically, reunited twins ignorant of their kinship status must combat each other to establish Selfhoodto regain title to the Selfbefore they can determine dominion of estate. We know this with some certainty because the spectropolitics of pos- sessive individualism have determined that any fight to regain title to Self must be waged outside the conscience with other individuals. For being a Self-proprietor means not just obtaining the Will to property but remaining free from the will of others. The text registers its material engagement with this discrete social reality when the narrator expresses resentment at WW 2 s frequent officious interference with his will (PT, 345). The narrator cannot H I S T O R Y , T H E O R Y , I N T E R P R E T A T I O N 29 L Y N N L A N G M A D E force WW 2 to bend to his will because WW 2 , who exists in the storys fact domain, has his own body with a will of its own. As such, the battle of wills that Poe foregrounds in Wilson is not simply an issue of self- mastery, as one might see in the problem of a divided self; rather, it is an issue of overproductionof surplus-value itself. It is the problem of what happens when bodies and their correlate selves become unruly and begin doing the unthinkable: multiplying. If bodies, especially inheritable bodies, begin multiplying, then they begin partitioning the estate, especially the estate that is legally protected by ones acquisitive skills. However, I maintain that Poes modification to the gemicidal topos with this story is not only more comprehensive but also more sophisticated. William Wilson does not simply modernize this topos; it actually reinvents it as metafiction. At root, William Wilson is a self-reflexive study of the perils of corporatism. Poe quite deliberately provides his reader with a situation in which a twin murders his co-twin, not because he must possess the property of gentlemanly estate (PT, 349), but because he cannot fathom the possibility that the entity who revisits him is actually a real person, not a ghost. In this manner, the battle for the body, the container of selfhood, is played out through the dialectics of corporative in/visibility, which is best exemplified when WW 1 begins to gaze on WW 2 while he sleeps: Gasping for breath, I lowered the lamp in still nearer proximity to the face. Were thesethese the lineaments of William Wilson? I saw, indeed, that they were his, but I shook as with a fit of the ague in fancying they were not. What was there about them to confound me in this manner? I gazed;while my brain reeled with a multitude of incoherent thoughts. Not thus he appearedassuredly not thusin the vivacity of his waking hours . . . . 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? (PT, 347) In this scene, Poe undermines all the classic techniques used to sustain the kind of hesitationbetween a natural and supernatural explanation of events in doubling narratives that results in the fantastic by decelerating the plot, decreasing distance, illuminating the scene, and allowing his narrator to gaze at length at his Double, which has no antecedent in the literature of the Double. Rather, this scene has the rhetorical effect of objectifyingindeed, materializingWW 2 by imbuing WW 1 with a newfound narratorial authority. In fact, this scene may be the single moment of clarity in the entire text. The narrator shines the light on his phantom, but instead of disappearing, 30 P O E S T U D I E S T H E W I L S O N D U P L E X the apparition grows heavy with matter and remains stuck like other corporeal bodies, trapped under, and even curiously receptive to, the narrators empirical gaze. The narrators reified gaze at his co-twin is cast from the ironic subject position of a multiple reared as a singleton. Visually impaired, the narrators gaze plays out the politics of spectrology, in which singleton gazing becomes a complicated exercise in metaphysics or scanning the world for absences rather than presences. For the narrator looks at the material lineaments of WW 2 and asks, What was there . . . ? and what are his objects?