Text: James W. Gargano, “Art and Irony in William Wilson,” New Approaches on Poe, 1970, pp. 18-22

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“William Wilson” is an excellent example of Edgar Allan Poe's remarkable ability to deal with human derangement and disorder in a world made up of orderly and rational sequence. While the narrator-protagonist flails about with wild rhetoric and unregulated actions, his career appears to be dictated by inescapable laws. The more he raves about the mystery enveloping him and the more feverishly he runs from inexplicable persecution, the more “logical” seems the concatenation of events leading him to destruction. It is the fact that Poe's confused narrator lives in the midst of an order he cannot perceive and cannot evade that turns “William Wilson” into a masterpiece of irony.

I believe that an understanding of the nature and pervasiveness of Poe's irony will leave little doubt of his conscious artistry and literary intelligence. It will show, I am persuaded, that his thematic intentions are implicit in and furthered by the point of view, structure, narrative movement, and imagery of “William Wilson.” It should, moreover, help to scotch the lingering and rather “lazy” notion that Poe's tales are full of self-indulgent rhetoric and gratuitous horror. It will be my contention that “William Wilson” has a tight and coherent form which expresses Poe's view of the relation between man's inner, psychological disorganization and his futility in the world at large.

First of all, Poe demonstrates great skill and authorial objectivity in allowing Wilson to document, with both care and precision, a completely erroneous version of his life. From beginning to end, Wilson records facts and misses their meaning; he presents as enigma what should be evident truth; and he constructs explanations that impressively explain nothing. His blindness is as complete as it is perverse it never dawns upon him that in fleeing from a “stranger” he is seeking to escape an estranged part of himself, and he never suspects that flight from his namesake merely invites and intensifies pursuit. In short, Wilson's tale reveals, with unflagging irony, more than he understands. His history is not so much a confession as a betrayal; since he cannot see that he cannot see, he does not know that his limitations are writ large in everything he says. Nor can he discern that his inability to discover relation and unity in the world is due to his own internal fragmentation and lack of harmony.

Wilson, thus, belongs to a long line of Poe characters whose lives are elaborate dramas of self-deception and self-destruction. It is characteristic of these men to elevate derelict fantasies into sustaining manias; consequently, because they expend themselves in doing battle against chimeras, everything they do in the real world must be abortive or it must ultimately miscarry. Forever planning to extricate themselves from dreadful dilemmas, they perversely choose the very means that will bring about their doom. In fact, it soon becomes obvious that their strategies for survival are hoaxes unconsciously designed against themselves. The narrators in “The Tell-Tale Heart,” “The Imp of the Perverse,” and “The Black Cat,” for example, give the impression of preparing clever traps for themselves; Prospero, in “The Masque of the Red Death,” ostensibly seeks security but ironically provides an appropriately bizarre setting for his inevitable destroyer; and Montresor, in “The Cask of Amontillado,” is “possessed” by the-man whose tyranny over him he sought to end. Clearly, these characters rush toward rather than away from catastrophe; they avoid all knowledge that may save them, and, indeed, having inverted all values, they can only find salvation in personal dissolution.

Even more than the other tales which it resembles, “William Wilson” dramatizes, archetypically, man's quarrel with the “composition” of his own nature and the terms on which he is granted life. Indeed, all of Wilson's errors and terrors stem from an internal ailment, his basic antagonism to an innate part of consciousness which he regards as a meddlesome alien. Supposedly dodging and thwarting an enemy, he learns to hate, to flee from, and finally to declare war on a potential ally and a sure source of strength. In projecting his problem outside of his being, he seems to simplify it but, in reality, he turns his whole life into self-mockery and self-torment. Every aggressive blow against the external villain is [page 19:] directed against himself, and every ingenious plan of escape from an outside pursuer is self-defeating. Moreover, even Wilson's very words belie and ridicule themselves; for the conclusions he presents in his apologia are disproved by his alter ego. In such a tight network of irony, it is not surprising that the narrator's angry acts of self-defence turn out to be acts of self-humiliation and self-torture ending in suicide.

