Edgar Allan Poe and E. T. A. Hoffmann: The Double in "William Wilson" and The Devil's Elixirs
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In response to accusations that horror in his stories was derived from German literary sources, Edgar Allan Poe claimed in Preface for Tales of Grotesque and Arabesque in 1840 that if in many of my productions terror has been thesis, I maintain that terror is not of Germany, but of soul. (1) There are several indications, though, that Poe could have gained access to German literature and to E. T. A. Hoffmann's writings through Gillies's translation of Devil's Elixirs, through Carlyle's publication of German Romance, through Sir Walter Scott's essay on Hoffmann's use of supernatural, or through readings of his own in English translation. As editor of several prominent journals such as Southern Literary Messenger, Burton's Gentleman's Magazine, Graham's Magazine, Mirror, and Broadway Journal, Poe was well acquainted with publications by European writers and even accused other American authors of plagiarizing their ideas. (2) While some critics have noted similarities between William Wilson and Devil's Elixirs, scholarship on double in these works still requires further investigation beyond a positivistic approach. This article traces developmental stages of double in William Wilson and Devil's Elixirs according to a reading of Freud's essay The Uncanny. It also examines impact of double on lives of protagonists and analyze Poe's and Hoffmann's overall statement on divided self. historical background of double is rooted in philosophical, literary, and scientific theories of German Romanticism, which illustrate Romantic poet's constant struggle within himself to reach beyond his own existence. In terms of German philosophy, double is steeped in Fichtean Idealism, according to which ego creates and projects itself onto world, and in Schelling's concept of as developed in his philosophy of nature, which illustrates interaction of individual with its counterpart in nature. From a literary perspective, double signifies Romantic poet's continuous longing for infinite, which can never be fulfilled. Since Romantic ego is continuously striving for something higher than itself, Romantic poet finds himself divided into two parts: one is rooted in his mortal existence, other pursues a higher transcendental harmony with infinite. Typically, Romantic literature abounds with references that illustrate discrepancy between real and ideal, that seek to express sublime, longing for mystical and spiritual unity, and interaction between man and nature. interest in supernatural or unexplained phenomena such as hypnosis, telepathy, sleepwalking, insanity, drives, and in subconscious also contributed to motif of double in Romantic literature. Students of German physician Friedrich Anton Mesmer (1734-1815) developed a scientific method of delving into human psyche that provided medium with access to patient's inner world and secrets that lay beyond human existence. This new scientific approach became cutting-edge development in scientific research to approach mysteries of spiritual world and dark side of human mind. Romantic poet, therefore, employed motif of double as chance to investigate passions and illnesses of human mind and to examine presence of a supernatural world. Prior to advent of Romanticism, motif of double existed for sake of comedy through mistaken identity of characters such as one finds in Plautus's Menaechmi or Shakespeare's Comedy of Errors. Romanticism gave double its psychological depth by endowing it with meaning of the admonishing angel, good repressed ego, or tenacious devil (3) and by building around it a canon of literature that included Friedrich de la Motte Fouque's Der Zauberring (1813), Adelbert von Chamisso's Peter Schlemihls wundersame Geschichte (1814), and Jean Paul Richter's Siebenkas (1776-97). …
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".