(PT, 347, 354). In- deed, the narrator claims to grow dizzy from the sheer sameness between the two, precipitating onto-phenomenological speculation: Who owns/possesses this configuration? Under this gaze, pieces of the reified twin body, like lapidary gems, become currency in the market transaction of Self-possession. Yet the narrator ultimately resolves his panic over self-sameness by resorting to contradiction, asserting within a single sentence that WW 2 s features were his and were not. The narrator uses the word fancy, contracted from the Latin phantasia, in at least eight different places in the narrative to describe his relationship with WW 2 . Only by optically scrutinizing his own duplication can WW 1 begin to write his own fantasy by fancying that WW 2 doesnt possess his features (PT, 347). The narrators preteritive gaze has begun writing his fantasy for the thrill of reading it: he looks at his co-twin but only sees Double. Yet it is this very fantasy that reveals, as Toroks work attests, a conscious symptom of a problem: a terror that the narrator has already lost his Self. More precisely, in a world saturated with the discourse of possessive individualism, the narrator has become unable to discern whether he is in fact fettered or free. WW 1 soon perceives WW 2 s existence to be an inscrutable tyranny and questions if his natural rights of self-agency are being insultingly denied! by WW 2 (PT, 354). However, unlike in other gemicidal mythemes, Poes narrator kills his co-twin not simply from ignorance (or awareness) of his kinship status but from his repression of that status. For admitting he has a co-twin would be tantamount to admitting he has no Self and worsethat he has never had one. And if he has no Self, no property that he can call his own, WW 1 is not simply a commoner in the new aristocracy of MIND who has to struggle for his economic livelihood, but he is a slavea dispossessed being who has to fight tooth and nail for his very existence; the narrator opines, I would submit no longer to be enslaved. Accordingly, WW 1 s struggle for existence plays out as the spectropolitics of surplus (re)production, the Derridean non-truth of infinitely disseminated selves, the hall of mirrors that makes it impossible to know what there is. In short, murder becomes H I S T O R Y , T H E O R Y , I N T E R P R E T A T I O N 31 L Y N N L A N G M A D E the only way WW 1 can overcome his own absence created by the power of a multitude that he feels within (PT, 355, 356). Poe brings the story of gemicidal rivalry to its conclusion during the opprobrious scene in which WW 1 engages WW 2 in a duel, appears to mortally wound WW 2, and then possibly kills himself. The twins, WW 1 and WW 2 , who have been reared apart and still cannot fathom that they are two and not one, end the cycle of rivalry with an inevitable gemicide. The story, so Poe seems to argue, has nowhere else to go but here. To regain possession of the fictitious capital, his title to the SelfWilliam Wilsonone of the unruly bodies must be eliminated. As the narrator stares at his mirror image in agonies of . . . dissolution, he fantasizes for a moment that he has seen himself. When the dying WW 2 claims to yield and says In me didst thou exist (PT, 356, 357), this expression, which is usually interpreted figuratively, can be interpreted quite literally. As identical twins, WW 1 and WW 2 cannot exist as a multiplicity without the other. Their collective identity has been eradicated under the relentless discursive pressure of possessive individualism, which denies the integrity of any corporative configuration that contests the mythology of Self. Thus, in a radical revision to an ancient story originally conceived to sacralize empire building, the twin body is murdered, but the murder has no juridico-political value or social utility as an actjust the nickel-and- dime economics of bourgeois theft. As Poe recasts Romulean discourse the primordial battle for sovereign estateas the life-threatening economy of capitalistic exchange, the narrator and WW 2 fight an obscure and tepid battle with no witnesses, no chroniclers, no officiates. To take possession of this property, to own this title, murder must be mistaken for suicide. No one can actually see the co-twin die, only a phantasmic Self. Indubitably, in the Age of Individualism, a twin looks at his own mirror image and in a paroxysm of conscious self-deception calls that image, not self or even rival, but gothic apparition because he cannot see that which has become invisible by its very visibility: am I not now dying a victim to the horror and the mystery of the wildest of all sublunary visions? The narrators vision, which lies somewhere between sight and fantasy and between blindness and prophecy, has succeeded in killing him. It is a murderous visiona melancholic vision of such loss, an absence of such magnitude that the full recognition of it would shatter everything. So bodies and their matters go on colliding with crepuscular vision, conjuring ghosts of the narrators Self that begin to speak nothing but gray shadow. . . and phantasmagoric pains (PT, 33738, 341). Like a double exposure, in which two ghostly images appear from a single plate, the two identical images of WW 1 and WW 2 haunt each other, being 32 P O E S T U D I E S T H E W I L S O N D U P L E X neither