The Double as Other: Alterity, Doubling, and the Crisis of Identity in Edgar Allan Poe’s Tale “William Wilson’’

Abstract

The relationship between the Self and the Other has occupied a central position in philosophical, psychoanalytic, and literary theories of identity. This paper will advance beyond the classical conception of Otherness as a process whereby societies construct Otherness to subordinate and legitimize the exclusion of an external Other. Edgar Allan Poe’s “William Wilson” offers a more inward and psychologically complex configuration of alterity which is localized within the contours of the schizophrenic Self through the figure of the double. The second William Wilson is simultaneously a rival, a moral counterforce, a reflection, and an unsettling counterpart to the narrator’s identity. Drawing on concepts from Freud and Lacan’s psychoanalysis and theorization of the uncanny, Sartre’s philosophical insights, and Derrida’s thoughts on difference and alterity, the paper examines how Poe destabilizes the opposition between Self and Other. It shifts attention from what the double represents to what the double does to the narrator’s conception of identity. The double repeatedly interrupts the narrator’s autonomy, appearing whenever the protagonist attempts to pursue his desires without moral or social restraint. His eventual attempt to eliminate the double consequently becomes an attempt to eliminate a constitutive part of himself. The final mirror scene makes this paradox explicit: in destroying the Other, the narrator discovers that he has destroyed himself. Poe’s tale thus suggests that identity is neither autonomous nor self-contained but emerges through an unstable relationship with alterity. The ultimate aim of this paper, however, is to read Poe’s story as a celebration of the idea that despite being a ‘hell’, the Other is always part and parcel of the Self’s identity.