SOURCE: Stern, Julia. “Double Talk: The Rhetoric of The Whisper in Poe's ‘William Wilson.’” ESQ: A Journal of the American Renaissance 40, no. 3 (September 1994): 185-218.

[In the following essay, Stern probes Poe's use and subversion of melodramatic conventions in the story “William Wilson.”]

For Edgar Allan Poe, the melodramatic mode is a logical literary form in which to articulate ethical conflict, a form in which the utterly polarized terms of good and evil clash in a highly personalized encounter.¹ Typically, as in “William Wilson,” Poe's doppelganger tale of 1839, melodrama shapes the manner and the matter of the story and inflects a variety of issues from character psychology to contemporary politics. Critics traditionally have read “William Wilson” as an allegory of a mind at war with itself, as a romantic fiction of dual personality in the tradition of Fyodor Dostoyevski and Robert Louis Stevenson, and so have overlooked the importance of the melodramatic conflict and formal gestures that permeate the story.² By examining the way in which Poe uses and subverts melodramatic conventions, it is possible to resituate “William Wilson” as a fiction deeply grounded in the culture and sectional politics of the 1830s.

Melodrama, which sees the world in terms of darkness and light and articulates this vision in larger-than-life gestures, serves as the postsacral world's theatrical forum for resolving ethical conflicts. According to Peter Brooks, without the universal belief in God or a divine order upon which tragedy depends, there can be no “terminal reconciliation, for there is no longer a clear transcendent value to be reconciled to.” Melodrama represents both “the urge toward resacralization and the impossibility of conceiving sacralization other than in personal terms.” Born in the aftermath of the French Revolution, which did away with the notion of divinely anointed kings, melodrama offered the public a new post-revolutionary vehicle for cultural catharsis: it became the form in which “ethical imperatives” could be “made clear.”³ Poe, a Southern intellectual who remained immune to the waves of revivalism in nineteenth-century America, lived on the verge of this post-Christian universe. In his fictional world, one haunted by the absence of God, he turned to melodrama to fill the breach.

In “William Wilson,” the narrator (WW) is a master of the idiom of melodrama who renders his fable of conscience defeated by appetite as a struggle of enormous moral dimensions. Obsessed with painting the battle against his virtuous double for possession of his “self” in absolute, black-and-white tones, WW desires only to demarcate his own Byronic evil from WW2's suffocating goodness. Unaware that the post-tragic world is a diminished place, the narrator believes that his own adventures constitute a “drama” in the tragic mode.⁴ Without a theatrical paradigm for interpretation, the dimensions of his suffering would be reduced pitifully, dwindling into the realm of the ordinary, the banal. Accordingly, it is only in the superlative mode that WW can render his experience in a meaningful way. He is incapable of perceiving his world in any but hierarchical terms: if he is not the most depraved of villains he may as well not be at all. This obsession with power and superiority is a central feature of melodrama, where, ultimately, one element in a polarity must dominate the other or be dominated by it. WW strives to subjugate whomever crosses his path, but it is his particular desire to subdue his double. Significantly, and to the narrator's dismay, WW2 seeks balance rather than dominion, and he resists WW's dualism in entirely unmelodramatic terms. “William Wilson” charts, step by step, WW's failure to make melodrama, with its dualistic vision and Manichaean analysis of contention, a viable tool for carving out identity.

WW could be speaking of the multilayered nature of his own tale rather than of the peculiar architectural features of his public school when he remarks that “[i]t was difficult, at any given time, to say with certainty upon which of its two stories one happened to be” (340). In “William Wilson” there exist two readings for every narrative episode: the literal explanations offered by WW and a nonliteral, alternative reading at odds with his stated intent. I call these the narrator's melodramatic text and the discourse of the double, WW2's “inside narrative,” which exists beneath the story proper only to subvert it.⁵ Bakhtinian polyphony does not quite account for this rhetorical structure, which may be unique in the doppelganger genre; for just as the narrative is not integrated under the controlling voice of WW (what Bakhtin would call monologism), neither does it partake of a back-and-forth play between multiple voices.

Instead, the tale is composed of WW's “manifest” narrative, punctuated and, ultimately, taken over by the accents of its unconscious dissenting under-voice, the discourse of the double. Throughout the span of his storytelling (a span corresponding roughly to his fall into consciousness about his life), WW desperately struggles to maintain personal and narrative authority, to squelch or cancel the meaning suggested by his double. Indeed, the narrative emphasizes the fact of such suppression by making the whisper its most important metaphor. Eventually, WW's narrative authority is overthrown from a space outside the self or, more precisely, from a kind of inside out—by a dislocated projection of the inner voice that WW has evicted long before. In “William Wilson,” Poe's radical experiment in the first-person form becomes a perfect vehicle for expressing the idea that not only authority but identity itself is vulnerable to destabilization and transformation.

1

On the level of plot in “William Wilson,” which part of the self has what kind of authority is always under question. Technically, the story is the product of WW, a self-described wicked man whose callously egotistical behavior has harmed innocent people. And yet the narrator's opening language partakes of the manners and civility that mark the perfect gentleman. This seeming paradox suggests that the narrator's voice has been infiltrated by the discourse of the double, who is known throughout the tale for his courtesy and refinement.

Poe's narrator begins his tale with a request for permission: “Let me call myself, for the present, William Wilson” (337). While the phrase may simply stand as a declarative convention of nineteenth-century rhetoric, a more subversive possibility exists; it also communicates a shaky sense of the narrator's authority (may I?) and a need to distance himself from his own experience (by renaming). In this sense, WW's pseudonym is a kind of “double name” and as such literalizes what is going on at the level of voice in the story. Since it is not necessary for a first-person narrator to name him- or herself in order to engage the reader's interest (as in Poe's own “Fall of the House of Usher” or in Melville's “Bartleby, the Scrivener: A Story of Wall-Street”), such a revelation is always significant. And to make much ado of a pseudonym is even more significant, for by such withholding a narrator puts a need for control on full display. WW's manipulations of his name in the story become symbolic of his consuming desire to withhold and repress material relating to issues of identity that is simply too painful—in his terms, too fraught with “horror”—to confront. Underneath what is revealed in “William Wilson” lies an even darker secret, something unnameable that the narrator refuses to “embody,” just as he refuses to “embody” the “record of [his] later years of unspeakable misery, and unpardonable crime” (337, my emphasis).

Perhaps most peculiar of all in the tangle of identity is a tenuousness of voice (“for the present”), the sense that identity itself is neither stable nor invulnerable to erosion by forces outside the self. The pseudonym WW takes evokes the heroic attempt to strike out for freedom; it makes emblematic the notion of the will, that most human of faculties arbitrating between desire and self-command. Embodied in this particular act of renaming is a wish that the name itself will act as a referee between the narrator's own base appetite and the double who hounds him as conscience personified. Renaming represents a fantasy of achieving control and, most importantly, autonomy. But there is a catch: he is Will-i-am son of Will, his self-authorship undercut by his own fiction of being second, an offspring, someone's son.⁶ At best an emphatic tautology, the pseudonym also suggests the assertion of independence (Will-I-Am) and the immediate undercutting of that independence (Son-of), a pattern that contains in miniature the central dialectic of the story.

