Poes 44-Libre PDF

The Wilson Duplex:
Corporatism and the Problem of Singleton Reading in Poe’s

“William Wilson” (or, Why Can’t You See Twins?)
LYNN LANGMADE
I
n June 2003, the Funk Family of Chicago went to China to adopt a baby
girl who had been abandoned outside a textile factory in Yangzhou amid
the buzz of streaming cars only hours after birth. They named her Mia.
In 2004, the Ramirez family of Miami also adopted a baby girl from China
found abandoned outside the same factory in Yangzhou one week later. As it
happened, the Ramirez family also named their baby Mia. But it wasn’t until
August 2006 when Diana Ramirez placed an advertisement on an international
orphanage Web site about the upcoming birthday party of her three-year-old
daughter that these two families collided. Holly Funk, who just happened to
be surfing the orphanage’s Web site on the day Ms. Ramirez’s advertisement
went up, put two and two together and wrote back: “Diana, I have a Mia as
well and she is almost 3.”1 After emails and photos had been exchanged and
DNA tests completed, Ms. Ramirez and Ms. Funk came to the shocking, yet
inevitable, conclusion that their daughters—Mia and Mia—who lived fourteen
hundred miles apart and over twelve thousand miles from their birth country—
were twin sisters.2 The families quickly arranged a meeting between Mia and
Mia and discovered that, although they had spent the first three years of their
lives apart, the twins shared a remarkable number of personality traits beyond
their identical names and appearance. Such similarity coupled with the twins’
reunion is, according to Mia Funk’s adoptive father, nothing short of a miracle:
“ ‘What are the odds that of all the people in China these two are sisters? What
are the chances of the two of them . . . [finding] each other? It’s amazing.’ ”3 But
more importantly, this case illustrates the way twins, who appear poised to live
their entire lives apart, are often reunited by deceptively simple means, such as
a Web site advertisement—pulled back together by a far more powerful force
than the culture, time, and space separating them.
Though the happy ending to the Mia Twins’ story would have been
unthinkable without the technological advancement of the Internet, it is ac-
tually just a modern installment of a very old tale: twins separated at birth
miraculously reunite by chance or fate and discover eerie similarities. But it’s

C 2012 Washington State University
P O E S T U D I E S , V OL . 45, 2012 5
L Y N N L A N G M A D E
a tale psychologists did not take seriously until T. J. Bouchard published his
groundbreaking Minnesota Study of Twins Reared Apart (MISTRA) in 1990,
which conclusively documented the similarities of real twins who had been
separated at birth.4 The MISTRA study made the Jim Twins (Jim Lewis and
Jim Springer), who were reunited thirty-nine years after being separated at
four weeks, world renowned. The study documented that both men were gifted
in math, struggled with spelling, enjoyed mechanical drawing and carpentry,
had first wives named Linda and second wives named Betty, named their sons
James Allan and their dog Toy. Not too coincidentally, Lewis and Springer
also developed headaches at the same time of day, drove the same color and
model of Chevrolet, chain-smoked Salem cigarettes, bit their fingernails, and
vacationed in the same spot each year.5 Separated twins, as these brothers
demonstrate, may not only reunite quite unexpectedly under bizarre circum-
stances but also lead, inexplicably, “twin” lives.
This archetypical tale of twins reared apart, which has spawned an entire
mythic lore about multiples, is also crucial for delineating a classic problem
in the exegesis of one of Edgar Allan Poe’s most critically acclaimed short
stories, “William Wilson.” Critics, such as Daniel Hoffman, who typically
regard the story as a masterpiece in the genre of the “double,” have almost
universally assumed the story is about a second or “divided self” that “haunts
the protagonist and leads him to insanity.”6 This more generalized reading of
the story begins with D. H. Lawrence’s assumption that the protagonist engages
an internal battle “to kill his own soul,” which ends in a spiritual death.7 Thus
critics who disagree about other points of interpretation are united in their
assumption that WW 2 is the protagonist’s imaginary “double” rather than
a real person.8 One result of this assumption is that the story’s violence is
inevitably read as psychic violence against the self.9 Even more problematic
is the fact that recent criticism has used materialist-based theory to entrench
this orthodox reading, persistently referring to WW 2 as a “double.”10 While
many critics consider the epigraph to be definitive proof that the story is
about the divided self, Jonathan Elmer has convincingly demonstrated why
this epigraph should be read ironically.11 Proffered again and again in slight
variation to the delight of the critical community, this “unavoidable and
entirely uncontroversial thesis”12 has served another subtle function in the
process of cultural signification, which is to foreclose completely on alternative
readings, specifically those antithetical to allegory. Either way, the verdict is in:
with only a few recent exceptions, “critics of ‘William Wilson’ maintain that
there is only one Wilson.”13
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T H E W I L S O N D U P L E X
However, unlike previous scholars who have focused on the Double in

“William Wilson,” I maintain that the eerie story of twins reared apart with
which I opened this discussion is central not only to the plot of “William
Wilson” but also to its primary thematic concerns. For no reading with the
all-too-easy conclusion that WW 2 is an imaginary Double has managed to
resolve the essential ambiguity of the tale: whether there exists one William
Wilson or two. Furthermore, the casual, indeed haphazard, way in which two
identical characters in this text are nearly unanimously denominated imaginary
“Doubles” tells us that literary criticism itself mirrors the essential conflict in
“William Wilson,” a conflict provoked by acute confusion between the real
and the imaginary, the material and the ideal. Fundamentally, the metacritical
discussion of this text illustrates that the conflation of twins and Doubles in
literary praxis has considerable political implications.
In the forthcoming discussion, I examine the metacritical history of
the literary Double and the twin with two goals: first, to distinguish the
two terms as discrete concepts, and second, to recuperate twins as a viable
literary motif in its own right, one capable of resolving a long-standing literary
aporia in “Wilson” scholarship. It is my hope that such an approach will
answer the following questions: How might essential ambiguities in literary
praxis—especially those regarding “William Wilson”—be resolved by properly
identifying twins in literature? What does the invisibility of twins say about the
stories we tell about being “human” or, alternatively, those we tell about pos-
sessing individual identity? And finally, what are the practical consequences of
reducing a class of people to the status of symbol? In other words, what impact
does denying the material existence of certain bodies—certain identities—have
on a discipline, and what can this denial tell us about the politics of literary
practice?
In contrast to the orthodox Double thesis, I offer an equally rigor-
ous, if counterintuitive, reading of “William Wilson” that assumes manifest
replication—twinship—is at work in the narrative precisely because Poe is
interested in staging the confrontation between two material bodies. In par-
ticular, I maintain that Poe deliberately leverages a centuries-old discourse
surrounding the topos of twins separated at birth as an optimal literary de-
vice for staging the hesitation required in a tale of the fantastic, in which
a confrontation with one’s co-twin could conceivably be interpreted as a
supernatural event. “William Wilson” is not a story about the anxiety provoked
by the Double as many have argued, but about the fear that the body, and
perhaps even the Self, has always been multiple.
HISTORY, THEORY, INTERPRETATION 7

Double Vision
[a pathological condition of vision in which a single object appears double

—Random House Unabridged Dictionary]
A
s Juliana de Nooy astutely observes in Twins in Contemporary Litera-
ture and Culture, when twins are mentioned in any general treatise on
the Double in nineteenth-century literature, they are subsumed under
the “broader category of doubles,” which is considered to be the “ ‘central
theme’ of the period.”14 This compulsion to subordinate twins is largely due
to the fact that neither a comprehensive definition nor a rigid taxonomy of the
Double has ever existed. In fact, according to Albert Guerard, a scholar of the
Double, “no term is more loosely used by casual critics of modern literature.”15
Robert Rogers further complicates this taxonomic confusion by widening the
jurisdiction of the Double from character to textual structure itself, stating that
a distinction must be made “between doubling by multiplication and doubling
by division,” in which multiple characters in a story represent a single concept
or in which a unified psychological entity is divided and represented by other
characters in the tale.16 Because the Double has been interpreted to mean
almost any dual—and in some cases even multiple—structure in a text, most
critics agree it has become an outworn literary device “completely detached
from history” 17 that “ceases to carry any literary information.”18
Despite the fact that criticism of the Double is riddled with confusion,
the device’s ever-increasing detachment from history is a result of the premium
scholars of the Double place on hidden, psycho-transcendental concerns with
the Self. This exorbitant value can be traced back to Freud, who theorized
in “The Creative Writer and Daydreaming” (1908) that the literary Double is
essentially a “divided self”: “On the whole the psychological novel no doubt
owes its special character chiefly to the tendency of the modern writer to
split up his ego, by self-observation, into partial egos and consequently to
personify the conflicting currents of his mental life in several heroes.”19 Freud
initiates a whole school of psychoanalytic criticism via “The Creative Writer”
by establishing the trope of the Double as an “ego” that has been divided
and dispersed among several characters in a text. And if the Double arises
out of the manifest tension in the “divided self,” then according to such
scholars of self-division, it necessarily falls to the purview of psychoanalytic
criticism to decipher its secrets.20 The unfortunate result of the psychoanalytic
monopoly of the Double motif is that it privileges the “division” theory of the
8 POE STUDIES
Double at the expense of the “multiplication” theory, giving primacy, as Rogers

maintains, to “latent” rather than “manifest” conceptions in literature.21
Even so, the critical (and metacritical) discussion of the Double that I
have outlined here, in which singleton critics subordinate manifest twins to
latent Doubles, becomes more curious in light of psychological studies that
conclude singletons secretly desire twinship. Prominent Freudian psychoan-
alyst Dorothy Burlingham argues in “The Fantasy of Having a Twin” that
the same emotional situation that produces the “family romance” in which
a child fantasizes about being reunited with lost parents also produces a
frequent fantasy in singletons for a reunion with a lost co-twin: “A common
daydream which in spite of its frequency has received very little attention
to-date is the fantasy of possessing a twin. It is a conscious fantasy, built
up in the latency period as the result of disappointment by the parents in
the oedipus situation, in the child’s search for a partner who will give him
all the attention, love and companionship he desires and who will provide
an escape from loneliness and solitude.”22 Though classical psychoanalytic
theory generally defines fantasy as an unconscious, unfulfillable desire that
is imperfectly repressed and returns in the camouflage of neurosis,23 Freud is
quite emphatic, as Susan Isaacs notes in her foundational study “The Nature
and Function of Phantasy,” that fantasies express “destructive instincts” and
“ ‘hallucinatory wish-fulfillment’ ” via the psychic processes of introjection and
projection.24 In contrast to Freud, preeminent psychoanalyst Maria Torok
deduces that fantasy is both an unconscious source and a conscious symptom of
a problem.25 If Torok’s logic is valid, then what problem is the “hallucinatory
wish-fulfillment” of the twin-fantasy masking?
Freud again helps answer this question. According to Freud, during this
same latency period the family romance produces psychic division when a
fantasist/writer splits “up his ego into partial egos,”26 and energy previously
devoted to dealing with the Oedipus problem is now devoted to developing
the Self, as sexual and aggressive drives are channeled into such socially
accepted forms as repression and sublimation. If the family romance is the
means by which one replaces/substitutes/exchanges the totalitarian regime of
one’s mother and father based on the rejection of oedipal object-cathexes, then
the twin-fantasy—resulting from the same complex that produces the family
romance—is the means by which one promotes the fellowship of one’s Self to
the status of the multiplicity via rejection of the autoerotic cathexis. Moreover,
Burlingham suggests, the only significant difference between the fantasy of
recovering a lost co-twin and the fantasy of recovering lost parents “is the
fact that the love-object is replaced by a being who is like the daydreamer
himself.”27 Consequently, the twin-fantasy is not so much a family romance as

