SOURCE: Stern, Julia. “Double Talk: The Rhetoric of The Whisper in Poe's ‘William Wilson.’” ESQ: A Journal of the American Renaissance 40, no. 3 (September 1994): 185-218.

In the following essay, Stern probes Poe's use and subversion of melodramatic conventions in the story “William Wilson.”

For Edgar Allan Poe, the melodramatic mode is a logical literary form in which to articulate ethical conflict, a form in which the utterly polarized terms of good and evil clash in a highly personalized encounter.¹ Typically, as in “William Wilson,” Poe's doppelganger tale of 1839, melodrama shapes the manner and the matter of the story and inflects a variety of issues from character psychology to contemporary politics. Critics traditionally have read “William Wilson” as an allegory of a mind at war with itself, as a romantic fiction of dual personality in the tradition of Fyodor Dostoyevski and Robert Louis Stevenson, and so have overlooked the importance...