The Double in Nineteenth-Century Fiction John Herdman EDINBURGH STUDIES IN CULTURE AND SOCIETY General Editors: John Orr and Colin Nicholson John Herdman THE DOUBLE IN NINETEENTH-CENTURY FICTION David McCrone and Brian Elliott PROPERTY AND POWER IN A CITY: The Sociological Significance of Landlordism John Orr TRAGICOMEDY AND CONTEMPORARY CULTURE: Play and Performance from Beckett to Shepard (Second Edition) John Orr TRAGIC DRAMA ANO MODERN SOCIETY: A Sociology of Dramatic Form from 1880 to the Present John Orr TRAGIC REALISM AND MODERN SOCIETY: The Passionate Political in the Modern Novel Stanley Raffel PLEASURE, VALUE AND FRIENDSHIP IN HABERMAS AND POST-MODERNISM Series Standing Order If you would like to receive future titles in this series as they are published, you can make use of our standing order facility. To place a standing order please contact your bookseller or, in case of difficulty, write to us at the address below with your name and address and the name of the series. Please state with which title you wish to begin your ~tanding order. (If you live outside the UK we may not have the rights for your area, in which case we will forward your order to the publisher concerned.) Standing Order Service, MacmilIan Distribution Ltd, Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire, RG212XS, England. This page intentionally left blank The Double in Nineteenth-Century Fiction John Herdman © John Herdman 1990 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 33-4 Alfred Place, London WClE 7DP. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. First published 1990 Published by THE MACMILLAN PRESS LTD Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 2XS and London Companies and representatives throughout the world British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Herdman, John, 1941- The double in nineteenth-century fiction - (Edinburgh studies in culture and society). 1. English literature 1800-1945. Characters. Multiple personalities ~ Critical studies I. Title II. Series 801'.92 ISBN ~3-4902~X Printed and bound in Great Britain by Biddies Ltd, Guildford and King's Lynn 8765432 02 01 00 99 98 97 96 For Arthur Sale Teacher and friend Je est un autre Rimbaud This page intentionally left blank Contents Preface ix 1 The Psychological and Theological Background 1 2 The Emergence and Development of the Double Theme 11 3 Terror, Pursuit and Shadows 21 The Gothic Romance 21 William Godwin and Charles Brockden Brown 30 Chamisso and Andersen 41 4 E. T. A. Hoffmann 47 'The Sandman' 48 The Devil's Elixirs 54 5 James Hogg 69 6 Edgar Allan Poe 88 7 The Russian Double 99 Gogol, and Dostoevsky's The Double 99 The Later Dostoevsky 112 8 The Double in Decline 127 R. L. Stevenson 127 Oscar Wilde 137 Kipling, Maupassant and Chekhov 143 9 Into Psychology 153 Select Bibliography 169 Index 171 vii This page intentionally left blank Preface The genesis of this study lies in the personal interest in - or, better, haunting by - the idea of the double which has been mine since childhood. This seems to have begun when, at the age of about eight, I listened on the wireless to a story about a man who is pursued by the footsteps of an invisible being: eventually he comes to believe that he has succeeded in excluding it from his room, perhaps killed it, only to find that it is still with him. The details are now hazy in my memory and I cannot identify the tale - possibly it was a dramatisation of Maupassant's story 'The Horla' - but the terror with which it inspired me is still vivid. Perhaps about the same time I learned of the folk belief that to see one's double presages an early death. Two or three years later, at school, I watched as a line of a dozen or more boys followed a friend of mine, imitating in unison, or as near to it as could be managed, his every word and gesture; and I experienced vicariously the horror of the reproduction of one's own personality, which is at the same time its loss. Much later I discovered that I was quite a good mimic, and enjoyed becoming through mimicry the double of another, and simultaneously I became deeply interested in the aesthetic status of mimesis in art. Then I read James Hogg's The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner, and later E. T. A. Hoffmann's The Devil's Elixirs, and myself wrote a short novel that was intended at once as a respectful pastiche of these classic tales of the double, and as a modest attempt to make a new use of the genre. Some years later again I had a series of dreams which involved violent struggles between identical twins, and became fascinated by the psychological dimension of the double and by Jung's concept of the shadow. Finally I made a study of dualism in orthodox Christianity and in early and medieval heresy, and became vividly aware of the religious provenance of the literary double. When the idea of the present book was suggested to me by one of the co-editors of this series, I was aware that certain aspects of the subject had had a fair amount of previous attention. In 1949 Ralph Tymms published a pioneering study, Doubles in Literary Psychology; as its title indicates, this work is centred on the psychology of the double, and it is also heavily weighted towards ix