it is a self-romance that provides evidence of a latent psychic crisis, which

results in a genuine psychological complex—“a core pattern of emotions,
memories, perceptions, and wishes organized around a common theme” that
influences behavior.28
However, literary doubling is only a specific manifestation of the more
general phenomenon Freud refers to as Unheimliche (or uncanny), which
is symptomatic of the psychological complex generated by the twin-fantasy.
Though Freud enumerates many experiences that fall under the rubric of
the uncanny, according to Nicholas Royle in his comprehensive study of
the subject, the concept can be distilled to the single phenomenon of the
Double,29 which threatens the corporation of the singleton with its untimely
division: “the repetition of the same facial features, the same characters,
the same destinies, the same misdeeds, even the same names,”30 or what
sociologist Avery Gordon summarizes as “frightening familiarities, animated
doubles . . . involuntary repetitions.”31 While many scholars have endeavored
to illustrate the special relationship between the uncanny and the Double, it
is Freud himself who inadvertently highlights the strange interdependency of
the two terms in a curious story he narrates in “The Uncanny” about his own
confrontation with his “double” on a train: “I jumped up to put him right,
but soon realized to my astonishment that the intruder was my own image,
reflected in the mirror on the connecting door. I can still recall that I found his
appearance thoroughly unpleasant. Hence, instead of being frightened by our
‘doubles’, both Mach and I simply failed to recognize them. Or was the displea-
sure we felt at seeing these unexpected images of ourselves perhaps a vestige
of the archaic reaction to the ‘double’ as something uncanny?”32 But it isn’t
surprising that Freud should perceive a second version of himself in a mirror,
because the illusion of the Double is primarily contrived through technologies
of sight. Whether a mirror, a portrait, or a doll, it is material objects—not
persons—within the literary environment that sustain the illusion of a Double.
Yet Freud’s own pseudo-biographical story in “The Uncanny” informs
us that real people, not just fictional characters, are haunted by objects in the
environment. Just as Freud encountered the involuntary repetition of his Self
as Other precisely because he failed to see himself in the mirror, so too the
uncanny Double is equated with self-deception. Because Freud categorized
all uncanny experiences as arising from either (1) the return of “repressed
infantile complexes, from the castration complex, womb fantasies,” or (2) the
revival of primitive beliefs,33 the Double represents the return of the repressed
romance of the Self in which the longing for what has been lost (Self) returns
in the form of an apparition—a ghost. Indeed, Derrida has not only recognized
the spectral relation of the individual to the Self, but has also maintained in
10 POE STUDIES
Specters of Marx that such spectrality provides the structural foundation for
most of what comprises Western philosophy after Descartes—the Cartesian
cogito is actually a colossal, phantasmagoric self-haunting: “Ego=ghost. There-
fore, ‘I am’ would mean ‘I am haunted’: I am haunted by myself who am.”34
In fact, by adding the controversial epigram to “William Wilson,” Poe signals
his own engagement with the ego’s spectrality: “What say of it? what say of
CONSCIENCE grim, / That spectre in my path?” (PT, 337).
But when we examine the epigram in relation to the story’s larger
thematic ambitions, we must not lose sight of the fact that specters are
fundamentally material phenomena, as is evident from Marx’s first usage of
the term ideology in The German Ideology (1845), in which he likens human
brains to houses haunted by “phantoms” that are repressions of material life
processes: “The phantoms formed in the human brain are also, necessarily,
sublimates of their material life-process, which is empirically verifiable and
bound to material premises.”35 Gordon concurs, postulating that any ghostly
matter is “itself a historical materialism,” whereby haunting is automatically
tied to “historical and social effects.”36 Taking such “times” and “history” of
the specter “into consideration,” Derrida classifies The German Ideology “as the
inexhaustible gloss on . . . ghosts” and the entire corpus of Marx’s work as a
veritable “spectrology.”37
Accordingly, the fundamental haunting embodied in Marx’s work, par-
ticularly the mysticism of commodity fetishism in Capital, registers as an effect
of a trauma that becomes a failed attempt in the “work” that Derrida sees as
mourning: “a mourning in fact and by right interminable . . . between intro-
jection and incorporation.”38 Though Freud originally defined introjection in
The Ego and the Id as a defense mechanism brought on by the loss of an object-
cathexis that facilitates mourning by allowing the ego to give up a lost object,39
editor and psychoanalytic scholar Nicholas Rand suggests that Maria Torok
and Nicolas Abraham redefine introjection to be the “unhindered activity
of perpetual self-creation” and the enrichment of psychic “self-fashioning”
and “self-awareness.”40 According to this revised definition, in the event of
failed introjection, the lost object (Double/phantom) that continually haunts
by its very repetition results in the ego literally incorporating the objectal loss.
For our purposes here, the demetaphorization (taking literally what is meant
metaphorically) and objectivation (pretending suffering is not an injury to the
subject), which results in incorporation, ensures that the figurative loss of
Self is translated literally and quite materially into the bodily corporation of
the twin, and that the singleton subject will remain oblivious to the shock of
the psychic trauma of this loss. For as Torok and Abraham astutely observe,
incorporation is “the refusal to acknowledge the full import of the loss, a loss

that, if recognized as such, would effectively transform us.”41 While Torok and
Abraham explain that fantasy can lose its verbalizing function, becoming “a
form of desperate magic” that tricks the sufferer “into acting as if some actual
and devastating trauma had not really occurred,”42 I would argue that the twin-
fantasy violates oedipal law, becoming a terrorizing witchcraft that threatens
the fiction of singleton individuation. Similar to, but distinct from, Abraham’s
theory of the fantôme, the twin-fantasy as a fantasy of non-introjection haunts
the subject via an anthropophagic, Freudian incorporation of the lost twin-
self and begins to speak as Other—Double—from within the subject’s own
mouth.43
Critical then to the uncanny is not merely the “fact” of the deception
that a Self is repeating but the fact, according to Derrida, that such “sights”
have everything to do with how one refuses to see: “The specter, as its name
indicates, is the frequency of a certain visibility. But the visibility of the
invisible. And visibility, by its essence, is not seen . . . . The specter is also,
among other things, what one imagines, what one thinks one sees and which
one projects—on an imaginary screen where there is nothing to see.”44 The
uncanny experience, by which unsubstantiated Doubles are pathologically
projected onto inanimate material objects in the environment, is the absolute
demetaphorization. The uncanny experience is a haunting of the most exact
kind by ghosts who in some strange way challenge us to see. Because fantasy,
according to Torok and Abraham, results from “the denial of a gap,”45 twins,
as subjects of the twin-fantasy, become liminal beings that provide events for
particular ways of unknowing in singleton society—that is, they are constantly
articulating themselves by forcing singletons to recalibrate their vision for
absences rather than presences when searching the visible world. The once-
familiar Self now alienated by repression morphs into a specter (a Double),
which inevitably returns to haunt us. And if, as these theorists maintain, the
ghost is a legitimate social figure who signifies what is absent and/or lost, then
the Double is also a manifestation of an unconscious wish for a second self:
a co-twin. In this sense, as objects for singletons’ autoerotic cathexis, twins
necessarily produce material effects, becoming fantômes—delegitimized social
figures—in a world of singletons haunted by repressed fantasies of their second
“self.” The uncanny experience is then not so much a garden variety haunting
by a ghost as it is a confrontation with our own fantôme—our own death—and
our own suicide.
But the twin-fantasy that results in this psychological framework has
a complex relationship to the scene of reading and writing, which is duly
noted by Freud in “The Creative Writer and Daydreaming” when he theorizes
that fantasy is consciously written by a “little fantasist,”46 and by Rand, who
12 POE STUDIES
confirms that fantasies, no less than dreams, are “readable entities.”47 Yet if we
think about the origin of the uncanny experience as the distortion of a viable
fantasy for a lost co-twin in the autoerotic complex of self-romance, we will do
well to remember that the fantasist/writer always writes his or her own twin-
fantasy for the thrill of reading it. As such, the twin-fantasy generates some
very uncomfortable questions about the ideological conditions that “enable”
singleton reading and writing.
These questions become evident in the protracted literary debate over
the Double in which twin characters who have been manifestly added to a
text are unseen by blind singleton readers/critics, interpreted as one entity, not
two. In literary praxis, a singleton reader encounters a choice between manifest
twinship or latent self-division when making an interpretative decision about
the onto-phenomenology of a character in a narrative, but looks through or
past the twinship, never registering that a choice has been presented. Such
preterition, such “overlooking,” connotes not only an omission by passing
over but also the gap or absence left by voiding, a process of cancellation. The
systemic critical blindness that cannot see the choice between various forms
of corporative organization is evidence of an ideology—a spectropolitics—in
which critics as readers and readers as writers unwittingly fall prey to certain
assumptions about what constitutes legitimate personhood and who qualifies
as an authorized subject for literary interpretation. Such critical blindness
assumes, in other words, that the singleton is the basic political unit by
naturalizing subjectivity as the socio-political domain of the singleton. Indeed,
such a praxis, what I deem literary corporatism, is likely the reason most
scholars have erroneously categorized twins in narrative as a subspecies of
the Double. But I wish to suggest that if the “family romance,” which places
individuals into different kinship structures than those they were born into,
goes “to the heart of Western fiction,”48 then we will need to rethink why so
many literary critics simply cannot see twins.
Certainly, the fact that critics have trouble seeing twins is inextricably
bound up in the politics of difference, given that the Double bears little resem-
blance to the twin when examined in any depth. Yet it is this very “difference”
that has been exploited by critics to bind twins illegitimately to Doubles
in the interest of singleton consolidation. For a long Western philosophical
tradition rooted in a pathological anxiety over identity undergirds the refusal
to see twins in literary-critical praxis. In fact, in his demolition derby on the
metaphysics of presence, Dissemination, Derrida designates the Double as the
necessary supplement of human identity, whereby involuntary repetition is
added to identity to supply it with a fundamental unity that it lacks. The
additive or supplement that posits non-truth actually serves to reinforce truth

