Gothic Doubling
            as Spiritual
        Revelation

Dissertation
(in progress)

How can one come to know the glorious heights and horrific depths of one’s own soul –– all the potential for good, or for evil, hidden therein? Christian writer, C.S. Lewis, famously posited that eternity would one day reveal the either marvelous or nightmarish being that exists within even “the dullest and most uninteresting” human exterior. But if the quality of our immortal selves, either divine creature or corrupted horror, is hidden from sight until after death, are we damned to fumble through our lives unaware of our inner reality, never given the opportunity to face the ‘other’ within?  

Gothic fiction strides forth with a strange and arresting offer: the possibility of an encounter with one’s doppelganger or alter-ego. From texts like A Tale of Two Cities by Dickens to The Double by Dostoevsky, confrontations with an alternate self give gothic characters the opportunity to, quite literally, face themselves: looking into their own visage and acknowledging all the beauty or horror they find there. Historically, texts such as Sigmund Freud’s “The Uncanny” (1919) and Carl Jung’s Aion (1952) have popularized reading the literary doppelgänger as a psychological projection, usually symbolizing a suppressed desire or else indicating madness. As such, the psychological double is often imagined as destructive: a haunting signifier of death. The intervention, then, that my project would make is to offer an alternate analysis of the double: namely, reading doppelganger encounters as essentially spiritual, a moment of divine awakening. By viewing the double as not just a psychological projection of a person’s mind but the mystical unveiling of their soul, the encounter shifts from an omen of death to an offer of life –– an instigator of revelation and, perhaps, change. 

My dissertation, To Face Oneself: Gothic Doubling as Spiritual Revelation, pays attention to the spiritual dimensions of the trope of the double, following Otto Rank’s observations tying doubles to primitive ideas of immortality. My project will apply Rank’s ideas to the lush 19th and 20th-century American literary landscape, tracing the works of prominent gothic writers –– such as Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edgar Allan Poe, and Flannery O’Connor –– and their literary exploration, not only of the psyche, but of the soul.