American Literature: Romanticism research assignment Student Research Submissions 2013

Sarah McCall DeLaRosa

Politics and tricking the reader in Edgar Allan Poe’s "William Wilson"

            I decided I wanted to do my first research post on Poe’s “William Wilson” (1839), the short story we read in class. That particular story of Poe’s struck me quite differently than any of his other work that I have come across, and I wanted to see how it is generally received by scholarly critics. I found “WW” to be not as creepy and uncomfortable, and not as climactic as the other pieces by Poe that I have read—it did not bother me at all, and I am usually very affected by Poe’s work. The purpose of this research post was to determine how other people thought of “WW,” and particularly if they saw it as an outlier compared to his other work.

            It frustrated me to realize that, while I was not very interested in “WW” I was also not very interested in scholarship concerning “WW.” Not many of the researchers that I came across discussed “WW” as an anomaly of blandness in Poe’s otherwise dynamically disturbing oeuvre. I did, however, find two very interesting pieces discussing “WW” in political terms. Theron Britt’s 1995 article, “The Common Property of the Mob: Democracy and Identity in Poe’s ‘William Wilson’,” is very intriguing in its thesis that “by figuring its narrator caught between a necessary relation to others and the urge for a radical independence from those others as ‘the mob,’ ‘William Wilson’ stages Poe’s deep cultural fears about the threat to the individual latent in early nineteenth-century American democracy” (3). Britt suggests that Poe was very concerned for democracy in America, and had a sense of pessimism toward it because he feared that the democratic mob could abuse and even erase the individual. Britt’s article illustrates in great detail the political and historical situation Poe was writing in, and demonstrates Poe’s own involvement in politics at the time, to evidence his arguments. Britt says that “[Wilson] is an avatar of self-reliance run amok, a sort of Emersonian Everyman gone horribly wrong in his amoral relation to society, prone to the very excesses of the mob that Tocquevlle feared and which Whigs painted onto Democrats” (7)—the political philosopher Alexis de Tocqueville and the American Whig party both seen by Britt as influences on Poe’s opinions. Britt concludes that Poe “shows us that the dangerous mob impulse in a democracy isolates individuals, throws them back on themselves, and eventually undermines their very identities. And so, thrown back on himself alone, in the solitude of his own heart, Wilson exemplifies Tocqueville's and Poe's worst fears for the American experiment in democracy” (8). This political reading of “WW” was very surprising to me, as I had no previous information to make me ready to perceive it in my own reading. I thought Britt’s arguments were very interesting, and I thought his article very good overall.

            The second article that took “WW” politically was by Thomas Peyser, and it is entitled “Poe’s ‘William Wilson’ and the Nightmare of Equality” (2010). Peyser, like Britt, made several connections between writings of de Toqueville and “WW.” Unlike Britt, however, Peyser’s article was less about Poe’s fears of mob rule and more about the flip side—the loss of one’s individual self to the American ideal of universal equality. Peyser’s thesis throughout his article is that “Poe suggests not only that equality frustrates ambition, but also that democratic ideals, once internalized, can turn one’s conscience into an elaborate mechanism of self-torture” (101). Peyser sees Wilson as an individual fleeing from equality, while his double embodies the democratic hostility toward nonconformity. In “WW,” Poe is commenting on how “democracy at one stroke turns every citizen into a potential competitor and makes the individual democrat declare war on his own desires—if, that is, they are at odds with the will of the majority” (Peyser 103). Peyser’s article and Britt’s article together really interested me in this politicized reading of “WW.”

            The third article that I will use for this research post I did not like very much at all. It is “Who's Master in the House of Poe? A Reading of ‘William Wilson’” by Thomas Joswick (1988), and it is a very very long reading. This article plods along through twenty-eight pages of single-spaced type. It is way too long for its topic, in my opinion. Joswick’s main thesis is that “WW” is “a cautionary tale about recognizing the differences between the appearances and the realities of mastery” (226). He says Poe utilizes this concept on many levels, including on the level of tricking the reader into believing they have mastered his deceptively simple story. I suppose I would fall into Joswick’s category of the tricked reader, given my first reactions to “WW.” Joswick later narrows his thesis to these questions: “what if Poe’s story is really about how a reader’s linguistic mastery of ethical tales such as this one signifies his own ethical dilemma? What if Wilson’s failure, in some perverse way, is the figure for the reader’s failure?” (227). Joswick’s long article meanders through Wilson’s struggle and his personal failure, and then hops to a parallel reading of St. Paul’s letter to the Romans. Joswick ultimately concludes that perhaps we can never master “WW.” That is a fine enough conclusion, but I think Joswick took way too much time to build it throughout his unapproachably long article.

