Edgar Allan Poe’s Multiple Personality in Both His Fiction and His Real Life

In the history of "the double" (literary metaphor for multiple personality), before there was Joseph Conrad’s “The Secret Sharer” (1910), Henry James’s “The Private Life” (1892), Wilde's Dorian Gray (1890), Robert Louis Stevenson’s Jekyll and Hyde (1886), and Dostoevsky’s The Double (1846), there was Poe’s “William Wilson” (1839).

Poe’s “double” story “William Wilson” is well known and was previously mentioned in this blog: in my November 7, 2013 essay on Freud, who was obsessed with the idea that he, himself, had a real-life double (which is one reason to think that Freud, himself, had multiple personality).

Unknown to most people, but well known to Poe scholars, is evidence of multiple personality in Poe’s real life. Poe scholars don’t take what they know as evidence of multiple personality, but I will explain why I think it is.

I quote from Kenneth Silverman’s biography, Edgar A. Poe: Mournful and Never-ending Remembrance (HarperCollins, 1991):

“Having created a sensation with 'The Raven,' Poe expanded in the Journal his recent assault on Longfellow, and became more talked about than ever. The Longfellow War, as it got to be known, began…when Willis’s newspaper published a lengthy letter by a purported acquaintance of Longfellow who signed himself Outis, the Greek word for 'Nobody.' With mild-mannered reasonableness, Outis turned aside Poe’s charges of plagiarism against Longfellow…

“Over the next month Poe published in the Journal no fewer than five rejoinders to Outis’s letter, mounting a siege of Longfellow that in modern editions runs to some fifty pages. Still more remarkably, the great likelihood is that with Willis’s aid Poe himself concocted the entire exchange…In fact, Outis was likely Poe himself, attacking himself under a pseudonym…

“Still more unaccountably, as Briggs assured Lowell, ‘Poe has, indeed, a very high admiration for Longfellow’…

“Such incompatible judgments suggest inner stress, some ‘crisis,’ as Elizabeth Barrett noticed. Poe gave her Drama of Exile his most important review in the Journal, in two substantial, strangely equivocal parts…Nonplussed at being both flogged and caressed, Barrett marveled at how Poe’s review embraced ‘the two extremes of laudation and reprehension, folded in on one another. You would have thought it had been written by a friend and foe, each stark mad with love and hate, and writing the alternate passages’.”

NOTE: In the Longfellow dispute, Poe was in conflict with a letter writer named “Outis” (Greek for “Nobody”). You might think that this name proves Poe was joking, and that he knew that his antagonist was pure fiction. But, in fact, it is evidence that Poe’s antagonist was an alternate personality:

“Many personality systems will have one or more ‘unnamed’ personalities. Sometimes these ‘unnamed’ alters [alternate personalities] use the same trick Ulysses pulled on the Cyclops: they go by the name ‘No one.’ When the therapist inquires as to who in the system is responsible for some behavior, he or she is told ‘No one.’ So the therapist should be prepared to inquire whether there is a personality known as ‘No one,' 'No name,’ or ‘Nobody’” (1, p. 117).

1. Putnam, Frank W. Diagnosis and Treatment of Multiple Personality Disorder. New York, The Guilford Press, 1989.

[Note added 8 pm: Putnam's literary reference should have been to how Odysseus fooled the Cyclops in Homer's Odyssey, not to the "Cyclops" episode in James Joyce's Ulysses.]