wholly discrete nor mingled, neither one nor two, and neither original nor copy. The Wilson Duplex has left WW 1 and WW 2 brutally exposed, violently visibleindeed, naked in their g emell eit e [twinness]. Through such spectral exposure, the self becomes haunted by its Self that can never be itself. And this is how longings for lost co-twins return from the dark vault of repression, where twins, who have been separated, begin life paradoxically as de-twinned singletons fantasizing about being a twin. For when such twins later gaze on that which has returned to them, they inexorably recoil from the sight of that which undoes them. This is how fant omes are made real. This is how, in the name of the self-willed individual, all fant omes come to have selvestransmuting the sacred bond of twinship into a relentless horror. UC Davis Notes 1 Russell Working, Separated at Birth, United by Chance, Chicago Tribune on the Web, 20 August 2006, http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/chi- 0608200381aug20,1,5394589.story. 2 Jacqui Goddard, Mamma Mia! Twins Are Reunited 12,000 Miles from Home, Times Online, 22 August 2006, http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/us and americas/article615898.ece. 3 Richard Luscombe, Separated and Abandoned in China, Twin Girls Find Each Other in America, 21 August 2006, http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2006/ aug/22/topstories3.china. 4 T. J. Bouchard et al., Sources of Human Psychological Differences: The Min- nesota Study of Twins Reared Apart, Science 250, no. 4978 (1990): 22328. 5 Nancy L. Segal, Entwined Lives: Twins and What They Tell Us About Human Behavior (New York: Plume, 2000), 118. 6 Daniel Hoffman, Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe (Garden City: Doubleday, 1972), 212. 7 D. H. Lawrence, Edgar Allan Poe, in Critical Essays on Edgar Allan Poe, ed. Eric W. Carlson (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1987), 100. 8 Arthur H. Quinn, in his monumental biography of Poe, claims that the story attempts to study the effects of conscience upon a man, whereas Patrick F. Quinn later denies WW 2 any basis in material reality: the double is a mental projection and only that. See Quinn, Edgar Allan Poe: A Critical Biography (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1998), 286; and Quinn, The French Face of Edgar Poe (Carbondale: Southern Illinois Univ. Press, 1957), 221. 9 While critics disagree as to whether this double is indicative of the soul or the conscience, virtually all concur with Robert Coskren that the story portrays the gradual disintegration of a self-divided psyche, or the problem, according to Ottavio Casale, of the dematerialization of a unified Self. See Coskren, WilliamWilson and the H I S T O R Y , T H E O R Y , I N T E R P R E T A T I O N 33 L Y N N L A N G M A D E Disintegration of Self, Studies in Short Fiction 12, no.2 (1975): 155; and Casale, The Dematerialization of WilliamWilson: Poes Use of Cumulative Allegory, South Carolina Review 11, no. 1 (1978): 7079. And despite recent attempts to revaluate Poe and his works, neither time nor new literary-critical technologies have had a significant effect on the death grip of this allegorical reading. Indeed, David Reynoldss revisionary study, Beneath the American Renaissance: The Subversive Imagination in the Age of Emerson and Melville (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1989), persists in validating this tried-and- true reading by matter-of-factly identifying WW 2 as a double who does not exist outside Wilsons consciousness and the murder as self-murder, which occurs as a result of the warring impulses in his own soul (235). 10 New Historicist readings proffered by both Julia Stern and Theron Britt do emphasize that William Wilson is acutely invested in the material worlds impact on identity, but they also go to great pains to subsume the larger diachronic implications to transhistorical concerns of the singular conscience. In particular, Stern reads the story as a fable of conscience in which the the psychology of the split self is put into service for a larger political allegory of sectional strife. Stern and Britt both relentlessly refer to WW 2 as a double, claim William Wilson is a story of doubling, and go so far as to denominate almost every structure in the narrative as double: setting, character, and scene alike. See Stern, Double Talk: The Rhetoric of the Whisper in Poes William Wilson, ESQ: A Journal of the American Renaissance 40 (1994): 185 218; and Britt, The Common Property of the Mob: Democracy and Identity in Poes William Wilson, Mississippi Quarterly 48, no. 2 (1995): 197210. More recently, Russ Castronovo examines the story, through a Marxist theoretical lens, as a theory of mass culture and a commentary on democracy and reproduction, but he still cannot seem to escape conventional assumptions that William Wilson is a story of doubling and revenge (187), which ends in self-annihilation (188). See Castronovo, Death to the American Renaissance: History, Heidegger, Poe, in Reexamining the American Renaissance, special issue of ESQ: A Journal of the American Renaissance 49, nos. 13 (2003): 17992. See also Lawrence Berkove, Poe, Twain, and the Nature of Conscience, ESQ: A Journal of the American Renaissance 46 (2000): 23953. 