Dialectical nightmares: The historicity of the Romantic-era doppelganger in the works of Godwin, Hogg, Blake, Burney, and the Shelleys.

Abstract

While the doppelganger has consistently been studied by psychoanalysis and mythography, historically-inflected methods offer other insights into its nature. Furthermore, many nonhistoricist studies tend to locate the double as a postmodern, or largely recent phenomenon. However, the origins of the double in the British Romantic era reveal its roots in class division and a complex engagement with that period's construction of the state. The Marxist model of dialectical subjectivity, as developed by Benjamin and Adorno, shows the context of the double to be the coalescing of working-class identity in the 1790-1830 period. The notion of radical class antagonism, as expressed by Negri, illuminates the tensions and insurgencies of this moment, analyzing the double as the uncanny, threatening, and chiasmatic duplication of one character through another, enabled by the extensive socialization of capital's logic of exchange value. The tragic double (Godwin's Caleb Williams, Hogg's Confessions) operates across clearly marked class divisions, where the underclass subject threatens his or her opposite with destruction and replacement. The conflict is attenuated through a thriller narrative, which ultimately reveals: what traits are suppressed in each character; a sociology of the text's space; a metaphorical realization of exchange value. Feminist texts (Shelley's Frankenstein, Burney's Wanderer) modify the double parodically to reveal its gendered nature, as well as inflecting the double's sociology in terms of women's lived experience and gender-specific epistemology. The feminist doppelganger remains tragic and destructive, but potentially controls and confirms much of the status quo. Blake (Jerusalem) and Shelley (Prometheus Unbound) offer a eucatastrophic double, where characters deliberately will doubling as a weapon against repression and for utopia. The double becomes more social than egocentric in narrative terms; this social nature indicates an ideology of a strongly collective constitution of experience, where difference ultimately subsumes hegemonic history. Following the Romantic era, doppelganger texts enact various historically-situated strategies for masking its class and state-based nature. The development of capital in particular offers new formal inflections for the double. Nevertheless the division of labor and the power of the state remain within the doppelganger's materiality, and persist within representation.