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Self versus Alter Ego
As a story that centers on a man meeting his identical double, “William Wilson” externalizes the internal struggle of different factions of the narrator’s personality. The doppelganger Wilson is physically identical to him, dresses like him, and exhibits the same mannerisms. The primary difference between them, aside from the pitch of their voice, is the doppelganger’s moral compass. The narrator himself recognizes Wilson as mature and wise, and states that Wilson attempts to counsel him to better, kinder behavior. The narrator wants to dominate, cheat, and bully those around him, but the whispery voice of Wilson thwarts him, behaving, essentially, like an external manifestation of the narrator’s conscience. As a child, the narrator expresses that he almost feels fond of Wilson, but the realization that Wilson is part of him, identical to him, turns this fondness to terror. The existence of the doppelganger Wilson suggests that there’s a part of the narrator that doesn’t believe in his own superiority and disapproves of his actions. The narrator attempts to flee from this reality until he realizes he cannot possibly escape. In killing Wilson, the narrator effectively kills off a part of himself.
The Corrupting Nature of Wealth
Supporting the narrator’s cruelty is a seemingly bottomless well of financial resources. While Poe doesn’t necessarily portray wealth as the cause of the narrator’s bad character, it certainly enables it. When describing the kind of man he has become after the murder of the doppelganger Wilson, he states he is “more than the enormities of an Elah-Gabalus,” referring to a famously depraved Roman emperor. In other words, his depraved character is of a sort that only the wealthy and powerful can enact. Money offers him access to sites of trespass and excess only available to the wealthy, like the kind of elite prep school reverie found at Eton or the luxurious Carnival party of Duke Di Broglio. The narrator’s particularly cruel targeting of Glendinning at Oxford is made possible by the wealth the narrator’s parents provide him with. The narrator’s classmates dismiss the manipulative way the narrator uses gambling, partially because of his personality, but also because he has the same financial resources as his noble classmates. Money allows him greater leeway to sin. The narrator’s sense of entitlement, culminating in his desire to exorcize his conscience by killing his doppelganger, stems in part from his familial wealth.
Wickedness and Restraint
“William Wilson” also explores the question of what inclines a person toward evil. Through the narrator’s tale of his life, he appears to conclude that a lack of restraint causes a person to be wicked. He states that his parents refused to place restrictions on him, meaning that his whims controlled his entire household. For example, he states: “At an age when few children have abandoned their leading-strings, I was left to the guidance of my own will.” He leaves schools like Dr. Bransby’s Academy and Oxford on his own whim and seemingly without consequence to his future prospects. Because of his familial wealth and strong personality, people are inclined to see his gambling as a harmless folly, instead of shunning him socially. Furthermore, as the narrator gets older, each school he attends offers more and more freedom to its students, and the narrator’s behavior worsens accordingly. It is only his doppelganger, William Wilson, who attempts to put any check or restraint on his bad behavior. After Wilson’s death, the narrator describes his deterioration as being instantaneous. In “William Wilson,” one’s conscience, here externalized as Wilson, works by restraining evil impulses, tempering wickedness with restraint.