By the third sentence of the tale, the speaker has split all sense of naming from his actual identity: “[M]y real appellation … has been already too much an object for the scorn—for the horror—for the detestation of my race.” He cannot even utter his own name but reduces it from the status of grammatical subject to that of object, literally. Reification in the form of the self-become-pseudonym provides a fitting defense against the self's own “horror.” What is this voice? Clearly the narrator sees himself among the ranks of the damned, as a Cain figure, “outcast of all outcasts most abandoned” (337). On the literal level, such a tone is entirely plausible: a central tragic insight of the damned is that they loath themselves and can recognize virtue but cannot attain it.⁷ There is another explanation, however; speaking through the letter or literal plane of this discourse is the adversarial part of the self, WW2. Here, at the level of tone and figuration, the narrator exposes the essential dynamic of his doppelganger story: William Wilson the wicked has not successfully killed off his conscience at the end of the story he now recounts in retrospect; on the contrary, that temporarily repressed monitory whisper has returned in the opening two paragraphs of the tale to usurp narrative authority and to control the terms of the ensuing discourse.

Poe has created a narrative physics of infinite regression: identity may get smaller and smaller through splitting, but the dynamics of the dualism remain the same. The depraved WW first splits off the virtuous part of the self, WW2, and then goes so far as to kill that part; but in the meantime, the remaining, depraved part of the self has been splitting further. WW2, no longer existing as a projected other body, now lives contained within WW's narrating voice. The double is, as it were, reincarnated inside the narrator as a Manichaean vocal counterpart that the host self will never be able to shed. The footprints that WW2 leaves on the narrative path ostensibly cleared by WW reveal that the dualistic split WW is so desperate to establish, to the point of committing murder, is never so schematic or absolute as he desires; the two sides of the self are always to some degree enmeshed, knit together as the same fabric—a meshing that, to the extent it unravels, weakens both sides of identity.

2

The narrator's dualistic reading strategy in “William Wilson” will not be my own. To clarify this difference in method, I briefly turn to the following passage from the story, in which WW recalls WW2's impersonation of himself and in the process reveals his own melodramatic interpretive practices.

That the school, indeed, did not feel his design, perceive its accomplishment, and participate in his sneer, was, for many anxious months, a riddle I could not resolve. Perhaps the gradation of his copy rendered it not so readily perceptible; or, more possibly, I owed my security to the masterly air of the copyist, who, disdaining the letter, (which in a painting is all the obtuse can see,) gave but the full spirit of his original for my individual contemplation and chagrin.

(345)

In the character of the narrator, Poe has created a fiercely literalistic reader who inhabits a black-and-white universe. In matters requiring interpretation he strives to control meaning by defeating or rejecting implication, what can be called “the spirit” of the narrative, or its unconscious voice. But as this passage demonstrates, the narrator characteristically fails to fix his own meaning on the literal level. The irony of the episode is heightened by the fact that at this very moment, WW is reading his double's “interpretation” of himself. As we study WW scrutinizing his double, we ourselves practice the dynamic of reading through the narrator's tropes, of becoming attuned to the nonliteral level of the narrative's double talk.

The narrator believes that WW2 is plotting against him. Not averse to “plotting” himself (he is after all a narrator), WW describes his double's activity as a “design.” The letter/spirit passage alludes to the idea that wrongful artistic imitation constitutes a sin against the authority of an individual's identity, an act virtually tantamount to sacrilege, by using the famous distinction between the literal and the spiritual made by Paul in Romans 2:29 and 7:6; WW speaks of the “masterly air of the copyist, who, disdaining the letter, (which in a painting is all the obtuse can see,) gave but the full spirit of his original for [the narrator's] individual contemplation and chagrin” (my emphasis). Literally, WW is saying that the outside world will not recognize WW2's attempt to impersonate him because the “copy” is less mimetic than illustrative; only WW, a nonobtuse observer, can detect the resemblance. Here WW characterizes himself as uniquely in the know, spirit-wise, a departure from his avowed literalism that signals WW2's infiltration even at the level of the narrator's assertions about his own reading practices. The notion of a copyist who possesses a “masterly air,” which verges on the oxymoronic, further clouds the issue of who is in charge, for “to master” is not only to perfect a skill but also to overcome. The passage implies that the copy, WW2, may be overcoming the original, WW.

Origination is a major theme of this tale. WW wants to trace the roots of his Fall, metaphorically, his own kenosis. In a human twist on this theological idea, whereby the divine nature empties out that which properly belongs to its as divine,⁸ WW empties himself of virtue (as embodied in WW2), leaving what WW believes is an empty-vessel-self that is autonomous and free to follow its appetites wherever they lead. WW tries to locate his Fall in a discrete, binary moment: “[I]n an instant, all virtue dropped bodily as a mantle,” he claims in the second paragraph of his story (337). The impulse to read the self emblematically provides a defense against taking responsibility for a less schematic, less orderly slide into depravity. The melodramatic remark about losing all virtue makes figurative an actual episode, not yet narrated but already past, in which WW2 will drop a fur cloak, symbolizing the fact that he can no longer protect WW from his own brazen nakedness of desire. The narrator's very metaphors about his own wickedness originate in the literal experience of his double. The self cannot divest itself of the other as cleanly and as definitively as the conceit of the dropped mantle of virtue might suggest, for the double's deeds resurface in the figurative language the narrator uses for imagining his own perversion.

In WW's excessively melodramatic account, the very language of a “Fall” projects outside what is essentially a process taking place within. The split in WW's self begins as an external rift between parents and son over just whose voice will hold authority: “Thenceforward my voice was a household law; and at an age when few children have abandoned their leading-strings, I was left to the guidance of my own will, and became, in all but name, the master of my own actions” (338). The narrator's conception of power, of how it devolves and where it should rightly lie, has less to do with superior physical prowess, intelligence, material resources, or even charisma than with the ability to speak out and command the arena of discourse. Ironically, WW becomes “master” in “all but name” (338), recalling his rather proprietary and bizarre relationship with his name; Poe is punning on the notion of authority, of powers held in name versus those held in fact. On the literal level, WW holds a kind of de facto power in his family. But he is denied the acknowledgment that a verbal recognition would convey, power “in name” as well as fact, precisely the sort of authority that a narrator, a self built up of words, most covets.

Though we never meet his biological father, WW writes of a father substitute whose power and authority become subjects of his obsessive fascination and relate directly to the major themes of the tale.⁹ Dr. Bransby, the headmaster of WW's school and also called “Dominie” (Latin for father and suggestive of the connection between patriarchs and oppression), personifies the duality that will so plague the narrator. Bransby is at once the withholding, judgmental, and punitive principal and the benign and forgiving pastor of the village church. He embodies the “Draconian law of the academy” (339), a troubling notion for WW since the only law he wants or can tolerate is his own. Yet the memories the narrator relates of Dr. Bransby's authority are reverential: the schoolboys would no sooner have opened their principal's door in his absence than they would “all have willingly perished by the peine forte et dure,” he asserts (340).¹⁰ The reminiscences of these school days code WW's nostalgia for a time when the external world was powerful enough to keep him under control—evidence, perhaps, that WW2 influences or permeates WW's memories.

