A Double Life: Personifying the Corporation from Dartmouth College to Poe

This essay pursues the prehistory of contemporary debates over corporate personality by investigating the early nineteenth-century American corporate imaginary In 1819, Dartmouth College v. Woodward enshrined the common-law definition of the corporation—an artificial person, immortal and invisible—in American jurisprudence. In contrast, contemporaneous satirical poems on failing banks personified corporations as strikingly visible and mortal. In subsequent decades, Poe drew on the legal doctrine of artificial personhood in a number of works—the sonnet “Silence” and the tales “William Wilson” and “Peter Pendulum, the Business Man”— and juxtaposed it unsettlingly with the so-called natural personhood of human beings. Whereas literary scholarship on antebellum legal personhood has principally explored the contested status of African Americans, this essay argues that the early corporation confronted both jurists and lay writers with an idea of personhood irreducible to the human being. It shows how Poe’s work, in particular, articulates the challenges posed by the complex ontology and ghostly genealogy of the corporation to the logic of human identity.