The Identity Phobia And The Doubles

This study has chosen three nineteenth century's Gothic novels,namely Mary Shelley's Frankenstein,Charles Maturin's Melmoth the Wanderer and James Hogg's The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner and made an attempt to discuss the identity phobia and the double.Following the survey and literature review of the double,the dissertation provides a new reading on the phobia and fantasies arising from the identity crisis in the main characters of the three texts,and demonstrates a decentered and disparate identity reset of people in the post-Union and post-industrialized Britain,where the social order was facing resetting in the fermenting after-effects of social reform,nationalism of Ireland and Scotland and the early urbanization in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.The research argues that the identity resetting is only a Romantic form and doomed to fail.In the changing context of the historical background,people cannot know who they are and what the world is when they apply their own episteme to make sense of the relationship between the world and themselves.They suffer from a subjectivity crisis and then an identity phobia.Mary Shelley,Charles Maturin and James Hogg all create a mode of double respectively to express different identity phobias.In Frankenstein,the scientist Victor Frankenstein creates a “man” as a double to create a Romantic,new identity for himself;this created “man” turns to be an identity-less monstrous and ugly creature serving as a counterpart of Victor's Utopian new identity and epitomizing the fears of the individual's existential identity in the long-established conventional society.In Melmoth the Wanderer,the Faust-like wanderer Melmoth is a mutual double for the suffering characters: Stanton,Alonzo,Immalee/Isidora,Walberg and Elinor.He visits them on the verge of these characters' collapsing and offers them his wandering identity as a devil soul-exchange deal.His deal is an unrealistic escape for these alienated individuals in a society and his visit is a test for them to fulfill their spiritual identity's pursuit.In The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner,the Calvinist Robert is seduced by a shadow-like friend Gil-Martin with a predestinarian identity.He is convinced to be the Elected inheritor to the Dalcastle by God;however,he is converted by Gil-Martin to be a schizophrenic sociopath in the realistic society.Gil-Martin is a religious double and incarnates Robert's borderline identity phobia.The novel decodes the borderline identity phobia of an individual who is living inbetween rural and urban life in the very early modern urbanization.The doubles all act in a way horribly antithetic to that of the main characters to dramatize their identity phobia.In the examination of identity phobia and the doubles,the study argues that the double is the performer,the speaker and finally a catharsis for the subjects in identity crisis.It concludes that the double is only an identity mirage for the characters who extricate themselves from its haunting only through death or faith.The surviving characters are still seeking their individual identity after the double has gone.