by opening up difference through “the possibility of the double, the copy,

the imitation, the simulacrum.” Repetitions are non-truths because “what is”
essentially gets lost when it “multiplies itself through . . . phantasms, simu-
lacra.”49 In passages such as these, Derrida illustrates that ghosts and copies
through their multiplicative onto-phenomenology exist as reified phenomena
only to provide identity to that which is stable, singular, identifiable, so that all
forms of involuntary repetition are stripped of their uniqueness and collapsed
under the homogenizing signifier “Double.” In due course, Derrida finds West-
ern philosophy indebted to the Double for its indentured servitude as necessary
supplement, which it must perpetually exclude to reinforce difference as the
foundation of its metaphysics.
More important for our purposes here is Derrida’s later deconstructive
metacritique of Lacan’s tri-logical reading of Poe’s “The Purloined Letter.”
In “The Purveyor of Truth,” Derrida surrenders to his own curious form of
logic—his own “peculiar blindness”—by substituting for Lacan’s “triangle” a
bi-logical “labyrinth of doubles without originals.”50 It is telling that Derrida’s
critique of the metaphysics of presence is inextricably tied to Poe’s work
and that Derrida needs Poe’s “doubles,” no less than Lacan, to justify his
assumptions. Accordingly Derrida unconsciously performs a semiotic slippage
in a brief but illuminating moment of rhetorical signification at the end of
“Purveyor,” in which he likens Dupin’s duplicity, not simply to doubling, but
to actual twinning: “a blow signed by a brother or confrere, a twin.”51 In the
hallucinogenic play of signification, Derrida moves syntagmatically, and quite
presumptively, from the Double to the twin and in so doing identifies the twin
as the necessary supplement of the Double, which through its difference is
always providing a “lack” or “absence” that confirms the presence of essence
for the singleton’s missing unity of Self (identity). The Double cannot be
defined-named-identified without twin (juxt)opposition; consequently, with-
out the twin, the Double remains an incognizable construct. What’s more,
Derrida, who has conjured the Double to support his arguments in a multitude
of texts and has even based his own critical praxis on the innovation of the
“Double Session,” has given the Double an open invitation to revisit him,
becoming haunted by his own voluntary repetition, a textual regurgitation of
his own anthropophagic crisis of incorporation. While I concur with Derrida’s
seminal essay “Freud and the Scene of Writing” that the “deconstruction of
logocentrism is not a psychoanalysis of philosophy,”52 I argue in contrast that
it is through the confession we call deconstruction that philosophy came to
psychoanalyze Derrida, exhuming unsuccessful repression and its concomi-
tant suppression in criticism as a viable psychological framework. For Der-
rida’s phenotext that writes a scathing critique of the politics of metaphysics
14 POE STUDIES
produces a genotext that tells of an extended search for his lost co-twin in
the haystack of “texts” that comprise Western philosophy. Such a genotext
disseminates an acutely invisible metaphysics of presence, which is first and
foremost sustained not on speech (“logos”), or patriarchy (“law of the father”),
or ethnocentrism (“white mythology”), but on corporatism (“spectrology”).
More importantly, Derrida’s unsanctioned genotext demonstrates that even
the “revolutionary” poetics of poststructuralist praxis are constantly narrating
its own flight from meaning by remaining blind to, and complicit in, the
dissemination(s) of literary corporatism.
To summarize, I have described a progressive quadripartite psycho-
logical framework that (1) begins as an unconscious loss of the autoerotic
object-cathexis (Self); (2) becomes symptomized as a conscious fantasy for a
co-twin during latency (incorporation); (3) later transforms into the return
of the repressed via the more generalized experience of uncanny haunting
and its specific projection of the Double (lost co-twin); and (4) becomes
institutionalized in the discursive dissemination of the ideology of literary
corporatism, which blinds otherwise astute critics to twin visibility. However,
it might be more practical simply to think of this framework as “The Double
Complex” or a duplex, from the Latin defined as “consisting of two together,”
“forming a pair,” “composed or compounded of two parts or elements”—all of
which connote society’s desire to name and control its anxiety over limitless
dissemination.53 Ultimately, this duplex begins as the childhood twin-fantasy
and then eventually exhibits itself in the systemic blindness of literary critics
who persist in seeing Double or Nothing, or a self-consolidating literary vio-
lence that effaces the identity of twins and continually places their ontological
viability as a discrete corporative organization in jeopardy.
Double Take
[a rapid or surprised second look, either literal or figurative, at a person

or situation whose significance had not been completely grasped at first
—Random House Unabridged Dictionary]
I
t should come as no surprise, then, that criticism of “William Wilson”
falls right into this Double or Nothing trap. As I noted at the beginning
of this discussion, critical consensus regarding “William Wilson” assumes
that the narrator of the story (WW 1 ) is imagining the second William Wilson
(WW 2 ) and that the manifestation of this second body is merely allegory for

psychic fission. The discursive domination of this allegorical reading provokes

an inevitable question: why is it privileged over literal readings when more-
than-sufficient evidence exists within the story, other twin tales by Poe, bi-
ography, history, and even biology to throw serious doubt on it? In fact, all
one needs to do to unsettle the notion that WW 2 has no objective basis in
the storyworld (a mental projection) is to look at two critical paragraphs that
bookend the text: (1) the narrator’s initial proleptic comment that he survives
the narrative’s event; and (2) the narrator’s revelation that two material, yet
identical, cloaks exist (PT, 337, 353). But a real barrier to seeing twins in
the tale, even for critics of “William Wilson” who do not preclude the literal
reading and its material bodies, is what the narrator calls the constant “twofold
repetition” in the story (PT, 344). Though we now know that Poe’s foster
father, John Allan, actually did business with two discrete individuals named
“William Wilson,”54 commonness of the name and/or sheer coincidence does
not account for the persistence with which these two indistinguishable bodies
come into contact throughout the tale. For even Tsvetan Todorov, who is
sympathetic to a literal reading, acknowledges in The Fantastic that, while
many of the events can be comprehended without resorting to allegory, one
should not assume that this kind of coincidental “contact” would constitute the
kind of “haunting” that it does in “Wilson”: “this double appear[s], as though
by magic, at every important juncture of William Wilson’s life.” But even if
we could explain the events of the story, Todorov suggests, there is simply no
way to explain the “utterly improbable resemblance of the two men,”55 which
would allow us to move “William Wilson” from the rubric of the fantastic to
the uncanny.56
But there is an explanation for the involuntary repetition in the tale, both
the recurring collisions and the resemblance between the two figures, and Poe
actually gives us that explanation in a carefully coded, but nonetheless discrete,
sentence early in the tale when the narrator begins analyzing the uncanny
likeness between himself and WW 2 . After elucidating that WW 2 engages in the
same conduct and possesses the same name and even date of birth, the narrator
theorizes: “I have before said, or should have said, that Wilson was not, in the
most remote degree, connected with my family. But assuredly if we had been
brothers we must have been twins” (PT, 342; emphasis original). Most likely
critics have not taken the phrase “must have been twins” seriously because a
disqualifying conditional phrase, “if we had been brothers,” precedes it. The
narrator is justifiably making kinship a requirement for twinship, and if kin-
ship cannot be confirmed, then the duplicate Self cannot be a twin, but merely
a Double. What better way is there to illustrate an eerie likeness between two
seemingly unrelated individuals than to suggest that if it weren’t for certain
16 POE STUDIES
conditions, two individuals could be twins? But what if the narrator, who has
already demonstrated astonishing feats of unreliability, either from volition
or ignorance, is himself also an unreliable source for disproving kinship in
the tale? In other words, reading “we must have been twins” as an objection
against a “twin reading” fails to take into account that not all twins are aware
they are twins. For the field of Twin Studies begins, not only as a study of
twins reared apart via Sir Francis Galton’s seminal work, The History of Twins,
As a Criterion of the Relative Powers of Nature and Nurture (1875), but also with
the assumption that many of these twins remained unaware of their kinship
status.57 More importantly, Bouchard’s well-known MISTRA study showed
conclusively in 1978 that twins who are reared apart often reunite by meeting
each other by chance.58 Further studies have also verified that “sets [of twins]
most separated also are among the most similar [in looks] and personality.”59
It is with this in mind that I take a counterintuitive step in the history of
“Wilson” scholarship and dare to do an honest “double take” on a literary
situation whose significance has not first been grasped; that is, to rethink
decades of sedimented readings of this text, which have been grounded on
a singleton vision of the world, and reposition it from the perspective of the
multiple—to imagine how persons who come into this world as multiple might
interpret this tale. Based on the careful analysis of studies of twins reared
apart, the only rational explanation that accounts for the excessive involuntary
repetition in the tale is that WW 1 and WW 2 are twins who were separated
at birth. The advantage of reading the text literally and taking for granted
that two similar but material bodies are inhabiting the same local universe
in “William Wilson” is that portions of the story that once appeared almost
extraneous reveal themselves to be lucid and significant to the narrative’s larger
thematic aims. Take, for example, this passage: “I discovered . . . something
which first startled, and then deeply interested me, by bringing to mind dim
visions of my earliest infancy—wild, confused and thronging memories of a
time when memory herself was yet unborn. . . . I could with difficulty shake off
the belief of my having been acquainted with the being who stood before me,
at some epoch very long ago—some point of the past even infinitely remote”
(PT, 346). Here, the reader witnesses the narrator explaining that despite the
fact that he has never met WW 2 prior to school, he still has the nagging
sensation of having seen WW 2 before that first encounter, some time in his
“infancy” when memory “was yet unborn.” The only valid explanation for
the narrator’s belief that he was acquainted with WW 2 prior to school is that
he was acquainted with him in the cradle, a time in life predating language
and, hence, memory. But this could only be explained, given their striking
resemblance, if the narrator and WW 2 were twins who were separated at birth.