The narrator's painfully detailed representation of Dr. Bransby's school proves to be no casual or digressive scene-painting; here, as in other Poe tales, setting provides a metaphor for the protagonist's mind. The school wall is “riveted and studded with iron bolts, and surmounted with jagged iron spikes,” and the schoolyard is an “extensive enclosure … irregular in form, having many capacious recesses” (339). This landscape of restriction, limitation, and punishment, and yet of largesse, intricacy, and nuance, coupled with the winding passages and irregular architecture of the interior of the school, provides a telling picture of WW's repressive mental apparatus. Both are characterized by “incomprehensible subdivisions” that “return[] in upon themselves” (340). WW seems confounded by the existence of space the exact dimensions of which cannot be ascertained and which is divided up into uncountable portions. He dwells rather obsessively upon the seemingly superficial details of this setting, even claiming self-consciously, “I shall be pardoned for seeking relief, however slight and temporary, in the weakness of a few rambling details” (338). It is precisely in these obsessive details, however, that the heart of Poe's matter typically lies.

This architectural landscape becomes the object of the narrator's fixation because it is an analogy for, or even a projection of, his own conflicted mental terrain in all of its incomprehensibility and self-division. He remarks:

It was difficult, at any given time, to say with certainty upon which of [the school's] two stories one happened to be. From each room to every other there were sure to be found three or four steps either in ascent or descent. Then the lateral branches were innumerable—inconceivable—and so returning in upon themselves, that our most exact ideas in regard to the whole mansion were not very far different from those with which we pondered upon infinity.

(340)

From his earliest school days, WW has trouble determining his “level,” whether or not he is “above” or “below.” Poe has here created a brilliant metaphor for exploring issues of moral rectitude; the narrator's future ethical purlieu will be identified with that of the underworld (vice, alcoholism, gambling, swindling, seduction, murder), while WW2's entire motivation is to pull the narrator up from this morass. This blurring of vertical levels has an analogue in the narrative voice itself, which professes to be a unique and independent utterance but actually reads like a duet in early rehearsal, with the two distinct parts not quite clearly articulated. The pun on “two stories” reinforces the idea that out of one ostensible story come two, told by two voices, and that it is by no means obvious which William Wilson is speaking or upon which “level” one is reading.

Thus, we have a narrator obsessed with autonomy, integrity, and distinction (in both the concretely literal and the symbolic senses) who cannot articulate his story solo voce. This duality of voice, or blurring of stories, has a graphic or written counterpart in an image WW remembers from childhood. As he describes the appointments of Dr. Bransby's schoolroom, the narrator focuses with rapt attention upon the schoolboy graffiti carved into the desks:

Interspersed about the room, crossing and re-crossing in endless irregularity, were innumerable benches and desks, black, ancient, and time-worn, piled desperately with much-bethumbed books, and so beseamed with initial letters, names at full length, grotesque figures, and other multiplied efforts of the knife, as to have entirely lost what little of original form might have been their portion in days long departed.

(340)

On the literal level, the formlessness described refers to the desks themselves. But this passage also marks another eruption of the discourse of the double, the subversive inside narrative; the syntax unofficially shifts so that one could “misread,” ascribing the loss of “original form” to the initial letters and names themselves. Within the grammar, individual parts of speech compete for authority: the object of the sentence takes on a nominative status as if it had an independent, subversive life of its own.

What is gained by accepting a willful but provocative misreading, the kind of step frequently invited by Poe's cagey narrative strategies? How does the issue of formlessness as the result of overinscription figure in the meaning of this tale? Poe is playing with two points here. First is the notion of individual names losing their integrity and separateness, just as WW's name has become the “common property of the mob” (341). Such events constitute violations, for every name, according to the logic of this sentence, has a distinct allotment of “original form” due to it as a sort of right, perhaps just as members of every enlightened society have the right to pursue their own happiness in individual ways. Yet who has freely chosen this pseudonym that expresses commonality rather than individuality? The narrator himself—or, more precisely, the narrator as haunted by WW2. In not exploiting the forum of renaming to its fullest capacity for fictional self-creation, as Jay Gatsby was to do, WW reveals another sign of double talk. The narrator's “original form” has been overwritten by the impress of the double.

Second, the graphic inscriptions in the desk become metaphors for the boundaries of the self in the world, and WW is made uncomfortable when those demarcations are obscured: how can the originality of the self prevail if the signature proclaiming that originality is virtually effaced? Thus arises the more general issue of “losing form,” another way of describing the blurring of boundaries and the passing of limits, which calls to mind WW's later moral problems. “Gentlemen” behave in “good form”; they attend to a fixed social code. WW's excesses, particularly his cheating at cards, violate that code. Expressed in suggestively similar language, an aesthetic observation about schoolroom furniture can be read as a moral one about behavior in society.¹¹

3

Immediately after describing the schoolroom, WW comments that “the teeming brain of childhood requires no external world of incident to occupy or amuse it” (340), as if to assert that the boundaries distinguishing self from world are not applicable in his case. WW is all self. WW2 represents the encroachment of the world's naysaying forces. The story recreates Freud's myth of the id's fall from the paradisiacal wholeness of infancy but does so by recapturing the essentially religious nature of that myth. Poe's narrator does not merely feel guilt over his imperial desires; he is damned and punished for them, sentenced to a metaphysical laryngitis and forced to play the part of the ventriloquist's puppet while his worst enemy or “best self” literally puts words in his mouth.

As the struggle opens, WW fights “not to be overcome,” a phrase associated with the loss of autonomy. He notes:

Wilson's rebellion was to me a source of the greatest embarrassment;—the more so as, in spite of the bravado with which in public I made a point of treating him and his pretensions, I secretly felt that I feared him, and could not help thinking the equality which he maintained so easily with myself, a proof of his true superiority; since not to be overcome cost me a perpetual struggle. Yet this superiority—even this equality—was in truth acknowledged by no one but myself. … Indeed, his competition, his resistance, and especially his impertinent and dogged interference with my purposes, were not more pointed than private.

(342)

What is most interesting in this passage is WW's perplexity over WW2's entirely private arena of combat: the double has neither public ambition nor any “passionate energy of mind,” and thus, no exteriority (342).¹² And emblematically, WW2 has no outward voice other than a whisper. Is it mere coincidence that WW describes his double's lack of vocal power as a “constitutional defect” (344)? Might Poe not be punning on the relationship between physical bodies and the body politic, between the self (constitution here meaning one's “structure” or “physical makeup”) and a written or unwritten text (“the basic principles and laws of a nation, state, or social group that determine the powers and duties of the government and guarantee certain rights”)?¹³ What are the implications for right rule when the different voices constituting the “body” cannot articulate or vocalize their opinions?

What WW finds perhaps most disturbing about WW2's incursion against him is the co-opting of voice: “[I]n spite of his constitutional defect, even my voice did not escape him. My louder tones were, of course, unattempted, but then the key, it was identical; and his singular whisper, it grew the very echo of my own” (344). To add insult to injury, this mimicry “could not justly be termed a caricature” but had to be acknowledged as “exquisite portraiture” (344). Indeed, the narrator makes a point of the fact that he “will not now venture to describe” how this unauthorized portrait “harassed” him (344-45). For to “give voice” to the issue is to participate in and repeat the mimetic violation of the self that the double has perpetrated; it is to yield authority to that incubus voice and broadcast it again. But we must acknowledge the cunning imprint of the double's discourse here: though WW does not offer a mimesis of WW2's impersonation, he gives us a précis by omission when he articulates his refusal to describe the “exquisite portraiture.”

