The Emergence and Development of the Double Theme

Abstract

Before we proceed to examine individual works, it will be useful to provide an outline of the emergence of the theme of the double in Romantic fiction and its development, traceable in several intertwining strands, through the course of the nineteenth century. The preoccupation with duality which characterises the age took no monolithic form; the double was only one way, though an important one, of giving expression to the consciousness of self-division, opposition, contradiction and ambiguity, and it often shades off into, or interpenetrates with, related approaches and forms. The theme also developed differently and on a different time-scale in the various national cultures of Europe and America, though the degree of common consciousness and experience transcending national divisions is often more remarkable and important than the variations.