Q1. Edgar Allen Poe Variation

Question 1

Introduction

Answer 1

• The division of self
• narrative gothic feature of a Doppelgänger
• William Wilson represents an external force inhibiting one from becoming too debauched and selfish
• spiritual law that constantly betrays the truth of the narrator to his surroundings (could be read as conscience or lack of constitutional legality on the western frontier

Question 2

The Narrator as a debauched based character

Answer 2

1. Existing on the uncomfortable line between exceptional and unexceptional
2. Debaucherous self when the narrator is left unchecked

Question 3

1. Existing on the uncomfortable line between exceptional and unexceptional individuality

Answer 3

• ‘Oh, outcast of all outcasts most abandoned!’
• ‘my parents could do but little to check the evil propensities which distinguished me’ (but William Wilson could)
• ‘I am the descendant of a race whose imaginative and easily excitable temperament has at all times rendered them remarkable’
• ‘The noblest and most liberal commoner at Oxford’

Question 4

2. Debaucherous self when the narrator is left unchecked

Answer 4

• ‘I grew self-willed, addicted to the wildest caprices, and a prey to the most ungovernable passions.’
• ‘By slow, but natural gradations, gave me an ascendency over all not greatly older than myself’
• At Eton ‘Madly flushed with cards and intoxication, I was in the act of insisting upon a toast of more than wonted profanity’

-[on gambling at Oxford] ‘the very enormity of this offence against all manly and honourable sentiment… I had effected his total ruin’

• [In Rome] ‘unworthy motive, the young, the gay, the beautiful wife of the aged and doting Di Broglio’

Question 5

Doubling/Gothic/Mystical

Answer 5

1. Double nature of schoolmaster
2. Slow realisation of doppelgänger
3. Gothic setting of discovery

Question 6

1. Double nature of schoolmaster

Answer 6

• The Doubling begins with the Schoolmaster – demonstrating the prevalence of split-personalities within society and the need of different personalities to navigate society
• ‘Oh, gigantic paradox, too utterly monstrous for solution!’

Question 7

2. Slow realisation of doppelgänger

Answer 7

• ‘The person of a scholar, who, although no relation, bore the same Christian and surname as myself’
• ‘The same name; the same contour of person; the same day of arrival at the academy!’
• ‘Was it, in truth, within the bounds of human possibility that what I now saw’

Question 8

3. Gothic Setting

Answer 8

• ‘It was very long, narrow, and dismally low, with pointed Gothic windows and a ceiling of oak.’
• ‘The huge old house, with its countless subdivisions, had several enormously large chambers communicating with each other, where slept the greater number of the students’
• ‘It was upon a gloomy and tempestuous night of an early autumn, about the close of my fifth year at the school’

Question 9

The morality/nature of the split self

Answer 9

1. the quiet permanence of the voice
2. The moralising quality of it

Question 10

1. The quiet permanence of the voice

Answer 10

• ‘his singular whisper, it grew the very echo of my own.’
• ‘the imitation, apparently, was noticed by myself alone’
• he knows his double from another ‘epoch’ – this is a very strange, deeply personal, and seemingly timeless relationship

Question 11

2. The moralising quality

Answer 11

• The instances of intervention are essential in understanding the morality behind the tale and they also seem to take place after periods of separation: at Eton, Wilson turns up to ruin all of the narrators schemes
• William Wilson is the singular force inhibiting the narrators life of easy debauchery and vice – pushing him ostensibly to a life away from these things detrimental to a society- to the point where the ghost says at the end ‘how utterly hast thy murdered thyself’