The Rage of Caliban

Abstract

The Philistine in Wilde's aphorism is confronted by a simplified form of the Victorian problem of personal identity. It was the rage of Caliban, a rage against the images of man available to the contemporary mind, that led to the preoccupation with doubles and psychological dualism which Dorian Gray illustrates. Dissatisfied with the pragmatic and the idealistic views of the self, yet detecting truth in both of them, the nineteenth century turned to the hypothesis that the mind was a dualism which could accommodate contradiction. To many hard-pressed Victorians this seemed a plausible, even an inescapable explanation of their spiritual crises. It acquired the status of an ethical convenience, a psychological fact, a metaphysical reality. Doubling invaded literature as a theme, a pattern, a ubiquitous unconscious inference. Even the unimaginative could grasp the validity of the principle expressed in Rimbaud's "JE est un autre." It led an underground life, for it was in conflict with the dominant assumption that the soul is a unity, and with the traditional beliefs that rested on it. In his study of this subject, Doubles in Literary Psychology (1949), Ralph Tymms names Dorian Gray as a book which brings together several of the forms the motif of the double had been given in earlier works. But it does more than this, for it also registers the crucial change in the ideas about the self that has become a central theme in twentieth-century literature.