Literary Twinship from Shakespeare to the Age of Cloning

Wieland Schwanebeck

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000032734
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: English Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Unlike previous efforts that have only addressed literary twinship as a footnote to the doppelganger motif, this book makes a case for the complexity of literary twinship across the literary spectrum. Shortlisted for the ESSE Book Award 2022 (Literatures in the English Language), it shows how twins have been instrumental to the formation of comedies of mistaken identity, the detective genre, and dystopian science fiction. The individual chapters trace the development of the category of twinship over time, demonstrating how the twin was repeatedly (re-)invented as a cultural and pathological type when other discursive fields constituted themselves, and how its literary treatment served as the battleground for ideological disputes: by setting the stage for debates regarding kinship and reproduction, or by partaking in discussions of criminality, eugenic greatness, and 'monstrous births'. The book addresses nearly 100 primary texts, including works of Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Wilkie Collins, Charles Dickens, Arthur Conan Doyle, Aldous Huxley, Christopher Priest, William Shakespeare, and Zadie Smith.

1 Introducing Twins

The Omnipresent Twin

Ask anyone to think of two people who share a near-absolute physiognomic similarity, and chances are they will picture a pair of twins. Yet behold a pair of identical twins in more detail and, once your initial ‘shock of likeness’ has passed, you will end up scanning them for differences rather than similarities. Identical (2012), a volume of twin portraits taken by Martin Schoeller, reveals this paradox on every page. Popular culture all too frequently emphasises that the essence of twinship is to signify sameness – in French, identical twins are known as vrai jumeaux, that is: ‘true’ twins. Yet Schoeller’s photographs, particularly the ones that show the wrinkled faces of aged twins, tell a different story. Life has left traces in the physiognomies of these people, and these traces quite literally make a difference: some of the twins look more tired and worn-out than their siblings; some make a point of wearing their hair differently; and some bear the evidence of sub-cultural affiliations, accidents, and biographic circumstance: tattoos, hair-styles, tooth spaces, scars, and wrinkles.

The effect displayed in Schoeller’s photographs is truly uncanny if we resort to Freud’s original definition of the uncanny as “what was once well known and had long been familiar” (Freud 1919/2003, 124) and thus always bears traces of the homely. It is worth noting, however, that Freud does not include twins in his list of examples of the uncanny, but related phenomena like doubles, automata, and waxwork figures. When nature presents us with visible differences, we are bound to look for similarities; yet if two portraits seem to match at first sight, we will scrutinise them until they reveal to us what distinguishes them, much like the popular riddles of the ‘spot the difference’ variety. Our minds will not rest until they have safely established that, in fact, nothing in the world looks less similar than identical twins, maybe because we are intrigued by the intellectual challenge. It is the paradoxical dialectics of similarity and difference that seals the fate of the murderous protagonist in Vladimir Nabokov’s Despair (1965). Nabokov’s narrator fails in his attempt to commit the perfect murder, killing his doppelganger to make the world believe he has died, because he does not understand what the painter Ardalion tells him: “what the artist perceives is, primarily, the difference between things. It is the vulgar who note their resemblance” (51).

Evidently, the field of twinship is brimming with paradoxes: similarity triggers a search for difference, and we attribute to twins a singular status on the basis of their being not singular, for they are each other’s spitting image. Inevitably, then, it would be impossible to reconcile all the diverse semantisations twins have undergone in our culture. They have been conceptualised as harbingers of doom, adultery, the apocalypse, and the hereafter; as personified narcissism, as eroticised objects of desire; as devouring cannibals; as projection screens for collective fantasies about reproduction and fertility; as the founding fathers of civilisation; or as benign deities in charge of various departments, ranging from success in battle to meteorological phenomena (see Frey 2006, 71–76). In some mythologies,

they could throw spells, transform themselves into supernatural beasts, and make epidemics and other ills that befall livestock and gardens go away; they could cure certain illnesses; they were immune to bites of venomous animals; and they could give success in hunting, fishing, and so on.

