William Wilson's Double

Author(s): Ruth Sullivan

Source: Studies in Romanticism, Vol. 15, No. 2, Psychoanalysis and Romanticism (Spring, 1976),
pp. 253-263
Published by: Boston University
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25600010
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 William Wilson's Double
RUTH SULLIVAN

EDGAR Allan Poe's "William Wilson" is a puzzling tale. It

seems a rather dull, formulaic story without ambiguities. I
stifle a yawn over the too-obvious moral tag:

"You have and I art thou also dead?

conquered, yield. Yet, henceforward
dead to the World, to Heaven and to Hope! In me didst thou exist?and, in
see thou has mur
my death, by this image, which is thine own, how utterly
dered thyself."!

And a second yawn over the also heavy-handedly direc

epigraph,
tive:

What say of it? what say [of] CONSCIENCE grim,

That spectre in my path?
Chamberlayne's Pharronida

Another one of those doubles tales, I say, like The Picture of

Dorian Gray, in which the suppressed portion of the self is pro
jected into a second character or object and in which the reader is
warned that the instinctual selfmust be curbed by conscience; that
one kills the even
complementary self only by spending the health,
the life, of the whole person. Besides, for me the tale is remarkably
abstract. True, there is the grizzly climax in which a maddened
William Wilson confronts his dying, blood-dabbled double; the
scene of William Wilson's
practical joking trip to his double's
bedchamber; and the description of Dr. Bransby's school; but
otherwise the story lacks the consistent concreteness of
hair-raising
the narrator's stalking of the old man's eye in "The Tell-Tale
Heart," for example. "William Wilson" is a talky tale, a bit ratio
cinative, though not at all for me of a tone with Poe's detective
fiction.
But indeed the tale is fascinating, ambiguous, for the narrator is
not who he seems. Is he the
representative of instinct unleashed?

1. James A. Harrison, ed., The Works of Edgar Allan Poe

Complete (New
York: AMS Press, Inc., 1965), III, 325. In italics in the original. All future
references to "William Wilson" will be to this edition and will in
appear
parentheses in the text.

SiR, 15 (Spring 1976) 253

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 254 RUTH SULLIVAN

And he kills?is
the double he the representative of conscience?
The epigraph seems to say this by telling the reader in advance
that this is a tale about "CONSCIENCE grim" and the concluding
moral tag says much the same, for when William Wilson kills his
conscience, he dooms himself to a life of "turpitude" (299). All
through the tale, the narrator damns himself: he has engaged in
"unpardonable crime" (299) and "miserable profligacy" (313), has
. . . into more than the enormities of an Elah-Gabalus"
"passed

(299), and so on; whereas William Wilson the double consistently

whispers good advice into his school fellow's ear and arrives in time
to thwart several immoralities. For one
psychoanalytic critic, Robert
Rogers, the second William Wilson is "one of the most representa
tive superego doubles" in Poe;2 and forMarie Bonaparte, too, the
second William Wilson is the superego, who represents "the intro
jection of [Poe's] repressive father system."3
But can William Wilson have killed his superego? Where, then,
does the self-condemnation come from? A moral sense and convic
tion of wrongdoing can come only from some form of the superego.
Clearly, William Wilson cannot have killed his conscience-double;
equally clearly some trompe-Voeil occurs at the climax when
William Wilson claims the superego murder. One notices that the
dying double no longer speaks in a whisper as the conscience
double had; that it seems William Wilson the reprobate's voice
blends with his double's. In other words, the climax is ambiguous
about who dies. Most likely, the reprobate dies and Poe has the
superego masquerade as the instinct-driven William Wilson, in this
guise telling his horrifying autobiography. Loosely, William
Wilson's superego tells the story ofWilliam Wilson's id. More pre
cisely, part of his ego dominated by the superego tells the story of
the part of the ego dominated by the id.
Poe gives many clues about the identity of the narrator: by the
tone of the tale, for example. It is moralistic; further, the con
demnations Wilson
William levels far exceed the evidence of
wrong-doing. William Wilson has committed no
"unpardonable
crime." At least none is detailed in what purports to be a scru
to assign cause to his later infamy. As Rogers puts it:
pulous effort
"Except for cheating at cards and excessive drinking, the various
2. Robert Rogers, A Psychoanalytic Study of the Double in Literature
State U. Press,
(Detroit: The Wayne 1970), p. 25.
3. Marie Bonaparte, The Life and Works of Edgar Allan Poe (London: Imago
Publ. Co., 1949), p. 553.