Of course, the ironic art of “William Wilson” goes beyond Poe's conception (with all its ramifications) of his character as divided and deluded. Of equal importance is Poe's quiet mastery of a narrative structure which unfolds with insistence and logic that contradict Wilson's rantings about the mysteriousness of his fate. The narrative events of the tale reveal, in sharply defined stages, the inexorable “progress” of Wilson's evil; Poe's structural emphasis is manifestly on development, on his character's step-by-step increase in moral blindness and irresponsibility. Three of the story's four major incidents take place in schools, Dr. Bransby's academy, Eton, and Oxford; as Wilson climbs the educational ladder, he undergoes an irreparable and unmistakable deterioration. Beginning what, at Dr. Bransby's, turns out to be an inversion of the educational process, he encounters and refuses to accept the second William Wilson as his psychological and moral complement. Though this early rejection begets all his future maladjustment and evil, it is attenuated by strange concessions and recognitions; he grants his namesake a kind of superiority and confesses that he could not “hate” him. At one point, he trembles on the verge of embracing and being reconciled to his alien self; he states that he “discovered or fancied I discovered” in the second Wilson something that aroused memories of “my earliest infancy.” But, the initial spurning of the schoolmate who so enigmatically attracts him exacts its penalty: it so dims his intuition and insight that he transforms his perfectly natural confrontation with his ubiquitous “foe” at Eton into a mystery. The gulf between Wilson and his rebuffed “self” is gradually widening: ever more certain that his troubles arise from the machinations of an external force, he obtusely declares, “I did not pretend to disguise from my perception the identity of the singular individual who thus perseveringly interfered with my affairs, and harassed me with his insinuated counsel.” Ironically, Wilson's words show how completely he misses the meaning of his experience; for he does practice “disguise” upon himself and he does not truly perceive the “identity” of the being who is not, after all, a “singular individual.” In spite of his professed knowledge then, the narrator is forced to admit his fatal ignorance: “But who and what was this Wilson? — and whence came he? — and what were his purposes? Upon neither of these points could I be satisfied,”

Obviously, the process of self-denial and self-alienation cannot be arrested at this downward point; Wilson's self-deception must be played out to its ironic climax. At Oxford, a new element enters into and complicates the relation between Wilson and his double; after another encounter with his alter ego, the narrator rages against outside “authority so imperiously assumed” and insists that he will recover the “natural” rights of self-agency so pertinaciously, so insultingly denied!” Tired of being hounded by the intrusive stranger, he now decides to assume the offensive and drive him from the field. Unfortunately, his movement from passive resistance to active rejection is irreversible, and forever obviates any reconciliation between the sundered parts of the self. Conspicuously, too, this movement constitutes one of the principal ironies of the tale, for in “boldly” planning to protect himself by lashing out against the stranger, Wilson unwittingly plots his own destruction. His almost extinguished perception cannot apprise him that pursuer and pursued are one. He has so entangled himself in the blind folly of unavowed identity that he can injure no one but himself. It is inevitable that in the climax of the tale in Rome he will lose all “self-control” and abandon himself to anger, threats, and, finally, assault — all insanely directed against himself. It is inevitable, too, that only his murder of the second Wilson (in reality a ritual suicide) can afford a way out of the labyrinth of passionate bewilderment. The crowning irony of the story, however, is reserved for the end, for Wilson fails to understand the most unassailable proof of the moral significance of his adventure. He can derive no special import from seeing “an absolute identity, mine own!” in the face of his “dying antagonist.” Nor does he appear to gain any enlightenment from the second Wilson's final words, spoken in such a way that the narrator “fancied” (he never really knows) “that I myself was speaking:” “In me didst thou exist — and, in my death, see by this image, which is thine own, how utterly thou hast murdered thyself.” [page 20:]

Poe, then, exhibits dramatic skill in making each stage of the narrative action document a progressive darkening of Wilson's moral vision. He also shows a fine artistic sense in his use of “light imagery” to enforce his theme. At Dr. Bransby's school, the youthful protagonist enters his namesake's room, “lamp in hand;” bent on petty mischief, he is shocked as the ‘bright rays fell vividly upon the sleeper.” Wilson's strong physical reaction to the sight of his sleeping double is due to the momentary clarity of his vision; he perceives, as he never will again, that his rival is not an imitative imposter but an absolutely identical “self.” (Interestingly, the juvenile Wilson, at this crucial moment in his life, bears a strong resemblance to one of Poe's maniacal characters, the narrator of “The Tell-Tale Heart;” this compulsive murderer conceals himself in the dark and trains a steady ray of light from his lantern upon the vulture eye of the old man he intends to kill. Unlike Wilson, however, he is so maddened by the “identity” he discovers that he “throws open” the lantern and commits his crime in a flood of light.) At Eton, when Wilson again encounters the foe he left behind at Dr. Bransby's, he can no longer see him distinctly; he reports, with a growing sense of mystery and confusion, that since the room contained “no lamp” the “faint light enabled me to perceive; but the features of his face I could not distinguish.” Undoubtedly, the impairment of his insight explains why Wilson becomes progressively less able to cope with the meaning of his experience. It is not until the second Wilson's appearance at Oxford, however, that the narrator finds himself almost completely in the dark. The entrance of the double causes “every candle in the room” to be extinguished “as if by magic;” though the narrator declares that the “darkness was not total,” he insists that the occupants of the room could “only feel,” not see, the stranger “in our midst.” At this juncture, Wilson has become incapable of seeing the least glimmer of intellectual and moral light and walks blindly and truculently to his catastrophe.