In fact, the feeling the narrator describes is so commonly expressed by identical

twins when reunited after a lifetime of separation that it borders on cliché.
And Poe chose this scenario precisely because twins-reared-apart, as the many
treatments of this topos attest, is an optimal literary device for staging the
hesitation required in a tale of the fantastic.
But it would be foolish to argue that the story is about twins, just as
much as it would be foolish to argue that the story is about the divided Self.
For the terror produced in the story, as Todorov and Ware suggest, arises
from the fact that Poe provides no conclusive evidence that it is one or the
other within the text itself. I wish to propose, however, that this terror is
produced not simply because the reader doesn’t know whether the antagonist
is a real antagonist or imaginary. Critics have consistently erred in their efforts
to account for the curious events in the story because they have assumed that
these two ideas are mutually exclusive. That is, they assume criticism must
make a choice between a symbolic (latent) and literal (material) reading of
the tale. I argue that to make such a choice is to do a serious disservice to
the deliberate structures that bring off the tale’s dramatic effect. Poe himself
endorses choosing not to choose in an 1842 review of Hawthorne’s Twice-Told
Tales when he compares one of Hawthorne’s stories to “Wilson” and suggests
that WW 2 is “the phantom or reduplication,” and later in the same essay
calls the figure “a wraith or duplication of the beholder” (ER, 576–77). It is
important to note here the persistent linkage of the word phantom with the
word duplicate. Poe himself either wasn’t sure whether the figure of his creation
was an imaginary ghost or real duplicate, or did not want his reader to know
whether it was imaginary or real. Either way, Poe’s own analysis of the tale
gives credence to the idea that the terror produced for the protagonist and,
thereby, the reader exists precisely because the figure is defined by being both.
The reunion of separated identical twins is the only possible situation in which
an uncanny event can produce an effect associated with the marvelous: when
a twin’s altercation with his/her co-twin can appear to be a supernatural event.
Thus the story “William Wilson,” or more accurately the metacritical
dialogue regarding the story, becomes an optimal text in the United States’
literary tradition with which to examine the literary hegemony of the “Double.”
For the metacritical spectropolitics of seeing Double or Nothing, what I call
“The Wilson Duplex,” articulates a theory of duplication by reenacting the
classic gesture of literary corporatism. When analyzed from within the hege-
mony of literary corporatism, any form of involuntary repetition is instantly
translated into a Double, which is really a divided singleton, whose presence
within the narrative signifies psychopathology. Literary multiples are never
what they appear to be at face value but are always pure pretext, marginalized
18 POE STUDIES
as disembodied, spectral presences. In this sense, the multiple is not exactly,

as Poe describes it, a “phantom,” but rather a mental aberration—a fantôme.
As such, the category of the Double is a self-consolidating literary violence
engendered by singletons to individuate the singleton more clearly. Twins
don’t call themselves “Doubles” and don’t think of themselves as “Double”;
singletons call twins “Doubles.” Double is just another word singletons use
to demarcate a zone of terror brought on by the limitless dissemination they
euphemistically refer to as “uncanny.” It is yet one more word to identify that
which is not unique, special, or one-of-a-kind. If so, the study of twins cannot
be a study of the Double. And if it is not a study of the Double, then what is it?
Double or Nothing
[a bet in gambling where a player who owes money has the debt doubled or
canceled depending on the outcome of the next play]
I
n part one of this essay, I challenged the validity of the orthodox reading of
“William Wilson” as the story of a Double (divided singleton). In part two,
I offered an alternative to this orthodox reading, speculating that material
duplication, not symbolic doubling, is the story’s real thematic concern. For
the remainder of this argument, I hope to answer the following question: What
could Poe possibly gain from staging a confrontation between two identical,
but seemingly unrelated, persons in “William Wilson”? The most critically
rich place to begin to answer this question is the quotation with which Poe
concludes “The Purloined Letter,” a story many critics consider to be another
classic “double” tale: “Un dessein si funeste, S’il n’est digne d’Atrée, est digne
de Thyeste” [If such a sinister design isn’t worthy of Atreus, it is worthy of
Thyestes]. This frequently discussed quotation comes from Crébillon’s Atrée
et Thyeste (1707),60 a play that begins as a battle for primogeniture between
the mythological Greek twins Atreus and Thyestes and ends with one twin
murdering—indeed, devouring—his co-twin’s sons.61 Poe’s explicit reference
to this play signals his interest in what I call the literature of “gemicide,”
derived from the Latin root “gem,” as in “geminus” (“twin-born, twin”) and
“gemino” (“to double”).62 Poe gestures to both the popular Romulean tradition
of gemicidal literature, in which twins battle each other, often to the death, for
dominion over state (territory and people), and the more recent diluted version
in which twins battle over estate (an extensive manor and its property). It is a
literature, in other words, preoccupied with the conflict that arises when the

birth of twins makes it impossible to determine primogeniture—that is, who

will inherit the right to title.
Certainly many critics have been quick to point to the issue of title in the
story, specifically the “name” in “William Wilson,” to underpin a “Double”
reading of the tale. For example, the reader learns at the outset of the story
that the narrator is not using his real name: “In this narrative I have therefore
designated myself as William Wilson,—a fictitious title not very dissimilar to
the real” (PT, 341; emphasis added). With this simple utterance, which is
a partial confession of imposture, the narrator explicitly identifies naming
as a function of personal identity to be a major thematic concern of the
tale by positing identity as a negative proposition: ∼William Wilson. This
partial confession is the first of two apparatuses Poe inserts to foster narrative
unreliability and critical ambiguity. However, unlike other critics who have
suggested that the name “William Wilson” foregrounds the primeval argument
between father and son for symbolic “title”—“Will-I-am” versus “Will-son”—I
argue that the story is primarily concerned with a literal “title” to property and
that this has everything to do with the precarious position of primogeniture
statutes in the nineteenth-century United States.
In The Origins of English Individualism, Alan Macfarlane notably demon-
strates the link between individualism and primogeniture, arguing that the
institution of primogeniture was the decisive factor in forming a purely English
individualism.63 Similarly, historian Lawrence Frederick Kohl has shown that
a “divisive political conflict” erupted over the exact nature of the U.S. society
being erected upon individualism during the Jacksonian era: “This political
conflict may well be called the ‘politics of individualism.’ ”64 Though Alexis de
Tocqueville introduced the neologism individualism in Democracy in America
to describe a shift in emphasis from corporate to individual structures of
society,65 Kohl maintains that in an individualistic society, individuals don’t
actually thrive in isolation but instead depend on complex social networks
based on wealth that allow them to stand above or apart from one another,
regulating how individuals “relate to each other.”66
Yet if wealth regulates social relations, how did Jacksonian individual-
ism, which marks the near-apotheosis of the individual in U.S. political and
civil discourse, erupt precisely at the moment when U.S. jurisprudence defini-
tively abolished the institution of primogeniture? Legal historian Lawrence
Friedman explains that, in all but Rhode Island, primogeniture, or the En-
glish system of partible descent, was nonexistent in New England. Only the
Southern states, notably Virginia, Maryland, and the Carolinas, still had pri-
mogeniture statutes on the books prior to the American Revolution, and those
were quickly wiped away: “Gradually, the rules of inheritance of land were
20 POE STUDIES
assimilated to the rule of inheritance of money and goods. The statute makers
swept feudal tenures—most of them were not living law in this country—clean
off the books.”67 Both Jefferson and Paine railed against the institution because
it destroyed liberty and equality for posterity. In fact, one of Jefferson’s first
acts after signing the Declaration of Independence was to draft a bill in the
Virginia legislature to prevent the development of a permanent aristocracy,
or “Patrician order” as he called it: “To annul this privilege, and instead of
an aristocracy of wealth, of more harm and danger, than benefit, to society,
to make an opening for the aristocracy of virtue and talent . . . was deemed
essential to a well-ordered republic.”68
Not only was the system of primogeniture abolished primarily to pre-
vent the formation of a landed aristocracy, but U.S. jurisprudence, in its
zeal to create a Jeffersonian “aristocracy of virtue and talent,” underwent a
tectonic shift in its treatment of property rights. In “Inheritance in Amer-
ican Legal Thought,” Ronald Chester clarifies that, while Supreme Court
Justice John Marshall believed the English brought certain natural rights,
including property rights, to America, “these property rights were to be
specifically protected if they made use of one’s acquisitive skills, but if they
merely represented the fruits of inheritance, they were afforded less protec-
tion; thus, institutions such as primogeniture could be abolished summarily
by the new nation, whereas the right to make use of the fruits of one’s
labor could not be so easily curtailed.”69 Though early U.S. jurisprudence
remained closely tied to its English predecessor, during the nineteenth cen-
tury U.S. jurists gradually broke with the English tradition by making a
qualitative distinction between property earned by an individual’s own skills
and property that was simply inherited. A simple concept in theory, but in
Tocqueville’s view, eliminating primogeniture had substantial social effects on
the U.S. public:
Its work of destruction is almost over in the United States . . . . The

law of entail was modified . . . to leave virtually unaffected the free
circulation of possessions. The first generation passed away; the
estates began to be parceled up. This process increased in speed as
time went by. Nowadays, after a lapse of little more than sixty years,
society has already quite an altered appearance: the families of the
great land owners have been swallowed up by the masses . . . . The
last traces of hereditary rank and distinction have gone; the law of
inheritance has reduced all men to one level.
Though this abrogation divided great landed estates and in so doing increased
the distribution of land holdings, it also had an unintended side effect,

according to Tocqueville, of making it increasingly more difficult for landed

elites to secure hereditary fortunes, forcing more and more individuals to
struggle to earn a living: “But wealth circulates with an astonishing speed
and experience shows that rarely do two succeeding generations benefit from
its favors.”70 Historian Karen Halttunen confirms Tocqueville’s assessment:
“within the system of partible inheritance, average farm holdings underwent
a steady rate of decline,” resulting in many farmers’ sons becoming “landless
agricultural laborers, craftsmen, or small home manufacturers.”71 From the
premise that inheritance laws reduced landed states, Tocqueville concludes
that, if literal property no longer represents riches, then “wealth will of
necessity derive from [different] sources.”72 But what other elements could
constitute a person’s wealth if not literal property? I submit that in the Age of
Individualism, the Self must constitute wealth.
While the discourse of Jacksonian individualism was based on notions of
equality, evinced by the abolition of primogeniture, it logically became fixated
on the loss of one’s freedom resulting from inequality. As John Locke had
famously declared in chapter 5 of his Second Treatise of Civil Government,
people are first individuals, and as such have inalienable property in their
person, making them not only “proprietors” of their person but also “masters”
of themselves.73 Locke’s theory laid the groundwork for what political theorist
C. B. Macpherson later identified as “possessive individualism,” which was
pervasive by the advent of the nineteenth century and which codified what
many now take for granted: that an individual’s identity depends on the fact
that he possesses inalienable property in his “person” or “Self,” which only
he, himself, can own. According to this theory, only some may actualize
individuality by accumulating property, and many will do so at the expense
of others.74
As such, systems of slavery that forced individuals to submit their will
to an external authority called into question the assumption of the indi-
vidual’s freedom. In The Gold Standard and the Logic of Naturalism, Walter
Benn Michaels, who engages directly with Macpherson and thereby Locke,
explains that in order for property to be property “it must be alienable.”
And if it is alienable, then a possible barrier exists between what is valued
(the owning Self) and what is feared (the owned Self), creating a terror of
dispossession/possession that may be reflected in gothic conventions but is
nonetheless erected on the horrors of capitalism: “If the masochist’s desire to
be owned is perverse, it is nevertheless a perversion made possible only by the
bourgeois identification of the Self as property. Without that, no truly modern
slavery is possible, since only if you identify freedom with self-ownership can
being owned by someone else seem an intrinsic abridgment of that freedom.”75
22 POE STUDIES
Thus, as Kohl illustrates, the more individualism is emphasized, the more

insecurity about the status of that individual’s autonomy will increase because
any Self that can be owned is ultimately a Self that can be sold or stolen: “In
an age that celebrated individualism, the Jacksonian feared enslavement to the
will of others. References to chains, bonds, and manacles were abundant in the
editorials of Democratic newspapers.”76
If, as Terence Whalen maintains, Poe understood “how material condi-
tions could determine” the form of literature,77 and if his works, as Jonathan
Elmer argues, are “profoundly responsive to social reality,”78 then “William
Wilson” appears most interested in “fleshing out” the socioeconomic impact
of primogeniture on life in the United States. Though “William Wilson” may
not explicitly thematize a familial crisis brought on by primogeniture, it does
foreground a crisis precipitated by the abolition of this institution in the U.S. I
offer two instances from Poe’s own biography in defense of my thesis. First,
Poe’s relationship with both the Southern Literary Messenger and Burton’s
Gentleman’s Magazine placed him amid a heated transatlantic debate on the
subject.79 In 1838, shortly before Poe became coeditor, Burton’s published “A
Chapter on Aristocracy,” in which the following passage on primogeniture
appeared:
Those who look for distinctions from the long-drawn inheritance

