Terror, Pursuit and Shadows

Abstract

The double reaches full maturity in the work of Hoffmann, but there are three distinct preliminary strains which can be distinguished apart from the work of the early German Romantics alluded to in the previous chapter. Two of these are preliminary in both a chronological and a developmental sense, the third only in the latter. The first is the English Gothic romance: although the seminal early works in this genre do not contain doubles in any strict meaning of the term, they deal with themes of moral reversal, of evil and remorse and of the divided will and spiritual pride, in ways which will crucially influence and be taken up by later books which, while perpetuating Gothic conventions, harness these themes to the device of the double. The second strand is the rationalistic but psychologically quite profound treatment of complementarity and role reversal in the work of William Godwin and his American disciple Charles Brockden Brown. The third strain is the special genre of ‘shadow’ fiction initiated and primarily exemplified by Chamisso’s Peter Schlemihl (1814), which, although exactly contemporary with Hoffmann’s The Devil’s Elixirs, essentially belongs to an earlier, less developed conception of the double which is much closer to the folk tale than to the psychological novel. We shall look at each of these groups of fictions in turn.