Poe appropriately stages the gradual lessening of light throughout the story to coincide with Wilson's “progression” from mere mischief to murder. Though the narrator oddly asserts in his apologia that from “comparatively trivial wickedness I passed, with the stride of a giant, into more than the enormities of an Elah-Gabalus,” Poe establishes an evident connection between Wilson's accelerating evil and his deteriorating perception. After all, the young protagonist rather harmlessly launched his ill-starred career by planning a practical joke upon a particularly contentious comrade. Only after he refuses to face the knowledge that he and this comrade are one does he begin his rapid moral descent. His flight from Dr. Bransby's academy, after he significantly “extinguished the lamp,” leads to three years of folly at Eton, where he crowns “a week of soulless dissipation” by proposing a “toast of more than wonted profanity.” But even his Etonian dissoluteness pales before his “accomplishments” at Oxford. Here, as he almost boastfully celebrates, he “out-Heroded Herod” and “added no brief appendix to the long catalogue of vices then usual in the most dissolute university of Europe.” Yet, there is no doubt that this extended catalogue of vices is possible only because Wilson has blotted from his mind the image of his moral “censor,’” who at Eton in the thickening darkness had shaken a warning and “uplifted finger” at him. Once he has dismissed his speculations about the second Wilson as “morbid,” he is free to seek fresh sensations and evils. In setting out to destroy a fellow student by cheating at cards, he now sinks to a new depth of depravity; still, even at this crisis, a small residue of shame embarrasses him and causes, on the story's allegorical level of meaning, the materialization of his alter ego. The almost impenetrable darkness in which the rejected self appears, however, demonstrates that the protagonist has come close to losing contact with himself. Wilson's last act of violence, in sharp contrast to his early pranks and misdemeanors, can no longer be prevented, for he has prepared for it by increasingly regarding his moral counterpart as a foreign intruder in his life. Wilson's final and worst crime is directly related to his descent into total ignorance and self-deception. This, his perfervid declaration, after he has slain his “double,” that he has been “the slave of circumstances beyond human control,” ignores his slow psychological disintegration and the gradual and seemingly willful eclipse of his vision.

No study of the ironic art of “William Wilson” should fail to indicate at least a few of the symbolic and metaphorical devices which contribute to the story's thematic effectiveness. Indeed, it might be said without exaggeration that in this tale Poe meets his own high requirement that every detail of a work of art must deepen and intensify its unity of impression. Even the casual portrait of the principal at Dr. Bransby's academy is clearly related to the theme of the divided self. Poe cleverly attempts to give a larger application to his theme of [page 21:] Wilson's internal “split” by presenting the principal as a man who contains within him two seemingly incongruous personalities which Wilson ponders in a “deep spirit of wonder and perplexity:” “This reverend man, with countenance so demurely benign, with robes so clerically flowing, with wig so minutely powdered, so rigid and so vast, — could this be he who, of late, with sour visage, and in snuffy habiliments, administered, ferule in hand, the Draconian laws of the academy? Oh, gigantic paradox, too utterly monstrous for solution!”