of their fathers, begin now to feel that their places in society are
occupied by others, whose own qualifications have been received
as a safer guarantee than the long spun and time frittered mantle
of a once honored name; and while they find, in the abolition of
primogeniture, the destruction of the family equipage and estate,
they behold, in the enterprise and industry of some new made man
beside them, the eclipse that drives them into an obscurity that
not even their own vanity, feeding on itself, can give a show of
radiance.
This “new made man,” who eclipses the fallen aristocrat and forces him to
feed off his own vanity, will become the basis of a new social elite by virtue
of possessing a singular mark of “distinction”: an “aristocracy of MIND”
equivalent to the new kind of Tocquevillian “riches” detached from material
property.80
My second piece of biographical evidence is the frequently overlooked
fact that the abolition of primogeniture actually played a role in Poe’s ability
to inherit—or failure to inherit—wealth from his foster father. According to
biographer James Hutchisson, despite the fact that Poe was not John Allan’s
legitimate son, Poe believed he had a right or claim to Allan’s legacy, a thought

that would have been inconceivable prior to the abolition of primogeniture

in Virginia after the Revolution. Allan came into an inheritance valued at
$750,000 dollars from William Galt, whom many dubbed “the wealthiest man
in Virginia”; Galt’s bequest included “plantations in several counties, grist
and sawmills, stock in the Bank of Virginia, and several hundred slaves.”
Although Allan did not receive his inheritance until Poe was sixteen, the
fortune nevertheless allowed the family to live the life of “the landed gentry” or
as aristocrats with “overflowing coffers.” We know that the issue of inheritance
was of primary concern to Poe because he lied on his application to West Point,
declaring not only that Allan had adopted him but that he was also Allan’s
heir.81 Biographer Kenneth Silverman offers even more compelling evidence
that Poe lied about being disinherited by Allan: Poe “also told his cousin
William Poe not that Allan had cut him out but that ‘No will was found among
his papers.’ ”82 According to America’s revision of the laws of partible descent,
each time Allan produced another heir, he reduced the partition of the estate
and more widely distributed its wealth. This unfortunate situation for Poe was
complicated even further by the birth of Allan’s illegitimate twin sons, who
eventually inherited portions of the estate, whereas Poe was left with nothing.83
If names were once synonymous with great estates, it stands to reason that the
addition of more children to one’s estate would further divide and diminish
inheritable portions of that estate.
Though Poe was never adopted, he thought of himself as a first son
and rightful heir to Allan’s fortune. As such, Poe went from being an heir
to one of the richest estates in Virginia and a member of the leisure class to
a professional writer eking out a living. With the revised partible estate, the
family name—“Allan”—lost its power to stand for wealth and was diluted into
mass property. Furthermore, because Poe never received even a penny from
the Allan estate, he felt the impact of primogeniture divesture more than any
of Allan’s children, and this grievance was a direct response to the birth of
Poe’s twin foster brothers. Generally speaking, the more his “once honored
name” fell into the common property of the masses,84 the poorer was the fallen
aristocrat who was unlucky enough to be born in the U.S. rather than England.
The fact that Poe used the surname “Allan” in England but later used
“Poe” in the U.S. demonstrates his preoccupation with the national politics
of naming. In communications to Allan, Poe threatened to use his own ac-
quisitive skill to make a “name” for himself: “ ‘If you determine to abandon
me . . . Neglected—I will be doubly [ambi]tious, & the world shall hear of the
son you thought unworthy of your notice.’ ” (In fact, as Poe pleaded with his
father, he explicitly equated disinheritance with his name: “My father do not
throw me aside as degraded . . . . I will be an honor to your name.”)85 The fact
24 POE STUDIES
that Poe later re-appended the surname “Poe” to his formal signature, “Edgar
Allan,” after his disinheritance in many ways solidified his desire to recreate
wealth in the form of his own personal “acquisitive skills,” a kind of wealth to
which U.S. jurisprudence gave ipso facto more protection than to inheritance.
Rather than reading the name William Wilson exclusively as a dialectic
between father and son, as other critics have done, I suggest that we read it as
a declaration of exclusive right to a title—“Will, I am” “Only Son of Will”—
and, given that the narrator disparages the “twofold repetition” of his name
(PT, 344) and refers to WW 2 as his “namesake” at least five times, that we
recognize the story’s primary concern with the abolition of primogeniture. It is
a story, in other words, that thematizes what happens when the right to inherit
the estate only by virtue of being first, singular, or eldest—or, in the case of
“Wilson,” of being one, not two—is no longer a right. The narrator explains
on more than one occasion that, despite his common name, he possesses “a
noble descent” (PT, 341) and explicitly argues that he owes his own “security”
to “the masterly air of the copyist” who imbues WW 1 with “the full spirit of
his original” (PT, 345; emphasis added), equating economic livelihood with
individuality or being an “original,” not a gradated “copy.” What if possessing
the name means possessing not “the common property of the mob” (PT, 345,
341), that is, landed wealth, which has been diluted due to the abolition of
primogeniture, but as Tocqueville suggests, a new kind of property that cannot
be owned without first possessing one’s Self? What if the failure to possess self-
identity, to individuate oneself, in this story has not only acute psychological
consequences but also severe material effects?
This theory accrues even greater credence with the recognition that
WW 1 ’s economic livelihood depends on not only his individuality but also
his capacity to deploy his “acquisitive skills.” Quite simply, WW 1 survives
by virtue of becoming a professional gambler: “It could hardly be credited,
however, that I had, even here, so utterly fallen from the gentlemanly estate,
as to seek acquaintance with the vilest arts of the gambler by profession, and,
having become an adept in his despicable science, to practise it habitually as a
means of increasing my already enormous income at the expense of the weak-
minded among my fellow collegians” (PT, 349–51). Certainly these narrative
events are disturbingly analogous to Poe’s own biography, for gambling was
an occupation he chose for economic survival while at college, one that
negatively affected his right to inherit a portion of Allan’s estate. Similarly,
WW 2 ’s interference at various gambling events makes it impossible for WW 1
to sustain his economic subsistence, as I will show.
The narrator’s fall from “gentlemanly estate” (PT, 349) causes him to
seek refuge in activities that Victorian economist Thomas Corbet had by 1841

already identified as “speculation.” According to Corbet’s treatise on political

economy, An Inquiry into the Causes and Modes of the Wealth of Individuals,
gambling is distinguished from trade because trade consists of exchanging
different products that will provide use-value to each trader, whereas gambling
“consists in a mere exchange of money for money.”86 But Marx, who takes
up Corbet’s discussion of gambling in Capital, is careful to point out that the
exchange of money for money is actually “the characteristic form of circu-
lation” in capitalistic exchange,87 and he further argues, drawing on banker
James Gilbart’s words, “ ‘that it is impossible to say at what precise point trade
ends and speculation begins.’ ”88 In this sense, for Marx, gambling, no less than
trade, strikes at the heart of capitalism’s mystical exchange.
In volume 3 of Capital, regarding the division of profit into interest,
Marx attempts to explain more accurately the mysterious effect of money
traded for money. If “gentlemanly estate” is capital, then any title of ownership
is what Marx calls “fictitious capital” or “capitalization,” a claim or title to
property rights on a commodity that is as yet unsold. This ownership title
essentially posits a “title to value” or “to the surplus-value which this capital is
to realize,” and it is mystical precisely because profit is made by trading in fi-
nancial claims based on signs, such as paper, that are completely detached from
tangible assets, that is, referents. Marx is very clear that such ownership “titles”
are “real capital” beyond even the capital or “claim to which they may give
title,” and become legitimate commodities in their own right, which reflect a
typically ghostly differential between market and nominal value without there
being any change in the actual capital. In fact, according to Marx, any profit
(surplus-value) or loss that is accrued from fluctuations in the price of the
ownership title at the time of sale is eventually “the result of gambling, which
now appears in place of labour as the original source of capital ownership, as
well as taking the place of brute force.”89 Buying, trading and brokering of
one’s ownership title—gambling—is the primordial basis of the relations of
production that usurps labor’s heretofore privileged role as the source of all
capital ownership.
With this in mind, we will want to examine the nature of the relationship
between the narrator’s so-called “fictitious title” (PT, 341) in “William Wilson”
and Marx’s concept of “fictitious capital.”90 To begin with, the narrator, who
has already declared “weak-minded” men to be his prey, deliberately targets
a man (Glendinning) of great “riches” “as a fitting subject for [his] skill”
(PT, 351, 350). Thus, the wealth the narrator amasses is a product not of
inheritance by virtue of a “once honored name” but of his distinctive labor-
power, which he sells in a market under his fictitious title. In this way,
the narrator’s acquisitive skills serve to separate him—individuate him—from
26 POE STUDIES
others in the relations of production that produce the title to property in

gambling. Accordingly, the title to estate, the name “William Wilson,” is also
“fictitious capital,” as it represents the surplus-value and capitalization gained
in the commodity of labor-power that he has not yet sold. Because the narrator
targets those of weak character, surplus-value is also a phantasmic function
of the Self that has been transformed into a commodity in the relations of
production that take place between sole proprietors. For the store of Self is
gained by exploiting those who have no Self.
Yet what becomes apparent as WW 2 keeps dogging WW 1 across Europe
at one gambling event after another is that WW 2 collides with WW 1 only at
those specific moments when he is entering into the relations of production
with a view to increasing the market capitalization in his title. But these
uncanny visitations are a natural by-product, as Derrida maintains, of spec-
ulators’ unhealthy preoccupation with specters.91 In this light, the narrator’s
disturbing encounters with his second Self during market exchange more
adequately reflect this involuntary repetition as an economic haunting. The
narrator complains, in one example, that WW 2 keeps interfering with his
gambling, and this interference is a spectral effect: “yet with how spectral
an officiousness, stepped he in between me and my ambition” (PT, 354). In
sentences such as these, Poe eerily captures the fetish character of commodities
in which persons—particularly identical persons—are converted into ghosts
via the mysterious differential in the commodity exchange of selves.
An example may serve to outline this point further. The climax of
“William Wilson” involves the narrator’s attempt to employ his signature skills
via the speculative strategy Corbet calls Double or Nothing, which consists of
“doubling the preceding stake every time he loses.”92 The narrator’s goal is to
defraud a man of his personal wealth: “In a very short period he [Glendinning]
had become my debtor to a large amount, when, having taken a long draught
of port, he did precisely what I had been coolly anticipating—he proposed
to double our already extravagant stakes” (PT, 351). In this passage, we
witness the narrator’s acquisitive skill converting the pure exchange-value
of his ownership title (promissory note) into credit with an eye toward re-
marketing his opponent’s capitalized debt, which has been converted via the
market transaction of gambling into a commodity that can be sold. As a result,
gambling creates a unique mode of production, in which all participants in
the exchange own the means of production and may sell either their own
debt (promissory note) or credit (debt + capitalization). Yet behind this new
democratic exchange lies a sinister reality, which can be demonstrated via a
hypothetical scenario.

