#gothic double

(...) Already at the start, when he lies recumbent and listless in his seedy room, Uncle Charlie is a man visibly tired of life. Young Charlie also lies recumbent when we first see her, but she’s dissatisfied rather than listless, she wants something better from life, she’s reaching out for something wonderful that she thinks he represents. She’s animated by her dreams, while his seem spent. If the waltzing couples are an image the uncle and niece share in their minds, they share it from opposite perspectives: he has been through that dream of glamour and romance and come out the other end, having decided that, as he tells her after she finds out his secret,“ The world’s a hell.” Stories of the double often end in suicide. It’s fitting that the jaded uncle, despairing of life, would have his double, the spirited niece who bears his name, put an end to it all for him.

There is a kind of double that is called the Gothic Double. And it has to do with exactly that period in the 19th century when this kind of disturbing doppelgänger starts to appear in fiction. And one reason for it, which is really interesting, is because of the expansion of British Empire. I mean, I'm talking mainly about English literature, which is what I know best here. You start to get all kinds of ethnic myths and ideas that creep into England and into the literature. You get, you know, the Celtic Fetch, which is this uncanny double, the German Doppelgänger, the English have their Wraith, and all of these figures are terrifying. And so what you start to get in the literature of this time is horror moving from a location, moving from a place like the haunted house —which is a kind of double itself of the home — to the self.