Poe continues to use puns to express the subversive substratum of this tale, the inside narrative. WW experiences his double's supervision as “distasteful” (345); appropriately, the “appetitive” portion of the self is dis-gusted by the limiting force of the conscience. Even more interestingly, WW cannot be disgusted by WW2 unless he has ingested him, taken him in, suggesting that the outer and inner selves, or more importantly, the self and the world, are inextricably connected, just as are the two William Wilsons that the narrator is so eager to cleave. My choice of the word cleave here articulates or reproduces the duality of WW's dilemma, for it simultaneously denotes separation and communion. This is the duality Freud has in mind when talking of “the antithetical sense of primal words” in an essay of the same name. In the realm of human psychodynamics, primal words have the unique ability to express both a concept and its opposite in a single stroke.¹⁴ In the narrative realm of “William Wilson,” puns, in all their doubleness, are Poe's version of primal words; they speak the discourse of the double.

4

Three episodes anticipate (another form of doubling) the climactic confrontation between the narrator and his double at the masquerade ball in Rome: WW's midnight visit to WW2's sleeping chamber at Dr. Bransby's school, the drinking orgy at Eton, and the card game with Glendinning at Oxford. The first is set in what the narrator describes as a “closet” (346), evoking Gothic images of the pious in confession or private prayer and thus underscoring the spiritual nature of the conflict. For although the melodramatically conceived universe of “William Wilson” is a postsacral world, the absence of God is painfully felt by Poe's depraved narrator. When WW enters his double's sleeping chamber with his lamp, it is not with the purpose of shedding any beneficent light upon their relations. The attempt at “illumination” is of decidedly darker cast. While WW never explains his motivation for committing this act, his intent is clearly malicious. The scene projects a kind of symbolic rape or violation of WW2.

As the waking self confronts the sleeping one, the narrator's “whole spirit [becomes] possessed with an objectless yet intolerable horror” as he nears “the sleeper” and “the face” (347, my emphasis). The peculiar lack of possessive pronouns and the word “objectless” in this passage provide clues that a bizarre mirroring or merging of identities has occurred: whose face does the narrator see? The terror he feels upon viewing the body in the bed is objectless, that is, it has no object. Yet there are ostensibly two people in the room, a seeing subject and the object of his perception. But the focus of the gaze has become a horror both “objectless” and “intolerable.” I would suggest that the status of WW2 as object, as other, dissolves, on the level of the plot and on the level of the narrator's language, and that a double subjectivity already existing in sub-rosa form emerges here once and for all.

WW gives us a physical rendering of this scene that at the same time censors any representation of the corporeal, which makes it especially suggestive. The narrator plans to unman WW2, either through the indecent exposure of himself to his double or of the double to the narrator himself, that is, by stripping WW2. Whatever the precise nature of his transgressive act, such behavior redounds negatively upon WW. Withholding from our view what he actually sees and does, WW communicates nothing but excessive affect—nearly hysterical ejaculations of terror and horror. The scene becomes more interesting as a picture of displacement and repression than as a revelatory tableau. But the heightened affect suggests that what began as a symbolic rape has degenerated even further into a scene of self-abuse. How else might we interpret the fact that the conscience is disabled, asleep? WW's “self-knowledge,” with its potentially carnal connotations, climaxes in “shudder[s]” of horror rather than pleasure (347). The episode releases a level of anxiety and dread never before experienced by the narrator and causes him to run away, as if for his very life.

It is at this point that Poe calls up the excessively dramatic, grandiose emotional gestures of melodrama to underscore the ethical conflict plaguing his narrator. Articulation of the nonverbal in writing is by no means an obvious achievement. Poe turns to punctuation and typography as a playwright would to stage directions. Using italics and dashes as if they were music and special effects, Poe is able to convey nuances of expression that the medium of print would otherwise seem to preclude. The narrator cries melodramatically, “Were these—these the lineaments of William Wilson?” (347), the syntax and typography underscoring confusion and duality of identity with the doubled use of the word “these.” On the level of denotation, WW refers to WW2, his own relentless conscience (here, interestingly, for the first and last time pictured asleep on the job). But the language is also veering, pushing the reader to an alternate interpretation: might not the narrator be “seeing” himself? The dash acts as a device that simultaneously separates or distinguishes the two figures and joins them together, visually representing the tenuous paradox that marks their relatedness.¹⁵ Functioning as a kind of mirror/barrier, the dash appears at each of the four important confrontation scenes in the story (347, 349, 352, 355-57). Similarly, the narrator uses italicized speech to indicate the discourse of or about WW2; it is another way of pointing out, literally and figuratively, the similarities and differences between the two characters.

5

Pace Leslie Fiedler, Ann Douglas has called “the image of flight the image of life” in American fiction,¹⁶ and flight is literally embodied in Poe's story as the only means by which the embattled self can preserve its autonomy—its survival as itself. Thus, after WW makes his escape from Dr. Bransby's, the second half of the story is organized around the three remaining confrontations and the subsequent “flights for life” upon which the narrator embarks. As he moves from Eton to Oxford, external authority and limitation become less vigilant, and he himself grows more depraved; fittingly, the admonitions of WW2 become more overtly disruptive as if to compensate for the indifference of the outer world to WW's dissipation.

The card game debacle at Oxford emblematizes what is central in all three confrontations: each takes place in the context of play or at a party of some kind in which the rules of normal behavior are suspended or inverted. The reader only sees the narrator in these situations of a world turned upside down, a festival of misrule, as if to underscore the fact that WW neither exists in nor experiences any normative life. The plot to cheat Lord Glendinning at cards literalizes and puns on the main action of the story: Glendinning becomes WW's debtor, just as WW is in a sort of moral debt to his own conscience; the stakes of the game are “double[d]” (351); and WW “effect[s]” Glendinning's “total ruin,” just as WW will undo his double, and thus himself. In a single stroke, Poe has the double expose WW's treachery via facsimiles of playing cards and further symbolizes this notion of exposure by having WW2 drop his cloak, as if to indicate that he is now abandoning the previous delicate handling of WW. Notably, the emblem of conscience comes out of hiding precisely when WW begins to destroy persons outside himself.

In the penultimate moments of the story, the narrator renames WW2 “my evil destiny” (353), subtly signaling that he has become conscious of the process of incorporation I have been arguing for all along: WW has begun to read his doppelganger as a living metaphor for personal misfortune and thwarted desire. And it is here that a series of political tropes used only infrequently in the earlier parts of the story begin to proliferate: the narrator has “succumbed supinely to … imperious domination,” to WW2's “inscrutable tyranny” and “arbitrary will” (354, 355). What the narrator finds most disturbing about his double's intrusions is the fact that WW2 is increasingly omnipotent and yet effaced. In other words, he is essentially a voice. Indeed, the physics of the story have suggested that as the whisper becomes louder, the host voice—its powers and authority—grows diminished. Hence the narrator's complaint, resonant with ambiguity, that he has become “more and more impatient of control” (355). WW is saying that he is less and less willing to be controlled by his conscience, but curiously, the implication is that he seeks sole “control” or authority over his life of no control, of self-indulgence; he wants the power to indulge himself without limit. At the same time, this odd phrase suggests the opposite, that he wants to control, to set limits upon, his debauchery. That ambivalence hints at the underlying process of incorporation; traces of a blurred identity become more overt as the story moves to its climax. As the narrator will confess in the final “murder scene,” “I could have fancied that I myself was speaking” (356).