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 WILLIAM WILSON'S DOUBLE 255

debaucheries are with one unspecified. In this disparity

exception
between the innocuous nature of the crimes
relatively protagonist's
and the extreme baseness with which they are characterized in the
story itself, the tyrannical severity of the superego finds expres
sion."4

Rogers is right. The two severe offenses concretely described are

immoralities but not crimes suitably punished by death or suicide.
One offense iswould-be adultery. But the object ofWilliam Wilson's
desires is "the young, the gay, the beautiful wife of the aged and
doting Di Broglio. With a too unscrupulous confidence she had
previously communicated to me the secret of the costume in which
she would be habited . . ." Wilson
(323). contemplates adultery
(it seems he did not perpetrate it), but with a willing, or at least a
casual, woman. His other offense is at cards to the
morally cheating
financial ruin of the "young parvenu nobleman, Glendinning?
rich, said report, as Herodes Atticus?his riches, too, as easily
acquired" (316). Once more, the deed is immoral but not one ap
propriately punished, ultimately, by self-murder. What are William
Wilson's crimes, then? He is a spendthrift, a gambler, a drinker,
an adulterer and an opium-taker ("there were
(perhaps), possibly
not wanting other and
perhaps more dangerous seductions" than
liquor [313]), but nowhere does the narrator describe deeds merit
such severe condemnations as crime." Not even
ing "unpardonable
the climactic murder-suicide is such a deed, for it is not clear who
kills whom. Besides, William Wilson, dogged to distraction, defends
himself a too-harsh
against superego.
Every other crime attributed toWilliam Wilson is a generalized
For his "crimes" at Eton: "I do not wish, how
allegation. example,
ever, to trace the course of my miserable here?a
profligacy prof
ligacy which set at defiance the laws, while it eluded the vigilance
of the institution. Three years of folly, passed without profit, had
but given me rooted habits of vice . . ." (313). At Oxford:

Excited by such appliances to vice, my constitutional temperament broke forth

with redoubled ardor, and I spurned even the common restraints of decency in
the mad infatuation of my revels. But it were absurd to pause in the detail
of my extravagance. Let it suffice, that among spendthrifts I out-Heroded Herod,
and that, name to a multitude of novel follies, I added no brief
giving
appendix to the long catalogue of vices then usual in the most dissolute uni
versity of Europe. (315-16)

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

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 256 RUTH SULLIVAN

Other alleged crimes are just as vaguely described. His "crime" in

Rome is "ambition"; in Paris, "revenge"; in Naples, "passionate
love"; and in Egypt, "avarice" (322).
One must wonder about the reliability of these unspecific ac
cusations and about the validity ofWilliam Wilson's assertion that
he "might, to-day, have been a better, and thus a happier man,
had I
less frequently rejected the counsels embodied in these
meaning whispers which I then but too cordially hated and too
bitterly despised" (310). William Wilson is a villain, perhaps, but
so is his superego. The moral tag of the tale is therefore misleading,
for no psychic wholeness can come out of William Wilson's ac
ceptance of the tyranny of this particular demon.
This conscience has a stake in appearing benign and righteous,
an affectionate
giver of wholesome advice, the potential savior of
the dissolute William Wilson. What stake does William Wilson
have in painting himself so bloodily? Remorse, guilt, self-aggran
dizement, perhaps; perhaps even gaining the sympathy of his fellow
mortals, as he says he wishes at the beginning of his tale. But the
heavily moralistic tone of the tale sounds more like a superego
voice, effective in its sadism because masked in repentant con
fession.