Beginning with an initial $5 wager and subsequent loss: This loss can be
converted into pure credit whose principal through nine progressive losses of a
doubled wager will be transformed into a debt of approximately $2,560. In this
hypothetical scenario, the $5 gambling loss possesses a market capitalization of
$2,555 dollars for those who would trade in the commodity of debt. Given that
Poe began to feud with John Allan over $2,000 dollars worth of gambling debts
he had accrued at the University of Virginia, it is reasonable to conclude that
Poe likely fell victim to such speculative economics. Poe’s $2,000 debt, which
is equivalent to over $38,000 dollars worth of debt in today’s economy, had the
initial catastrophic effect of forcing him to resign from the university, and the
resulting ignominy caused him the further injury of loss of his inheritance.93 As
Marx notes, speculative strategies, particularly Double or Nothing, are always
simultaneously a source of extreme “sudden enrichment” for one participant
in the exchange and economic impoverishment for the other, demonstrating
with utter clarity the economic violence at the heart of capitalistic exchange.94
Indeed, Marx believed that “fictitious capital” has a steroid-like effect on the
natural fetish character of commodities because it further obscures the forces
of production (labor) behind capital. In “William Wilson,” Glendinning is the
unfortunate victim of this sinister effect, whose economic destruction is so
totalizing that despite a crowded room, he produces an “ejaculation evincing
utter despair” (PT, 351). Glendinning’s despair demonstrates that WW 1 has
grown wealthy by quite literally capitalizing on debt that has become pure
exchange-value—on phantasmagoria itself—whose magic has been effectuated
by the narrator, who is metonymically equated with a “fiend” (PT, 351).
As this capitalization represents surplus-value in money-to-money mar-
ket exchange, “William Wilson” also eloquently illustrates the ephemeral
quality of exchange-value, particularly how it allows the producer selling credit
and the consumer buying debt to exchange roles depending on their skills. Not
only does WW 2 ’s constant intervention into WW 1 ’s gaming make the story’s
tenuous role-playing even more precarious, but it is likely the reason, both
structurally and thematically, that Poe chose to stage a confrontation between
two material bodies rather than imaginary Doubles. For instance, just as the
narrator is about to collect his winnings, WW 2 enters the gambling den with a
goal of tarnishing the narrator’s reputation by calling him a cheat. By defaming
the narrator’s skills, WW 2 effectively diminishes his reputation (name) and
thus “steals” his “fictitious title.” With the mere presence of the second Self,
who has “so disastrously exposed” the narrator (PT, 341, 353), Glendinning
is instantaneously rescued from the precipice of economic ruin. The exposure
of WW 1 ’s theft is an exposure of the immaterial loss of Self that voids any
material gain. If the narrator is not the proprietor of his Self, then he cannot
28 POE STUDIES
possibly enter into economic exchange in the era of possessive individualism.

Eventually, this “exposure” produces the terror that will result in WW 2 ’s death,
showing that the simultaneous presence of two material, identical bodies with
the same “fictitious title” can have a disastrous effect on the political economy
of the Self.
Double Exposure
[the repeated exposure of a photographic plate or film to light, often

producing ghost images —Oxford Dictionary]
I
wish to close this discussion by circling back to the quotation from
Crébillon’s gemicidal play, Atrée et Thyeste, that Poe appended to “The
Purloined Letter” because, in the long history of gemicidal literature, the
occasion of the attempted murder of a twin by his co-twin for property is
highly correlated with and predicated on the plot device of twins who have
been reared apart. For example, the disturbingly popular Valentine and Orson
(1510), an early modern English prose romance in which twins reared apart
stumble upon each other in the woods and attempt to kill each other, had
received at least thirty-three treatments by the beginning of the nineteenth
century and was frequently referenced by Poe’s contemporaries.95 As I have
already suggested, the struggle for property in this story, to which WW 1
refers as “gentlemanly estate” (PT, 349), as well as the numerous references
to competition and rivalry in “William Wilson,” give a reader ample cause
to place the story within this tradition. I would like to press this argument
further and propose that this story does not simply reenact the profane myth
of gemicidal rivalry but actually constitutes a dramatic renovation of it by
illustrating why agonism over material property is inevitably preceded by
agonism over intellectual property. Theoretically, reunited twins ignorant of
their kinship status must combat each other to establish Selfhood—to regain
title to the Self—before they can determine dominion of “estate.”
We know this with some certainty because the spectropolitics of pos-
sessive individualism have determined that any fight to regain title to Self
must be waged outside the conscience with other individuals. For being a
Self-proprietor means not just obtaining the Will to property but remaining
free from the “will” of others. The text registers its material engagement with
this discrete social reality when the narrator expresses resentment at WW 2 ’s
“frequent officious interference” with his “will” (PT, 345). The narrator cannot

force WW 2 to bend to his will because WW 2 , who exists in the story’s fact
domain, has his own body with a “will” of its own. As such, the battle of
“wills” that Poe foregrounds in “Wilson” is not simply an issue of “self-
mastery,” as one might see in the problem of a divided self; rather, it is an
issue of overproduction—of surplus-value itself. It is the problem of what
happens when bodies and their correlate “selves” become unruly and begin
doing the unthinkable: multiplying. If bodies, especially inheritable bodies,
begin multiplying, then they begin partitioning the estate, especially the estate
that is legally protected by “one’s acquisitive skills.”
However, I maintain that Poe’s modification to the gemicidal topos
with this story is not only more comprehensive but also more sophisticated.
“William Wilson” does not simply modernize this topos; it actually reinvents
it as metafiction. At root, “William Wilson” is a self-reflexive study of the perils
of corporatism. Poe quite deliberately provides his reader with a situation in
which a twin murders his co-twin, not because he must possess the property of
“gentlemanly estate” (PT, 349), but because he cannot fathom the possibility
that the entity who revisits him is actually a real person, not a ghost. In
this manner, the battle for the body, the container of selfhood, is played out
through the dialectics of corporative in/visibility, which is best exemplified
when WW 1 begins to gaze on WW 2 while he sleeps:
Gasping for breath, I lowered the lamp in still nearer proximity to

the face. Were these—these the lineaments of William Wilson? I
saw, indeed, that they were his, but I shook as with a fit of the
ague in fancying they were not. What was there about them to
confound me in this manner? I gazed;—while my brain reeled with a
multitude of incoherent thoughts. Not thus he appeared—assuredly
not thus—in the vivacity of his waking hours . . . . Was it, in truth,
within the bounds of human possibility that what I now saw was
the result, merely, of the habitual practice of this sarcastic imitation?
(PT, 347)
In this scene, Poe undermines all the classic techniques used to sustain the kind
of hesitation—between a natural and supernatural explanation of events—
in doubling narratives that results in the fantastic by decelerating the plot,
decreasing distance, illuminating the scene, and allowing his narrator to gaze
at length at his “Double,” which has no antecedent in the literature of the
Double. Rather, this scene has the rhetorical effect of objectifying—indeed,
materializing—WW 2 by imbuing WW 1 with a newfound narratorial authority.
In fact, this scene may be the single moment of clarity in the entire text.
The narrator shines the light on his phantom, but instead of disappearing,
30 POE STUDIES
the apparition grows heavy with matter and remains stuck like other corporeal
bodies, trapped under, and even curiously receptive to, the narrator’s empirical
gaze.
The narrator’s reified gaze at his co-twin is cast from the ironic subject
position of a multiple reared as a singleton. Visually impaired, the narrator’s
gaze plays out the politics of spectrology, in which singleton gazing becomes a
complicated exercise in metaphysics or scanning the world for absences rather
than presences. For the narrator looks at the material “lineaments” of WW 2
and asks, “What was there . . . ?” and “what are his objects?”(PT, 347, 354). In-
deed, the narrator claims to grow dizzy from the sheer “sameness” between the
two, precipitating onto-phenomenological speculation: Who owns/possesses
this configuration? Under this gaze, pieces of the reified twin body, like
lapidary gems, become currency in the market transaction of Self-possession.
Yet the narrator ultimately resolves his panic over self-sameness by resorting
to contradiction, asserting within a single sentence that WW 2 ’s features “were
his” and “were not.” The narrator uses the word “fancy,” contracted from the
Latin phantasia, in at least eight different places in the narrative to describe his
relationship with WW 2 . Only by optically scrutinizing his own duplication can
WW 1 begin to write his own fantasy by “fancying” that WW 2 doesn’t possess
his features (PT, 347). The narrator’s preteritive gaze has begun writing his
fantasy for the thrill of reading it: he looks at his co-twin but only sees Double.
Yet it is this very fantasy that reveals, as Torok’s work attests, a conscious
symptom of a problem: a terror that the narrator has already lost his Self. More
precisely, in a world saturated with the discourse of possessive individualism,
the narrator has become unable to discern whether he is in fact fettered or
free. WW 1 soon perceives WW 2 ’s existence to be an “inscrutable tyranny” and
questions if his “natural rights of self-agency” are being “insultingly denied!”
by WW 2 (PT, 354). However, unlike in other gemicidal mythemes, Poe’s
narrator kills his co-twin not simply from ignorance (or awareness) of his
kinship status but from his repression of that status. For admitting he has a
co-twin would be tantamount to admitting he has no Self and worse—that he
has never had one. And if he has no Self, no property that he can call his own,
WW 1 is not simply a commoner in the new “aristocracy of MIND” who has to
struggle for his economic livelihood, but he is a slave—a dispossessed being
who has to fight tooth and nail for his very existence; the narrator opines,
“I would submit no longer to be enslaved.” Accordingly, WW 1 ’s struggle
for existence plays out as the spectropolitics of surplus (re)production, the
Derridean “non-truth” of infinitely disseminated selves, the hall of mirrors
that makes it impossible to know “what there is.” In short, murder becomes