In “William Wilson” as in many other stories, Poe turns his houses into symbolic structures which reveal his characters' states of mind. The abbey in “Ligeia,” the decaying mansion in “The Fall of the House of Usher,” and the cellars in “The Black Cat” and “The Cask of Amontillado” become, in a real sense, mere extensions of their occupants' psyches. In “William Wilson,” the house at Dr. Bransby's academy is, like the principal-clergyman, part of a strangely bifurcated world: “It was difficult, at any given time, to say with certainty upon which of the two stories one happened to be.” Obviously, Poe intends to show that Wilson does not move confidently in an environment of smooth transitions and clear demarcations. Instead, the levels merge or collapse into each other, thus multiplying Wilson's doubts and uncertainties: he confesses, for instance, that “During the five years of my residence (at Dr. Bransby's), I was never able to ascertain with precision, in what remote locality lay the little sleeping apartment assigned to myself and some eighteen or twenty other scholars.” Once he has been divided against himself, the young man cannot live in a world that inspires reliance upon order and logic; even though order and logic do not cease to exist everywhere around him he encounters “endless irregularity,” “incomprehensible subdivisions,” and the effacement of “what little or original form” might have prevailed. Poe brilliantly adumbrates an architectural nightmare in which Wilson's fragmentation and his inability to understand his condition appear not only probable but almost inevitable. Thus, when the second Wilson is introduced, the two Wilsons resemble the divided principal and have an obvious congruence with their environment. Moreover, the irony which governs the central action of the story is established by the narrator's mystified contemplation of his extraordinary destiny. He, too, is part of the paradox “too utterly monstrous for solution.”

In addition to his strikingly functional use of “house imagery,” Poe employs highly suggestive masquerade motif in the denouement of his story. The final scene in Rome during a carnival season resembles the carnival setting in “The Cask of Amontillado.” In fact, the masquerade motif may almost amount to one of Poe's fictional obsessions. It is present in, and helps to determine the tone and mood of, such stories as “The Masque of the Red Death,” “Hop-Frog,” and “King Pest,” as well as “The Cask of Amontillado.” Moreover, “though the masquerade functions differently in each of these works, it quite predictably serves to emphasize Poe's lurid preoccupation with disguise. Hop Frog, for example, stages a masquerade to conceal his motives from, and gain revenge upon, the inhumane king; Prosper's masquerade represents his futile attempt to escape into voluptuousness, color, and music from the stark reality outside his abbey; and Montresor, through a succession of disguises and ruses, complacently escorts the unsuspecting Fortunato to his death. Indeed, even where balls, carnivals, and costuming are absent from Poe's tales, the masked intentions of his characters suggest that they are figures in a psychological masquerade. It may not be too bold a speculation to say that Poe saw all human life in the masquerade terms of “The Conqueror Worm,” for in this “metaphysical” poem the cosmic drama of the “Mimes, in the form of God on high” has much in common with the giddy but pleasureless masquerade in “The Masque of the Red Death.”

The masquerade in “William Wilson” furnishes a fitting background for the termination of the narrator's flight-turned-into-pursuit. Just as Prince Prospero throws himself upon the figure of the Red Death, Wilson angrily assaults his alter ego “attired, as I had expected, in a costume altogether similar to my own.” The grim comedy of confused identity has reached the last act without any enlightenment on the part of its principal character; up to the end of his psychological masquerade, he continues to regard his nemesis as a mocking outsider without any affiliation to himself. In spite of the most convincing evidence of his identity with the second Wilson, he rejects logical explanation for a rhetoric of terror and obfuscation. What can be more rational and inevitable, in the symbolic context of the tale, than the fact that the reflection of his dying antagonist turns, in the revealing mirror, into “mine own image?” Yet, the narrator incredulously exclaims, “But what human language can adequately portray that astonishment, that [page 22:] horror which possessed me at the spectacle then presented to my view?” I believe that in staging the denouement of “William Wilson” in a masquerade setting Poe, with a stroke of genius, extended the connotative range of his central idea: he succeeded in showing that, once his protagonist has abdicated his kinship to his namesake, his life becomes a never-ending masquerade of motive and identity.

Perhaps, the dissimulation and self-disguise practiced in the masquerade offer keys to Poe's view not only of Wilson's but of man's plight. Poe seems to imply that the external world, despite all concealments, mirrors the ills of the individual psyche. As already indicated, the crazy structure of the building and the “split” in the principal at Dr. Bransby's academy correspond to Wilson's internal condition. Moreover, his overt evil — recognizable as such by his classmates — reflects his interior deterioration. It is ironically true, therefore, that the narrator's second self is both a constituent part of the total self and also objectively “real.” Consequently, Wilson's final atrocity, though perpetrated against himself, must also be a crime against society. It is no accident, then, that the culminating symbol in the tale is a “mirror” in which Wilson sees the murdered masquerader as, simultaneously, a separate identity and himself.

Washington and Jefferson College