Moralistic tone is not the only clue Poe gives that the over
zealous conscience is the narrator. The style of the story pro
vides another. It is, by Donald Baylor Stauffer's excellent analysis,
abstract, rather stilted?even mannered." It is "the lan
"highly
of and . . . and order . . .
guage speculation conjecture. Formality
are the chief characteristics of the dominant style of 'William
Wilson.'. .." Words "often have not an but a
only analytic strongly
moralistic tone as well."5 This is not the language of instinctual
license, even repentant, but of a personified superego pretending
mildness and reason.
Then there is the sentimental nostalgia evinced in the narrator's
memories of Dr. Bransby's school. The "old and irregular" (301)
house is surrounded by "a high and solid brick wall, topped with a
bed of mortar and broken glass. . . . This prison-like rampart
formed the limit of our domain; beyond it we saw but thrice a
week . . ." (301). "At an angle of the ponderous wall frowned a
more was riveted and studded with iron bolts,
ponderous gate. It

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

?
Wilson/ SSF, 2 (1965), 326, 328.

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 WILLIAM WILSON'S DOUBLE 257

and surmounted with jagged iron spikes" (302). Presiding over this
prison-like place isDr. Bransby from "a remote and terror-inspiring
angle" (303) of the schoolroom, who, "with sour visage, and in
snuffy habiliments, administered, ferule in hand, the Draconian
laws of the academy" (302). Here William Wilson says he was
happy: "It gives me, as much as I can now in any
perhaps, pleasure
manner experience, to dwell upon minute recollections of the
school and its concerns" (301). "Encompassed by the massy walls of
this venerable academy, I passed, yet not in tedium or disgust, the
. .The
years of the third lustrum of my life. . apparently dismal
monotony of a school was replete with more intense excitement
than my riper youth has derived from luxury, or my full man
hood from crime" (304). Such pleasure from confinement in a
school ruled by a harsh father-figure seems inconsistent
prison-like
for the character of someone who is described as from earliest
infancy "self-willed, addicted to the wildest caprices, and a prey to
the most ungovernable passions" (300), one who grows increas
ingly restive under what he calls his double's "impertinent and
dogged interference with my purposes ..." (306). The pleasure is,
however, consonant with the superego double, the narrator, who, by
affirming that the wild William Wilson was happy in this school,
says in effect that he not only needed but thrived under control.
By the device of misleading the reader into believing that the
sinful William Wilson is the narrator, Poe not only permits a
tyrannical superego to run rampant but also directs the reader to
what I believe is another concern of the tale, which is both a moral
about how William Wilson destroys himself because he cannot
assimilate his conscience and, as well, a moral about the latent
criminality in the reader, who can readily perceive "evil" in in
stinctual license but cannot so easily perceive it in the destructive
ness of an excessive curb to instinct, a vicious Conscience
superego.
can be a criminal, too. The later crimes, committed after the self
murder, can as well have been perpetrated by a ruthlessly domi
nating superego. Poe holds up the whole story as the mirror
wherein, like William Wilson seeing his own bloody visage, the
reader, too, can perceive, if dimly, his own duplicity in the double
murder of William Wilson. "CONSCIENCE grim" has driven
William Wilson to his self-destructive act; hence, both of them are
murderers. The narrator's story is the revenge of the
superego
against his double, of excessive morality against instinctual license.
Certain ambiguities remain, however. For instance, the scene in

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258 RUTH SULLIVAN

which William Wilson looks upon his double asleep in his bed
chamber: what do his anguished words mean? "Were these?these
the lineaments ofWilliam Wilson? . . What
. was there about them
to confound me in this manner? . . Was
. it, in truth, within the
bounds of human possibility, that what I now saw was the result,
merely, of the habitual practice of this sarcastic imitation?" (312).
I assume thatWilliam Wilson
perceives not only that his double
carries his name, effectively imitates him, and so on, but that the
two look, indeed, are
exactly alike. The climax makes this obvious,
for there it seems William Wilson sees "mine own image" in "a
larger mirror"; and "I could have fancied that I myself was speak
ing while he [William Wilson, the double] said ..." (325), and
so on.

