The tales open identically: the one man’s tortured confession that he ‘cannot, for his soul, remember’ where he met Ligeia is deflated by the other’s offhand admission that he ‘cannot just now remember’ where he met the warrior. The general’s literal dismemberment stands emblematically for the philosophical incoherence of personal identity as a concept. Just as the general is exposed to be without his cosmetics only an ‘odd looking bundle of something’, so all ‘self’ may be (as Hume feared) merely a random ‘bundle’ of sensations. When placed alongside its political twin, the psychological ‘Ligeia’ appears as a similarly bleak meditation on how personal identity works—an exploration of the boundaries not between consciousness and unconsciousness but between self and other. We cannot trust our ability to remember people in their absence, even after their bodies have disappeared. Will and memory maintain Ligeia’s integrity no better than reputation held together the general’s body parts. The final transformation of one wife into another only concedes the instability of all ‘others’, and of the perceptions which defined them as separate entities in the first place.

Poe’s preoccupation with personhood helps explain the lifelessness of his female characters. Obviously Poe had no concern for gender as such: his famous statement that the most poetic theme was the death of a beautiful woman came dangerously close to claiming that the only good woman was a dead one. Poe’s Ligeia is not meant to represent a real individual of whatever gender. She is not even an allegorical figure, like the Red-Cross Knight or Mr Smooth-It-Away, standing for a single moral position. She is less a person than an idea about personhood. In no sense an imitation of life, her story artificially isolates one aspect of personal identity to test the relation between will and personality. The strangeness throughout the ‘women’ tales—their treatment of people as hypotheses and events as experiments testing those ideas—suggests a model for reading all Poe’s characters and plots. Shifting the philosophical focus from ethics to metaphysics, the ‘women’ tales make clear, as ‘William Wilson’ did not quite, that Poe’s intellectual categories were not primarily moral. It may make some sense to wonder whether or not Wilson was right to cheat at cards. It makes no sense, however, to ask whether one should yank out a lover’s teeth or turn one’s second wife into one’s first. These ‘events’ do not represent real-life physical situations but approximate a meta-physical condition of disunity. Everywhere in Poe, the Gothic is used to question the integrity of human existence, while twins and doubles blur the distinctions between self and other.

Metaphysical analysis may even redeem ‘William Wilson’ from the limitations of its moralizing. Although a superficial analysis of the Id and the Super-ego, ‘William Wilson’ offers an interestingly revisionist account of will and identity. Specifically, the narrator’s confusion dramatizes the incoherence of models that represent free will or agency as an internal disagreement over alternative responses—the commonplace belief that one can be ‘of two minds’ about something. As Jonathan Edwards and Joseph Priestley warned Locke, if such a thing as will existed, the self could assert its freedom only by choosing badly. Were Wilson to accept his double’s morality he would become a pale copy of society’s conventionalism; to believe in his intellectual independence he must reject logical reasoning as imposed from outside, a kind of doubled ‘other’. More generally, the story asks, ‘How could you tell if someone was yourself or not?’ In terms of so broad a scepticism, the unsatisfactoriness of the tale’s conclusion is philosophically astute. The sole solution to such cosmic self-doubt is not to ask the question in the first place, and to his fear that ‘he’ might be ‘me’, the narrator can only respond, ‘Not any more, he isn’t.’

Despite Poe’s preference for his poetry, it is the tales, with their leisure to linger over thoughts, that have most impressed subsequent readers. Poe’s modern appeal derives most from his ability to give an almost palpable immediacy to abstract questions about will, choice, and personality. Psychoanalytic readers rightly see his explorations of the mental as a kind of proto-psychology, although one concerned more with otherness than with unconsciousness, more with Locke than with Freud. Post-modernists correctly sense that his disinterest in characters or plots avoids the presence and subjectness that prevent the free play of meaning in traditional writing. For Poe, however, problems of identity did not originate in consciousness but resulted from the foreignness of the environment in which mentality found itself. Minds did not imagine horrors but saw clearly the horribleness of their universe.

Starting with his early prize-winning ‘MS. Found in a Bottle’, Poe defined minds in terms of the landscape through which they passed.