Doppelgänger in Gothic Literature: From Romanticism to AI

The doppelgänger, or 'double-walker,' has haunted Gothic literature since the term was coined in Jean Paul's 1797 novel. The figure appears across cultures as spirit doubles, evil twins, split selves, and harbingers of doom. Romantic writers like Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Mary Shelley used doubles to explore identity and mortality—Shelley's Frankenstein (1818) links creator and monster as doubles. Edgar Allan Poe's William Wilson (1839) features an evil twin who reveals they are the same person. Robert Louis Stevenson's Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886) and Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890) explore split identities and moral duality. Sigmund Freud's 1919 essay The Uncanny, building on Otto Rank's 1914 work, theorized the double as both ego protection and a source of terror. Fyodor Dostoyevsky's The Double (1846) depicts a protagonist undone by his imagined rival. Modern examples include David Lynch's Twin Peaks (1990-91, 2017) and Coralie Fargeat's film The Substance (2024), which updates Jekyll and Hyde for contemporary pressures on women. A 2021 Danish theater production adapted Hans Christian Andersen's The Shadow (1847) using AI and Pepper's Ghost illusion, questioning identity in the digital age.