This symbolic reading, that the twoWilsons are identical because

each represents half of one personality, is logical. There is also this
peculiar passage which is, I am certain, related to the two occasions
in which William Wilson perceives an essential identity between
himself and his double:

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

him, in which he was more than usually thrown off his guard, and spoke and
acted with an openness of demeanor rather foreign to his nature, I discovered,
or fancied I discovered, in his accent, his air, and general a some
appearance,
thing which first startled, and then deeply interested me, by bringing to mind
dim visions of my earliest infancy?wild, confused and thronging memories of
a time when herself was I cannot
memory yet unborn. better describe the
sensation which me than by saying that I could with difficulty shake
oppressed
off the belief of my having been acquainted with the being who stood before
me, at some epoch very long ago?some point of the past even infinitely re
mote. (310-11; emphasis added)

Though William Wilson passes this off as a delusion, I resonate

to the early he claims between himself, "self-willed, ad
identity
dicted to the wildest caprices" (300) and William Wilson the
superego, voice of a ruthless both are fed
morality: psychically
from the same early infantile source, an inborn sadism
(a "com
ponent instinct," says Freud) and narcissism that can inform both
one's instinctual life (as it does William Wilson's in his wild
pleasure seeking and aggressiveness) and conscience (in the too
harsh self-condemnations and possible later crimes of the
narrator).6

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

Freud says:

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 WILLIAM WILSON'S DOUBLE 259

The twoWilliam Wilsons are identical in being symbolically parts

of the same person and in having their early nourishment at the
same psychic sources. Ironic, of course, is that both William Wil
sons are criminals, one from a sense of and the other
wrong-doing
from uninhibited release of anti-social drives.
There are still other puzzles in this tale. The narrator isWilliam
Wilson's double, and that double is representative of the superego
dominated ego; but the puzzle remains that nowhere in the story
does William Wilson express guilt. If the superego-dominated ego
is telling the tale, one would expect guilt. Indeed, almost everyone
I have read or heard speaks of this story as narrated by someone
guilt-ridden. But when William Wilson describes his motivation
for telling his story, nowhere does he say he feels guilt for his years
of "unpardonable crime." He says he tells the story because on his
deathbed he wants to understand how he became so wicked so
suddenly; he wants the sympathy, even the of his fellow men;
pity,
and he wants to justify his life by belief in somehow "dying a
victim to the horror and themystery of the wildest of all sublunary
visions" (300). He continually complains about being "steeped in
misery" (301). To his classmates' reproachful glances when William
Wilson ruins Glendinning, the former reacts not with guilt but
with a more primitive emotion, shame: "I could not
help feeling my
cheeks tingle with the many burning glances of scorn or reproach

Such ideas, however, have sprung from the soil of unbounded self-love, from
the primary narcissism which dominates the mind of the child and of primitive
man. But when this state has been surmounted, the "double" reverses its aspect.
From having been an assurance of it becomes the uncanny har
immortality,
binger of death.
The idea of the "double" does not with the passing
necessarily disappear
of primary narcissism, for it can receive fresh meaning from the later stages of
the ego's development. A special agency is slowly formed there, which is able
to stand over the rest of the ego, which has the function of
against observing
and criticizing the self and of exercising a within the mind, and
censorship
which we become aware of as our "conscience." In the case of
pathological
delusions of being watched, this mental agency becomes isolated, dissociated
from the ego, and discernible to the physician's eye. The fact that an agency
of this kind exists, which is able to treat the rest of the ego like an
object?
the fact, that is, that man is capable of self-observation?renders it possible
to invest the old idea of a "double" with a new and to ascribe a
meaning
number of things to it?above all, those things which seem to self-criticism to
belong to the old surmounted narcissism of earliest times. (James Strachey, ed.,
The Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud The
[London: Hogarth
Press, 1955], xvn, 235.)