(Lévi-Strauss 1995, 119)

It goes without saying that this pre-Christian legacy lives on, though in somewhat sublimated forms. Twins are media darlings who regularly provide stories of the rather curious kind: here we have the 38-year-old man from Illinois, claiming responsibility for the murder that his twin brother has been convicted for (see Chan 2016), the All-American family who welcomed three pairs of twins in three consecutive years, not to mention the man who “‘accidentally’ had sex with his wife’s identical twin sister” (Waugh 2015) or the former Pop Idol star who blamed his porn addiction on “watching his twin brother being given special medical help 10 minutes after he was born” (Hope/Saunders 2017). These stories are equal parts human interest and freak show: cue tearful embraces exchanged between adult twins who got separated at birth, and exploitative reporting on surgical attempts to separate conjoined twins. There is no shortage of juicy reading material; just consider the long list of media stories produced in the aftermath of the famous Minnesota twin study (see Segal 2012). The first widely reported case went down in history as that of the ‘two Jims’ from Ohio,¹ and was re-enacted several times across the media. The story is always about twins who grew up without being aware of each other’s existence and who, on meeting again after decades, discover they have quite a lot in common: that they happened to get married on the same day, that they injured themselves under similar circumstances, or that they gave the same names to their children. Where there is difference, we will prefer to see similarities, and vice versa; the differences just do not make the headlines even though, “scientifically, they are equally important” (Watson 1982, 96).

Not a week goes by without a media report to remind us that everyone can be brought down by an uncanny twin (in some cases their own), or that twinship indicates the presence of sinister forces. In recent years, there has been a wave of reports (and feature films) about fetus-in-fetu cases: people who learn that they have been living with twins absorbed inside them. Typical tabloid stories focus on well-adjusted young adults who undergo routine surgery in hospitals, only to have the doctors discover remnants of their late siblings. Trust medical detectives like Dr. Gregory House (House M.D., 2004–2012) to clear up the matter and to correctly infer that the young boy who is suffering from severe hallucinations is, in fact, not one person but two. As House explains to the astonished parents in episode Cane & Able:

It’s called chimerism. Unfortunately, [your son’s] brother’s like a bad double’s partner. The guy just takes up space, gets in the way. Clancy’s body thinks that he’s gonna put away the easy winners. His brother just keeps swatting balls into the net. We gotta get him off the court.

Tellingly, House adjusts his semantics to prepare the boy’s parents for the risky surgical procedure. Instead of marking out the embryo of Clancy himself as a greedy bunch of cells monstrously devouring the weaker one, it is the absorbed brother who is conceptualised as an unwanted intruder and free-loader. By removing the parasite in a suspenseful surgery sequence, the doctors also rid Clancy of his ghostly visions of aliens, the ultimate Other in popular culture.

As popular culture has caught on to the phenomenon, suppressed memories of vanished twins have become a staple in literature. In transcultural fiction, they serve as reminders of severed ties with the abandoned home culture, while Margaret Lea, the narrator of Diane Setterfield’s The Thirteenth Tale (2006), realises that it is a vanished twin “that had stained me,” and she recounts several uncanny experiences that suddenly make sense in the light of her biographical discovery, her “pale shadow” (20–21). Both Setterfield’s neo-Gothic tale and House’s medical detective work are examples of how outrageous ‘vanishing twin’ narratives are absorbed into the media, leading Hillel Schwartz to suggest that “we have begun to establish a cult around the vanished twin” (1996, 23). Contemporary twin narratives magnify and update what classical mythological tales have always ‘known’ about twinship and what other, infinitely more subtle iterations of the twin motif suggest: that the origins of twins are, at best, dubious and, at worst, immensely scary and frightening. While no-one will deny that horror stories of this kind have almost universal appeal, the reasons remain subject to debate – this book seeks to explore them in their historical contexts. It does so by engaging with medical literature of the particular time, which assigned a particular place to twins without actually saying much about them. More frequently, research engages with twinship only to illuminate other objects of inquiry; the list includes “intelligence, criminality, sociability, sedation thresholds, temperaments, obesity, homosexuality, depression, suicide, emotionality, cynicism, compulsiveness, submissiveness, pessimism, sexual inhibition, narcissism, passivity, [and] self-expressiveness” (Schwartz 1996, 36). My subsequent summary of twin scholarship and the nature/nurture debate in Chapter 2 will bear testimony to this, as will the individual chapters that engage with the relationship between medical discourse and literary approaches to the twin motif.