6

By setting the final episode at a masquerade, Poe literalizes the theme of identity in suspension. According to Terry Castle, whose Masquerade and Civilization delineates the masquerade in English literature, “psychologically speaking, the masquerade [is] a meditation on self and other.” Castle maintains that the goal of the masquerade is to search for perfect freedom, to seek out the very sort of altered state, or “intoxication, ecstasy, and free-floating sensual pleasure,” that WW makes the motivating quest of his life. Masqueraders obtain “personal abdication from the responsibilities for identity.”¹⁷

The narrator's description of the shifting throng of the masked crowd, in which the individual is easily overwhelmed, takes us back, symbolically, to the landscape of the story's beginning. WW feels suffocated as he wanders through mazes of revelers, recalling the physical confusion he experienced in the labyrinthine corridors of Dr. Bransby's school. Just as WW is about to initiate the seduction of his host's wife, he hears that familiar “damnable whisper.” He attempts to respond and notices that his own voice is “husky with rage,” its articulations muted; WW has himself begun to speak in a whisper, to take on his double's voice—another sign or symptom of inward colloquy (355).

This is the climax of the story: during the fatal duel, WW describes his “single arm” as containing “the energy and power of a multitude” (356). Clearly a metaphor for extrahuman strength, this phrase at the same time ominously suggests that in one man lie more than one. After repeatedly stabbing WW2, the narrator hallucinates a mirror reflecting back his own bloodied form. Then comes a remarkable passage in which double negatives, exclusively, are used to express identity: “Not a thread in all his raiment—not a line in all the marked and singular lineaments of his face which was not, even in the absolute identity, mine own!” (356). The narrator here uses italicized speech, hitherto used primarily to describe WW2, in speaking of himself. In other words, the form he used to give voice to his doppelganger has become domesticated. Or, more darkly, WW2's characteristic mode has taken over the narrator's voice. And it is not even clear whose voice is actually speaking: “It was Wilson; but he spoke no longer in a whisper, and I could have fancied that I myself was speaking while he said: ‘You have conquered, and I yield. Yet, henceforward art thou also dead—dead to the World, to Heaven, and to Hope!’” (356-57).

The fanciful italicized doublet “dead—dead” expresses typographically what has happened to the characters literally and metaphysically: they have undergone complete interpenetration. At the earliest confrontation, in the sleeping chamber, the narrator had described the confusion over his identity by saying “were these—these the lineaments of William Wilson?” (347). The distinction between the self and its other, though confused in fact, was graphically demarcated; the narrating self could express the difference with the dash and italics. Here, the two William Wilsons have merged in death, and by a kind of law of the double negative, the relationship will continue for eternity. For the italicized voice will become the narrator of Poe's “William Wilson,” haunted with guilt, unable to express depravity without censorship, judgmental anguish, or regret. This passage echoes and anticipates WW's opening words about being “dead” “to the earth” (337). Between the conclusion of the story and its first two paragraphs we have witnessed the birth of a narrative conversion of enormous power. Melodramatic self-definition has failed, utterly and completely, as a device capable of demarcating the “good” self from the “bad.” Good or bad, if the self in “William Wilson” was once dual bodied, it now wears its divisions on the inside, in the form of the dual voice that cannot stop speaking double talk.

7

Instead of leaving us with the “victory over repression” that characterizes melodrama, an airing of the dirty linen of evil and its triumphant purgation by the forces of virtue,¹⁸ Poe ends his tale with the central mystery unexplained. The enigma of identity in “William Wilson” remains “unsaid,” still morally occluded. What, finally, is the meaning of the double talk or inside narrative in this tale? We have established that the central rhetorical and metaphorical strands of the story are psychological, complete with the symptoms of the title character manifested in the religious language of salvation and damnation. But the tale exhibits a seemingly political dimension as well. This should strike devoted Poe readers as unusual, for critics have long decried the decidedly ahistorical, atemporal features of his fiction: Poe's tales, such scholars observe, typically take place in Gothic dreamscapes out of time, or at mythic South Poles out of nightmares.¹⁹ “William Wilson” is different for being set overtly and unquestionably in the privileged England of public school and Oxford.

Even more uncharacteristic is the featuring of a peculiarly political set of tropes: WW's real name, though noble, is “the common property of the mob” (341). And later, after first characterizing WW2's behavior as “rebellion” (342), he curses the double's “inscrutable tyranny” and expatiates upon his “[p]oor justification … for an authority so imperiously assumed,” his “[p]oor indemnity for natural rights of self agency … denied” (354). We see here two sorts of American political rhetoric. The first quoted phrase echoes the conservative fear of the mob expressed from the post-revolutionary period of Charles Brockden Brown down through such tales as Hawthorne's “My Kinsman, Major Molineux,” like “William Wilson” written in the 1830s. The other phrases suggest the seemingly incongruent anti-authoritarian sentiments of the Declaration of Independence. Thus we see both an elitism bordering on aristocratic attitudes and a hostility to unjust authority (figured forth as royal, “imperious”) at work within one character.

Perhaps even more troubling is that in this debate over authority, it is by no means clear—it is, in fact, always under question—which part of the self is the “governing body,” “mother country,” or “imperial self” and which the seceding colonist or rioting commoner. For one could argue that the notions of “inscrutable tyranny,” “authority … imperiously assumed,” and “natural rights of self-agency … denied” cut two ways. The first two phrases could refer to WW2 as the colonist-self acting as if he were king when he is just a spin-off, a branch office, a subsidiary. Or, and the final phrase underscores this other reading, they could suggest that WW2 is himself the weak ruler who resents the dissension and rebellion of WW. WW then becomes the threat to union, the unruly colonist who wants independence to take his own wayward path.

8

With this double-edged reading in place, it is difficult to make definitive judgments concerning the political allegory afoot in “William Wilson,” since allegory is a predictive form that relies upon precise correspondences. In fact, the disruption and rejection of melodramatic dualism in the story can serve as a warning against efforts to read Poe in allegorical terms. “William Wilson” subverts all binary attempts to classify meaning. Even so, tentative speculations are in order.

On one hand the story seems to offer itself as a conservative parable warning against the dangers of revolution. But Poe is no Tory, rereading the American past by writing “historical” fiction.²⁰ The “revolution” in “William Wilson” refers not to the struggle of 1776 but to the battles between North and South in Poe's present. Poe has taken the language of the American Revolution and brought it to bear upon the contemporary issue of sectional strife. For in the terms of the 1830s, “revolution” connotes the secession of states from the Union, most specifically, the threat that South Carolina would secede in the Nullification Crisis of 1832-33.²¹ In its Ordinance of Nullification, South Carolina declared that the tariffs of 1828 and 1832 were “null and void” within state boundaries. Among other related claims, the document asserted that if the federal government adopted any kind of coercion against the state, its citizens would “hold themselves absolved from all further obligation to maintain or preserve their political connection with the people of the other states, and [would] forthwith proceed to organize a separate government, and do all other acts and things which sovereign and independent states may of right do.”²² Ostensibly pitting only South Carolina against the Union, nullification actually embroiled Georgia as well. Georgia, too, had a constitutional quarrel with the Unionist view of government sovereignty that President Jackson espoused against the nullifiers. And other Southern states, particularly Virginia, long known for its states' rights legacy, also had much to lose. Under contention was how to interpret the Constitution's definition of the national union. Was the Union a compact of consenting states that, while retaining sovereignty, had joined to create the Constitution and a confederation from which they also could legally withdraw? Or was sovereignty located within the people themselves, the majority of the electorate,²³ a symbolic body that transcended local affiliations to individual states. Would not sovereignty so located make the Union perpetual and indissoluble only according to the consent of the people so defined? These were the questions that the Nullification Crisis brought to a head.