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 260 RUTH SULLIVAN

cast upon me by the less abandoned of the party" (318). He is

"affected" by the "silent contempt, or the sarcastic composure" (320)
of his fellows. "Abased, humbled to the dust" (320), he "left the
apartment with a resolute scowl of defiance . . . a
[in] perfect
agony of horror and shame" (321).
Can there be a sense of wrongdoing without an accompanying
sense of guilt? There can be. First, however, the reader must
remember that the double is telling the tale. If he is representative
of a superego-dominated ego, he might be punishing in his char
acteristic way, by making the ego experience guilt. However, in
as William Wilson the reprobate, he records accu
masquerading
rately the feelings thatWilson would have. Not guilt, because one
purpose of the tale is to record the fruits ofWilliam Wilson's in
ability to assimilate a conscience (a person without conscience does
not, of course, feel guilt). The narrator-double practices his sadism
on William Wilson in other ways; by making him appear a blacker
villain than he is, for instance; but he generally tries to record
accurately how William Wilson feels. And after all, inability to
feel guilt for such alleged wrong-doing is an implied condemnation
in harmony with the punitive purposes of the narrator.
Another emotion consonant with a strong sense of wrong-doing
yet not necessarily involving a sense of guilt is anxiety concerning
abandonment. "If I behave badly and am caught, I feel not only
shame but fear that I will no longer be loved." At the beginning of
the story,William Wilson shows marked concern about this. For
one thing, he seems to hate himself (self-hatred can be a reflex
from being unloved formisbehavior). He wishes not to use his real
name because "the fair page lying before me need not be sullied
with my real appellation. This has been already too much an object
for the scorn?for the horror?for the detestation of my race" (299).
Later, in young manhood, he ismost deeply irritated by his double
for whispering his name, thus confounding some ill deed. In Dr.
Bransby's school, "there was one form of his practical wit that
disturbed me beyond measure. ... He habitually practiced the
annoyance. I had always felt aversion to my uncourtly patronymic,
and its very common, if not plebeian praenomen. The words were
venom in my ears ..." (308). With the coming of his double,
William Wilson is "doubly disgusted with the name because a
stranger bore it, who would be the cause of its twofold repeti
tion . . ."
(308).
William Wilson also fears abandonment. He believes himself to

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 WILLIAM WILSON'S DOUBLE 261

be "outcast of all outcasts most abandoned!?to the earth art thou

not forever dead? to its honors, to its flowers, to its golden aspira
tions??and a cloud, dense, dismal, and limitless, does it not hang
eternally between thy hopes and heaven?" (299). He tells of his
"later years of unspeakable misery" (299). This combination of
feelings and deeds (misbehavior, fear of being abandoned, self
loathing, self-recrimination, sense of misery and shame) sounds like
the intrapsychic relationship between the ego and the superego,
for the superego can treat the ego like a child, withdrawing love as
punishment formisdeeds and burdening the ego with painful self
disgust and sense of abandonment. Thus far, Poe's story rings true,
therefore, as an accurate portrayal of how the second William
Wilson as superego-dominated ego would treat the first. But this
does not yet fully account for the absence of a sense of guilt in the
story.
There are some clues whereby one can further refine a definition
of the narrator. One of these is the fact thatWilliam Wilson the
seems never to learn from his
reprobate (by report of the narrator)
double's or thwartings of
advice, admonitions, planned misbe
havior. At school, the two engage in mutual mild hostilities: prac
tical joking, arguing, teasing, and so on. William Wilson recognizes
with chagrin "his true superiority" (305). "It is difficult, indeed, to
define, or even to describe, my real feelings towards him. They
formed a motley and heterogeneous admixture;?some petulant
which was not hatred, some esteem, more
animosity, yet respect,
much fear,with a world of uneasy curiosity" (307). William Wilson
recognizes about his double "that his moral sense, at least, if not
his general talents and worldly wisdom, was far keener than my
own . . ." (310). Nevertheless, William Wilson
responds "with a
repugnance which gained strength as I grew in years" (310).
Further, he is apparently stupid later when he seems unable fully to
recognize who his double is and why he pursues the reprobate. He
knows it is theWilliam Wilson from Dr. Bransby's school. "But
who and what was thisWilson??and whence came he??and what
were his He even
purposes?" (315). recognizes that his double comes
only on certain occasions, when William Wilson I is about to
embark on another piece of misbehavior. What is striking,
though,
is that William Wilson not only does not learn from the advice
and interference of his seemingly benevolent double but
apparently
grows more and more dissolute and violent.
One psychological fact can add up these details: William Wilson

