For a writer as revered as Edgar Allan Poe, there are lots of his stories which end up being forgotten. Everyone knows ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’ almost by heart, and everyone has the first stanza of The Raven committed to memory. ‘The Masque of the Red Death’, ‘The Black Cat’, ‘The Cask of Amontillado’: all of these tales crop up time and time again, not least in Netflix’s Wednesday series. Yet some lay dormant. The Oval Portrait, one of Poe’s shortest stories, is a forgotten gem, as is his eerie tale of doubles and identity crises, ‘William Wilson’.
For those who haven’t read the story, it is advised to go and read it ahead of time, because this article will be discussing it in depth, and like a number of stories written at this time, sent off to the magazines and the penny dreadfuls, there’s a kicker ending. With that said, a refresher of the plot.
The narrator is William Wilson. He grew up a small English town, learning at the hands of the local Deacon, spending most of his time in a large, rambling, Elizabethan boarding schoolhouse. In all regards, he is superior to his schoolfellows, save for one, another student named William Wilson. The two share the same birthday, and although they have disputes, and the narrator feels hatred for having the same name as he, can just about get along with him.
However, over the years, the second Wilson begins to copy the narrator’s gate and general manner, and stealing to his chambers one night, the narrator sees Wilson the same as he, but not the same, at the same time. This bizarre, supernatural strangeness follows the narrator as he progresses through life, the second Wilson cropping up at various moments, before a final, fateful confrontation at a party in Rome. The narrator rushes and stabs the second Wilson, only to find himself confronted with a mirror, himself bleeding, and the second Wilson’s dying words of “In me didst thou exist – and, in my death, see by this image, which is thine own, how utterly thou hast murdered thyself.”
Aside from the general principle of your childhood foil following you your whole life in your image and name and mannerism, which is a generally disturbing concept, lots of small details give William Wilson a little extra kick.
Although there isn’t your typical gothic darkness and gloom pervading the text, the story does begin in a small rural English town (based on Stoke Newington, where Poe spent his youthful years), in a boarding school (based on Manor House School, that Poe attended for several years). The small town has now been amalgamated into London, and is certainly no longer the strange, folk-horror style image we might have in our mind, but the church mentioned nearby does sit in a ‘dusky atmosphere in which the fretted Gothic steeple lay imbedded and asleep’. The schoolhouse is ‘old and irregular’, with ‘a high and solid brick wall, topped with a bed of mortar and broken glass…’ Anyone familiar with ‘House of Usher’ will recall the ‘vacant eye-like windows’, which was published the month before ‘William Wilson’.
Poe is therefore still very much in the gothic trend of his other stories. Indeed, the house itself seems to reflect a splitting, or doubling, of Wilson’s personality, perhaps prefiguring psychoanalytical thought which would come to be discussed in the next century. Not only is the house maze-like in its construction, ‘There was really no end to its windings – to its incomprehensible subdivisions,’ but Poe follows this up by saying that ‘It was difficult, at any given time, to say with certainty upon which of its two stories one happened to be.’ Knowing that the story is about doubting identity, it’s not hard to see the importance of these lines. The house is a maze when one is stuck behind the ‘solid brick wall’ of the self, where numerous identities might be lurking. In a way, it is much a reflection of the self as the hedge maze is in The Shining. The narrator also says that during his time there, ‘I was never able to ascertain… in what remote locality lay the little sleeping apartment assigned to myself…’ In other words, in childhood, he never managed to establish a distinct identity, a place where he was sure where he was in two identical plains of reality; the two floors represent the two Wilsons of the story.
It is therefore not surprising that it is only a good page following this description of the location about confusion and a world split in two, that the second Wilson is introduced into the story. He is the perfect thwart to the ambitions of the narrator; ‘…destitute alike of the ambition which urged… me to excel.’ His spookiness is aided by his inability to raise his voice, therefore meaning everything he says is said in ‘a very low whisper.’ He is the uncanny split spirit inside the narrator.
Added to this, the second normal Wilson is not normal. Whether we read the story as a precursor to Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Doctor Jekyll and Mr Hyde, that the second Wilson seems a strange part of the narrator’s inner psyche seems almost certain. It is through the strange inner depths of the boarding school, a ‘wilderness of narrow passages’ that definitely feels cave-like and ancient, that the narrator travels by lamplight to find Wilson. This is a Wilson which, in the previous passage, has given the narrator, briefly, ‘…the belief of my having been acquainted with the being who stood before me, at some epoch long ago…’. One thinks again to Mr Hyde’s being a manifestation of an ancient evil that exists inside all mankind, and to H. G. Wells’s ‘The Red Room’, where the sinister old people who own the castle are ‘atavistic’, the narrator of that story showing his fear of age, and as a result, ghosts, immortally connected to the past. The past intrudes on the present as the uncanny intrudes on reality.
Wilson, then, is seemingly not of this world. He is not just an individual. This much is doubly reinforced when the narrator glimpses him asleep:
‘Were these – these the lineaments of William Wilson? I saw, indeed, that they were his, but I shook as if with a fit of the auge, 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?’
Poe, like his student, H. P. Lovecraft, doesn’t exactly spell out what the issue is, but it is clear that there is a play between Wilson being exactly like the narrator, but some strangeness in not being like them. One wonders which part scares the narrator more. Would a perfect replication be better than something very slightly monstrous in the mirror before him?