The central image of “William Wilson,” in which parts split off from the whole, in which unity totters on the verge of fragmentation, evokes an issue of particular resonance for Americans. Secessionist threats did not, as the popular imagination would have it, emerge as unique to mid-nineteenth-century American political discourse. They had been uttered, on the contrary, as early as the period of the Constitution's ratification (1787) and were a consistent feature of states' rights politics until South Carolina actually seceded from the Union in December of 1860.²⁴ It was the Nullification Crisis of 1832-33, however, that decisively riveted national attention to the issue of sectional strife. Perhaps more than earlier threats of secession by various dissatisfied factions, nullification threw a spotlight on questions of state versus national sovereignty and authority. It was against this background of national crisis—of section seeking to detach from section—and of the rich oratorical activity that gave voice to the debate, that Poe's imagination developed into maturity.

In the context of this sectional turmoil, “William Wilson” can be read as a fantasy that addresses the danger of secession, since the “secessionist” part of the self is depraved and demented and the “Unionist” side virtuous and controlled. Or the story can be understood alternatively, as a critique of the sort of conservatism that calls for morally questionable compromise rather than for definitive schismatic action. According to such a reading, WW2 dissents from the secessionist part of the self. Despite WW2's disapproval of the depraved behavior of his “other half,” he doggedly attempts to maintain union with his wicked mother country and to effect reform through loyalty and loving admonition. But WW2 pays the ultimate price for his efforts to sustain connection: he sacrifices his existence for what is, essentially, a lost cause. In this reading, Poe suggests that attempts to conciliate unhappy members of the body politic through persuasion are not only destined to fail but may incite violent reaction. Both readings suggest that efforts in the 1830s to deal with dissent in the nation state were inadequate. Schism and compromise each seem to forebode destruction.

“William Wilson” warns unequivocally against taking dualistic measures to cordon off problems that compromise identity. WW2, as perceived by the narrator, embodies just this sort of danger to the self. The effort to resolve conflict by branding it as evil (or good, in the inverted world of this tale) and by attempting to banish it to a kind of quarantine is a melodramatic gesture that fails precisely because conflict cannot be reduced to black-and-white terms.

To a Southern intellectual like Poe, the 1830s were an era of tremendous moral confusion. By 1835, abolitionists had begun to seize the terms of the national discourse on slavery, and outraged citizens were responding with anti-abolitionist riots throughout the North. To the Northern abolitionist imagination, slavery was an evil institution and all slaveholders damned; the only way in which the national soul could be saved, argued the abolitionists, was to destroy this wicked institution with one deadly blow.²⁵ But Southern intellectuals could not afford to read the dilemma in such terms; for them, abolitionism was the melodramatic characterization of an issue they saw as considerably more complex.²⁶ Thoughtful Virginians like George Washington and Thomas Jefferson had felt uneasy about slavery as early as the mid-eighteenth century but believed that the evils of the “Peculiar Institution” were inextricably bound up with what they saw as its more virtuous effects. Apologists for slavery argued with conviction that the paternalistic system had a protective value for Blacks. Left to fend for themselves in a hostile society, so the argument went, free black laborers would be crushed at the hands of superior Whites. Because slavery, from this perspective, embroiled Blacks and Whites in an almost incestuously intimate relationship, it was much harder for Southerners to imagine a clean and simple extrication from the problem. When the nation offered abolition as its only narrative solution to regional dissent, secession was the equally melodramatic answer returned by the South.²⁷

Though “William Wilson” contains powerful images of slavery, Poe uses them to animate a psychological, rather than a physical and political, form of bondage. The issue of political division is a fact of the story, but any attempt to argue that Poe codes that division around slavery must fail because he is silent on precisely this subject. Slavery is the great unmentionable for him as for the South. The melodramatic division of good and evil on the political level becomes a disaster for the politics of Union because the North keeps mentioning the unmentionable and forcing the melodrama on everyone.

If the defeat of melodrama by WW2's subversive inside narrative can become a guide for recovering the political discourse of the story, where does that leave the reader of “William Wilson”? The abolitionist versus secessionist melodrama offers a drastic strategy for coping with a body at war with itself: amputate the ailing member and pray that the infection will be contained. The disease process in “William Wilson,” however, proves to be systemic; the infection has pervaded the narrating voice. In the self as in the nation state, secessionist measures do not succeed in restraining the threat of potentially poisonous conflict. Melodramatic Mason-Dixon lines, the inside narrative of “William Wilson” suggests, are meant to be crossed.

An alternative to the melodramatic solution would be the attempt to tolerate the mix of good and evil. The story offers only a fleeting image of such peaceful coexistence, when the young William Wilsons briefly maintain a relationship on “speaking terms” (343). In the arena of politics, such a reading would seem to imply keeping slavery in place. Because Poe's story dramatizes the defeat of the first alternative, we are left with the unpalatable but undeniable force of the anti-melodramatic solution, the protection of the institution of slavery. But it would be difficult to argue that Poe takes much pleasure in this state of affairs.²⁸ For in the story, though WW survives his debacle, his very language is haunted by the rhetoric of the whisper internalized in the final struggle, and furthermore, he is dying. Generalizing from a reading of the tale as fiction to an interpretation of the fiction as a document of culture at a moment in time, we might say that dying along with WW are the more enlightened ideals of the South in the 1830s.²⁹ In “William Wilson,” Poe has dramatized the dilemma of the Southern intellectual who finds no way out for his region in the face of its problems of identity.

9

Historians have noted that a rich oratorical tradition arose in the 1830s from the conflict that threatened to split the nation. Daniel Webster, who asserted the supremacy of the Union, and Robert Hayne, who opposed him by arguing for the sovereignty of states, articulated the terms of the debate. The speeches of these men quickly reached all literate Americans through newspaper transcriptions and even the illiterate through the recitations of school children. Daniel J. Boorstin notes that in these years, which he characterizes as the golden period of American oratory, “[o]ration seemed almost to displace legislation as the main form of political action.”³⁰ In light of this prominence given to spoken modes of political activity in the 1830s, it is significant that Poe underscores the orality of his tale. The difficulty of remaining on “speaking terms” forms the crux of the characters' drama, and the whisper is the expressive form given most significance in the story. There is never a moment of balance between the two Wilsons until the final scene, when the two figures whisper at each other, sharing their only inside colloquy. Though the communion is barely audible, there is contrapuntal activity at work here. And though WW has “killed” his conscience, he cannot silence its voice, for it has usurped his powers of expression and attained sovereignty.

Parallels can be drawn here with the larger political problems of Poe's day. Voices within a single Union were in conflict, never in balance. The fundamental theory of those who sought to preserve the Union depended upon the two sides remaining on “speaking terms,” upon the debate continuing until solution or compromise was attained (as in the Nullification Crisis). In the 1830s, a powerful orator could meld the audience to him- or herself and bridge ideological conflict by making the hearer lose “any sense of dualism.” Such charismatic use of language could create a sympathy powerful enough to dissolve seemingly insurmountable barriers.³¹ By the 1850s, however, dualism within the nation had become unbridgeable and words insufficient. As sectional conflict grew, oratory failed to unite the nation and “eloquence itself appeared a source of disruption.”³² Inner colloquy was no longer possible and civil war loomed imminent and unavoidable. This is the uncanny lesson of “William Wilson.” When the speaking stops, when the inner colloquy fades away to the level of the whisper, fratricidal violence and insanity become inevitable.

