The New York Review of Science Fiction Issue 305 January 2014 by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Published: 2014-01-31T05:00:00+00:00

Despite their many years spent in aimless pursuit of pleasure in the capitals of Europe (tellingly, both men also make analogous side trips to exotic Egypt, de rigueur for wealthy cosmopolites of the time), Wilson and Brydon finally confess how, deep down, they are jealous of the disciplined, mature, and productive lives led by their ghostly counterparts, copies that are clearly better than the originals. In the former’s case, the highborn English drunkard, dropout, card cheat, and womanizer admits that his many “years of folly,” all of them “passed without profit” (Poe 634), have left him feeling empty and unfulfilled, so “utterly fallen from the gentlemanly estate” to which he was born (636). He grudgingly admires “the elevated character” and the “majestic wisdom” (640) which are so very evident in the other Wilson, a man who personifies self-discipline, for even when a schoolboy, he resisted “temptation” (626) and “caprices” (627), turned his back on the self-indulgence which has proven so damning to the constitution of the weaker Wilson, a vulgar hedonist who cannot “control” (640) any of his “base” (626) impulses. In essence, one of the main reasons that the original William Wilson both fears and envies his relentless “annex of the self” (Herdman 42) is because this disparate identity exercises moral restraint, a trait that is well beyond the ability of the lifelong self-aggrandizer who now, aging, weak, and remorseful, seeks “pity” (Poe 626) for his lengthy catalog of sins, both carnal and otherwise.

Spencer Brydon, desperate for a “cultural and spiritual identity” (Oates 12) of some kind, likewise grows to envy the stronger persona that is represented by his tough and successful “alter ego” (James 707), accepting that his shadow form is the better man, the more disciplined and responsible of the two variants. “Rigid and conscious, spectral yet human, a man of his own substance and stature waited there to measure himself with his power to dismay” (724). While “the alienated Europeanized” (Tambling 211) Brydon was living off of his father’s wealth in Paris and London for three decades, the all-American Brydon—in what amounts to an alternate universe—was dedicating year upon disciplined year to expanding the family business back in New York, growing it into a multimillion dollar enterprise, thus elevating the Brydon name to a par with that of “the Morgans, Rockefellers, and Carnegies” (Nixon 808). The spectral Brydon, via his hard work and self-sacrifice, becomes a captain of American industry and a dominant figure in Manhattan society, whereas the Brydon who has spent his life “passively” (James 715) amid Continental café culture is, as he laments early on, but “a dim secondary social success” (710).

On the morning after he faints in the presence of his overachieving doppelganger, an “active, dominating Faustian self” (Fadiman 643), Spencer Brydon regains consciousness by slow degrees. As he remembers what accosted him in the vestibule of his ancestral mansion, what flung itself at him and into him, he believes that he has at last healed “the deep split in his psyche”

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