            However, Joswick’s article makes a nice connection with the last article I will discuss, one by Ruth Sullivan entitled “William Wilson’s Double” (1976). Sullivan, too, deals with the idea that Poe could be tricking his readers in “WW,” and I enjoyed her take on it much better than I did Joswick’s. First of all, I was interested in Sullivan’s article immediately because she admits, like I do, that “WW” is strangely boring compared to the rest of Poe’s work. Sullivan describes “WW” as “a puzzling tale,” and says that it is “a rather dull, formulaic story without ambiguities” over which she has to “stifle a yawn” (253). Then Sullivan changes direction and argues that “WW” is actually very interesting, and makes it seem so to me, too, because “the narrator is not who he seems” (253). Sullivan explains that many scholars assume that in the battle scene at the end of “WW,” the narrator kills his conscience represented by his double, the other William Wilson. Sullivan’s thesis is that this common assumption is faulty, and her argument is to me very fascinating: “But can William Wilson have killed his superego [conscience]? Where, then, does the self-condemnation come from? A moral sense and conviction of wrongdoing can come only from some form of the superego. Clearly, William Wilson cannot have killed his conscience-double; equally clearly some trompe-l’oeil occurs at the climax when William Wilson claims the superego murder” (254). Sullivan then goes on to explain the many clues she sees Poe placing throughout “WW” to lead us to believe that it is in fact the conscience masquerading as the licentious William Wilson who is narrating the story. She makes several points, but the one that I found most interesting is her explanation of the tone of “WW.” Sullivan describes the tone of the story as extremely “moralistic; further, the condemnations William Wilson 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 scrupulous effort to assign cause to his later infamy” (254). Nothing we see William Wilson do merits the murder-suicide confusion at the end of the story, and so perhaps the severity of the tone can be attributed to this trick that the narrator is actually the conscience of William Wilson who survived the final confrontation. Similar to Joswick, Sullivan discusses this trickery that Poe plays on the readers and concludes that “the device of misleading the reader into believing that the sinful William Wilson is the narrator, Poe […] permits a tyrannical superego to run rampant” (257). At closing, Sullivan admits that “WW” “is more ambiguous, more complex than it appears” (263), and after all my research for this post I feel like I am ready to admit that point too.

            After spending time with all my research material for this post, I really have become interested in some of these approaches to Poe’s “William Wilson.” I feel vindicated, too, that I found someone else who felt the level of boredom and confusion that I did on my initial impression of the story. I think the political analyses of “WW” were very interesting and especially Britt’s article was very educational. Sullivan’s article really excited my attention more than the others, though. I do not think I will continue in this area for my next research post, however, because as I mentioned above, there were not very many articles that interested me. As of this moment, I plan to research Washington Irving and the Dutch American literary tradition that he participated in for my next post.

Works Cited

Britt, Theron. “The Common Property of the Mob: Democracy and Identity in Poe’s ‘William Wilson’.” Mississippi Quarterly; Spring 95, Vol. 48. 198-210.

Joswick, Thomas. “Who’s Master in the House of Poe? A Reading of ‘William Wilson’.” Wayne State University Press: Criticism, Vol. 30, No. 2 (spring, 1988). 225-251.

Peyser, Thomas. “Poe’s ‘William Wilson’ and the Nightmare of Equality.” The Explicator, Vol. 68, No. 2, 2010. 101–03.

Sullivan, Ruth. “William Wilson’s Double.” Boston University: Studies in Romanticism, Vol. 15, No. 2, Psychoanalysis and Romanticism (Spring,1976). 253-263.