the only way WW 1 can overcome his own absence created by “the power of a
multitude” that he feels “within” (PT, 355, 356).
Poe brings the story of gemicidal rivalry to its conclusion during the
opprobrious scene in which WW 1 engages WW 2 in a duel, appears to mortally
wound WW 2, and then possibly kills himself. The twins, WW 1 and WW 2 ,
who have been reared apart and still cannot fathom that they are two and
not one, end the cycle of rivalry with an inevitable gemicide. The story, so
Poe seems to argue, has nowhere else to go but here. To regain possession
of the fictitious capital, his “title” to the Self—“William Wilson”—one of the
unruly bodies must be eliminated. As the narrator stares at his mirror image
in “agonies of . . . dissolution,” he fantasizes for a moment that he has seen
himself. When the dying WW 2 claims to “yield” and says “In me didst thou
exist” (PT, 356, 357), this expression, which is usually interpreted figuratively,
can be interpreted quite literally. As identical twins, WW 1 and WW 2 cannot
exist as a multiplicity without the other. Their collective identity has been
eradicated under the relentless discursive pressure of possessive individualism,
which denies the integrity of any corporative configuration that contests the
mythology of Self.
Thus, in a radical revision to an ancient story originally conceived to
sacralize empire building, the twin body is murdered, but the murder has
no juridico-political value or social utility as an act—just the nickel-and-
dime economics of bourgeois theft. As Poe recasts Romulean discourse—
the primordial battle for sovereign estate—as the life-threatening economy
of capitalistic exchange, the narrator and WW 2 fight an obscure and tepid
battle with no witnesses, no chroniclers, no officiates. To take possession
of this property, to own this title, murder must be mistaken for suicide. No
one can actually see the co-twin die, only a phantasmic Self. Indubitably,
in the Age of Individualism, a twin looks at his own mirror image and in a
paroxysm of conscious self-deception calls that image, not “self” or even rival,
but gothic apparition because he cannot see that which has become invisible by
its very visibility: “am I not now dying a victim to the horror and the mystery
of the wildest of all sublunary visions?” The narrator’s “vision,” which lies
somewhere between sight and fantasy and between blindness and prophecy,
has succeeded in killing him. It is a murderous vision—a melancholic vision
of such loss, an absence of such magnitude that the full recognition of it
would shatter everything. So bodies and their “matters” go on colliding with
crepuscular vision, conjuring ghosts of the narrator’s Self that begin to speak
nothing but “gray shadow . . . and phantasmagoric pains” (PT, 337–38, 341).
Like a double exposure, in which two ghostly images appear from a single
plate, the two identical images of WW 1 and WW 2 haunt each other, being
32 POE STUDIES
neither wholly discrete nor mingled, neither one nor two, and neither original
nor copy. The Wilson Duplex has left WW 1 and WW 2 brutally exposed,
violently visible—indeed, naked in their gémelléité [twinness]. Through such
spectral exposure, the “self” becomes haunted by its Self that can never be
itself. And this is how longings for lost co-twins return from the dark vault
of repression, where twins, who have been separated, begin life paradoxically
as de-twinned singletons fantasizing about being a twin. For when such twins
later gaze on that which has returned to them, they inexorably recoil from the
sight of that which undoes them. This is how fantômes are made real. This
is how, in the name of the self-willed individual, all fantômes come to have
selves—transmuting the sacred bond of twinship into a relentless horror.
UC Davis
Notes
1
Russell Working, “Separated at Birth, United by Chance,” Chicago Tribune
on the Web, 20 August 2006, http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/chi-
0608200381aug20,1,5394589.story.
2
Jacqui Goddard, “Mamma Mia! Twins Are Reunited 12,000 Miles from Home,”
Times Online, 22 August 2006, http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/us and
americas/article615898.ece.
3
Richard Luscombe, “Separated and Abandoned in China, Twin Girls Find
Each Other in America,” 21 August 2006, http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2006/
aug/22/topstories3.china.
4
T. J. Bouchard et al., “Sources of Human Psychological Differences: The Min-
nesota Study of Twins Reared Apart,” Science 250, no. 4978 (1990): 223–28.
5
Nancy L. Segal, Entwined Lives: Twins and What They Tell Us About Human
Behavior (New York: Plume, 2000), 118.
6
Daniel Hoffman, Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe (Garden City: Doubleday, 1972),
212.
7
D. H. Lawrence, “Edgar Allan Poe,” in Critical Essays on Edgar Allan Poe, ed. Eric
W. Carlson (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1987), 100.
8
Arthur H. Quinn, in his monumental biography of Poe, claims that the story
attempts to study the “effects of conscience upon a man,” whereas Patrick F. Quinn
later denies WW 2 any basis in material reality: “the double is a mental projection and
only that.” See Quinn, Edgar Allan Poe: A Critical Biography (Baltimore: The Johns
Hopkins Univ. Press, 1998), 286; and Quinn, The French Face of Edgar Poe (Carbondale:
Southern Illinois Univ. Press, 1957), 221.
9
While critics disagree as to whether this “double” is indicative of the soul or
the conscience, virtually all concur with Robert Coskren that the story portrays “the
gradual disintegration of a self-divided psyche,” or the problem, according to Ottavio
Casale, of the dematerialization of a unified Self. See Coskren, “ ‘William Wilson’ and the

Disintegration of Self,” Studies in Short Fiction 12, no.2 (1975): 155; and Casale, “The
Dematerialization of William Wilson: Poe’s Use of Cumulative Allegory,” South Carolina
Review 11, no. 1 (1978): 70–79. And despite recent attempts to revaluate Poe and his
works, neither time nor new literary-critical technologies have had a significant effect
on the death grip of this allegorical reading. Indeed, David Reynolds’s revisionary study,
Beneath the American Renaissance: The Subversive Imagination in the Age of Emerson and
Melville (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1989), persists in validating this tried-and-
true reading by matter-of-factly identifying WW 2 as a “double” who does not exist
outside “Wilson’s consciousness” and the murder as “self-murder,” which occurs as a
result of the “warring impulses in his own soul” (235).
10
New Historicist readings proffered by both Julia Stern and Theron Britt do
emphasize that “William Wilson” is acutely invested in the material world’s impact on
identity, but they also go to great pains to subsume the larger diachronic implications to
transhistorical concerns of the singular conscience. In particular, Stern reads the story
as a “fable of conscience” in which the “the psychology of the split self” is put into
service for a larger political allegory of sectional strife. Stern and Britt both relentlessly
refer to WW 2 as a “double,” claim “William Wilson” is a story of “doubling,” and
go so far as to denominate almost every structure in the narrative as double: setting,
character, and scene alike. See Stern, “Double Talk: The Rhetoric of the Whisper in
Poe’s ‘William Wilson,’ ” ESQ: A Journal of the American Renaissance 40 (1994): 185–
218; and Britt, “The Common Property of the Mob: Democracy and Identity in Poe’s
‘William Wilson,’ ” Mississippi Quarterly 48, no. 2 (1995): 197–210. More recently,
Russ Castronovo examines the story, through a Marxist theoretical lens, as “a theory
of mass culture” and a “commentary on democracy and reproduction,” but he still
cannot seem to escape conventional assumptions that “William Wilson” is a “story of
doubling and revenge” (187), which ends in “self-annihilation” (188). See Castronovo,
“Death to the American Renaissance: History, Heidegger, Poe,” in “Reexamining the
American Renaissance,” special issue of ESQ: A Journal of the American Renaissance 49,
nos. 1–3 (2003): 179–92. See also Lawrence Berkove, “Poe, Twain, and the Nature of
Conscience,” ESQ: A Journal of the American Renaissance 46 (2000): 239–53.
11
Jonathan Elmer, “Poe, Plagiarism, and the Prescriptive Right of the Mob,” in
Discovering Difference: Contemporary Essays in American Culture, ed. Christoph K.
Lohmann (Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 1993), 66.
12
Jonathan Elmer, Reading at the Social Limit: Affect, Mass Culture, and Edgar Allan
Poe (Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 1995), 71.
13
Tracy Ware, “The Two Stories of ‘William Wilson,’ ” Studies in Short Fiction 26,
no. 1 (1989): 43. Ware attests in her meta-analysis of the story that these general
assumptions about the text would not have gained such tenacious critical currency if
they were not assumptions most conducive to allegory. Ware notes that whether critics
are suggesting the story’s conclusion is an allegory of the narrator’s suicide (James W.
Gargano) or of a spiritual death (Thomas F. Walsh) or of destruction of the superego
(Robert Rogers), virtually all agree that this purported “self-divided psyche” (Coskren)
is functioning at an allegorical level (45).
34 POE STUDIES
14
Juliana de Nooy, Twins in Contemporary Literature and Culture: Look Twice (New
York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 11.
15
Albert J. Guerard, introduction to “The Perspectives of the Novel,” special issue
of Daedalus 92 (1963): 204.
16
Robert Rogers, The Psychoanalytic Study of the Double in Literature (Detroit:
Wayne State Univ. Press, 1970), 5.
17
Benjamin Eric Daffron, Romantic Doubles: Sex and Sympathy in British Gothic
Literature, 1790–1830 (New York: AMS Press, 2002), 4.
18
Paul Coates, The Double and the Other: Identity as Ideology in Post-Romantic Fiction
(London: Macmillan, 1988), 35.
19
Sigmund Freud, “The Creative Writer and Daydreaming,” in The Uncanny, ed.
Adam Phillips, trans. David McClintock (1908; New York: Penguin Classics, 2003), 31.
20
In “The Double as Incomplete Self: Toward a Definition of Doppelganger,” in
Fearful Symmetry: Doubles and Doubling in Literature and Film, ed. Eugene J. Crook
(Tallahassee: Florida State Univ. Press, 1981), Clifford Hallam argues that “the vast
majority of available evidence suggests that any Double figure in prose fiction which
can be explained by anthropology (including folklore), spurious scientific theories,
philosophy, or some other system, can in most cases be understood more fully, more
clearly, and, in crucial ways, more convincingly by depth psychology” (12–13).
21
Rogers, Double in Literature, 4.
22
Dorothy Burlingham, “The Fantasy of Having a Twin,” Psychoanalytic Study of
the Child 1 (1945): 205. In “Family Romances” (The Uncanny), Freud theorizes the
family romance as “a fantasy that replaces both parents by others who are grander”
(38–39), or, as scholars Catherine Backès-Clément and J. Dickson frame it in “Family
and Fiction,” SubStance: Literature and Psychoanalysis 1, no. 3 (1972): 15–22, as “a story
a child tells himself to invent a family other than his own” (15).
23
Nicholas T. Rand, editor’s note to The Shell and the Kernel: Renewals of Psycho-
analysis, ed. and trans. Nicholas T. Rand (1959; Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1994),
1:24.
24
Susan Isaacs, “The Nature and Function of Phantasy,” in Unconscious Fantasy,
ed. Riccardo Steiner (1945; London: Karnac Books, 2003), 185.
25
Maria Torok, “Fantasy: An Attempt to Define its Structure and Operation,” in
The Shell and the Kernel, 1:29–30.
26
Freud, “Creative Writer,” in The Uncanny, 31.
27
Burlingham, “Having a Twin,” 4.
28
Duane P. Schultz and Sydney Ellen Schultz, Theories of Personality, 9th ed.
(Belmont: Wadsworth Cengage Learning, 2009), 109–10.
29
Nicholas Royle suggests: “The uncanny is not what Freud (or anyone else)
thinks. It has to do with a sense of ourselves as double, split, at odds with ourselves”
(The Uncanny: An Introduction [Manchester: Manchester Univ. Press, 2002], 6).
30
Freud, “The Uncanny,” in The Uncanny, 142–43.
31
Avery Gordon, Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination (Min-
neapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 2008), 31.