Poe's personal circumstances caused him to reach in his fiction to political statement and beyond it. He was in many ways America's archetypal displaced person.³³ A Southerner self-exiled to the North, Poe was an eternal wanderer, metaphysically homeless even when his material needs were provided. A professional writer, he strained to make a place and a living for himself in a social climate that favored leisured gentlemanly belletrists. The son of impoverished actors, he was raised by an upper-middle-class Virginia merchant who refused him the emotional and financial security a legal adoption would accord. John Allan's inconstant attention and his unwillingness to acknowledge his foster son cost Poe the sense of being firmly rooted in a family and a social class, aspects of identity that virtually defined the self in the hierarchical South. This combination of circumstances left Poe's identity tenuous in his own mind and helped make the quest for self a powerful subject of his art. His frustrations of place and of placement forced him into the generic limbo of a story like “William Wilson,” where character and identity hover between melodramatic representation and realistic psychological rendering. It was Poe's gift and his greatness that he could transform the psychology of the split self into a fiction with powerful political implications.

Notes

1. For my treatment of melodrama in Poe, I rely on Peter Brooks, The Melodramatic Imagination: Balzac, Henry James, Melodrama, and the Mode of Excess (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1976; New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1984); and George B. Forgie, “Abraham Lincoln and the Melodrama of the House Divided,” chap. 7 in Patricide in the House Divided: A Psychological Interpretation of Lincoln and His Age (New York: W. W. Norton, 1979), 243-81. See also David Grimsted, Melodrama Unveiled: American Theatre and Culture, 1800-1850 (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1968; Berkeley and Los Angeles: Univ. of California Press, 1987).

2. Classic interpretations of “William Wilson” include Thomas F. Walsh, “The Other William Wilson,” American Transcendental Quarterly, no. 10 (1971): 17-26; and Robert Coskren, “‘William Wilson’ and the Disintegration of the Self,” Studies in Short Fiction 12 (1975): 155-62. See also Marc Leslie Rovner, “What William Wilson Knew: Poe's Dramatization of an Errant Mind,” in Poe at Work: Seven Textual Studies, ed. Benjamin Franklin Fisher IV (Baltimore: Edgar Allan Poe Society, 1978), 73-82.

3. Brooks, Melodramatic Imagination, 17, 16, 17.

4. Edgar Allan Poe, “William Wilson,” in Edgar Allan Poe: Poetry and Tales, ed. Patrick F. Quinn (New York: Library of America, 1984), 354. Hereafter, all references to this text will be cited parenthetically.

5. I borrow the term “inside narrative” from Melville, who uses it in Billy Budd, Sailor to identify the limits between what can be known in a fiction and what cannot. In “William Wilson,” inside narrative refers to that which is not known consciously to the narrator but which WW2 raises from repression to a whispering consciousness. Notions of inside and underneath become synonymous in this tale. See Herman Melville, Billy Budd, Sailor (An Inside Narrative), ed. Harrison Hayford and Merton M. Sealts Jr. (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1962).

   Also see Wayne Koestenbaum's study of literary collaboration and homosexuality, Double Talk: The Erotics of Male Literary Collaboration (New York: Routledge, 1989). I use the term “double talk” to describe the subversive thrust of WW2's impact upon WW's storytelling. Though WW2 seeks union with WW, the force of his double talk is anti-collaborative; put another way, the story details WW's struggle to resist WW2's collaboration, which ultimately fails. Koestenbaum's work explores dynamics related to, but the obverse of, those at play in “William Wilson.”

6. See Walsh, “The Other William Wilson,” 23. Evan Carton makes a similar point: “[T]he recalcitrant name remains to indicate—perhaps even, given its acknowledged similarity to the alias ‘Wilson,’ to insist—that he is not self-authored” (The Rhetoric of American Romance: Dialectic and Identity in Emerson, Dickinson, Poe, and Hawthorne [Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1985], 38).

7. Consider Pier della Vigna, the suicide in Inferno, 13.55-108, who, in contrast to the majority of his infernal compatriots, is confirmed in the belief that his act was morally wrong.

8. See Webster's Third New International Dictionary, s.v. “kenosis”: “kenōsis, fr. Gk, evacuation, action of emptying, fr. kenoun to purge, empty (fr. kenos empty) + -sis 1: … the act of Christ in emptying himself of the form of God.”

9. Poe's biological father abandoned his family when Poe was eighteen months old, and upon the death of Poe's mother a year and a half later, he was taken in by John Allan, who became his foster father. Thus Poe's obsession with authority and identity is well grounded in his biography. See Kenneth Silverman, Edgar A. Poe: Mournful and Never-Ending Remembrance (New York: Harper Collins, 1991), 3-11.

10. See editor Thomas Ollive Mabbott's gloss in Tales and Sketches, 1831-1842, vol. 2 of Collected Works of Edgar Allan Poe (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, Belknap Press, 1978), 449 n. 5: legally, peine forte et dure—pressing to death—was “the penalty for refusing to plead guilty or not guilty to a capital charge,” a punishment “endured by courageous persons to save their estates from confiscation.” Such rejection of choice on the part of a defendant represents the obverse of what I have been calling melodramatic thinking, which is characterized by its dualistic view of conflict and by its insistence upon stand taking. The narrator's use of this simile marks another instance in which his figurative language is permeated by WW2, who, like the victim of peine forte et dure, goes to his death in order to avoid taking melodramatic stands.

11. In effect, the narrator and his double represent opposing versions of the late eighteenth-century gentleman. WW is the depraved rake renowned for his excesses. WW2 is the courtly and chivalrous man of privilege who risks life and limb over points of honor and who is ultimately destroyed in a duel.

12. To be more precise, WW2's ambitions are collaborative in nature, since he does desire to see WW well thought of by the world.

13. Webster's Ninth New Collegiate Dictionary, s.v. “constitution.”

14. Sigmund Freud, “The Antithetical Sense of Primal Words,” review of Ueber den Gegensinn der Urworte, by Karl Abel, in On Creativity and the Unconscious: Papers on the Psychology of Art, Literature, Love, Religion, ed. Benjamin Nelson (New York: Harper and Row, 1958), 55-62; first published in Jahrbuch für psychoanalytische und psychopathologische Forschungen (Vienna, 1910).

15. In “Marginalia,” Poe comments on the dash as a punctuation mark that articulates duality; he notes that it “represents a second thought—an emendation,” and later asserts that it “gives the reader a choice between two, or among three or more expressions, one of which may be more forcible than another, but all of which help out the idea.” See “Marginalia,” in Edgar Allan Poe: Essays and Reviews, ed. G. R. Thompson (New York: Library of America, 1984), 1426, my emphasis in the second quotation; first published in Graham's Magazine 32 (1848): 130. For an extended reading of the poetics of the dash in Poe's Eureka, see Joan Dayan, “The Analytic of the Dash,” in Fables of Mind: An Inquiry into Poe's Fiction (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1987), 55-79.

16. Leslie Fiedler remarks that the typical protagonist in American fiction is a “man on the run.” See Love and Death in the American Novel (New York: Stein and Day, 1966), 26. I am indebted to Ann Douglas for her insight about Fiedler's work.

