The double personality in Edgar Allan Poe's tales: William Wilson and The Cask of Amontillado

Résumé du document

It is common knowledge that the stories of Edgar Allan Poe often reflect some of his own personal problems. His works, ?William Wilson' and ?The Cask of Amontillado' are usually classified under the label "tales of the double (or evil) personality". They reflect one of the strangest aspects of Poe's life. He is believed to have had a blurred identity, and his quest for his real self is evident in the different names he assumed during his early life. Born Edgar Poe, he was orphaned at the age of three and was adopted by the Allans. He took their name for his middle name at the age of fifteen. Three years later his adoptive father drove him to enlist in the army, where he wanted to be called Edgar Perry. Poe is also known to have been an alcoholic and a drug addict, but at the same time he was keenly aware of these vices and tied to fight them. This duality may be viewed as another aspect of his blurred personality.

Extraits

[...] The Cask of Amontillado, from Tales of Mystery and Imagination, Ware: Wordsworth Classics, 1993-2000. pp. 202-207. William Wilson. [...]

[...] The very name of William Wilson reveals its bearer's double nature: the initials are two ‘W's (double-‘U's), the syllable ‘Wil' is repeated twice and the name consists of two times two syllables. Even if it is a pseudonym that the narrator chose because it been already too much an object for the scorn for the horror for the detestation of [his] race' (first paragraph), he says that it is fictitious title not very dissimilar to the real' (paragraph so we can imagine that his real name had similar properties. [...]

[...] Actually it is probably just a metaphor: he killed some part of himself, his soul or rather his conscience, which was embodied by his double. Evidence of this lies in sentences such as the following: moral sense . was far keener than my own; and . I might, to-day, have been a better, and thus a happier man, had I less frequently rejected the counsels embodied in those meaning whispers which I then but too cordially hated and too bitterly despised' (par. [...]

[...] The double personality in Edgar Allan Poe's tales: William Wilson and the Cask of Amontillado Edgar Allan Poe's stories often reflect some of his own personal problems. William Wilson and The Cask of Amontillado are usually classified with the label “tales of the double (or evil) personality”. They reflect one of the strangest aspects of Poe's life. He actually had a blurred identity, and his quest to find who he was is visible in the different names he assumed during his early life: born Edgar Poe, he was an orphan at the age of three and was adopted by the Allans. [...]

[...] clothes (every time they ‘met', they were dressed in the same way), and ‘even [his] voice did not escape him . and his singular whisper, it grew the very echo of [Wilson's] own'(par. 20). The facts that the ‘Other' looked exactly like Wilson and behaved in the exact same way as he does, that he only whispered, that no one else seemed to notice him and that he appeared only in moments when Wilson's imagination was stimulated in some way, prove that he had no other existence than in Wilson's very mind. [...]