. . .ndividual, and the combination of mesmerism and metempsychosis as leading motives in one and the same story.

Mr. Cobb points out in detail the similarities between Poe’s stories of dual personality and the German use of the theme as found in Fouqué, Novalis, and Hoffmann, particularly the last. Hoffmann’s exaggerated use of this idea is to be explained on the ground that he was obsessed by the thought that his double was haunting him, and he, like Maupassant under similar conditions of mind, wrote of supernaturalism associated with madness. Hoffmann uses the theme of double personality.[39] In Poe’s William Wilson the other self is the embodiment of good, a sort of incarnate conscience, as in Stevenson’s Markheim, while Hoffmann’s Elixiere represents the evil. Poe has here reversed the idea. In Hoffmann’s Magnetiseur we find the treatment of hypnotism and metempsychosis and the dream-supernaturalism in the same combinati. . . Read More