32
Freud, “The Uncanny,” 162.
33
Freud, “The Uncanny,” 151.
34
Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and
the New International, trans. Peggy Kamuf (1993; New York: Routledge, 2006), 166.
35
Karl Marx, The German Ideology, ed. C. J. Arthur (1845; New York: International
Publishers, 1970), 47.
36
Gordon, Ghostly Matters, 190, 198.
37
Derrida, Specters of Marx, 126, 178, 219.
38
Derrida, Specters of Marx, 121.
39
Freud, The Ego and the Id, ed. and trans. James Strachey (New York: Norton,
1962), 24.
40
Nicholas Rand, editor’s note to The Shell and the Kernel, 1:101, 25.
41
Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok, “Mourning or Melancholia: Introjection
versus Incorporation,” in The Shell and the Kernel, 1:127.
42
Rand, editor’s note to The Shell and the Kernel, 1:25.
43
Jacques Derrida, forward to The Wolf Man’s Magic Word: A Cryptonymy, trans.
Nicholas Rand (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1986), xiv–xv.
44
45
Abraham and Torok, “Mourning or Melancholia,” 128.
46
Freud, “Creative Writer,” 28.
47
Rand, editor’s note to The Shell and the Kernel, 1:25.
48
Hugh Haughton, introduction to The Uncanny (Penguin Classics, 2003), xxvi.
49
Jacques Derrida, Dissemination, trans. Barbara Johnson (Chicago: Univ. of
Chicago Press, 1981), 157, 168.
50
Jacques Derrida, “The Purveyor of Truth,” in The Purloined Poe: Lacan, Derrida,
and Psychoanalytic Reading, ed. John P. Muller and William J. Richardson, trans. Alan
Bass (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1987), 203, emphasis added.
51
Derrida, “Purveyor of Truth,” 203.
52
Jacques Derrida, “Freud and the Scene of Writing,” in Writing and Difference,
trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1978), 196.
53
Oxford Latin Dictionary, combined ed. (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1983), s.v.
“duplex.”
54
David K. Jackson, “William Wilson: Another Possible Source for the Name,” Poe
Studies 16 (1983): 13.
55
Tsvetan Todorov, The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre, trans.
Richard Howard (Cleveland: The Press of Case Western Reserve Univ., 1973), 71.
56
According to Todorov, what differentiates the uncanny from the fantastic is a
natural explanation for seemingly supernatural events. If the text accepts the super-
natural events, it falls into the category of the “marvelous.” When a text hesitates
between a natural and supernatural explanation of events, it falls into the category of
the fantastic. Todorov actually defines the uncanny as “the supernatural explained” and
the marvelous as “the supernatural accepted.” See The Fantastic, 41–42.
36 POE STUDIES
57
Martin Brookes, Extreme Measures: The Dark Visions and Bright Ideas of Francis
Galton (New York: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2004), 198.
58
Segal, Entwined Lives, 9.
59
Susan L. Farber, Identical Twins Reared Apart: A Reanalysis (New York: Basic
Books, 1981), 247.
60
This quotation from Prosper Jolyot de Crébillon’s play notably receives exegesis
by Derrida in his tour-de-force analysis of the story, “The Purveyor of Truth,” although
I believe unsatisfactorily in support of an argument that Poe’s work is preoccupied
with “doubles” even when they are not explicitly present. See also Barbara Johnson’s
extended discussion of Poe’s usage of the passage in “The Frame of Reference,” in
Purloined Poe, 213–51.
61
In Greek and Egyptian Mythologies (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1992),
Yves Bonnefoy and Wendy Doniger identify primogeniture as the primary cause for
the murderous rivalry between Atreus and Thyestes: “Atreus was the older of the
two (though twinhood is precisely intended to weaken and contest the privileges
of primogeniture)” (103). They also note that the violence Atreus commits against
Thyestes’ sons results from Atreus falsely telling Thyestes that he would be willing to
share power (104).
62
Oxford Latin Dictionary, 756.
63
Alan Macfarlane, The Origins of English Individualism: The Family Property and
Social Transition (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 1978).
64
Lawrence Frederick Kohl, The Politics of Individualism: Parties and the American
Character in the Jacksonian Era (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1989), 13.
65
Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, trans. Gerald Bevan (New York:
Penguin Classics, 2003), 589.
66
Kohl, Politics of Individualism, 14.
67
Lawrence M. Friedman, A History of American Law, 3rd ed. (New York: Touch-
stone, 2005), 171.
68
The Life and Selected Writings of Jefferson, ed. Adrienne Koch and William Peden
(New York: Modern Library Classics, 1988), 38.
69
Ronald Chester, “Inheritance in American Legal Thought,” in Inheritance and
Wealth in America, ed. Robert K. Miller and Stephen J. McNamee (New York: Plenum
Press, 1998), 26–27.
70
Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 64.
71
Karen Halttunen, Confidence Men and Painted Women: A Study of Middle-class
Culture in America, 1830–1870 (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1986), 12.
72
Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 62.
73
In Second Treatise, regarding property, Locke argues: “Though the earth, and all
inferior creatures, be common to all men, yet every man has a property in his own
person: this nobody has any right to but himself. The labour of his body, and the work
of his hands, we may say, are properly his” (5.27). However, in the chapter on slavery,
Locke suggests labor is alienable: “Having by his fault forfeited his own life, by some act
that deserves death; he, to whom he has forfeited it, may (when he has him in his power)

delay to take it, and make use of him to his own service, and he does him no injury by it”
(4.23). See John Locke, Two Treatises of Government and A Letter Concerning Toleration,
ed. Ian Shapiro (Binghamton: Vail-Ballou Press, 2003), 110–11.
74
According to Macpherson, three basic assumptions provide the basis for this
theory: (1) what makes a person human is freedom from dependence on the will of
others; (2) freedom from dependence on others means freedom from any relation with
others except those into which the individual enters voluntarily with a view to his
own interest; and (3) the individual is essentially the proprietor of his own person and
capacities, for which he owes nothing to society. See C. B. Macpherson, The Political
Theory of Possessive Individualism: Hobbes to Locke (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1962),
3, 255–56.
75
Walter Benn Michaels, The Gold Standard and the Logic of Naturalism: American
Literature at the Turn of the Century (Berkeley and Los Angeles: Univ. of California Press,
1987), 112, emphasis added; 124.
76
Kohl, Politics of Individualism, 28.
77
Terence Whalen, Edgar Allan Poe and the Masses: The Political Economy of Litera-
ture in Antebellum America (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1999), 107.
78
Elmer, Reading, 20.
79
In December of 1835, the month Poe became editor, the Southern Literary
Messenger published a review of the fifth edition of a controversial work by Isaac
Tompkins, Thoughts upon the Aristocracy of England, and two rebuttals of Tompkins’s
work from Peter Jenkins and Timothy Winterbottom. In his analysis of the debate
between the three men, the writer declares that Tompkins’s book had “created a great
sensation.” See “Critical Notices,” Southern Literary Messenger 2, no. 1 (1835): 41–68.
80
“A Chapter on Aristocracy,” Burton’s Gentleman’s Magazine 2, no. 4 (1838): 249,
250.
81
James M. Hutchisson, Poe (Jackson: Univ. Press of Mississippi, 2005), 14, 15, 23.
82
Kenneth Silverman, Edgar A. Poe: Mournful and Never-ending Remembrance (New
York: Harper Perennial, 1992), 126.
83
Hutchisson describes the direct relationship between Poe’s loss of fortune and the
birth of Allan’s illegitimate twin sons: “After his first wife’s death, Allan had produced
other heirs to his vast fortune . . . . He also had illegitimate twins by his mistress in July
1830. In 1832 and again the following year, while Poe was scrambling to find enough
work to care for the Clemm family, Allan revised his will and added a codicil. All of his
children, illegitimate and legitimate, were mentioned in the will, but Poe was ignored”
(Poe, 45).
84
“Chapter on Aristocracy,” 249.
85
Edgar Allan Poe to John Allan, quoted in Silverman, Mournful and Never-ending
Remembrance, 45.
86
Thomas Corbet, An Inquiry into the Causes and Modes of the Wealth of Individuals;
or the Principles of Trade and Speculation Explained (London, 1841), 5.
87
Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, vol. 1, trans. Ben Fowkes
(New York: Penguin Classics, 1992), 251.
38 POE STUDIES
88
Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, vol. 3, trans. David Fernbach
(New York: Penguin Classics, 1993), 533.
89
Marx, Capital, 3:597, 598, 609.
90
Marx, Capital, 3:597.
91
92
Corbet, Wealth of Individuals, 211.
93
Hutchisson, Poe, 18.
94
Marx, Capital, 1:741.
95
Arthur Dickinson notes in his gloss on the 1510 Wynkyn de Worde publication,
Valentine and Orson: A Study in Late Medieval Romance (New York: AMS Press, 1929),
that Godwin, Byron, Hazlitt, De Quincey, Dickens, Browning, Meredith, and Henry
James all allude to it (1).

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The Wilson Duplex:

Corporatism and the Problem of Singleton Reading in Poe’s

However, unlike previous scholars who have focused on the Double in

HISTORY, THEORY, INTERPRETATION 7

[a pathological condition of vision in which a single object appears double

Double at the expense of the “multiplication” theory, giving primacy, as Rogers

HISTORY, THEORY, INTERPRETATION 9

it is a self-romance that provides evidence of a latent psychic crisis, which

HISTORY, THEORY, INTERPRETATION 11

HISTORY, THEORY, INTERPRETATION 13

by opening up difference through “the possibility of the double, the copy,

[a rapid or surprised second look, either literal or figurative, at a person

HISTORY, THEORY, INTERPRETATION 15

psychic fission. The discursive domination of this allegorical reading provokes

HISTORY, THEORY, INTERPRETATION 17

In fact, the feeling the narrator describes is so commonly expressed by identical

as disembodied, spectral presences. In this sense, the multiple is not exactly,

HISTORY, THEORY, INTERPRETATION 19

birth of twins makes it impossible to determine primogeniture—that is, who

Its work of destruction is almost over in the United States . . . . The

HISTORY, THEORY, INTERPRETATION 21

according to Tocqueville, of making it increasingly more difficult for landed

Thus, as Kohl illustrates, the more individualism is emphasized, the more

Those who look for distinctions from the long-drawn inheritance

HISTORY, THEORY, INTERPRETATION 23

that would have been inconceivable prior to the abolition of primogeniture

HISTORY, THEORY, INTERPRETATION 25

already identified as “speculation.” According to Corbet’s treatise on political

others in the relations of production that produce the title to property in

HISTORY, THEORY, INTERPRETATION 27

possibly enter into economic exchange in the era of possessive individualism.

[the repeated exposure of a photographic plate or film to light, often

HISTORY, THEORY, INTERPRETATION 29

Gasping for breath, I lowered the lamp in still nearer proximity to

HISTORY, THEORY, INTERPRETATION 31

HISTORY, THEORY, INTERPRETATION 33

HISTORY, THEORY, INTERPRETATION 35

HISTORY, THEORY, INTERPRETATION 37

HISTORY, THEORY, INTERPRETATION 39

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