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262 RUTH SULLIVAN

hates his double, who fears abandonment as retaliation

as-superego
formisbehavior, experiences misery and shame but not guilt because
his double represents not an internalized conscience but a fore
runner of the superego in the voice of
parental authority before
and during the oedipal period. True, the double grows weaker
when Wilson drowns himself in wine and he whispers as the voice
of conscience does, but he also uses as words of admonition,
"William Wilson!" just as parents often do to erring children.
Before the child fully introjects parents' voices and cultural values
to form the superego
during and after the oedipal period, that child
responds to external curbs to his behavior and will do whatever he
can get away with.7 There is, as Otto Fenichel puts it, "no unified
organized character in the prohibitions"; for instance, bogeymen
and policemen "represent these 'externalized pre-superegos/ The
child fluctuates between giving in to his impulses and
suppressing
them."8 William Wilson, like a child before his introjection firmly
occurs, needs external curbs to his drive, needs the ex
pleasure
ternal voice of admonition, feels abased and ashamed and horri
fied but only temporarily, and has not yet learned to
discipline
himself. The double, then, can be called a
conscience-representative
only in a loose way; more accurately, he is representative of the
precursor of conscience.

Poe gives another fact, indeed, a clinically useful one, to support

the probability of what I am suggesting. In earliest infancy,Wilson
says, "my parents could do but little to check the evil propensities
which distinguished me. Some feeble and ill-directed efforts re
sulted in complete failure on their part, and, of course, in total
triumph on mine. Thenceforward my voice was a household law;
and at the age when few children had abandoned their leading
strings, I was left to the guidance of my own will, and became,
in all but name, the master of my actions" (300). These facts say
thatWilliam Wilson's parents did not the moral founda
provide
tion or supervision necessary for eventual development of a super
ego. Later, at school, when William Wilson is between ten and
fifteen (in his "third lustrum"), he acquires a father-surrogate in
the stern-and-benevolent Dr. Bransby; he also experiences the

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

City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1957), pp. 124-140, for a comprehensive discussion of
the superego.
8. Otto Fenichel, The Psychoanalytic Theory of Neurosis (New York: W. W.
Norton, 1945), p. 104.

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 WILLIAM WILSONS DOUBLE 263

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

Brenner, the superego is not fully formed until about age nine or
ten)9 of his double, the precursor of the superego and representa
tive of parental authority he never had. The second William
Wilson becomes tyrant when a kind of psychic wholeness occurs,
ironically during the effort of the reprobate to kill him. A kind of
introjection there takes place with extreme unwillingness on the
latter's part. At the climax, the two merge, for both voices blend
and as one the that survives is the
speak person; part superego
dominated part of the ego.
Thus Poe lures us, his readers, deeply into his story by disguis
ing the narrator, thereby inviting at least a three-fold pleasure: the
socially acceptable delight in witnessing the punishment of for
bidden behavior (apparently, the reprobate suffers a life of "un
speakable misery"); the covert indulgence, under the noisy moral
tone, in sadistic identification with a ruthless superego; and, in
a more limited way, a
pleasure in identifying with vice. "William
Wilson" is more more than it appears.
ambiguous, complex

Northeastern University

9. Brenner, p. 126.

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