Ghost story na literatura vitoriana: a presença do estranho no conto fantástico e a relação do duplo nos personagens de Charles Dickens em “The Signalman”

Abstract

The ghost stories can be seen as essential products from the Victorian Age, in the nineteenth century, representations of the traditional among the determinant changes that this century has led. At the same time that these stories originate from the past literary traditions, they evidence the consequences of the industrialism, of reason as the core of society and the new sciences, evidencing thoughts present in the age e announcing, somehow, a future to come. The short story “The Signalman”, by Charles Dickens, embraces such issues, which are revealed through the meaning constructions obtained with the support of the theories from Tzvetan Todorov, about the fantastic in literature, and from Sigmund Freud, regarding the Uncanny and the Double. Concerning the fantastic, the characters in the narrative hesitate against the facts, as well as the implied reader hesitates during their reading; the character of the Signalman is questioned towards his sanity, but the narrator, as the storyteller of the story, is in a more doubtful position, for it is not known whether his reports are, indeed, true. The Uncanny suggests the characters are inserted in an atmosphere that is both unfamiliar and familiar, as well as the experience of both being considered ambiguous, existing there the presence of the Double: the Signalman as Double of the narrator. The dual relation of the characters establishes the tradition/modernity link, Signalman and narrator, respectively. The death of the railway worker represents, ultimately, the decay of romantic thought and traditional thoughts connected with eighteenth and nineteenth-century England facing aspects of rising modernity, such as the triumph of the sciences and technologies at that time.