Double+Personality+in+Frankenstein

doppelgänger
A mirroring or duality of a character's persona, the concept of the doppelgänger refers to the twin, shadow double, demon double, and split personality, all common characterizations in world folklore. Dating back to playwright Plautus in Republican Rome and his separated twins in //Menaechmi// (186 BCE ) and to possession by a dybbuk in Jewish Kabbalism, the concept of paired characters evolved into a psychological study of duality in a single person. The term //doppelgänger// derives from the German "double goer" or "double walker," a complex characterization that novelist Jean Paul Richter coined in //Siebenkäs// (1796), a novel depicting a bisected persona. The story was the beginning of a subset of gothic psychological fiction in which characters gaze inward at warring dichotomies through shadowscapes, look-alikes, sexual doubles, mirror images, portraits and statues, and dreams and nightmares. Literary models of the doppelgänger flourished in German fantasy with the tales and novels of the Prussian horror specialist E. T. A. Hoffmann, author of the gothic horror thriller //Die Elixiere des Teufels// (//The Devil's Elixir//, 1815–16) and in the short gothic story "Die Doppelgänger" (1821). In England, less obvious examples of the double permeate gothic novels of conflicted personality, the motivating force in the pairing of Catherine Earnshaw's disparate loves in Emily Brontë's //Wuthering Heights// (1847) and in the story of physically identical men of opposite character and disposition who love the same woman in Charles Dickens's classic historical novel //A Tale of Two Cities// (1859), a protest of injustice, prisons, and capital punishment. In the former, as a means of expressing her love for a foundling gypsy boy and for the wild moors that reflect their undisciplined roamings, Catherine asserts, "My love for Heathcliff resembles the eternal rocks beneath—a source of little visible delight, but necessary. . . . I am Heathcliff." In the latter novel, the debauched barrister Sydney Carton redeems himself by supplanting the hero, the husband and father Charles Darnay, and by riding the fateful tumbrel through jeering Paris mobs to the guillotine. The doppelgänger motif typically depicts a double who is both duplicate and antithesis of the original, as is the case with Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre and Bertha Rochester, William Godwin's Caleb Williams and the stalker Falkland, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley's Victor Frankenstein and Frankenstein 's monster, the female patient and the phantasmagoric image in the wall design in Charlotte Perkins Gilman's "The Yellow Wallpaper" (1892), the ship's captain and the stowaway in Joseph Conrad's "The Secret Sharer" (1912), and the slave and the rescuer in Octavia Butler's //Kindred// (1979). In mystery stories and crime novels, the pairing of opposites, similar to the ancient Egyptian alliance of a human with a //ka// or spiritual double, usually pits a normal character against a demonic alter ego or a mysterious harbinger of death. The former example invigorates the wrathful Nathan Slaughter in Robert Montgomery Bird's //Nick of the Woods//; //or, The Jibbenainosay: A Tale of Kentucky// (1837) and Mark Twain's //Pudd'nhead Wilson// (1894) and dooms Robert Wringhim, the tool of Satan in James Hogg's //The Memoirs and Confession of a Justified Sinner// (1824). Wringhim feels so enveloped by Gil-Martin, the embodiment of Satan, that he remarks, "I feel wedded to you so closely that I feel as if I were the same person. Our essences are one, our bodies and spirits being united." The latter form of the double fuels Edgar Allan Poe's macabre tale "The Fall of the House of Usher" (1839), in which Madeline Usher's escape from premature burial in the family crypt results in the death of her twin brother Roderick Usher, whom the author hints is also her lover. The appearance of a phantom self also controls psychological fiction—Poe's "William Wilson" (1839), an autobiographical tale of a man who stalks and overpowers his double during carnival season in Venice; the overpowering of the self by a wraith in Fyodor Dostoyevsky's //Dvoynik// (//The Double//, 1846); the fierce good-versus-evil struggle in Robert Louis Stevenson's //Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde// (1886); Frisian poet and novelist Theodor Storm's depiction of the doomed ex-convict in //Ein Doppelgänger// (A double-goer, 1887); and Oscar Wilde's regret-filled novel //The Picture of Dorian Gray// (1891), the story of a doomed sybarite who witnesses his decline in a portrait. American gothic produced a unique twist on the motif of the double with examinations of white and mixed-race children in the antebellum South. A dramatic example, George Washington Cable's colonial plantation saga //The Grandissimes// (1880), injects the themes of social class and miscegenation into a confrontation between the Creole and mulatto sons of a powerful Louisiana Delta landowner. The novel elucidates the dilemma of mirror-image brothers who share names—Honoré Grandissime the Creole and Honoré Grandissime the free man of color, the former destined to inherit all and the latter doomed to frustration and violence. Cable heightens the melodrama of failed ambitions and near-suicide by depicting a murder, flight to France, and the quadroon's drowning after he leaps from the brig //Américain// in a symbolic abandonment of his alter ego and an unloving motherland. The 20th century offered more heavily nuanced versions of the doppelgänger motif. American novelist Henry James created a subtle form of duality in the yearnings of Spencer Brydon, the protagonist of "The Jolly Corner" (1908), a suspenseful tale published in //English Review//. The story depicts a man obsessed with stalking his alter ego through the dark passages of a house he inherited in New York City. A confrontation with the monstrous phantasm gives Brydon a chance to study himself. Critics view Brydon's double identity from two perspectives—as a psychological reclamation of self and as a tentative gesture toward homoeroticism in a straitlaced American male. A significant contribution to Female gothic is Quebec author Anne Hébert's //Kamouraska// (1970), a tale of the duality of murderer Elisabeth Rolland. The novel was translated into English and filmed in 1973 by Claude Jutra.
 * Also known as:** double
 * From:** //Encyclopedia of Gothic Literature//.

[[image:http://www.fofweb.com/Lit/images/icon_furtherinfo.gif caption="Further Information"]] Further Information
Brontë, Emily. //Wuthering Heights//. New York: New American Library, 1959.

Herdman, John. //The Double in Nineteenth-Century Fiction//. New York: Macmillan Press, 1990.

Hogg, James. //The Memoirs and Confession of a Justified Sinner//. New York: W. W. Norton, 1970.

Ivkovi, Milaca. "The Double as the 'Unseen' of Culture: Toward a Definition of Doppelgänger," //Linguistics and Literature// 2, no. 7 (2000): 121–128.

Northey, Margot. //The Haunted Wilderness: The Gothic and Grotesque in Canadian Fiction//. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1976.

Webber, Andrew J. //The Doppelgänger: Double Visions in German Literature//. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997.



[[image:http://www.fofweb.com/Lit/images/icon_citation.gif caption="Citation Information"]] Citation Information

 * Text Citation:** Snodgrass, Mary Ellen. "doppelgänger." //Encyclopedia of Gothic Literature//. New York: Facts On File, Inc., 2005. //Bloom's Literary Reference Online//. Facts On File, Inc. http://www.fofweb.com/activelink2.asp?ItemID=WE54&SID=5&iPin= GEGL096&SingleRecord=True (accessed September 4, 2009).

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