With his novella The Wonderful History of Peter Schlemihl (1814), Adelbert von
Chamisso created the disquieting tale of a man who acquires a new identity as
Count Peter by parting with his shadow in exchange for bottomless wealth.
Recounted in a realistic manner, the story’s only inexplicable element is Peter’s
detached shadow. Since a world without shadows is not physically possible,
Peter, so as not to attract too much attention, is forced to live in the dark, and the
reader is left to wonder whether and how one’s shadow could be part of one’s
identity.
Doppelgänger
The 19th century saw the publication of a long list of doppelgänger narratives. In
E. T. A. Hoffmann’s 1816 short story ‘The Sandman’ one of the characters tries
to represent an automaton as a living person. Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘William
Wilson’ (1839) is about a man’s fight with his identically named replica. Feodor
Dostoevsky’s The Double (1846) tells the story of Yakov Petrovich Golyadkin’s
struggle with himself, as he goes mad. And Guy de Maupassant’s ‘The Terror’
(1883) is about a nameless man who is afraid of himself.
Robert Louis Stevenson’s novella The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde
(1886) became the literary exemplar of the clash of a man with himself. Hyde is
Jekyll’s evil self whom he, Jekyll, tries to control by means of a potion, but in
the course of time, Hyde is threatening to win the upper hand. After protracted
efforts to regain control, self-destruction is Jekyll’s only way out.
Oscar Wilde developed the shadow identity theme in The Picture of Dorian
Gray (1890), in which shameless and narcissistic Dorian is confronted with his
immoral self in the form of a picture that grows older and uglier with every evil
act he commits.
The doppelgänger motif entails the logical inconsistency of encountering oneself
as another and (failing to) unite ‘I’ and ‘not-I’ into one identity. Its literary
representation in the works just mentioned has been read as foreshadowing the
idea of identity crisis that so preoccupied 20th-century psychology. They have
invited a wealth of psychological and psychosocial interpretations, including
Sigmund Freud’s examination of the ‘uncanny’ based on his psychoanalytic
reading of Hoffmann’s ‘The Sandman’.