Corpos do fantástico: o duplo em “William Wilson”, de Poe, “O espelho”, de Machado de Assis e O médico e o monstro, de Stevenson

• Ano de defesa: 2021
• Autor(a) principal: Caputo, Elieni Cristina da Silva Amorelli
• Orientador(a): Junqueira, Maria Aparecida
• Tipo de documento: Dissertação
• Tipo de acesso: Acesso aberto
• Idioma: por
• Instituição de defesa: Pontifícia Universidade Católica de São Paulo
• Programa de Pós-Graduação: Programa de Estudos Pós-Graduados em Literatura e Crítica Literária
• Departamento: Faculdade de Filosofia, Comunicação, Letras e Artes
• País: Brasil
• Palavras-chave em Português: Edgar Allan Poe; Machado de Assis; Robert Louis Stevenson
• Palavras-chave em Inglês: Edgar Allan Poe; Robert Louis Stevenson
• Área do conhecimento CNPq: CNPQ::LINGUISTICA, LETRAS E ARTES::LETRAS::TEORIA LITERARIA
• Link de acesso: https://repositorio.pucsp.br/jspui/handle/handle/24386

This dissertation investigates the phenomenon of the double in the works: “William Wilson” by Edgar Allan Poe (1839/2012); “The mirror” by Machado de Assis (1882/2019), and The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson (1886/1995). Among the objectives of the research, we highlight: to create connections between the historical context of the authors and the formal and thematic configuration of the double in the corresponding texts; apprehending the imagetic, language, and body’s mechanisms in the formation of the double; connecting the corpus to the procedures and themes of the fantastic. The work discusses the dynamic of mirroring between the individual and his double as an identical image, in disintegration or opposite to the original, as we see respectively in the texts of Poe, Machado, and Stevenson. We have as a base hypothesis that Joãozinho/Jacobina, Jekyll/Hyde, and the double William Wilson require the configuration of borderline bodies, the literary material made of thresholds and borders. Other hypotheses are: these bodies require an atavistic presence, still undifferentiated and unconscious of the otherness; the construction of the characters evokes events from the XIX century; all the characters materialize fissures in the reason, recurring motto in the fantastic literature. The motif of the double appears in oral cultures and millennial narratives, which allow us questioning the unity of the self, disseminated by Western rationality. In the literature, the production about the theme is vast, particularly in the fantastic texts, which bring experiences of cleaving and splitting into antagonistic, mimetic parts. As a theoretical contribution, we highlight studies about the double by Otto Rank (2013) and Clément Rosset (1988); psychoanalytic and philosophical studies about the unconscious, the language, the perception, and the imagination by Sigmund Freud (2010), Jacques Lacan (1988), Mikhail Bakhtin (2003), and Giorgio Agamben (2007); fantastic theories by Tzvetan Todorov (1992), Remo Ceserani (2006), and Irène Bessière (2012). This research is qualitative, based on a kind of reasoning which passes through the tensions of unity vs. fragmentation, narcissism vs. otherness, imagination vs. language. The analysis revealed a regression to the primeval states of the psychological development in the mechanism of the double. We nominated the torn apart, amorphous images, or incomplete individuals, of “limbic bodies”, an expression that evokes the border and spectral literary framing. All those narratives bring, to some degree, themes and procedures from the fantastic, when they promote the tension between reason and unreason, besides taboo themes as crime, suicide, nihilism, madness