11 Jonathan Elmer, Poe, Plagiarism, and the Prescriptive Right of the Mob, in Discovering Difference: Contemporary Essays in American Culture, ed. Christoph K. Lohmann (Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 1993), 66. 12 Jonathan Elmer, Reading at the Social Limit: Affect, Mass Culture, and Edgar Allan Poe (Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 1995), 71. 13 Tracy Ware, The Two Stories of William Wilson, Studies in Short Fiction 26, no. 1 (1989): 43. Ware attests in her meta-analysis of the story that these general assumptions about the text would not have gained such tenacious critical currency if they were not assumptions most conducive to allegory. Ware notes that whether critics are suggesting the storys conclusion is an allegory of the narrators suicide (James W. Gargano) or of a spiritual death (Thomas F. Walsh) or of destruction of the superego (Robert Rogers), virtually all agree that this purported self-divided psyche (Coskren) is functioning at an allegorical level (45). 34 P O E S T U D I E S T H E W I L S O N D U P L E X 14 Juliana de Nooy, Twins in Contemporary Literature and Culture: Look Twice (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 11. 15 Albert J. Guerard, introduction to The Perspectives of the Novel, special issue of Daedalus 92 (1963): 204. 16 Robert Rogers, The Psychoanalytic Study of the Double in Literature (Detroit: Wayne State Univ. Press, 1970), 5. 17 Benjamin Eric Daffron, Romantic Doubles: Sex and Sympathy in British Gothic Literature, 17901830 (New York: AMS Press, 2002), 4. 18 Paul Coates, The Double and the Other: Identity as Ideology in Post-Romantic Fiction (London: Macmillan, 1988), 35. 19 Sigmund Freud, The Creative Writer and Daydreaming, in The Uncanny, ed. Adam Phillips, trans. David McClintock (1908; New York: Penguin Classics, 2003), 31. 20 In The Double as Incomplete Self: Toward a Definition of Doppelganger, in Fearful Symmetry: Doubles and Doubling in Literature and Film, ed. Eugene J. Crook (Tallahassee: Florida State Univ. Press, 1981), Clifford Hallam argues that the vast majority of available evidence suggests that any Double figure in prose fiction which can be explained by anthropology (including folklore), spurious scientific theories, philosophy, or some other system, can in most cases be understood more fully, more clearly, and, in crucial ways, more convincingly by depth psychology (1213). 21 Rogers, Double in Literature, 4. 22 Dorothy Burlingham, The Fantasy of Having a Twin, Psychoanalytic Study of the Child 1 (1945): 205. In Family Romances (The Uncanny), Freud theorizes the family romance as a fantasy that replaces both parents by others who are grander (3839), or, as scholars Catherine Back` es-Cl ement and J. Dickson frame it in Family and Fiction, SubStance: Literature and Psychoanalysis 1, no. 3 (1972): 1522, as a story a child tells himself to invent a family other than his own (15). 23 Nicholas T. Rand, editors note to The Shell and the Kernel: Renewals of Psycho- analysis, ed. and trans. Nicholas T. Rand (1959; Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1994), 1:24. 24 Susan Isaacs, The Nature and Function of Phantasy, in Unconscious Fantasy, ed. Riccardo Steiner (1945; London: Karnac Books, 2003), 185. 25 Maria Torok, Fantasy: An Attempt to Define its Structure and Operation, in The Shell and the Kernel, 1:2930. 26 Freud, Creative Writer, in The Uncanny, 31. 27 Burlingham, Having a Twin, 4. 28 Duane P. Schultz and Sydney Ellen Schultz, Theories of Personality, 9th ed. (Belmont: Wadsworth Cengage Learning, 2009), 10910. 29 Nicholas Royle suggests: The uncanny is not what Freud (or anyone else) thinks. It has to do with a sense of ourselves as double, split, at odds with ourselves (The Uncanny: An Introduction [Manchester: Manchester Univ. Press, 2002], 6). 30 Freud, The Uncanny, in The Uncanny, 14243. 31 Avery Gordon, Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination (Min- neapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 2008), 31. H I S T O R Y , T H E O R Y , I N T E R P R E T A T I O N 35 L Y N N L A N G M A D E 32 Freud, The Uncanny, 162. 