All of this points to an almost traumatic obsession: a wound that we keep returning to without treating it properly. It may have its origins at the dawn of Enlightenment in the Renaissance, though most twin myths are older than this, of course. The age of humanism has sung the praises of the in-dividual, that is: that which cannot be divided. Does the appearance of twins not tell us that this may just be one gigantic misunderstanding, or even an outright lie? Philosophers and mathematicians alike have reflected on the number two as “the true number,” the existence of which not only introduces multiplicity and, in a theological sense, the idea of creation (Farmer 1996, 332), but also the sense-making operations inherent in structuralism and modern semantics. If the experience of duality amounts to “the foundation stone of human consciousness,” in that it teaches us to distinguish “between the ‘I’ and the ‘not-I’” (Herdman 1990, 1), then twin stories are highly instructive tales that provide lessons about the binary structure of thought and the clear-cut boundaries of Western semantics.

Moreover, does the existence of twins not compromise our struggle for singularity? There have been various attempts to dispel such concerns. The most popular strategy has been to overemphasise the otherness of twins and to relegate them to the realm of the monstrous, thus exploiting the twin’s uncanny potential for eerie effect. Modern reiterations continue to insist that nurture can only do so much and that, once brought into the world, evil twins will reign supreme and multiply, for they escape parental control and the bounds of order and domestication. In Die zwei Brüder (The Two Brothers, 1812), a fairy tale anthologised by the Brothers Grimm, it only takes a mean-spirited relative’s suggestion that the twins are in league with the devil for their own father to abandon them in the forest.

Rationalisation looks easy, yet biology alone is not going to cut it: one or several sperms fertilise one or several ova, subsequent developments depending on the division(s) of the zygote. Go beyond the biological facts and you will discover that twins always constitute a social event “which may begin even before conception” (Stewart 2003, 3). Statistical data invariably comes with distinct models of explanation attached to them; take the fact that twin births have been steadily increasing in the recent past, particularly in the developed world – in the United States, England, France, and Germany, the rate almost doubled between 1975 and 2014. Two factors are credited for this development: the rising average age of mothers and the increase of IVF treatments and ovarian stimulation, all of which make twin pregnancies more likely (see Miller 2015; Beck 2016). Yet science is at a loss to account for other aspects of the global divide indicated by the numbers: that spontaneous twinning is in decline, even though the beneficial factors, such as maternal body weight, height, and age, are on the rise, or that twin births are much more likely to occur in Scandinavia and West Africa than in Japan, China, or India (see Campbell 1998, 129–132).

The statistical increase has not yet led to a reconceptualisation of twinship as anything other than a highly unlikely anomaly; an aura of the unusual and of deviance surrounds the phenomenon right from the beginning. This begs the question whether twins are ‘meant to be’ at all. It is tempting to give in to the view that the monstrous status of twinship is proven by the way nature deals with it in most cases: by ‘natural abortion,’ a disappearance of at least one twin without the carrying mother even suspecting that she was expecting twins to begin with. A twin pregnancy where both children survive is the exception rather than the rule, and the woman expecting a singleton has been safely established “as the norm, the reference point, both individual and social” (Stewart 2003, 169–170). Not only do twins represent an anomaly in this regard, they have been read as the embodiment of everything that is “unnatural and monstrous, and therefore as portending evil” (Hartland 1921, 491). After all, if we know one thing about monsters, it is that they always escape (Cohen 1995, 4), and there inevitably comes the moment when the maternal body literally cannot contain the twins anymore.

But turn the argument around – and in discussions of twinship, so ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Dedication Page
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introducing Twins
• 2 Conceiving Twins
• 3 Confusing Twins
• 4 Appropriating Twins
• 5 Detecting Twins
• 6 Multiplying Twins
• 7 Untangling Twins
• Index