The Double in Nineteenth-Century Fiction. - book reviews

In his preface, John Herdman acknowledges that the concept of the literary double--or Doppelganger--has received more than a fair amount of critical attention. Thus the context for Herdman's study is found in Ralph Tymms's Doubles in Literary Psychology (1949), Masao Myoshi's The Divided Self (1969), and Karl Miller's Doubles (1985). Herdman's contribution to these earlier studies is his examination of the composition of the double itself, or, as he puts it, "the content expressed by the fictional double," content which according to Herdman is predominantly theological and psychological.

Given these criteria, Herdman establishes the ground rules for his historically structured journey through nineteenth-century fiction by arguing that the self-division inherent in the Doppelginger has its roots in "the history of consciousness of division in the will in Western Christian thought."

Herdman proceeds through a wide range of nineteenth-century writers, chronologically including in his analysis the fiction of William Godwin, Charles Brockden Brown, E. T. A. Hoffman, James Hogg, Gogol, Dostoevsky, Stevenson, Wilde, Kipling, Maupassant, and Chekhov. Of particular interest to readers of short fiction, however, is Herdman's examination of Poe's frequent use of the double: here also the best aspects of Herdman's study shine.

Herdman's treatment of Poe excels where we rightly expect it to. He sets the tales within a wider gothic tradition: he outlines Poe's gothic influences, particularly Hoffman, and he chooses well those stories that best delineate Poe's unique use of the literary double. "Ligeia," Herdman argues, illustrates the concept of metempsychosis--the dead Ligeia in a sense consumes and replaces her other self, physically as well as spiritually. Herdman also shows how in "The Oval Portrait" and especially in "A Tale of the Ragged Mountains," mesmerism and magnetism are natural fodder for the literary double. Herdman writes that in "The Tell-tale Heart" the idea of the double is manifested in the narrator's "accusing--or reproachful conscience." In "The Black Cat," Herdman writes, the appearance of a second identical black cat represents the powerfully inexplicable supernatural in an otherwise overtly objective story. And, finally, Herdman convincingly suggests that in "William Wilson," as in "The Black Cat," Poe utilizes the "good double" to represent the character's "admonitory conscience."

In Herdman's analysis of these stories, not only are plot and character summaries informative, exact, and economical; they are also always relevant and often surprising. Along the way he supplies excellent definitions of terms, including clear background for the term "Doppelganger"--which Herdman points out was originated by Jean Paul Richter--and a concise examination of the gothic tradition that spawned the "double."

Herdman's text is a particularly valuable tool for the scholar of nineteenth-century gothicism in general, and of Poe's use of the literary double in particular.

COPYRIGHT 1993 Studies in Short Fiction
COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale Group