33 Freud, The Uncanny, 151. 34 Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International, trans. Peggy Kamuf (1993; New York: Routledge, 2006), 166. 35 Karl Marx, The German Ideology, ed. C. J. Arthur (1845; New York: International Publishers, 1970), 47. 36 Gordon, Ghostly Matters, 190, 198. 37 Derrida, Specters of Marx, 126, 178, 219. 38 Derrida, Specters of Marx, 121. 39 Freud, The Ego and the Id, ed. and trans. James Strachey (New York: Norton, 1962), 24. 40 Nicholas Rand, editors note to The Shell and the Kernel, 1:101, 25. 41 Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok, Mourning or Melancholia: Introjection versus Incorporation, in The Shell and the Kernel, 1:127. 42 Rand, editors note to The Shell and the Kernel, 1:25. 43 Jacques Derrida, forward to The Wolf Mans Magic Word: A Cryptonymy, trans. Nicholas Rand (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1986), xivxv. 44 Derrida, Specters of Marx, 125. 45 Abraham and Torok, Mourning or Melancholia, 128. 46 Freud, Creative Writer, 28. 47 Rand, editors note to The Shell and the Kernel, 1:25. 48 Hugh Haughton, introduction to The Uncanny (Penguin Classics, 2003), xxvi. 49 Jacques Derrida, Dissemination, trans. Barbara Johnson (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1981), 157, 168. 50 Jacques Derrida, The Purveyor of Truth, in The Purloined Poe: Lacan, Derrida, and Psychoanalytic Reading, ed. John P. Muller and William J. Richardson, trans. Alan Bass (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1987), 203, emphasis added. 51 Derrida, Purveyor of Truth, 203. 52 Jacques Derrida, Freud and the Scene of Writing, in Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1978), 196. 53 Oxford Latin Dictionary, combined ed. (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1983), s.v. duplex. 54 David K. Jackson, William Wilson: Another Possible Source for the Name, Poe Studies 16 (1983): 13. 55 Tsvetan Todorov, The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre, trans. Richard Howard (Cleveland: The Press of Case Western Reserve Univ., 1973), 71. 56 According to Todorov, what differentiates the uncanny from the fantastic is a natural explanation for seemingly supernatural events. If the text accepts the super- natural events, it falls into the category of the marvelous. When a text hesitates between a natural and supernatural explanation of events, it falls into the category of the fantastic. Todorov actually defines the uncanny as the supernatural explained and the marvelous as the supernatural accepted. See The Fantastic, 4142. 36 P O E S T U D I E S T H E W I L S O N D U P L E X 57 Martin Brookes, Extreme Measures: The Dark Visions and Bright Ideas of Francis Galton (New York: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2004), 198. 58 Segal, Entwined Lives, 9. 59 Susan L. Farber, Identical Twins Reared Apart: A Reanalysis (New York: Basic Books, 1981), 247. 60 This quotation from Prosper Jolyot de Cr ebillons play notably receives exegesis by Derrida in his tour-de-force analysis of the story, The Purveyor of Truth, although I believe unsatisfactorily in support of an argument that Poes work is preoccupied with doubles even when they are not explicitly present. See also Barbara Johnsons extended discussion of Poes usage of the passage in The Frame of Reference, in Purloined Poe, 21351. 61 In Greek and Egyptian Mythologies (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1992), Yves Bonnefoy and Wendy Doniger identify primogeniture as the primary cause for the murderous rivalry between Atreus and Thyestes: Atreus was the older of the two (though twinhood is precisely intended to weaken and contest the privileges of primogeniture) (103). They also note that the violence Atreus commits against Thyestes sons results from Atreus falsely telling Thyestes that he would be willing to share power (104). 62 Oxford Latin Dictionary, 756. 63 Alan Macfarlane, The Origins of English Individualism: The Family Property and Social Transition (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 1978). 64 Lawrence Frederick Kohl, The Politics of Individualism: Parties and the American Character in the Jacksonian Era (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1989), 13. 65 Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, trans. Gerald Bevan (New York: Penguin Classics, 2003), 589. 66 Kohl, Politics of Individualism, 14. 67 Lawrence M. Friedman, A History of American Law, 3rd ed. (New York: Touch- stone, 2005), 171. 68 The Life and Selected Writings of Jefferson, ed. Adrienne Koch and William Peden (New York: Modern Library Classics, 1988), 38. 