17. See Terry Castle, Masquerade and Civilization: The Carnivalesque in Eighteenth-Century English Culture and Fiction (Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 1986), 6, 53, 73. See also James W. Gargano, The Masquerade Vision in Poe's Short Stories (Baltimore: Enoch Pratt Free Library, 1977).

18. Brooks, Melodramatic Imagination, 4.

19. Such a stereotype is in fact undercut by other Poe tales as well, particularly “The Man of the Crowd” and such comic works as “The Man That Was Used Up” and “The System of Doctor Tarr and Professor Fether.” For a historical/political reading of the latter, see Louis D. Rubin Jr., The Edge of the Swamp: A Study in the Literature and Society of the Old South (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Univ. Press, 1989), 163-67. While scholars of the last fifteen years have begun to situate Poe's fiction in the material conditions of his culture, the notion of the ahistorical Poe permeates much criticism written prior to the late 1970s. For example, in Symbolism and American Literature (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1953), Charles Feidelson Jr. argues that Poe “was not, like Emerson and Whitman, primarily in conflict with a rationalistic society; he was at war with himself” (37). Like Feidelson, both Harry Levin and Daniel Hoffman read Poe as a psychological novelist writing of self-division and disintegration. See Levin, “Journey to the End of the Night” and “Notes from Underground,” chaps. 4 and 5 in The Power of Blackness (New York: Knopf, 1958), 101-64; and Hoffman, Poe, Poe, Poe, Poe, Poe, Poe, Poe (New York: Random House, 1972), 207-13.

20. This is the case Michael J. Colacurcio compellingly argues about Hawthorne in The Province of Piety: Moral History in Hawthorne's Early Tales (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1984).

21. Richard E. Ellis writes: “As [President Andrew] Jackson viewed it, secession was a revolutionary right, one that had to be fought for and therefore one that could be suppressed. Moreover, he believed nullification and secession were virtually synonymous, for the one verged almost automatically into the other. ‘Nullification,’ [Jackson] wrote, ‘leads directly to civil war and bloodshed and deserves the execration of every friend of the Country.’ Indeed, so hostile was he to ‘this nullifying doctrine, which threatens to dissolve our happy Union,’ that in his mind support for the nullifiers' cause became synonymous with ‘Treason against our Government.’” See The Union at Risk: Jacksonian Democracy, States' Rights, and the Nullification Crisis (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1987), 48; quoting Andrew Jackson's letter to James A. Hamilton, 2 November 1832.

22. State Papers on Nullification … (Boston, 1934), 28-31, quoted in Ellis, Union at Risk, 76.

23. “The electorate” seems a more appropriate term than “the governed,” since some of those governed were not enfranchised.

24. Seymour Martin Lipset writes, “[E]very major political faction and interest group attempted, at one time or other between 1790 and 1860, to weaken the power of the national government or to break up the Union directly.” See The First New Nation: The United States in Historical and Comparative Perspective (New York: W. W. Norton, 1973), 34.

25. William Lloyd Garrison, among other ardent abolitionists, was willing to see the Union dissolved rather than poisoned by slavery. This sentiment gained currency in 1842 and was called the “Disunion Movement,” the slogan of which became “No Union with slaveholders.” In The Abolitionists: The Growth of a Dissenting Minority (DeKalb: Northern Illinois Univ. Press, 1974; New York: W. W. Norton, 1979), Merton L. Dillon observes that “apparently some abolitionists were urging northern secession as early as the mid-1830s” and directs the reader to Catherine Beecher's Essay on Slavery and Abolitionism, with Reference to the Duty of American Females (Philadelphia: Perkins, 1837), 140-41 (see Dillon, 171 n. 17). See also Ronald G. Walters, The Antislavery Appeal: American Abolitionism after 1830 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1976; New York: W. W. Norton, 1984), 129-34.

26. See Forgie, “Abraham Lincoln,” esp. 267-68 and 270.

27. David Brion Davis writes that “some southern Unionists went so far as to charge that a conspiratorial alliance had developed between northern abolitionists and southern secessionists. However absurd this notion might seem, it showed some recognition of the fact that the extremists in both sections had joined in a coordinated attack on the earlier ‘conspiracy of silence’ over slavery. If politicians of both parties had tacitly agreed that discussions of slavery were highly imprudent, the abolitionists and southern firebrands shared the opposite conviction that the issue must be met head on.” See The Fear of Conspiracy: Images of Un-American Subversion from the Revolution to the Present (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1971), 105.

28. Robert Byer argues that Poe hated the paternalism identified with the slaveowning classes in Virginia, but that because he was white, he defended slavery, though never very strongly. See “‘The Man of the Crowd’: Edgar Allan Poe in His Culture” (Ph.D. diss., Yale Univ., 1979), 394, 397. Rubin writes that Poe, “knowing that a Richmond audience [for the journal he edited between 1835 and 1837, the Southern Literary Messenger] would have little use for any author, however meritorious his work, who opposed the Peculiar Institution, … doubtless used that knowledge to gain reader sympathy in his quarrel with [the abolitionist writer James Russell] Lowell.” Rubin goes on to indicate that despite this maneuvering, “Poe had no extreme love for proslavery advocates either.” See Edge of the Swamp, 179. For the continuing debate on Poe's attitudes toward slavery, see Bernard Rosenthal, “Poe, Slavery, and the Southern Literary Messenger: A Reexamination,” Poe Studies 7 (1974): 29-38; G. R. Thompson, “Edgar Allan Poe and the Writers of the Old South,” in The Columbia Literary History of the United States, ed. Emory Elliott et al. (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1988), 262-77; Joan Dayan, “Romance and Race,” in The Columbia History of the American Novel, ed. Emory Elliott et al. (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1991), 89-109; Dana D. Nelson, The Word in Black and White: Reading “Race” in American Literature, 1638-1867 (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1992), 90-92; J. V. Ridgely, “The Authorship of the ‘Paulding-Drayton Review,’” PSA Newsletter 20 (fall 1992): 1-3, 6; and Joan Dayan, “Amorous Bondage: Poe, Ladies, and Slaves,” American Literature 66 (1994): 239-73. I am grateful to Professor Dennis Eddings of the Poe Studies Association for his timely response to my queries.

29. In the 1830s, after Nat Turner's rebellion and the rise of aggressive Garrisonian abolitionism, the South became less open about debating slavery publicly. Byer writes that “the generosity, liberality, deism, and enlightenment of Jefferson were abandoned in the face of ‘higher necessity,’” press censorship, and religious conservatism (“Poe in His Culture,” 359).

30. Daniel J. Boorstin, The Americans: The National Experience (New York: Random House, 1965), 308, 311.

31. F. O. Matthiessen, American Renaissance: Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman (London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1941), 17-18.

32. Robert A. Ferguson, Law and Letters in American Culture (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1984), 229.

33. Byer writes eloquently of Poe's sense of displacement and his transformation of this theme in his stories of the city. See “The Poet of the Boarding House,” chap. 8 in “Poe in His Culture,” 550-625.

This essay would not exist in its current form without the generosity and encouragement of Robert A. Ferguson, whose belief in the basic argument never faltered, and whose trenchant criticism proved invaluable. Thanks as well to Jonathan Arac, who first suggested that the politics of the 1830s might be relevant to my reading of bodily division in “William Wilson,” and who quietly insisted that Poe could be read politically when other scholars resisted such interpretation. Finally, I am grateful to Ann Douglas for her advice at the early stages of composition, and to my anonymous readers, whose corrections, queries, and suggestions have enriched the essay in crucial ways.