ABSTRACT
The phenomenon of the double, which has been traced back to ancient myth, was exploited in modern times by Gothic fiction writers and by some Romantic poets, and has re-appeared with some regularity from Dostoyevski’s The Double (1846), through the well-known examples of Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886) and Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890) right down, in our own time, to Saramago’s O homem duplicado [The Duplicated Man] (2002). The list of related examples is so long (Goethe’s Faust, Espronceda’s El estudiante de Salamanca, Kafka’s Metamorphosis, among endless others) that any attempt at defining the phenomenon is self-defeating. What can confidently be said is that, in principle, we are dealing not with a psychological phenomenon but with a literary trope that lends itself to an infinite variety of uses. By contrast, the purely critical approach to the literary phenomenon is much narrower in range and more susceptible of orderly exposition. Broadly such approaches can be reduced to one of three, or to a mixture:
The theological approach. This sees the phenomenon as the revelation of a clash between cosmic forces embedded in human nature: good versus evil, the angelic versus the demonic, or even, archetypally, of primitive desires versus civilized forms of behaviour.
The psychological approach. This regards the phenomenon as a clear sign of mental instability, perhaps even of outright madness. In this approach the double is an invasive disease that threatens to destroy the integrity of the self or indeed succeeds in doing so.
The psychoanalytical approach. This has been the most common approach in the twentieth century. The double is interpreted as a sign of repressed anxieties that are threatening the dominance of the ego.