69 Ronald Chester, Inheritance in American Legal Thought, in Inheritance and Wealth in America, ed. Robert K. Miller and Stephen J. McNamee (New York: Plenum Press, 1998), 2627. 70 Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 64. 71 Karen Halttunen, Confidence Men and Painted Women: A Study of Middle-class Culture in America, 18301870 (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1986), 12. 72 Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 62. 73 In Second Treatise, regarding property, Locke argues: Though the earth, and all inferior creatures, be common to all men, yet every man has a property in his own person: this nobody has any right to but himself. The labour of his body, and the work of his hands, we may say, are properly his (5.27). However, in the chapter on slavery, Locke suggests labor is alienable: Having by his fault forfeited his own life, by some act that deserves death; he, to whomhe has forfeited it, may (when he has himin his power) H I S T O R Y , T H E O R Y , I N T E R P R E T A T I O N 37 L Y N N L A N G M A D E delay to take it, and make use of himto his own service, and he does himno injury by it (4.23). See John Locke, Two Treatises of Government and A Letter Concerning Toleration, ed. Ian Shapiro (Binghamton: Vail-Ballou Press, 2003), 11011. 74 According to Macpherson, three basic assumptions provide the basis for this theory: (1) what makes a person human is freedom from dependence on the will of others; (2) freedom from dependence on others means freedom from any relation with others except those into which the individual enters voluntarily with a view to his own interest; and (3) the individual is essentially the proprietor of his own person and capacities, for which he owes nothing to society. See C. B. Macpherson, The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism: Hobbes to Locke (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1962), 3, 25556. 75 Walter Benn Michaels, The Gold Standard and the Logic of Naturalism: American Literature at the Turn of the Century (Berkeley and Los Angeles: Univ. of California Press, 1987), 112, emphasis added; 124. 76 Kohl, Politics of Individualism, 28. 77 Terence Whalen, Edgar Allan Poe and the Masses: The Political Economy of Litera- ture in Antebellum America (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1999), 107. 78 Elmer, Reading, 20. 79 In December of 1835, the month Poe became editor, the Southern Literary Messenger published a review of the fifth edition of a controversial work by Isaac Tompkins, Thoughts upon the Aristocracy of England, and two rebuttals of Tompkinss work from Peter Jenkins and Timothy Winterbottom. In his analysis of the debate between the three men, the writer declares that Tompkinss book had created a great sensation. See Critical Notices, Southern Literary Messenger 2, no. 1 (1835): 4168. 80 A Chapter on Aristocracy, Burtons Gentlemans Magazine 2, no. 4 (1838): 249, 250. 81 James M. Hutchisson, Poe (Jackson: Univ. Press of Mississippi, 2005), 14, 15, 23. 82 Kenneth Silverman, Edgar A. Poe: Mournful and Never-ending Remembrance (New York: Harper Perennial, 1992), 126. 83 Hutchisson describes the direct relationship between Poes loss of fortune and the birth of Allans illegitimate twin sons: After his first wifes death, Allan had produced other heirs to his vast fortune . . . . He also had illegitimate twins by his mistress in July 1830. In 1832 and again the following year, while Poe was scrambling to find enough work to care for the Clemm family, Allan revised his will and added a codicil. All of his children, illegitimate and legitimate, were mentioned in the will, but Poe was ignored (Poe, 45). 84 Chapter on Aristocracy, 249. 85 Edgar Allan Poe to John Allan, quoted in Silverman, Mournful and Never-ending Remembrance, 45. 86 Thomas Corbet, An Inquiry into the Causes and Modes of the Wealth of Individuals; or the Principles of Trade and Speculation Explained (London, 1841), 5. 87 Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, vol. 1, trans. Ben Fowkes (New York: Penguin Classics, 1992), 251. 38 P O E S T U D I E S T H E W I L S O N D U P L E X 88 Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, vol. 3, trans. David Fernbach (New York: Penguin Classics, 1993), 533. 89 Marx, Capital, 3:597, 598, 609. 90 Marx, Capital, 3:597. 91 Derrida, Specters of Marx, 46. 92 Corbet, Wealth of Individuals, 211. 93 Hutchisson, Poe, 18. 94 Marx, Capital, 1:741. 95 Arthur Dickinson notes in his gloss on the 1510 Wynkyn de Worde publication, Valentine and Orson: A Study in Late Medieval Romance (New York: AMS Press, 1929), that Godwin, Byron, Hazlitt, De Quincey, Dickens, Browning, Meredith, and Henry James all allude to it (1). H I S T O R Y , T H E O R Y , I N T E R P R E T A T I O N 39