Re: Weird stories about split personality
Posted by:
Kipling (IP Logged)
Date: 8 March, 2022 09:25AM
T.O. Mabbott's notes for "A Tale of the Ragged Mountains" show that its hodge-podge of source materials includes Charles Brockden Brown's novel, Edgar Huntly. Anyone here read it? I read Brown's earlier novel, Wieland. In synopsis Edgar Huntly sounds like an artistic improvement over Wieland. Brown was probably not as influential on Irving and Hawthorne as, for comparison, William Godwin was to the Romantic movement in England at its outset, but his influence on Poe is well known.
Mabbott quotes Sidney Lund's assertion that Poe's story, unlike "Morella," and "Ligeia," is "a case study in mesmerism", with "no metempsychotic basis," which is borne out by my rereading of this most outlandish of Poe's weird productions.
To get back on to our topic, An Exchange of Souls, a novel by Barry Pain, concerns "a transference of an Ego to a mind and body other than that with which it had previously been associated" (Pain). In the novel a man exchanges his soul with that of his fiancee. Lovecraft owned this novel, so it could have influenced "The Thing on the Doorstep". It was published by Nash in 1911, 5 years before they published Algernon Blackwood's first book, The Empty House. Pain also collaborated on a witchcraft novel, The Shadow of the Unseen, which is quite good and, who knows, may have influenced John Buchan's fine novel, Witch Wood.
jkh