O mito do duplo em retratos

Abstract

The myth of the double is part of a set of the most antique human myths which permeate man`s imaginary since his own existence. It has as its main manifestations the cases of persons resembling one another, identical twins, the fact that someone sees himself in another one, the duality. The term used to designate the double, coined by German writer Jean-Paul Richter, is doppelgänger, and it means the one who walks by the side or close by, the travelling companion or fellow traveler. It has to do with one‘s experience of him/her in alterity or otherness. Some examples of occurrences of the myth of the double in literatures can be, among other: Shakespeare‘s A Comedy of Errors, Plato`s The Banquet, Robert Louis Stevenson‘s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Mary Shelley‘s Frankenstein, Dostoyevsky‘s The Double. This thesis has as the object of its analysis the recurrence (and reoccurrence) of the myth of the double in literature and in order to do that it concentrates on the examination of four works which are similar through the manifestation of the double in portraits. Three of them are short stories and the last one is a novel: Nathaniel Hawthorne‘s ―The Prophetic Pictures,‖ Edgar Allan Poe‘s ―The Oval Portrait,‖ Nikolai Gogol‘s ―The Portrait [Портрет],‖ and Oscar Wilde‘s The Picture of Dorian Gray. The theoretical support for the thesis concentrates on a larger use or presence of the idea of the double, as in the Romanticism, and in the development of some themes dear to the 19th Century, such as the fragmentation of the self, the new notions of myth, the idea of the double and specifically the myth of the double. The main theoreticians or theorists used where, among others, are Sigmund Freud, Otto Rank, Arnold Hauser, Anatol Rosenfeld, J. Guinsburg, and Jean-Pierre Vernant.