Years later, a stranger demands to talk to the narrator. The second Wilson (we assume the stranger is he), takes the narrator by the arm and only whispers ‘“William Wilson”’ before disappearing. This sequence reinforces the idea that, despite the appearance of the man upsetting the narrator, it is the speech, ‘…the character, the tone, the key, of those few, simple, and familiar, yet whispered syllables…’ which scares him. As language is an inherent part of how human beings navigate the world, and understand it, that this should be the weapon of destabilising the narrator’s world is chilling.
Iago does much the same thing to Othello in Shakespeare’s play. Othello, a character built upon his storytelling prowess and ability with words (he claims in a big speech in Act 1 Scene 3 that his storytelling of his bold exploits is how he won over Desdemona), is brought into sputtering, broken syllables by Iago’s storytelling abilities and manipulation of language. Othello’s identity is constructed through language, and as soon as that weapon is used against him, he crumbles (see Othello: Language and Writing, by Laurie Maguire, for an excellent deep dive into this idea).
It isn’t exactly the same with Poe’s story, but you can clearly see in both easily how important language, and names, are for establishing identity. As identity, and a distortion thereof, is the point of the narrative of ‘William Wilson’, this moment is crucial to the strange atmosphere of the piece, the attempt to destroy the narrator’s surety as to his own identity.
Despite the second Wilson not normally appearing in the dark (he spent several years at school, after all), he does in his penultimate appearance, where after cheating a significant sum of money at cards, the narrator is exposed by Wilson appearing, apparition-like, in a flurry. He doesn’t even seem to appear. Indeed, the candles after he (presumably) opens the door are extinguished, and the narrator says that ‘…we could only feel that he was standing in our midst.’ Even so, he still speaks in the ‘never-to-be-forgotten whisper…’, identifying it as the second Wilson. Once more, his identity is marked by speech, by language, even more so than the impossible knowledge of the narrator having the cheated cards hidden in the cuff linings of his left sleeve. This exposure drives the story, but the way it is revealed, through a linguistic identity crisis, drives the chill factor.
As an added note, it is also interesting to remember the nighttime visit by the narrator to the second Wilson’s bedside earlier in the story. Both times in the night, are seemingly when the doppelganger seems at his most ethereal. His most bizarre and inhuman. In the first instance, his form is unusual, and in this cheating-exposure sequence, he is almost a disembodied voice, not seen, but glimpsed and felt. Spooky and strange things happen in the black, where Poe’s writing is at its best.
This is all before we get to the very end of the tale. At a masquerade in Rome (one and a half years before ‘The Masque of the Red Death’ is published), Wilson appears in ‘a costume altogether similar to my own…’. Thinking once more of Stevenson’s tale, it is interesting in this final confrontational swordfight between the doppelgangers how the roles are reversed. The second Wilson ‘with a slight sigh, drew in silence,’ and the narrator ‘plunged my sword, with brute ferocity, repeatedly through and through his bosom.’ This is seemingly the opposite in characteristic to the characters of Jekyll and Hyde, Jekyll the good man of science, and Hyde the brutal, evil side of mankind. Our narrator is the violent one, our antagonist calm. In other words, the complete opposite of what we would usually expect.
But in the end, who is who in the tale? Everything gets confused, blurs into one, when for a moment we have the following:
‘The brief moment in which I averted my eyes had been sufficient to produce, apparently, a material change in the arrangements at the upper or farther end of the room. A large mirror; – so at first it seemed to me in my confusion – now stood where none had been perceptible before; and as I stepped up to it in extremity of terror, mine own image, but with features all pale and dabbles in blood, advanced to meet me with a feeble and tottering gait.’
Which level of the old boarding school are we on? Because later, although the narrator says ‘it was Wilson, who then stood before me,’ he speaks in the narrator’s voice, ‘no longer in a whisper, and I could have fancied that I myself was speaking…’. Is the narrator looking into a mirror that he hadn’t noticed? Has the mirror appeared? Is he looking at the second Wilson, or himself? Was he the second Wilson all along? We can’t work out where we are, and who we are.
It is impossible to tell who is who in the finale. Perhaps it is impossible to say which Wilson was the real one, if either, if both. Were there two real ones? Perhaps, much like in Jordan Peele’s film Us, there has been a switch, which might explain the strangeness in the temperaments of the two figures at the end of the story. That the narrator survives to tell the tale might suggest that the roles reverse, the psyches change bodies. After all, despite his apparent mortal stabbing and the second Wilson claiming that he has ‘murdered thyself,’ someone is narrating the tale. That there is some reality to the second Wilson is suggested by numerous other characters seeming to interact in some way with him. But how much? How much is projection, the impossible, the pure fancy? Was he a normal person that happened to have the same name, with jealousy from our narrator accentuating similarities to create an impossible story of being a doppelganger to justify the murder?
Perhaps it is all of this confusion which gives the feeling of unease to the tale. The inability to see more than that there is some internal projection onto the real world at play, a kind of Fight Club wish fulfilment gone horribly wrong. Its psychoanalytic implication are well ahead of its time, and the eerie nature of the relationship between the Wilson’s is worthy of Poe’s best. For now it is overlooked by other doubling stories of the 1800s such as The Portrait of Dorian Gray and Jekyll & Hyde, stories which Sarah Annes Brown compares to ‘William Wilson’ in her book, A Familiar Compound Ghost: Allusion and the Uncanny. One can only hope that this particular little tale might be better known, and will chill a great many more readers in our modern world, filled naturally with split identities and ghostly gangers in the dark.
Article by Kieran Judge
Edited by Emerian Rich
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